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.”

After another week of breathtaking demonstrations from Jordan to Yemen heralding dramatic revolutionary change, in occupied Palestine things appear much the same. The repetitions of bombing, air attacks on civilians, muted international protests, and dubious gestures towards a bankrupted peace process: all lend an air of futility and hopelessness to the trajectory of Palestinian freedom. Palestinians urgently need their voice to be represented at this historical moment in which unrepresentative rulers are being toppled by popular movements, and citizens are reclaiming their public squares and political institutions on the age-old principle of popular sovereignty.

Since January Palestinians in the refugee camps and under military occupation have all been asking the same question: is this not our moment too? Yet how are we to overcome the entrenched system of external colonial control and co-optation, the repression, the internal divisions and the geographical fragmentation that have until now kept us divided and unable to unify? The situation appears a thousand times more complex than Bahrain, or Egypt, or Libya, or Syria.

The solution to this fierce dilemma lies in a single claim now uniting all Palestinians: the quest for national unity. Although the main parties might remain irreconciled, the Palestinian people most certainly are not. Their division is not political but geographic: the majority are refugees outside Palestine, while the rest inside it are forcibly separated into three distinct locations. The demand is the same universal claim to democratic representation that citizens across the Arab world are calling for with such force and beauty: each Palestinian voice counts.

The campaign is for direct elections to the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the national parliament in exile. It is the institutional body that gives both legitimacy and a mandate to the PLO, which is still recognised internationally as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

The PLO signed the Oslo accords that created the (supposedly temporary) interim Palestinian Authority in 1994, and the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1996. The authority was to form the institutions of an independent Palestinian state within five years; 16 years later it has yet to achieve any one of the basic liberties Palestinians urgently require, reflecting instead an institutionalised division between the West Bank and Gaza – and, crucially, between Palestinians inside occupied Palestine and the majority of refugees outside it, who were disenfranchised by its creation.

The PNC, as the parliament of the PLO itself, was once the heart of the Palestinian national movement; made up of the resistance parties, unions and independents, it could claim the legitimacy of a national liberation movement. But there have not been proper elections to it for decades: most of the seats are quotas, reserved for the factions; members have died of old age; there is not even a definitive list showing who the current members are. Those on the West Bank and Gaza legislative council are the only directly elected members of the PNC. No one understands how the legislature should now function: everyone agrees it doesn't.

This crumbling hollowed-out mausoleum once housed a vibrant and well directed Palestinian struggle for freedom, full of dynamism and debate. Now only the mobilising power of direct elections can make it the representative institution Palestinians demand.

The call for PNC elections unifies every Palestinian because it rises above faction, ideology and political orientation. It is also the single revolutionary principle that can overturn Palestinians' current political imprisonment, because it reassures them that each voice contributes to determining national platforms, policies and strategies. Organising around this demand takes the decision-making out of the hands of the few and puts it back into the hands of the people themselves – Islamist and secular, one-state or two-state supporters, conservative or radical. And the one thing Palestinians certainly need is all these sectors working together in this moment: no one can lead except the people themselves.

It is also by now very clear that nothing else will work: democratic representation cannot be achieved by new presidential elections to the Palestinian Authority; nor can it be secured through fresh legislative council elections held only in the West Bank and Gaza, which excludes the voice of the majority of Palestinians. It cannot be brought about by the transfer of power to a provisional salvation front made up of individuals; it cannot even be achieved through the much needed Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, with the intention of re-activating the PLO on the basis of dividing the seats of the PNC between the two parties.

Indeed, many such measures are designed to keep power out of the hands of the Palestinian people themselves, and they continue to disenfranchise millions of young Palestinians (most of whom don't belong to either party), who have never had the chance to vote in their lives, but live days full of struggle and peril in the deathly prisons of Arab regimes and the horror of the refugee camps. Their voices are equally valuable and deserve the same dignity as every other Palestinian voice.

The challenge facing Palestinians is to hold to this key demand in the face of the concerted pressure that will be exerted by those who wish to keep to the old order, or to put themselves in charge of the new one. The decades-old Palestinian struggle for freedom and representation takes new life, and new hope, from the Arab revolutions.

