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.”

The sign in big, red Hebrew letters reads “Welcome to Mevasseret Adumim, the Harbinger of the Hills”. A three-lane road with roundabouts leads up the hill to a police station and street lamps line the flyover that links the new town to neighbouring Ma'aleh Adumim, one of the largest Jewish settlements in Israel.

There are no houses, cars or people in Mevasseret Adumim: it is a town laid out, waiting to be built. That is because international pressure has so far prevented construction from going ahead. The area is the last piece of open land linking Arab East Jerusalem to the West Bank and critics said that to develop it would bury the very notion of a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis.

According to reports in the Israeli media, the area has been earmarked for development under a secret accord between Binyamin Netanyahu, the new, conservative Israeli Prime Minister, and his ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Better known under its old British mandate name, E1, it is the most controversial development project in the region, one that diplomats and observers warn will trigger the collapse of the weakened Palestinian Authority, or drive it into armed resistance again.

Israeli army radio reported that the deal was struck between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Lieberman as part of the negotiations to form a government, and it would allow 3,000 homes to be built on E1.

Critics said that building a combined Jewish settlement and national park in the hills of E1 would cut the West Bank in two. And blocking mainly Arab East Jerusalem from the West Bank it would make it impossible for the Palestinians to have that side of the disputed city as their capital.

Khalil Shikiaki, a leading Palestinian political analyst, said: .“Failure to respond in an effective manner could lead to the collapse of the nationalist camp [the Fatah-led branch of Palestinian politics] My guess is, confronted with this development, the nationalist camp would probably support violence. Given the current tends I think of this as a potential trigger to major clashes.”

That view was backed by a senior Western diplomat, who feared that developing E1, which the Bush Administration urged against, may encourage Hamas to try to take over the West Bank.

All the pieces are in place. Land has been levelled for housing, the roundabouts indicate that more roads will soon spread out across the wooded hills and the existing road network hints at the future shape of Jerusalem, according to Haim Erlich, an Israeli researcher for the co-existence group Ir Amin.

Mr Erlich points to the almost completed flyover crossing the Jerusalem to Jericho highway, which links E1 to Ma'aleh Adumim, sealing the gap of Jewish suburbs around East Jerusalem. Once the two are joined and then combined with smaller existing Jewish settlements and an industrial area farther out in the West Bank, the so-called Adumim block will have about 45,000 residents and cover more land than Tel Aviv, the second- largest Israeli city, he said.

“If they are really going to build E1, the meaning of that for the Palestinians will ... [mean] that the talks about a two-state solution are only on the level of theoretical talks,” Mr Erlich said. “It's the end of the idea of the two-state solution.”

Construction workers are also busy completing a walled-off road with no turnings into East Jerusalem, which will run from the southern West Bank to the northern part. This would allow Israel to argue that the Palestinians have territorial contiguity. Mr Erlich and others in the peace camp argue that it will effectively leave the West Bank divided.

The office of the mayor in Ma'aleh Adumim declined to comment on the plans but in a statement that was issued recently it said that the thousands of homes would constitute “contiguous construction between our city to the capital Jerusalem and will be the Zionist response that will prevent the division of Jerusalem and the dislocation of Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Adumim [Adumim block] from the capital of Israel”.

The plans may be finalised under the Netanyahu Government but they were started two decades ago as part of the long-term Israeli strategy to secure the disputed city. A statement earlier this year from the Ministry of Defence, which has to approve all housing construction in the West Bank, made it clear that the state is not about to cede any of the area to the Palestinians.

“Ma'aleh Adumim is an inalienable part of Jerusalem and the State of Israel in any permanent settlement,” the statement, which was issued by the office of Ehud Barak, the Labour Party leader and Defence Minister in the previous and current governments, said. “E1 is a corridor that connects Ma'aleh Adumim to Mount Scopus [a longstanding Israeli pocket of land in East Jerusalem] and therefore it is important for it to remain part of the country. This is the position of Labour since Yitzhak Rabin and also of the Government of [Ehud]Barak in 1999, and the Americans know this position.”

Hagit Ofran, of the anti-settlement group Peace Now, said that building in E1 would fit with the reluctance of Mr Netanyahu to allow a sovereign Palestinian state.

“It's very hard to expect this Government will go for a two-state solution and negotiations,” said Ms Ofran, whose organisation protested outside parliament at the government inauguration with banners declaring: “This is not a unity government but a settler government.”

She said that the involvement of Mr Barak's centrist Labour Party in the Government would not act as a figleaf for the rightwingers' ambitions.

“Barak is worse than Netanyahu,” she said, pointing to the increasing numbers of settlers in the West Bank during Mr Barak's last term as Defence Minister. “They are trying to make it impossible for a two-state solution.”

In the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin, political points are traditionally made with guns and beatings. So when the actors of the Freedom Theatre decided to stage George Orwell's classic satire Animal Farm they knew that they were taking a risk.

Putting on a play in which the protagonists subvert the glorious revolution and collaborate with the enemy was dangerous enough in a part of the world that brooks little criticism of its leaders. That these same protagonists are pigs was unlikely to make things better before a Muslim audience.

