About 150 adults and kids turned out for the dedication a couple of weeks ago of Sderot's Afik Park, named for Afik Zahavi-Ohayon, the four-year-old boy who, in June 2004, became the first person in the town killed by a Kassam rocket. On the night of the dedication, the noise from all the kids climbing on the jungle gym was so loud that at times the people giving speeches had to raise their voices to be heard.

Ghost town: "Like in those Westerns, with the tumbleweeds blowing through the empty streets."
Photo: Jonathan Rosenblum

Things have changed in Sderot. A year ago, which local mother or father would have dared bring their kids out at night to play for a couple of hours in the park?

Things have changed, but not altogether. At the edge of the crowd, Olga Hanukayev, a mother of three, said, "Nobody in the city is calm. Everybody's just waiting for something to go wrong."

In the nearly 10 months since Operation Cast Lead, life hasn't been totally quiet in Sderot, but it's been relatively quiet - quiet, certainly, in comparison with the seven previous years when several thousand Kassams fell in the city. Fewer than 100 have landed here since the war's end, with two rockets destroying houses and all the others landing in open fields, said municipal spokeswoman Sima Gal.

No one has been wounded.

"Except from shock," Gal added, noting that on the day before the start of the school year, a "Code Red" alarm sounded through the streets - and about 500 people turned up at the local trauma center.

The 24,000 residents of Sderot have come out of their bomb shelters, but slowly, hesitantly. And with each Code Red, which can occur weeks apart, the old, Pavlovian fear in the gut gets triggered and everyone runs for the shelters. Psychologically, it's back to square one.

Behind the counter of the lottery parlor in the center of town, Bruria Dadon, who's run the place with her husband for 25 years, had nothing optimistic to say about this new period of relative quiet. "Business hasn't picked up at all; people don't have money," she said.

As for her state of mind, it hasn't gotten better either. "I've stopped going out; I have no peace of mind. I can't go out in the street for long. Nobody's calm here. I get stomach pains. There's a tension inside us."

A man buying a lottery ticket agreed. "I never used to smoke, now I smoke two packs a day," he said.

Another customer, Ya'acov Hanukayev, a dreadlocked photography student at nearby Sapir College, didn't like what he was hearing. This was all a display of miskenut, of victimhood, and he was sick of it. "My state of mind has definitely improved now that the Kassams have stopped. But on TV they show people in Sderot crying all the time, asking for charity. It's not good," he said.

"He's right. I agree 100 percent," said a woman customer.

In the face of this, Dadon retreated, saying she wasn't pleading miskenut, just making the point that people in town were still suffering psychologically, that even though there were a whole lot fewer Kassams, they still hadn't gotten over the years of incessant rocketing.

Hanukayev replied: "I know people are still suffering, we're never going to get over this completely, but when we cry and complain, this tells the terrorists that their rockets are having an effect, and it's just inviting more."

After the customers got their lottery tickets and left, Dadon told me her house had been damaged by rockets or shrapnel three times, while her sister's house had been destroyed. While she was talking about the hard times her family had endured, her cellphone rang. It was her husband calling about some practical matter. After a few words, she started weeping.

"I cry over every little thing," she said, composing herself. "My husband's coming soon. He'll be mad at me if he finds out I've been crying again."

Dadon's sister has returned to Sderot after failing to find work in Ashdod. Her brother has returned from Netivot after realizing that his professional prospects were better in town. I asked her if she, too, would like to leave.

"At our age, my husband and I can't leave," she shrugged. "This is our livelihood. At our age, what else will we do?"

LAST YEAR about 200 families moved out of Sderot, joining the hundreds of families who'd preceded them in the years when the Kassams were pouring down, said Gal. "The families who left are those who had the [economic] opportunity to leave," she said, confirming the sad notion that Sderot lost the "strongest" of its population to the Kassams. Very few have returned, and they're not expected to, said Gal. Once they've found work and housing and gotten their kids squared away at school outside Sderot, they're gone for good.

One or two new businesses have opened since the war, but there hasn't been any burst of economic growth, any major investments or job creation. In fact, said Ma'or Moravia, editor of the local paper Din V'heshbon, "When we had the Kassams, money was coming in from outside, either from charitable donations or from the 'solidarity convoys' of shoppers from Tel Aviv. Now that the Kassams have basically stopped, that money's dried up."

But there are very visible signs of improvement - for one, the shouk is pretty crowded with shoppers. "It's much better now. People go out of their houses; they're not always looking around for the nearest bomb shelter like they were before," said Yosef Cohen, a long-time vegetable vendor.

Yet the change in the security picture hasn't sunk in with a lot of people here. A young mother buying socks with her daughter said she doesn't feel any safer. She still keeps an eye out for the nearest bomb shelter; she still hurries home as quickly as possible. But when I asked her if she would have taken her little girl shopping in the shouk a year ago, she replied, "God forbid."

Another vendor, Vladimir Ledesky, said the relative security hadn't improved his business at all. "Nobody has any money; nobody comes to shop," he said. Ledesky complained about the water leaking into his house from the security room that's still under construction. "The government promises to finish the security rooms, but they don't do anything. It's a big problem," he said.