Etzion DCL

Once again, as we did last week, the MW Team was supposed to present requests to be removed from the blacklist for those Palestinians whose requests had fallen by the wayside and not been addressed.  This time we brought seven requests.  When we reached Etzion, we phoned the liaison officer, Mahdi, directly only to learn that he was on vacation and wouldn’t be back until next week.  When we suggested that we present the papers to one of the soldiers on duty in the DCL offices, Mahdi said that the requests would get lost in the shuffle and not be taken care of, and that only he could receive the requests and see to it that they were handled properly so that they received an answer.  So the requests remained with us and returned to Jerusalem.

Aside from Ora and myself, there was only one young man in the waiting room when we arrived and he had been invited to meet with the Shabak.  The DCL was completely empty and Ora said that in all her years with MW, she had never seen it like this.  Just then, one of the cleaning staff came out of the compound after finishing his day’s work.  We asked him how the day had gone and he told us that there had been a huge crowd of people in the morning who had come about their magnetic cards.  The machines had worked properly and all had been taken care of by 3 PM, so that no one had remained to complain to us.  The cleaning man hitched a ride with us as far as the Etzion traffic circle from where we returned to Jerusalem.