Our group of seven all passed without incident through the metal detectors except for my 88-year old father-in-law, a refugee from Jaffa, a once thriving, cosmopolitan Palestinian port city, now an urban slum on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He and 700,000 other Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the Nakba or Catastrophe of 1948. My father-in-law was asked to go to a small room with a blue curtain. Inside, Israeli military asked him to strip down to his underwear, and he was searched. He was touched familiarly, one might say. Later we joked that his balls had been deemed non-threatening to the state of Israel.

At passport control, a young Israeli soldier inspected my family’s passports. We asked politely that our passports not be stamped because we had plans to visit countries that would not accept a passport that showed evidence of a visit to Israel. Then she left her stool and walked away with our documents for about a half hour. We waited knowing that we would not pass through easily or quickly.

We were finally asked to take a seat and wait for our names to be called. In the waiting area (a small, dirty space with some metal chairs), we met several Palestinian families. An old woman from Jerusalem told us she had left Amman at 7 am and had been waiting on the bus for five hours before being told to wait yet again. We offered her some mint tea from the snack shop and some pita bread with Laughing Cow cheese that we had brought along for the kids. It was as if we offered her the moon. She insisted we come to Jerusalem to have lunch at her house. We met a young couple from Indianapolis arriving to see family with their seven-month old baby. The baby was uncomfortable and sweating, and we worried about how long this family would be forced to wait. We met a young man who was traveling on his American passport but because he also had a West Bank ID and did not reveal that fact at first, he was forced back to Jordan and refused entry.

The young man who came to interview my father asked who he was planning to visit. He gave him the name and phone number of his cousin in Ramallah whom the Israeli authorities immediately called to confirm my dad’s story. They demanded the ID number of our cousin when they spoke with him on the phone which he was obliged to provide. I wonder what the Israelis do with this information.

My father-in-law’s interviewer spoke perfect English and we learned he grew up in Virginia. He was kind and offered to facilitate a visa stamp on a separate piece of paper to keep our passports “clean”. His kindness brought some light to the situation. He added some dignity and humanity to a system that values neither of these. My husband noticed the irony of the situation. A kid from Norfolk had the power to decide if his father, a native of the land, would be allowed into the country.

All in all, we waited some seven hours to be cleared through the border. We were hungry, hot and tired when our passports were finally returned to us. We said goodbye to the people we had gotten to know during the wait and distributed the last of our snacks to the families with young children.

When we stepped out to find a taxi, we learned that only one taxi company has rights to transport passengers from the bridge. It is an Israeli firm and we wondered how Israeli drivers would go to our destination in Ramallah. The prices were double the usual, but we had no other options. We didn’t have a Palestinian sim card for our mobile yet,, and since we didn’t know when we would clear the border, we didn’t ask family to meet us. We paid the hefty price and loaded ourselves into the waiting cars. We were driven about 500 meters down the road and were asked to switch cars belonging to Palestinian drivers from Jerusalem for the remainder of the journey. We learned later that our Palestinian drivers are forbidden to pick up passengers from the bridge, but collect a 40% cut from the Israeli taxi company to drive customers to the West Bank. So, the Israeli company, it turns out, earns about $100 per car to drive 500 meters. Nice work if you can get it.

As we were leaving we saw the young Indianapolis couple with their baby come out of the border facility. I was so happy they were getting their child out of that hellish situation that I cried. So much emotion poured through me, relief for that young family, relief that my kids hadn’t been stripped-searched, anger at the humiliation of innocent people, sadness that young, vibrant Israelis were compelled to participate in such an unjust regime. Finally, I cried for the hundreds of Palestinians we left behind and wondered how long they would continue to wait.