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.”

If it is serious about making the Middle East a region of peace, the United States should pressure Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and require the country to undergo nuclear weapons inspections, Egypt's ambassador to the United States says.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Nabil Fahmy decried what he called a double standard in U.S. foreign policy and said the Bush administration must lean on Israel to the same extent it has on Iran, which agreed this week to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"There's no way that (Egypt) can reconcile this," Fahmy said. "It's a very serious issue that Israel has a nuclear program that's not safeguarded with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that it's not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it has rebuffed all of Egypt's attempts to convince it to become party to a region free of nuclear weapons."

American officials have said they won't prod Israel into signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have stressed that the country is a longtime ally of the United States, unlike Iran.

Experts say Israel has a highly developed program of nuclear weapons whose purpose is to deter any attempt to overrun the tiny country. While Israeli officials have never acknowledged the arsenal, they have repeatedly stressed that Israel will never "introduce" such weapons in the region.

Fahmy, who is on the advisory board of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, said Egypt has "raised this issue with the American government repeatedly. If America is serious about ensuring the Middle East does not become a region where weapons of mass destruction become a threat, it should be more active, more straightforward and more aggressive. It should apply one standard for all. It can't be on a case-by-case basis."

Regarding the most pressing crisis in the Middle East at present, Fahmy said that Egypt has not received "specific requests" from the United States for help in pacifying and rebuilding Iraq.

"We are ready to help today -- in a nonmilitary way," he said, adding that such aid could include training for Iraq's post-Saddam Hussein police and army.

Fahmy said that more countries would be contributing to Iraq's reconstruction if the requests for help had more of an "Iraqi face," rather than coming from Washington. He said that some Egyptians were in Iraq working on private contracts, primarily related to setting up a mobile phone system.

He said the violence there would continue to dampen foreign aid efforts for some time. "These same Egyptians who are on the ground there, if they get killed, people are going to come back to me and ask, 'Where was the security?' " Last week, President Bush said Egypt should "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East" and called on other Muslim governments to join what he said would be a new democratic movement in the region.

Fahmy defended his country's record, saying it had made recent progress in human rights, economic liberalization and other areas.

Human rights groups have long criticized Egypt for its crackdowns on dissent, and President Hosni Mubarak has ruled with unchallenged authority since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in October 1981.

"I support more democracy than what exists today in the Arab world, and that's my government's opinion, too,'' said Fahmy, who is in the Bay Area to address the World Affairs Council of Northern California and to meet with other board members of the center in Monterey.

"That's not to say that democracy doesn't exist -- just that it's a process that goes on continuously," Fahmy said. "I argue that Egypt has made major steps over the past 25 years, including moving from a one-party system to a situation today where we have 16 parties.

"We (recently) established a national council on human rights, to monitor human rights practices and to develop a culture of human rights in Egypt. We reviewed our education system. We abolished the military decrees that have been issued over the past few years, except for those on national security issues. We put all of that forward out of our own domestic requirements, not because President Bush was asking for them.

"Is that enough? No. We need to do more, and we will do more."

Fahmy called Egypt's earlier curbs on civil liberties "a step backward" that was taken "because we faced terrorism" from militant Islamic groups.

"The United States took steps backward when you faced terrorism," he said.

"Does that mean you're not a democracy?"

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Beneath the Western Stereotypes Lies a Rich Cultural Heritage

The tragedy of Saddam Hussein is more than just a tragedy of war and killing and suffering. It's a tragedy of imagery and information. For more than 20 years, Hussein has been the only Iraqi that Americans have really known. While we learn everything there is to know about his madness and personal habits (his ex-mistress told ABC recently that Hussein dyes his hair, regularly uses Viagra and wears relaxation masks to reduce wrinkles), the rest of Iraq remains much of a mystery.