The drivers of violence in Gaza are clearly external. When all Palestinians can vote for sovereign rule, peace will be within reach

There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other. How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here? These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is essential to understand just what we are witnessing.

This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster.

The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured."

How did we get here? The institutions created in occupied Palestine in the 1990s were shaped to bring us to this very point of collapse. The Palestinian Authority, created through negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, was not meant to last more than five years - just until the institutions of an independent state were built. Instead, its capacities were frozen and it was co-opted into performing the role of a security agency for the Israelis, who were still occupying Palestine by military force, and serving as a disbursement agency for the US and EU's funding of that occupation. The PA had not attained a single one of the freedoms it was meant to provide, including the most important one, the political liberty of a self-determining sovereign body.

Why did we get here? Once the exact nature of its purpose emerged, the Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser Arafat's compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death. Under those conditions of siege the international "reform" process created a new institution of a prime minister's office and attempted to unify the security apparatus under it, rather than that of the president, whom they could no longer control. Mahmoud Abbas was the first prime minister, and the Israeli- and US-backed Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, was appointed head of security. After the death of Arafat, Abbas was nominated to the leadership of the PLO, and directly elected as the president of the PA.

Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. Abbas's strategy was of an entirely different order: no resistance in any form and a complete reliance on the good faith of the Israelis. After a year of achieving nothing - indeed Ariel Sharon refused to negotiate with him and Israeli colonisation was intensified - the Palestinian people's support for this humiliating policy of submission wore thin. Hamas, polling about 20% in previous years, suddenly won 43% of the vote in 2006.

This popular reaction was a response to the failure of Abbas's strategy as much as the failure of Fatah to present any plausible national programme whatsoever. The Palestinians thus sought representation that would at least reflect their condition of occupation and dispossession. Although the elections were recognised as free and fair, the US and Britain immediately took the lead in applying sanctions against the Hamas government, denying aid - which was only needed in the first place because the occupation had destroyed the economy - and refusing to deal with it until it accepted what had become, under these new circumstances, impossible "conditions".

The US administration continued to treat Fatah as if it had won the election rather than lost it - funding, arming, and directly encouraging agents within it to reverse the outcome of that democratic election by force. The Palestinian president brought pressure to bear on Hamas to change its position on recognition of Israel. Palestinians refused to participate in this externally driven coup - indeed, the vast majority of Fatah cadres rejected outright an enterprise so clearly directed at destroying the Palestinian body politic. Both the prisoners' document and the Mecca agreement signed in Saudi Arabia creating a national unity government took place because Palestinian society insisted on a national framework. Yet a small group has brought us to this point. The outcome is what we have before us today, similar to what the Americans were seeking to create in Iraq: the total exclusion of democratic practices and principles, the attempt to impose an oligarchy on a fragmented political society, a weakened and terrorised people, a foreign rule through warlords and strongmen.

How do we get out of here? For the west, the path is both obvious and simple. It needs to allow the Palestinians their own representation. It can look to the terms of the Mecca agreement to see the shape that would take, and to the 2006 prisoners' document for the political platform the Palestinians hold. It needs to urgently convene a real international peace conference, which no one has attempted since 1991, as recommended in the Baker commission's report on the Iraq war, de Soto's end of mission report, and as championed by President Jimmy Carter. And it needs only to look to the Beirut Arab peace initiative to find everything it has been seeking, if indeed it is seeking peace.

For the Palestinians, the path is also clear: we have come to the end of the challenging experiment of self-rule under military occupation. We now need to dissolve the PA, mobilise to convene direct elections to our only national parliament, the Palestine National Council, in order to enfranchise the entire political spectrum of Palestinians, and thereby recapture the PLO, transforming it into the popular and democratic institution it once had a chance of becoming. This is already a popular demand of all Palestinians. Palestinians in exile must take their turn again in lifting the siege inside Palestine, as the inside did for the outside after the almost total destruction of the PLO in 1982 in Lebanon and the siege of the refugee camps there in 1986: we are one people. The Palestinians have a long history of struggle in which each generation has had to break out of the coercive prison imposed by British colonial, Arab, Israeli, and now American rule, and we will do it again.

Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University karmanabulsi@hotmail.com

The prevailing western view of what is happening to the Palestinians today is simple. A people hopelessly divided among factions, held to ransom by fanatical leaders, terrorised in the streets by gun-toting militia, paralysed by the failings of their third-rate ruling elites. A burdensome nation of dependants, wards of the international community, unwilling or unable to help themselves in spite of the millions in foreign aid, goodwill and concentrated attention poured into that tiny piece of land. In the press, one finds nothing but dissension and chaos between Hamas and Fatah; between the prime minister, Ismail Haniya, and the president, Mahmoud Abbas; between the Palestinian Authority and the PLO; between the refugee camps and the cities; between Gazans and West Bankers; between Palestinians under occupation and those in exile outside. Not only that, when offered the benefits of democratic elections, they have voted in a terrorist organisation as their representative. Against the background of such a portrayal, it is no wonder that Tony Blair should invite as his guest this week the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert - a man elected on the plan that Israel must unilaterally impose its own will on the Palestinians "because there is no one to negotiate with". Little wonder also that the US Congress recently passed a resolution branding the entire West Bank and Gaza as a terrorist area.

Of course there are political divisions, fostered and engineered by Israel and its western sponsors. But this is an image that fundamentally misrepresents not just what is going on in Palestine today, but also the profound political shifts that have taken place since the death of Yasser Arafat. In several crucial ways, Arafat represented Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine. Most important, he shaped and maintained the national consensus on how to deal with Israel.

This consensus essentially amounted to two propositions. First, that Israelis and Palestinians had to reach a negotiated settlement, based on UN resolutions and international law; and second, that until negotiations were successfully concluded, Palestinians had not only a right but a duty to resist Israeli military occupation. This dual strategy of negotiation and resistance was not unique to Arafat or to the Palestinian people in their long struggle for freedom. It has been the cornerstone of all liberation struggles throughout the colonial era. Nelson Mandela never surrendered the ANC's right to resist apartheid through armed struggle, even after he was released from prison and began negotiations.

But this consensus was splintered by the death of Arafat. Abbas, on assuming the role of PLO chair, ran for elections as president of the Palestinian Authority on the promise to follow Arafat's legacy. Yet under Arafat he had always reflected the preference for a strategy of negotiations without resistance, which Arafat (and most Palestinians) believed was inadequate to achieve an Israeli withdrawal, or even the possibility of bringing the Israelis to the negotiating table.

Once elected, Abbas pursued this policy of trying to achieve progress exclusively through negotiations with Israel - only to be rejected in this endeavour by Ariel Sharon, in spite of Abbas's conciliatory attitude to every Israeli demand. Throughout this period, Hamas maintained its policy of resistance without negotiation or recognition of Israel - the position held by the PLO until 1988.

Palestinians backed Abbas for over a year in his struggle to get the Israelis to the table. When it became clear Sharon was only interested in a unilateral settlement, and in expanding control of the West Bank, those living under occupation gave a majority of their votes to Hamas in the legislative elections in January. In doing this, Palestinian popular will has surmounted the obstacles placed on it by the occupying power and restored the national consensus that Arafat had maintained: negotiations and armed struggle until the end of occupation.

Throughout their epic history, Palestinians have faced repeated attempts to divide and undermine their national liberation movement. In Beirut throughout the summer of 1982; in the years of the first intifada, where people rose in resistance to military rule; in the second intifada; during the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, and especially today, in the collective punishment meted out to Palestinians for voting in a government that represents their right to hold fast, Palestinians have not surrendered their will to be free.

