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.”

Bethlehem, West Bank - Pilgrims traveling the ancient route from Jerusalem to Bethlehem this Christmas will find themselves hitting a dead end -- a towering concrete wall and metal gate under the lock and key of the Israeli army.

The dusty road to the town of Jesus's birth has been the gateway to Bethlehem since biblical times and would have been the likely path taken by Mary and Joseph. But today it leads to what the mayor of Bethlehem calls "the world's largest prison."

At the entrance is a brand new military crossing where for the first time this Christmas pilgrims and local Christians will pass through X-ray machines before emerging into Bethlehem from behind 26-feet high concrete walls.

"If Mary and Joseph were here today, they would go through the checkpoint just like everybody else," said Sister Erica, a nun, at the crossing.

Bethlehem is marking its first Christmas since being walled off from adjacent Jerusalem by an internationally condemned barrier Israel erected with the avowed aim of preventing Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating its cities.

The economy, which depends on visitors, plunged into deep recession five years ago when a Palestinian uprising began and the town became a virtual war zone, but tourism in Bethlehem has improved slightly this year.

But the mood is sour among residents contemplating the implications of the concrete wall cutting across their town.

"It's now clear it's not coming down. It seems very final," said Mary O'Regan, an Irish activist helping Palestinians.

Defending the barrier, Israel says it has stopped 90 percent of suicide bombings since work began three years ago after more than 180 people were killed in such attacks in Jerusalem alone.

"The aim of the barrier is to protect Jerusalem ... because a significant number of suicide bombers and accomplices entered Jerusalem from the Bethlehem area," Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

Palestinians see the barrier, made mostly of barbed-wire fence and concrete walls in some areas like Bethlehem, as a unilateral border created by Israel to stifle their hopes for an independent state in all the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army said it was easing restrictions at Christmas for pilgrims and local Christians and that some 200,000 pilgrims were expected, up from 100,000 last year.

"We're going to try to make things more lenient to allow them to move as quickly as possible," a spokesman said.

On the other side of a metal gate, reminiscent of a giant garage door, is the continuation of the Bethlehem Road.

The town's once thriving entrance -- where in bygone years Palestinians and Israelis milled about in cafes, local stores and even a dentist's surgery -- is now almost deserted.

Its decline began at the start of the Palestinian uprising five years ago, when fierce gun battles erupted daily between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers guarding the tomb of the biblical matriarch Rachel.

Today, the entrance is caught between two walls: the one that cuts Bethlehem off from its cultural and spiritual sister city of Jerusalem and another towering wall around Rachel's Tomb, a few hundred yards along the town's main road.

"It's choking the life out of our neighborhood and our businesses," said Nikola, the Christian-Palestinian owner of the Christmas Tree restaurant near Rachel's Tomb.

"A few years ago, this place was so crowded that I wouldn't have time to talk," said Nikola as he fried falafel balls. "These days, I can count the number of customers on my hand."

Nowadays, tourists bypass the bullet-scarred neighborhood near Rachel's Tomb, and head for the Nativity church. But even there, their visits are so brief they barely have time to browse at souvenir stores or grab a meal at a local restaurant.

"We demand the Israelis give Bethlehem freedom. If they won't do it then we won't have peace this Christmas," Bethlehem's mayor Victor Batarseh told reporters.

Sanur, West Bank - Overlooking a West Bank valley where the biblical Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery are two settlements that may become a last bastion for opponents of the Israeli government's withdrawal plans.

Sanur and Homesh were chosen as two of four West Bank settlements to be evacuated, along with all 21 in the Gaza Strip, in mid-August because of their relatively moderate population of Russian-born artists and secular Israeli families.

But as most of the original settlers reluctantly accept their evacuation and seek new homes, hundreds of Israelis from the most radical settlements in the West Bank have been pouring in to fight the government's plans to abandon Sanur and Homesh.

"The land of Israel belongs to the Jews. It is our homeland and the Arabs should go find a homeland somewhere else," said Miriam Adler, a 28-year-old mother of six who lives in Sanur.

About 240,000 Israelis have settled in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to about 3.6 million Palestinians who seek to establish an independent state on the territories, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Sanur, a settler artists' colony, was mostly deserted by its inhabitants and about a third of the residents of Homesh fled after militants killed several settlers in shooting incidents on nearby roads during a five-year-old Palestinian uprising.

The new arrivals who have replaced them have an ideology even more radical than that of most hardline settlers in Gaza.

Many are part of what has become known as the "hilltop youth", a young and more militant generation of Jewish settlers from the West Bank who are not averse to beating up Palestinian farmers, uprooting their olive trees and poisoning their flocks.

They see the fight to prevent the evacuation of Sanur and Homesh as a religious battle. Losing the campaign, the radicals say, could be the beginning of the end of Israel's hold of the Jewish people's biblical heartland, the West Bank.

