'Anin, Thu 16.5.13, Morning

Translated by Dvora K.

A'anin CP  0550-0810

Today we stayed at the A'anin CP for more than two hours. The residents of A'anin on their way from the village to the seamline zone can go through this CP twice a week. It opens for them on Mondays and Thursdays, for half an hour, at 6 a.m. and half an hour at 3 p.m. For the most part, the traffic is in one direction: In the morning people leave for the seamline zone, and in the afternoon, they return home to A'anin.

This morning, the inspections were especially slow. The soldiers of the CP, and most of all the Military Policewoman, invested a lot of effort (and questions) in order to discover who is going to work and who is 'working' (playing a trick) them.

The first people to go through were a grandmother (73) and grand-daughter (26), on their way to visit the family in Umm-Reihan. They went through. The last to go through was a young fellow who was refused passage at first, waited a while and finally went through. Between the first and the last, those going through at included the 'regulars' whose agricultural status cannot be doubted; those whose clothes are a bit dirty and whose bags are small, and therefore it's difficult to suspect them; those whose clothes are clean and still manage to convince the soldiers that their intentions are pure; and a few young people, some of whom did not go through to work on the land. We could not see how many were refused passage because  inspection was done in the center of the CP, far from us.

"She keeps each person for five minutes," said the people going through about the woman soldier. That explains why the passage of 60 people, which usually take half an hour, took two hours today. A fellow came out with a bitter look on his face. "What happened?" The woman soldier asked him when he was coming back. He did not understand her Hebrew and became confused. He said, "at four". He should have said at three thirty. That was enough for the woman soldier: "Four? Go back." He went back, afterwards returned and begged. So she gave in and let him through.

With Hannah's help we were able to get some information later from the authorities at the DCO, and it turned out that now they are more cautious about finding out where each person is going. Those who have work permits have to go through the Barta'a CP which is very far away. They try / prefer to go through here and sometimes there are soldiers who let them do it. Those who have an agricultural permit, who do not look as if they are going to weed the vineyard, especially the younger people, are interrogated and then they go through or else they are sent back.

Since the fence is the last physical obstacle between  the West Bank  and  Israel, passage into our country for people with bad intentions is forestalled with the help of the fundamental initiative that the "purist woman soldier" demonstrates. "She is doing exactly what she was told to do" say the authorities at the DCO, "those are the procedures."

If it is true that the army reads our reports, we had better not record here everything that we learned, heard, and saw.