Israeli Land-grabbers Return “Home” to Sderot

And resume their hill-top viewing of the carnage in Gaza

by Stuart Littlewood / April 13th, 2024

“Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot on Monday to watch the bombardment of Gaza” in 2014. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR), a worthy-sounding broadcaster which began life back in 1917 with the aim of sharing the educational resources of the University of Wisconsin with the state’s residents and now inspires communities around the world, has been feeding its listeners a load of old toffee about a place called Sderot, an Israeli township a stone’s throw from Gaza.

As WPR reports, it was attacked by the Palestinian resistance on October 7 and “almost completely emptied… most of Sderot’s 39,000 residents were evacuated to hotels across the country.”

They are now returning thanks in part to the schools re-opening and the inconvenience of living so long in hotels. “Those who come back are also receiving grants from the government to support them as they re-acclimatise,” says the report. I don’t suppose the Palestinian citizens returning to their bombed-out homes in Gaza will receive a re-acclimatising grant even if they can actually identify where they lived after the devastation of Israel’s genocidal collective punishment.

What the report doesn’t tell us is how Sderot came into being. Even some of its residents might be surprised. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan — they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map.

Palestinian Arabs owned over 90 percent of the land in Najd. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them have quite likely manned the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets has made Sderot a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime. Only a mile from the prison camp fence of Gaza, it has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover from Gaza’s erratic garden-shed missiles. Many of Sderot’s building have been made “rocket-proof”. It is now a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists.

WPR’s report says: “At the edge of Sderot is a hilltop where you can pay a bit more than a dollar and look through a viewfinder for a closer look across the border to north Gaza.” This must be the hilltop we’ve all heard about where local citizens took their deckchairs and crates of beer for a grandstand view of Israel’s military periodically bombarding Gaza as part of their “mowing the grass” programme. Those sick bastards knew perfectly well the atrocities their government inflicted on their Palestinian neighbours trapped in that open-air prison for 17 years before October 7. How they must have missed their ‘sport’ during the evacuation.

When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he spouted the well-worn mantra backing Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Gaza’s rocket attacks, adding: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s menacing threat “whoever hurts us, we hurt them” cuts both ways.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketeer in oil, electronics and manufacturing, and with innovation and product development consultancies. He also served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority. He is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and has produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper). Now retired, he campaigns on various issues, especially the Palestinians' struggle for freedom. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.