Despite one arson attack, a few smashed car windows and several arrests, the young troupe are playing to a packed house.

“One of the aims of the Freedom Theatre is to challenge the monolithic thinking of the people, the fear to be different,” said Juliano Mer Khamis, its director. “To oppose the major currents, especially the Palestinian Authority where it is in power, or Hamas where it is in power.”

The play has been a hit in a culture stifled by factional infighting, where the old guard of the PLO clings to power and resists change, while the opposition is provided by Hamas, whose conservative Islamist values risk dragging the Palestinians back into the past. “We are caught between the hammer and the anvil,” said Mr Mer Khamis, the son of an anti-occupation Israeli Jewish activist who married a Palestinian Arab. He set up a youth theatre in the West Bank in the 1980s.

The police have only managed in the past year to quell the lawlessness that reigned when Jenin was the centre of armed Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. The refugee camp was the scene of the most destructive battle of the Israeli offensive in the area in 2002. The music centre next to the theatre was burnt by suspected Islamists last week - an attack that almost razed the theatre too.

The Freedom Theatre was set up by Mr Mer Khamis with the aid of Zakaria Zubeidi, who was once the head of the Jenin branch of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. He gave up an armed struggle in favour of what he calls cultural resistance and was granted an amnesty by Israel in an attempt to defuse years of violence.

Too shy to act - and his face stained with gunpowder - Mr Zubeidi, 33, is a keen drama critic and sponsor of the theatre, and backs its latest attempt to challenge some of the Palestinians' flaws.

“We have to show the world what is happening. Every revolution makes mistakes,” he said. “Outside the theatre you can't express yourself, but on the stage you can.”

While many people in the camp have criticised former fighters for swapping their guns for greasepaint, one of Mr Zubeidi's former comrades-in-arms has taken up the theatre with enthusiasm and turns in a fine performance as the horse Clover in the adaptation.

“I knew the armed struggle was over but I wanted to continue the struggle in another way,” said Rabieh Turkman, 23, who fought the Israelis for eight years, was shot three times in the stomach and whose sister was killed by Israeli soldiers.

“People said to me, 'How can you leave, your sister is a martyr and you leave to work with a Jew?'” - a reference to the Jewish mother of the director.

On stage the entourage give a stirring rendition of Orwell's classic tale of the corrupting influence of power, with the word “revolution” interchanged liberally with the more Palestinian expression “intifada”.

In case audience members miss the message in the final scene the human who enters the farm to do business with the pigs, who have betrayed the revolution, speaks Hebrew and wears an army uniform - a scene that is greeted with clapping and whooping.

“Our message from this is the corruption in the Palestinian Authority, but not just in the PA, in all governments, especially after a revolution” Mr Turkman said. “It reflects our national struggle, we are fighting corrupt leaders who bring Israelis into our land, as you see at the end.”

So far the theatre has dodged the wrath of the Palestinian Authority, although the director doubts that President Abbas will be buying a ticket any time soon.

It could have been worse. They had intended originally to stage The Lieutenant of Inishmore, about a psychotic, violent IRA officer who loves nothing but his cat. Mr Mer Khamis said that it was too risky to attack the “sacred cow of the resistance - the shahid”, or martyr. “We got cold feet,” he admitted.

Hillary Clinton threw herself into the turmoil of the Middle East crisis yesterday by backing the creation of a Palestinian state despite opposition from the incoming Israeli Government.

The US Secretary of State also dispatched high-level envoys to Syria to discern the opportunities for regional talks.

Mrs Clinton urged continued dialogue with the Palestinian Authority to create an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “We happen to believe that moving towards a two-state solution is in Israel’s best interests,” she said. The new Administration of President Obama would be vigorously engaged in pursuing that goal, she said.

Mrs Clinton will be dealing with Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Likud party leader who has refused to endorse the idea of a two-state solution and openly rejected the last round of peace talks initiated by the Bush Government. Mr Netanyahu, who is forming a far-right government, was elusive about his intentions after meeting Mrs Clinton. “Our shared goal is the need for creative thinking to move forward and out of the maze,” he said.

An aide to Mr Netanyahu told the Ynet news website before the meeting: “He will tell her that, while he does not favour diplomatic stalemate, he will not commit to the Annapolis process and the two-state principle.”

Mr Netanyahu said that he had raised what he considered to be Israel’s most serious threat, Iran, in the discussions. He and others on the Right warn that a Palestinian state could pose a threat to Israeli security, pointing to the example of Gaza, which Israel left in 2005 but whose Islamist rulers, Hamas — backed by Tehran — continue to fire rockets at Israel. Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel, has said that it will not halt its attacks until the Jewish state ends a blockade that has crippled the coastal strip. Many Palestinians are also losing hope in a two-state solution, pointing to the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

A report this week by Peace Now, the leading Israeli anti-settlement group, said that the Israeli Housing Ministry had plans to build 73,000 more housing units in land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war. This would double the number of settlers and seriously impede any plans for an independent Palestinian state. Mr Netanyahu has said that he would not freeze settlement expansion, and would offer only an “economic peace” to the Palestinians, with Israeli forces retaining security control of much of their land.