"The evacuation of West Bank settlements constitutes a far more threatening precedent to what may come in the future than does Gaza because Gaza has always been perceived as a separate unit by most Israelis," said settlement expert David Newman.

Determined to keep hold of the near deserted settlements, scores of families like Adler's arrived with their children in tow and began to pitch tent camps and renovate abandoned houses.

Adler, who moved to Sanur from the hardline settlement of Kiryat Arba in the midst of the Palestinian uprising when it was almost abandoned, says her red-line is Sanur. "If we leave, then it will be one piece after another piece after another piece".

The takeover by the newcomers has left many of the veteran residents seething. Rueven Tabib, a 25-year resident of Homesh, said that many original settlers there have put a new twist on the settlers' anti-withdrawal slogan "Jews don't deport Jews".

"Jews have already deported Jews," he said, explaining that many of the old-timers at Homesh are rushing to leave to escape their new uninvited neighbours who he said had come without their permission and were squatting on their property.

The newcomers profess non-violence but many are armed and even Adler does not dismiss the possibility that she might fight back on evacuation day.

"I wouldn't be the one to initiate violence but nobody will evacuate me from my home and I would not turn the other cheek."

The new arrivals say supporters from nearby settlements, many of which have links to the anti-Arab Kach movement, will defy an expected army ban on Israelis from outside the settlements slated for evacuation from entering the area.

"On the day that we give the order, tens of thousands of people will come to Homesh and Sanur," Adler explained.

Unlike the Gaza Strip which is surrounded by a heavily guarded, electronic security fence, the West Bank settlements will be much harder to seal off.

Supporters may still be able to slip in by walking across barren West Bank hills where they may encounter Palestinian villagers and -- some Israeli security officials fear -- could carry out acts of violence against them.

"Evacuating the northern West Bank may prove much more difficult than Gaza because the settlements there are completely fence in while the settlers in the northern West Bank are more radical," a senior Israeli military official said.

At the moment, the settlers are using a potent weapon to hamper the military's preparations for the withdrawal -- an army of mothers and children.

On one blistering summer's day, settler women with babies in their arms blocked with their bodies army bulldozers digging a dirt road for troops to use for the evacuations.

Hundreds of other settlers, many bused in from nearby settlements, flocked in for the protest, forcing a retreat of the army bulldozers and a halt to the road construction.

Israeli soldiers, sweating in full battle dress, were confronted by settler protesters offering bottles of water and urging them to disobey orders to evacuate the settlements.

"Leave us alone. Let the army wipe the floor with the Palestinians," shouted one mother, so young she wore braces.

Mothers paraded up and down with babies in strollers, dabbing sunscreen on their children's faces to prevent sunburn.

"The land of Israel belongs to us. If they evacuate us then all of Israel is in danger," said one woman.

The Jewish settler, gun at his hip, broke down as he thought of what would happen when Israeli police arrive on his doorstep to remove his family from their Gaza Strip home.

"It's like asking me 'If someone comes to rape your wife, what will you do?'," he sobbed.

The settler, who called himself Haim as he did not want to reveal his real name, said he would not be tempted to draw his gun to prevent the evacuation of his family or the other 8,500 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza this July.

At least he thinks he won't.

"Nobody knows how it will develop, where heightened emotions might lead to," said Haim, who is on trial accused of having beaten Palestinian motorists.

"Someone who is a moderate could suddenly find himself doing something extreme," he said, sitting on a bench outside a synagogue in the Gaza settlement of Neve Dekalim.

Israeli security forces fear militant settlers and supporters might use guns and explosives to try to prevent the pullout from Gaza and the northern West Bank.

Many of the 235,000 settlers living on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war believe the territory is part of a religious birthright and the fulfilment of a biblical prophesy that will pave the way for the coming of the messiah.

"For them it's a dream of the redemption of the people of Israel. Leaving Gaza smashes that dream and is a complete disaster for these people," said Menachem Friedman, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and an expert on Jewish extremists.

"They might react in a very harsh way."

DETERMINED

Security forces are preparing for every eventuality, including attempts to assassinate Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and attacks on Palestinians and Islamic holy sites.

Activists from the outlawed anti-Arab Kach group are high on the security watch list.

"We will do anything we can to stop this disaster to the Jewish state. It is a danger to the survival of the Jewish people," said Baruch Marzel, a Kach leader. "We are going to fight it (the Gaza withdrawal) in any way we can."

When Israel evacuated the settlement of Yamit in the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 as part of a peace treaty with Egypt, dozens of Kach activists holed themselves up in a bunker and threatened to commit suicide, at one point dousing the walls with petrol.

The stand-off ended after they were persuaded to back down by their charismatic leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. U.S.-born Kahane was assassinated by an Egyptian gunman in New York in 1990.