Three years ago, when the great Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati died at age 73, the nightly TV news programs in the United States ignored it. Al- Bayati was one of the Muslim world's greatest living poets, a man who could write about love and passion and betrayal with poignancy and verve, as in his poem "Secret of Fire":

On the last day, I said to her:

You are the fire of the forests

The water of the river

The secret of the fire

Half of you cannot be described

The other half: a priestess in the temple of Ishtar.

Poetry aside, most Americans only get a small snapshot of the Muslim world, but this frozen image of menace, fear, foreboding and foolery is often enough to deceive us into making judgments.

Islam shouldn't be seen through this prism alone because it ignores the vibrant culture that has existed for centuries in Egypt, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and other Muslim countries. The poets, painters, writers, photographers, singers, filmmakers and artists who live in these countries create sublime work that reflects their diversity of faith, and occasionally -- very occasionally -- the work becomes widely known in the West.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Pakistani singer who collaborated with Eddie Vedder (leader of the grunge-rock band Pearl Jam) on the soundtrack to the movie "Dead Man Walking," was a Sufi Muslim who frequently sang at religious shrines in his native country. Sufism is a mystical form of Islam, and Khan's music -- with its hypnotizing rhythms and ecstatic verses about Sufi saints and faith -- was a potent embrace of his devotion to God.

Young Americans who dance to Khan's music in night clubs may not realize how religious his songs are. It's certain that when most Americans think of Pakistan, they don't think of the genial Khan but of other figures (like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, or the convicted killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl) who represent that country's reputation for terror, coups and mayhem. Khan's untimely death from a heart attack in 1997 -- just as his stardom was being recognized in the pages of Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker -- robbed the world of a towering figure who stood for peace between cultures and religions.

"By and large, Muslims remain a one-dimensional community," says Agha Saeed,

head of the nation's largest Muslim political organization, the American Muslim Alliance, which is based in Newark. "When you become a one-dimensional community, people only have one dimension to deal with you.

"Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died at the very moment of breaking through. I remember when a concert of his was publicized in The New Yorker and it said, 'Possibly the greatest living soloist in the world.' This could have been the moment where his voice would have played that clarifying and unifying role in creating other dimensions of understanding."

Iran, which President Bush has condemned as part of an "axis of evil," produces so many great poets, writers, filmmakers and thinkers that the country could easily be labeled a "nexus of knowledge."

Just one example: Director Abbas Kiarostami, whose movies include "Taste of Cherry," which won the top honor at Cannes in 1997 and "Close-Up," which film critic Godfrey Cheshire has called "the greatest film of the 1990s."

Widely regarded as one of the best filmmakers in the world, Kiarostami is a man who reaches out to other cultures and continents. He travels frequently to film festivals in the United States, but -- in a sign of the U.S. government's inability to differentiate between warmongering mullahs and men of morals -- the American embassy in Paris denied Kiarostami a visa last September. As a result, Kiarostami couldn't attend the New York Film Festival, which was screening his new movie, "Ten," and he couldn't give a scheduled lecture at Harvard University.

New York Film Festival director Richard Pena has called the United States' post-Sept. 11 visa policies, which require applicants from Iran and other countries to submit to greater scrutiny and a longer waiting period, "very shortsighted and counterproductive -- especially at a time when we need more contact with the Muslim world, particularly their finest artists and thinkers."

Iranian Americans are especially vexed by this development because they know how much their native country has to offer in terms of culture. Among the poets that Iranians claim as their own: Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Rumi was born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan but was then part of Persia. Seven centuries after his death, Rumi is the best-selling poet in the United States, thanks partly to Coleman Barks, a retired University of Georgia professor and poet whose Rumi books sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Barks rewrites Rumi's poems that have already been translated into English.

"If someone were to translate the other poets in Iran, you'll find at least ten other Rumis," says Susan Akbarpour, the CEO and co-founder of SiliconIran magazine, who was born in Mashad, Iran, and now lives in the Bay Area. "There's Khayam, Saadi, Ferdowsi -- all of them as deep as Rumi."

