Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

While it is of course welcome that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are now tackling final status issues, it is frustrating to learn that the most Israeli officials claim to be aiming for at this autumn’s US-sponsored Middle East meeting is a “framework” for the end of the conflict.

Haven’t we been there before? Is there not already an agreed-upon framework in the Oslo accords as well as the Arab Peace Initiative that is based on international law? Is it not already clear what the “framework” for the end of conflict is?

It is extremely unfortunate that the momentum created by the Arab Peace Initiative is being wasted. Israel, for all its fine words, simply does not come across as serious when officials are allowed to say such things. It has an opportunity, a big opportunity, by agreeing to negotiate on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative. But instead it wants to renegotiate, ad nauseam, the framework for negotiations. It is an Orwellian nightmare.

Coupled with what is happening on the ground, Palestinians, whether officials or civilians, Hamas or Fateh, are right to be extremely sceptical that Israel means business.

On the ground, there is still no movement on the Israeli pledge to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlements are expanding apace and Olmert’s promise to remove settlement outposts has been shelved to such a degree that the Israeli government is now hoping to strike a bargain with settlers to “legalise” some of these outposts.

On top of that, there is an inhumane siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, whereby Israel is not allowing any goods, except food and medicine for humanitarian purposes, to get in or out. The result: the UN estimates that some 80 per cent of Gazans are now reliant on international aid in order to eat, a percentage that is likely to rise to a full 100 per cent in the next two or three months.

A just and negotiated settlement to end the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is desired. But it is agony to watch Israel trying to take advantage of a divided Palestinian polity, starving some Palestinians while offering empty promises to others and believing the whole world will fall for it.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Israel is negotiating in good faith. On the contrary, Israel appears to be “negotiating” for the sake of negotiating.

All the while, Palestinian suffering is growing more intense and chances of real peace are receding.

So much for the only democracy in the Arab world. Having experimented with real, representative and fair elections, the Palestinian Authority, or the part that is controlled by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has announced that in effect it will not allow Hamas, the victors in the last elections, to take part in any new elections.

In a presidential decree yesterday, the Palestinian electoral law has been changed so that candidates for both legislative and presidential elections must “respect” the political programme of the PLO and previously signed agreements between Israel and the PA.

In other words, Palestinian politicians must now be fully paid-up members of the two-state solution as defined by the Oslo accords. Not only do Hamas and Islamic Jihad fall foul of the law, anyone, and this includes many Palestinian intellectuals and independents who believe Oslo was a trap, and everything since has been proof of that, will walk the wrong side of the line.

The law is problematic in the extreme. It stymies Palestinian options and robs Palestinians of genuine choices. It means that Palestinians will, in essence, only now be able to vote covering a few percentage points of the West Bank with regard to the thing that really matters to them: how to achieve statehood and freedom.

It also represents a quite astonishingly open bending to Israeli and US diktats. Where once Yasser Arafat, confident in his own ability and power, was quite willing to allow others to run on whatever tickets they felt reasonable while defying the West, the new Palestinian leadership is threatened to the degree that it wants to gerrymander elections that have neither been scheduled nor appear likely to take place.

There will be no elections if Hamas does not want them, and even if there were, elections without the demonstrably most popular political movement in the occupied Palestinian territories will be seriously compromised in terms of legitimacy.

In addition, for as long as the PLO excludes the growing political trends among Palestinians, be they Islamist or one-state, it too will appear just a private playground of an old guard increasingly jealous of its power.

There is no alternative to inclusive and free elections. At least there is no serious and credible alternative.

People in this region, but especially Palestinians, will no longer accept being dictated to by those claiming to represent them.

It has to be repeated: Palestinians need to unite before they can successfully confront the Israeli occupation, whether across a negotiating table or on the uneven battlefield. There is no way around a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation. It would be better if this were realised sooner rather than later.

The Palestinians’ right of return appears to be the issue keeping Israel from endorsing the 2002 Beirut Arab summit’s plan for peace between Arabs and Israelis.

Israel claims to be worried that giving the refugees the right to return, as spelled out in the UN Resolution 194 of 1948, will make them flood the country, a process that would de-Judaise the country.

Israel should rest assured. The exact words of the Arab Peace Initiative that Saudi Arabia introduced and that was then endorsed by the entire Arab world calls for “an agreed and just solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees, in accordance with UN Resolution 198”. “Agreed and just”, these key words in the Arab formula for the resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue, offer sufficient leeway and suggest a flexible approach.

While the right of return is clearly sacrosanct for the Palestinian refugees, and is well enshrined not only in UN Resolution 198 but in various international human rights conventions, it is doubtful that a high proportion would choose to live in Israel.

It would be painful for the Palestinians to choose between returning to their land of origin, now alien to them, and remaining where they have built their lives, raised their children, were born (in the case of many) and consider home.

All the same, what the Arab Peace Initiative is calling for is to give the Palestinian refugees the right to choose. The majority of refugees who would most probably opt to stay where they have lived since driven out of their homeland in 1947-48 should be fairly and promptly compensated. When and if compensation is preferred to repatriation, Israel must foot the bill, and not the international community.

Palestinians will feel that justice is better served when Israel, which caused their forced exodus from their country, is held accountable and made to bear the cost.

If Israel thinks that some of its people have a claim on some Arab countries from which they voluntarily left, it must bear in mind that the Palestinians’ rights are legally distinct and must not be confused or linked in any way to any such Jewish claim.

With these ground rules in mind, it should not be too difficult to implement the Arab Peace Initiative in all its aspects, including the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

There is, yet again, a diplomatic flurry in the Middle East. This happens periodically and is often scorned by close observers of this region. Yet, hope springs eternal, and something does seem different about the diplomatic activity this time around.

There are two main reasons. One is an apparent change of policy in Washington, where there seems to be a long-overdue realisation that diplomacy is the way forward.

Thus, in the past week, the US took part alongside Syria and Iran in a conference in Baghdad, while US officials also announced that America would not stand in the way of Israel-Syria talks, something Washington had until recently resisted.

Both these developments are welcome. For the US, they are absolutely crucial, America’s unrestrained belligerence in the past four years having proven unsustainable.

The second reason is that the diplomatic lead is being taken in the region by Saudi Arabia. Having brokered the Mecca agreement, bringing Fateh and Hamas together to form a unity government, a formation expected to be put to the vote in the Palestinian parliament on Saturday, Riyadh is also assertively promoting the Arab Peace Initiative it launched and had ratified by the Arab League in 2003.

That initiative contains nothing more than a restatement of international law vis-à-vis Israel’s occupation of Arab land in 1967 and a commitment to Palestinian (human) rights as stipulated by international bodies, primarily the UN, and agreed upon by all members.

If offers Israel full normalisation with all the countries in the region. Iran is the notable exception, but with, again, increased Saudi diplomacy on that front, Tehran is sure to be watching with interest.

Of course, Israel — one of the core problems in this region — has been predictably unhelpful. Israeli leaders have once again poured cold water on any suggestion that it is ready to abide by international law and its human rights obligations.

Nevertheless, the more shrill Israel sounds and the more rational Washington becomes, the more likely will be a comprehensive solution to some of this region’s many problems.

If Israel withdraws from all territory it occupied in 1967 and allows the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, it will only happen with America’s help.

That, in turn, will go a long way to pacify Iraq and ease Iranian fears. Nuclear energy can then be used for the benefit of all in this region and only for peaceful purposes. Even Israel might find itself breathing easier.