Security officials fear die-hards will blockade themselves in Gaza settlements, raising the spectre of carnage reminiscent of an FBI siege of the Branch Davidian apocalyptic sect in Waco, Texas in 1993 that ended in the deaths of some 80 people.

One nightmare scenario cited by officials has militant settlers planting mines and explosives around buildings and troops having to use force to remove them.

STOCKPILING FOOD

Settlers in Gaza referred to the story of Masada in which 1,000 besieged Jewish rebels held off Roman legions for three years at a desert fortress before committing suicide to avoid capture in AD 73.

Militants have set up an organisation called "Gamla Will Not Fall Again", named for the Jewish village where another group of Jewish rebels jumped from cliffs to their deaths when they faced defeat by the Romans in the first century.

The group is attempting to stockpile food and water as well as electrical generators for what they believe will be a protracted siege in Gaza if the army cuts off supplies to the settlers.

"Yamit was very minor compared to what is going to happen at Gush Katif," said Boaz Haetzni, one of the organisers.

Like many settlers, Haetzni insists he won't use violence to resist the evacuation -- which he calls "a second Holocaust".

Such comparisons with the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews during World War Two have caused concern about what militant settlers might do to stop the withdrawal.

For many settlers, it is the end of a dream and the beginning of what they fear will be more handovers of biblical land Palestinians want for a state.

The government hopes to entice most to leave peacefully in return for compensation of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"It's clear to everyone on the right today that if Gush Katif falls, the flood gates will open," said Haetzni, who lives in the West Bank but intends to move to Gaza to resist the pull-out.

His plan is to send tens of thousands of supporters to Gaza, blocking traffic on busy intersections so that police will be too busy restoring order to be able to carry out the evacuation.

Israel itself could become volatile as the July 20 kick-off of the withdrawal approaches.

Security forces, fearing attacks by Jewish extremists, have stepped up protection around public officials involved with the withdrawal as well as holy sites such as Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kach activist, says he is ready to die to prevent the evacuation. He like other many other militant Jews views his fellow Israelis involved in the withdrawal, especially Sharon, as traitors.

"I hope it won't happen, but I think the path Sharon is taking will lead to a bloodbath," said Ben-Gvir.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's shaky coalition Tuesday faced collapse in a row over the 2005 budget, raising the prospect of early elections that would endanger his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

His largest partner, the secular Shinui party, ignited the crisis by saying it would oppose the 2005 budget at its first reading in parliament Wednesday. Sharon's aides said he would dismiss Shinui if it defied him in the vote.

Without Shinui, Sharon would have to bring in the center-left Labor Party -- an option opposed by his right-wing Likud party followers -- or face a snap election.

"If all these efforts fail then we will have no choice but to go for early elections," said Uzi Arad, an adviser to Sharon. An election almost two years ahead of schedule could lead to an indefinite delay in his plan to "disengage" from conflict with the Palestinians by evacuating all 21 Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank in 2005.

But Sharon has not retreated from his threat to expel Shinui if it carries out its threat to reject the budget in anger at his promise of 290 million shekels ($64 million) for a religious party in exchange for votes needed to pass the budget bill.

Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, Shinui's leader, threatened in the daily Maariv Monday to leave the coalition and wrote that without his party "Sharon will be forced to go to elections."

Political analysts saw Shinui's unyielding stance as a sign the party did not want to alienate supporters by turning a blind eye to what Lapid called "bribing" ultra-Orthodox lawmakers for votes, even if this precipitated an early election.

The government has to win approval of the 2005 budget by March 31 or resign, but has run into opposition over steep cuts in social spending.

COALITION HEADACHES

Sharon lost his majority earlier this year when ultra-nationalist coalition partners were fired or bolted over their refusal to accept a Gaza pullout. He now commands only 55 seats, including Shinui's 15, in the 120-seat parliament.

Analysts said that if Shinui quit, Sharon could salvage his coalition only by bringing in Labor, and perhaps the ultra-Orthodox Shas party which might satisfy Likud rightists.

But there would be enormous obstacles to such a move as Likud's decision-making committee has banned Labour's entry in the hope of derailing the Gaza plan, which Likud rebels oppose.

Labor was to decide later Tuesday when to hold a party leadership vote, which would probably be a contest between its leader, Shimon Peres, and ex-premier Ehud Barak, who lost to Sharon in the 2001 election and has since relaunched his career.

A Labor source a party leadership vote in the next few months would prevent Labor joining a Sharon government in the near future.

Shas also appeared an unlikely partner as its spiritual leader has issued a religious edict opposing a Gaza withdrawal. Arad said Sharon was hoping that most Likud members, faced with the choice of new elections or a partnership with Labor, would opt for the latter.

Likud has much to lose as the 40 seats it has in parliament are the most it has ever held.

But as commentator Nahum Barnea wrote in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth: "The smell of elections does for politicians what a pill of ecstasy does for druggies. It sends the last vestiges of their ability to make level-headed decisions into a frenzy."