Like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music, Rumi's poetry is often enjoyed by people who don't know its religious origins. Rumi was a Muslim whose original poems made many references to God and religion. In an interview earlier this year, Barks told me he usually takes out Rumi's references to Islam. For example, Barks says he rewrote a Rumi line that originally read in English, "out beyond what is holy in Islam and what is not permitted in Islam" to "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing."

"I took the Islam out of it," Barks told me. "Yeah, the fundamentalists or people who think there is one particular revelation scold me for this."

Whether or not Barks gets a scolding, the result is the same: A kind of hidden Islam. The culture of Islam is hidden in the pages of Barks' books and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music, and it's hidden from view when poets like Al- Bayati are not known to a general audience. In the Muslim world, poetry is an especially important medium that unites people.

Among many Palestinians, Mahmoud Darwish is as important a figure as Yasser Arafat. Darwish is the Arab world's best-selling poet -- a man so revered that he can draw tens of thousands of people to a recital in a Beirut stadium. Darwish's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has won a slew of honors, becoming a French Knight of Arts and Letters and receiving Russia's Lenin Peace Prize (an award that has also been given to Pablo Neruda, Linus Pauling and other notable figures).

Born in 1941, in a village that became part of Israel, Darwish has lived in exile for many years. His poem, "State of Siege," captures the sentiment of many Palestinians with lines like these:

Under siege, time becomes place,

Fossilised in its eternity

Under siege, place becomes time

Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow

"Very few," says Omar Ahmad, board chairman of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, when asked how many Americans know Darwish and poems like "State of Siege." "It's not just him but other poets in the Arab world, or 20th century poets like Ahmad Shawqi from Egypt, who we call 'Prince of the Poets.' "

"For a long time," says Ahmad, "poetry was the medium of communication for people in the Middle East. In the Islamic world, poetry was like movies today."

Ahmad, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and now runs his own software company in Santa Clara, says the lack of information about Muslim poets, writers and artists affects people's perception of Islam.

A good example is the reader who sent an angry letter to The Chronicle that said, "Islam is not a religion. It is a cult devoted to the extension of terror and violence. Are you so stupid you cannot recognize the fact that these anti-Western scum have no ambition other than the adaptation of their backward-in-time cultist rituals that are buried in the twelfth century?"

Agha Saeed, who is from Pakistan and lectures in political science and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and California State University at Hayward, says people change their perception of Islam when they encounter Muslim writers and thinkers for the first time. Earlier last month, when the American Muslim Alliance held its convention in Edison, N.J., Saeed saw how FBI officials reacted to meeting Muslim professors.

"Three officials from the FBI came and had a public discussion with our other panelists, including Sulayman S. Nyang, who was born in Africa, is now an American citizen and is former chair of ethnic studies at Howard University, " Saeed says. "They were surprised, I think, to see people in a different context where you had panelists who are scholars, activists, civil rights attorneys, professors. The FBI had had only one experience of Muslims so far --

that was of Muslims as suspects, and this was perhaps the first time where they saw us as scholars and civilized thinkers. It's my impression that, in a small way, it changed their understanding of what the community is all about."

Of course, it's not just professors and writers and artists who humanize Muslims. Sports also has a humanizing effect -- as proven in France, where soccer star Zinedine Zidane, a Muslim who is the son of Algerian immigrants, is embraced by everyone for his charisma, smarts and athletic ability. In a country in which there are often tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, it's Zidane who is a uniter among the French. Author Salman Rushdie has said Zidane "has done more to improve France's attitude toward its Muslim minority, and to damage the political aspirations of the ultraright, than a thousand political speeches."

Saeed, Ahmad and other Muslims are hopeful that people will eventually see the Muslim world in its entirety. They say they see little signs that give them hope. On Sept. 10, the American Muslim Alliance had a poetry reading to signify the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. The event was attended by Muslims and non-Muslims.

"We had people reading poetry in German, Punjabi, Pashto, Urdu and other languages," says Saeed. "There are small beginnings. There is no major breakthrough or large beginning, but there are innumerable small beginnings."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle