Pinhas Amar knows why Obama became president: "It's the blessing I gave him. I know it."
By TOVAH LAZAROFFPinhas Amar 224.88(photo credit: Tovah Lazaroff)
Forget the political analysts.
Lying on a sofa in his living room wearing a white T-shirt and red running pants and nursing a broken leg, Pinhas Amar, a Sderot father of four, knows why Barack Obama became president of the United States.
"It's the blessing I gave him when he was here. I'm certain of it," Amar said Wednesday, as he held up a photograph of Obama taken during the politician's visit to the southern border city in July.
Along with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Obama stopped at the Amar home to see firsthand the damage done when a Palestinian-launched rocket slammed into the family's kitchen last winter just before Shabbat.
Unable to live in the house, the family had relocated to a rental until last week, said Amar, who wore a white knitted kippa over his graying hair.
They hosted Obama in their original home while it was still under construction and lacked a proper roof. They showed him where the rocket had landed and how Pinhas's wife Aliza, who is crippled, was knocked out of her wheelchair by the blast.
At the end of that visit, Barak suggested that as a religious man and a scribe, Amar should say a prayer for Obama.
"I blessed him so that he should succeed in all his endeavors," said Amar.
In response to his spontaneous blessing, according to Amar, Obama told him that if he were elected, Amar would be one of the first guests invited to the White House.
It was not the first time Amar had met a presidential candidate. Obama's Republican rival John McCain also stopped at the Amar home when he was in Sderot in March.
Although McCain is known for his strength in security issues, it was the tall young senator from Illinois who made an impression.
"There was a magical air about him. But he was also simple and modest, with a direct way of speaking," Amar said, adding that he was also more personable and charismatic than McCain. At one point, he explained, Obama had even put his arm around him as they spoke. "I believed then that he would become president."
At the time, Obama and Amar bonded over the fact that they were both fathers. Looking at Amar's children, Obama said "he would not let his small girls live in such a place where rockets fall all the time. He promised to do everything he could to stop the rockets," Amar said.
They were words that came back to Amar early Wednesday morning close to 6 a.m., when he turned on the news and saw that the same man who had spoken with his children that July day had now become president of the United States.
However, as Americans several continents away were celebrating the dawn of a new era, a barrage of Palestinian rockets hit the South from Gaza for the first time in almost five months catapulting the Amar family back into a nightmarish reality where such attacks were a daily part of their existence.
Even before waking to see the news of Obama's victory, at 4:30 a.m. the family had already risen from bed to the sound of a warning siren. Although it was hard for Amar, whose right leg is in a cast, and for his wife, who limps, they tried to make their way to the safe room where their children were sleeping.
Once they thought the attack had passed, they returned to bed. But Amar did not sleep well, and he awoke again soon after. He turned to the television news, where he saw a glimmer of hope that maybe now there was an American leader who could make a difference even for him in Sderot.
The renewal of the rocket attacks did not come as a surprise, Amar said. He had always believed the lull enjoyed over the last five months was temporary.
So on Wednesday, he was hopeful that Obama would keep both of his promises: a White House invitation and an end to the rockets.
A short distance away, Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council head Alon Schuster said he was looking closer to home for a solution - toward the Israeli government rather than Obama. He, too, had been watching the election returns when a rocket landed in a patch of mud only about 10 meters away from his home, a stroke of luck that minimized the damage, said Schuster.
But there was a lot of smoke and a lot of noise, he said, and his family, absent a safe room, cowered in a hallway. What's needed is for the government to do more to protect the homes along the southern border, he declared.
Meanwhile, in Ashkelon a Grad missile landed at about 9 a.m., and in a second stroke of luck for the day, buried itself in a lawn near a shopping mall on a major city thoroughfare.
Obama was the furthest thing from the mind of Yitzhak Aberjil, the principal of a religious Ashkelon high school located across the street from where the missile landed. He had done little more than note Obama's ascendency in passing.
He was deep in conversation with two pupils at about 9 a.m. when the warning siren rang out. The 200 students at his school raced for the available protected space, which in their case was a hallway away from a window. They were too far away to be harmed by the missile, said Aberjil.
Still, one pupil who commutes from Sderot went into shock and fainted. She was taken to the hospital and then sent home.
This was not an unusual scenario for Ashkelon, which is home to over 100,000 people and where there are few spaces that can withstand a missile strike.
In a bakery across the parking lot from where the missile landed, Nitza Eluz was handing a customer change when she heard the siren.
"I started to scream and shake. Then I ran from one end of the bakery to another like a crazy person, as if it would help. I didn't even know where I was running," said Eluz, adding that there was no actual safe place to go.
Once she understood that she had not been harmed, she looked outside and saw smoke, and then the police and ambulances arrived to treat shock victims. Her cellphone did not stop ringing. Her mother called, as did her friends. Even her 11-year-old daughter checked in from school.
"I hear it fell near you. Are you okay?" asked her daughter. Once Eluz had assured her daughter that all was well, the girl had other questions: "Will there be more attacks? What can we do?"
Eluz responded: "There is nothing we can do."
Once the calls stopped, Eluz sat, drank some coffee and then returned to work.
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