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 US president Barack Obama yesterday acknowledged the long road to Middle East peace after he directly entered the diplomatic process and brought the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders together for the first time.

As expected, there was no breakthrough, but Mr Obama reiterated his commitment to resuming peace talks and announced that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators would meet George Mitchell, US Middle East envoy, next week.

He also said Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, would give him a progress report in mid-October, revealing a rough timetable for the US administration for the first time, analysts said.

Mr Obama had separate talks with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, before the three men held a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, which is taking place in New York this week.

“Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon,” Mr Obama said.

While there was little substantive progress, it was the first time Mr Netanyahu met Mr Abbas since the Israeli prime minister formed his right-wing coalition government in March. An Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip at the turn of this year that killed about 1,400 Palestinians also made it difficult for the two sides to meet earlier.

But Mr Obama, whose peace efforts have aroused much scepticism across the Middle East, spoke of a “powerful sense of urgency” even while the protagonists remain far apart, with some Palestinians fearing an eventual new intifada or uprising unless there is palpable progress. “Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security but they need to do more to stop incitement and to move forward with negotiations,” he said.

“Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians and have discussed important steps to restrain settlement activity.

“But they need to translate these discussions into real action on this and other issues.”

He also urged “Arab states to take concrete steps to promote peace”.

Progress towards a resumption of full-blown negotiations has stalled over Israel’s public refusal to freeze settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.

But even partial Israeli moves on settlements, such an end to new building permits, might be enough for the United States to persuade the Palestinians to resume talks under a yet-to-be-decided framework, analysts said.

“It serves no purpose to write off this process when there is a lot energy being expended by the US to move things forward,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. “There’s a lot of space between a permanent status agreement and no progress at all.

“It might be too optimistic to hope for a comprehensive peace agreement by the end of Obama’s first term, as the US president is rumoured to hope for, but it’s not an unreasonable goal to create the conditions for permanent status talks. This is possible.”

Mr Obama’s peace push has led to historic lows in approval for a US president in Israeli opinion polls.

Mr Abbas, meanwhile, faces growing opposition from within his own Fatah movement the more time elapses without any progress. Hamas, whose Islamic rule is confined to Gaza, quickly dismissed in advance the Palestinian president’s participation in yesterday’s meeting.

Only Mr Netanyahu can claim some domestic political success, with many Israelis lauding his tough stance on settlements. But Israeli settler leaders already sense betrayal because he has publicly spoken about a “Palestinian state.

He also offered a nine-month West Bank settlement freeze, according to Israeli officials, falling short of the 12 months demanded by the United States and the open-ended commitment including east Jerusalem sought by the Palestinians.

It remained to be seen if and how the US might wield any “sticks” to push Israel into meaningful talks. But analysts have noted Mr Obama has not given up, and Congress and the American Jewish community broadly support his peace quest.

The future agenda of bilateral peace talks will be subject to further negotiation but Mr Obama made clear he was staying on course. “We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then pulling back,” he said.

Israel is considering marking products exported to the European Union with their point of origin following a long-standing dispute with Brussels, which says goods produced in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories are not eligible for preferential tariffs.

Israeli officials said Ehud Olmert, minister of industry and trade, announced the proposal during talks in Brussels yesterday. He said such moves would not affect Israel's diplomatic position on the territories.

Mr Olmert's proposal points to a marked shift in policy in the rules-of-origin dispute.

Silvan Shalom, Israeli foreign minister, this month accused the EU of prejudging the outcome of any final status peace talks because it was talking about goods originating from settlements that would be part of those negotiations.

The Israeli foreign ministry said it was aware that Mr Olmert had put forward some ideas but not the details.

EU officials said they would need time to consider the issue when the proposals were outlined further.

Relations between Israel and the EU have deteriorated since the intifada, or uprising, began more than three years ago, following European criticism of Israeli military policies towards the Palestinians. Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. The international community considers illegal the presence there of more than 400,000 Jewish settlers. The EU is Israel's main trading partner, number one in Israel's imports and number two in exports. An EU-Israel trade agreement gives Israel generous preferential tariffs for its exports. These tariffs - most of them duty free - cover a wide range of goods, including agricultural goods such as grapes, dates and wine. Israeli officials have argued that the rules-of-origin issue was being used by the Europeans for political reasons to pressure Israel. The value of goods from the settlements amounts to only a few million euros but the possibility of international arbitration to resolve the dispute had been raised in Brussels.

Pressure is mounting on the government of Ariel Sharon, prime minister, from a number of quarters. Two unofficial peace plans are gaining support and military chiefs are questioning the tough policies used against the Palestinians.

Mr Sharon recently announced he was considering options to get the peace process back on track and hinted at the evacuation of perhaps a small settlement in the Gaza Strip, where many Jewish settlers own greenhouses for agricultural produce.

Source: Financial Times (UK)