Indeed, attempts to make Palestinians surrender their rights have always generated more opposition. These sieges have not just failed, they have reinforced a greater sense of collective purpose, and restored popular unity. It is therefore futile for the Israelis and the west to attempt yet again to divide the Palestinians, by withholding aid and refusing to talk to their elected representatives. Violent resistance will only end when the military rule of the Israelis over the Palestinians ends. Peace only comes with justice. Any other notion of peace is merely a disguise for conquest, which the Palestinians will never accept. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked: "There is peace in the dungeons, but is that enough to make them desirable?"

Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and a former PLO representative.

Sharon is no statesman and his motives have never been opaque - conquest by military means

Everybody knows that Ariel Sharon had a dark past. For us Palestinians, for me as a Palestinian, he is our dark present. The entire destruction of the fabric of our civic and political society over the past five years has had the looming presence of Sharon at its black heart. That single moment when in the year 2000 Sharon went to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) to light the chaotic, atavistic fuse of his return to political power - the moment that sparked our revolt against everything that he represented, and which began his rise to power - that single moment was the essence of his persona, the uniquely ruthless, relentless dynamic of his role as conqueror.

With the return of this man, we were lost, again, and one could not let his return be witnessed without an active daily resistance to it, and the fate he had in store for us. It was this single fact that mobilised me to work again in the political realm. Having lived in Beirut with my family and friends, and having worked, and fought, and stayed alive throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Sharon engineered in the spring and summer of 1982, I had no doubt what he had in store for us when he began his final climb back to power. And just so: in February of 2001, within three days of being elected prime minister, he was replaying across the West Bank and Gaza his dark arts, a mad echo of his practices of 20 years before in Lebanon: the assassination and destruction of the fighters, the local defence committees, the refugee camps. Women and children and young men killed, our buildings demolished, our institutional infrastructure, our records, our art, broken, gone. And, of course, our leadership encircled and besieged.

If he destroyed our leader, he believed, he would destroy our collective aspirations for freedom and for an independent Palestine. His vision of our destiny was quite simply one of apocalyptic proportions, he was no politician, nor elder statesman. To us, he was always the classic military conqueror and adventurer - we never found him "controversial", nor his motives opaque. He never left us guessing. His practices, his aims, his intentions were made clear through his policies. Every Palestinian man, woman and child witnessed, lived, or died under that vision, and they each understood it well.

But during the new war launched by Sharon against our people, the generation of 1982 that I was part of were more scattered, further flung to the four corners of the world, farther away from being able to do anything to help, even more powerless than before. So to those of us who had fought in those earlier battles and were still living, his return did something more cruel than simply bring back haunting reminders of those days, and of how many friends had died. It changed the look of what we did, our luck, our motives, how we had failed to stop him when we were younger.

Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who evokes this terrible reaction.

I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return to public office.

To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and above all our national liberation movement. He did not want us to have a national framework, his desire was to reduce us to small quarrelling groups and factions trapped under his prison rule, disorganised, disintegrated, or co-opted; he planned actively and provocatively (and carefully) to create such an impoverishment of our people's public and private life.

This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination, imprisonment, violent military invasion. His fate for us was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what he had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.

His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel, but now turned into a tragedy of heartbreaking proportions, a destroyed place, corrupted beyond description by the devastation of Israel's terrible role there since 1967.

We Palestinians saw how he well he understood the west, how far he could push it - he had an almost magical ability to measure how craven the response could be to his violations of common decency and international law, how much he could get away with. He would test, and test the limits of his actions, would he get a red light? Would the Americans stop him?

I watched him at this, day after day, during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, from besieged Beirut, which was in flames. Every time he would break the ceasefire, break his word to the Americans. We, on the other side of this equation, were waiting, hearts in mouths, for international protection, intervention, help of any kind not to be left at his mercy. How many times in these last years did he break the ceasefire in Gaza through a provocative assassination, an aerial assault, a military raid killing dozens of civilians to provoke Hamas to attack Israel? His pattern was set in stone, a stone around our necks.

Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.

I have talked a lot about those days with old friends who survived the camps, exiles now living far away in snowy northern Europe. What it meant to have left under orders, what it meant to have been trapped behind. For the ones who had to stay behind when the fighters left, you see, already understood Sharon well.

Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and a former PLO representative