Afternoon

Participants: MachsomWatchers T.F., Ph.W. and 4 guests from Norway (members of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel)We wanted to see what transpires at the checkpoint during the hours when Machsomwatch representatives are not present, so we timed our arrival at Qalandiya for 12:30. There was no line at the checkpoint and the soldiers were “unemployed.”Our Norwegian guests spent the time photographing and interviewing us, and one another.The soldiers on this watch were friendly but businesslike, carefully fulfilling all regulations and unwilling to make compromises.For example a family of 3 who traveled from Hebron to Ramallah in the morning to see an eye doctor was separated. The mother, being an older woman, was allowed to pass through the CP (although she lacked appropriate papers) but her daughter and son were told to return to Ramallah and take the roundabout way home. All the mother’s asking and begging that her daughter be allowed to accompany her were refused, despite the mother’s evident fears and the fact that she hardly looked capable of reaching Hebron by herself.At 14:00 the guards at the CP changed shift and the team headed by Amir, with whom we had an unpleasant incident 2 weeks ago, took over. The new team included the well-known “mimicker [of the women's voices]."From 14:15 the lines at the CP began to grow longer as the workday ended and the flow of people to their homes further south grew stronger. Once again the CP guards carefully fulfilled all regulations and were unwilling to bend the rules, even a little, for those who didn’t have all the required pieces of paper.Due to the growing crowd, and also to the presence of the “mimicker” who aggressively contributed his share, the level of tension increased palpably.(Although in all fairness, we did observe several instances where the “mimicker” allowed mothers with a number of children who held blue ID’s to skip the line and go straight on.)We definitely felt hostility on the part of the soldiers to members of the Machsomwatch team. It appeared that intervention on our part doomed any request to failure, and the suppliant was left to wend his way home by alternative routes.In short, our contribution was nil. Repeated requests to Amir to open additional lines for inspection of papers were refused on the grounds that long lines and slow progress permitted him to control the CP better.We called Roni Numa’s Neta to try and have her speed things up, but she was busy and promised to call back. She never did.We left Qalandiya at 16:30. The line was still long (1/2 hour +) but moving.