What Gaza Could Be Like

Nat Frum, 15, visited Israel for the first time just after the recent ceasefire. This is the second of his reports. For the first, click here.

(Nat Frum with an IDF soldier at the Gaza border. The soldier is holding a "stress ball" that Nat's group distributed.)

On the roads in the south of Israel, our group passed many areas where rockets had hit. Funnily enough, we didn’t see one crater. The reason for this, our guide explained, was that whenever a rocket hit, the crater was filled in almost immediately. The local people knew they had to move on; that life had to continue.

This will to move on really impressed me. I encountered it throughout the post-war south. Israelis don't dwell in the past. A great example of this was a company we visited called Atzmona Potato. It was founded by a group of settlers who had been removed from Gaza by the Israeli government. (It's hard to remember, when you're here, that there were around 23 Jewish cities in Gaza before the settlers were relocated.) Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, these settlers got to work, and built a potato farm on nothing but sand. In three years, they were making a profit. Now they have become the biggest organic vegetable exporter in Israel.

We also passed through Sderot, a town that in three years has been on the receiving end of more than 10,000 missiles. Here we visited Israelis whose houses had been leveled by Qassam rockets. I met Maya Iber, a 50-year-old woman who had lived in a two-storey house: The second storey and parts of her first floor were completely destroyed. She was living now in one room with no electricity or water. However, when we came across her, three weeks after the rocket landed, she was already rebuilding her house. We visited four damaged houses in total; some had suffered worse damage than Iber’s, others less. But when talking to these victims, the thing I heard them express the most was not rage against Hamas, but gratitude for their safety.

Coming away I felt that if maybe the Palestinians could adopt the attitudes of the Israelis I met in SederotÑand instead of fighting, moved on and rebuilt Ñ who knows what Gaza would be like today?