To deflect US pressure on him, Mr Netanyahu is widely expected to focus on talks with Syria, which Washington wants to detach from its main regional ally Iran — now believed by US military chiefs to have enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

A day after Mrs Clinton gave her Syrian counterpart a surprise handshake at the Gaza donors conference in Egypt, she announced that she was dispatching two senior envoys to Damascus for preliminary conversations, reversing years of US isolation under President Bush, who labelled Syria part of his “Axis of Evil”.

“We have no way to predict what the future with our relations concerning Syria might be,” Mrs Clinton said. The two envoys will be Jeffrey Feltman, acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Dan Shapiro, of the National Security Council.

In a sign that Mrs Clinton may be starting to breathe life into a more regional approach to the challenge of Iran, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, urged a meeting of the Arab League to consider seriously ways of confronting Iran as it develops its nuclear capabilities. Many Gulf states are wary of Iran’s spreading influence and the power that it exerts over Arab militias such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as Syria. “In order to cement Arab reconciliation we need a common vision for issues that concern Arab security and deal with the Iranian challenge,” including its nuclear drive, the prince said.

Hillary Clinton starts her first tour of the Middle East as Secretary of State today with a mandate to reinvigorate collapsed peace talks.

She will find, however, that support for a two-state solution – the central plank in US-led efforts to tackle the crisis for almost two decades – is at a record low.

Not only is it waning on the Israeli side, which is under the new leadership of the right-wing hawk Binyamin Netanyahu, but it is also collapsing among Palestinians, who increasingly view the Oslo peace process, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) that was formed under it, as dead.

Palestinian officials and civil leaders told The Times that their governing body was all but defunct and would either waste away or turn into a kind of Vichy regime providing a cover for Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank. Many Palestinian civil leaders believe that time is running out for a two-state solution, thanks mainly to increasing Jewish settlement activity and Israel’s refusal to relinquish military positions.

Some Palestinians even said that if Israel did not soon agree to statehood, the Palestinians should abandon dreams of independence and confront the Jewish state with its worst nightmare – a one-state solution, in which Arabs would, in decades to come, outnumber Jews. “Oslo is dying and so of course is the Palestinian Authority,” said Mustafa Barghouti, an independent politician and head of the increasingly popular Palestinian National Initiative. “They are transforming the authority into a security subagent for Israel. It’s becoming a Bantustan government, a Vichy,” he said.

“The PA is a house with nothing inside,” said Qaddura Fares, a veteran Fatah member and former MP. In an attempt to establish the PA as a credible government, senior British and US army officers have been seconded to train the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, once made up of former Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) forces who had fought for years alongside Yassir Arafat and returned with him from exile in the 1990s. Billions of dollars have been pumped into the PA, money that its many critics say has made its leaders rich while doing little to improve the economy, which has been crippled by Israeli closure and restrictions on movement in the West Bank.

“The PA is wasting away,” said Diane Bhuttu, a Palestinian political analyst and former legal adviser to the PLO. “It’s not going to collapse because that would entail active measures on behalf of the international community and Israel, and because there’s still so much money coming in from donor states.”

The authority of the PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and Fatah head known popularly as Abu Mazen, was rapidly diminishing, she said. “Palestinians are asking, ‘Is this really the only strategy we have, just to negotiate and negotiate?’ If you add Bibi [Netanyahu] to the mix, then it is not just a question of not believing in Abu Mazen, but questioning the utility of the PA.”

Mr Netanyahu has avoided committing himself to continued negotiations on a two-state solution, offering instead what he calls an “economic peace”, whereby Israel would retain security control of the West Bank, allowing the PA to administer its towns. In return he would try to offer Palestinians more jobs and better conditions.

Ali Jarbawi, a professor of political science at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, said that Israel wanted to give the Palestinians a “state of leftovers”. While the former US President George Bush warned of the dangers of a “Swiss cheese” – a West Bank sliced up by Israeli settlements and military zones – Mr Jarbawi said that what was on offer was “a bunch of grapes”, isolated cities and cantons connected by single roads or even tunnels.

He warned that if Israel refused to grant full Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza it would be in the Palestinians’ interest to dismantle the PA. “If the Palestinians are to remain under military occupation, what’s the point in having an authority? If we remove this façade of the PA, Israel will be in trouble,” he said.

If Palestinians lived under Israeli rule – as they did for decades before the Oslo accords in the early 1990s – they would eventually demand equal rights inside a greater Israel that included the West Bank, Mr Jarbawi said. That would mean the end of a strictly Jewish state. “If we get rid of the PA, we are heading down the road of the one-state solution,” he said.

Growth of settlements

— In 2007 UN reported that almost 40 per cent of West Bank was covered by Israeli infrastructure. 450,000 Israelis living alongside 2.4 million Palestinians in West Bank and East Jerusalem

— Citing Israeli defence ministry figures, Human Rights Watch said settler population in West Bank and East Jerusalem grew 5.5 per cent in year to August 2008 and is four times what it was decade ago

— Ariel Sharon encouraged civilians to settle in the territories after the 1967 war because military installations could be removed by subsequent governments

Sources: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; Times archives