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.”

Patients with chronic kidney disease dying for lack of their routine dialysis. Some 165,000 employees of the Palestinian Authority (PA) unpaid for two-and-a-half months. Women selling their jewelry for fuel or food.

The humanitarian crisis of the West Bank and Gaza is not a Darfur. And what most shocks Arabs and Muslims is that it stems from a very conscious political decision by the world's only superpower. First, they say, you give us Iraq, now on the brink of civil war. Then this: the starving of a whole people.

The psychological and strategic linkage between Iraq and Palestine is not new. But its latest, most intense phase began with the United States' invasion of Iraq, conceived by its chief architects, the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the Bush administration, as the first step in their region-wide scheme for "regime change" and "democratization," whose consummation was to be an Arab-Israeli settlement. There likely wouldn't have been an invasion at all but for Israel and its partisans inside the US. But it had always been clear that the more authentic any democracy Arabs or Palestinians did come to enjoy, US-inspired or not, the more their conception of a settlement would collide with the US and Israeli one.

This was proven in the wake of Hamas' assumption of power, when President George W. Bush - pithy, plain and seemingly unabashed - declared: "We support democracy - but that doesn't mean we have to support governments elected as a result of democracy." And his administration set about engineering Palestinian regime change in reverse.

Its strategy found more or less willing accomplices - Europeans, Arab governments, the Palestinians themselves. But it was always going to be a perilous one: The more vigorously it was pursued in the face of the opposition it was bound to encounter, the more likely it was to make of Palestine a crucible of trouble for its own people, the region and the world - very much like the one which that other, quasi-colonial, Western intervention had already made of Iraq.

The idea was to get the Palestinians, through collective punishment, to repudiate the very people they had just elected. Some do blame Hamas. But most of those blame America much more. If anything, sanctions have had the opposite effect from that intended, encouraging Palestinians to rally round the government even while they suffer from it. Buoyed by its own popularity, on top of its electoral legitimacy, Hamas won't easily relinquish power - "not without a war," says Gaza psychologist Ayad Sarraj.

Yet even if the US did succeed in bringing the government down, it would, like the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, be a pretty catastrophic kind of success - plunging Palestine, too, into the chaos and internecine strife that is the antithesis of the modern, democratic, pro-Western Middle East order Washington is trying to build. It is clear that, with clashes erupting in Gaza, war between the rival Hamas and Fatah camps is eminently possible. It is far from clear that America's "side" could win out. "If Fatah couldn't fight Hamas while it was still in power," remarks General Ilan Paz, the former head of Israel's civil administration in the Occupied Territories, "how could it gain control with Hamas in power and itself disintegrated?"

Furthermore, chaos in the territories would attract militants, jihadists and suicide bombers from the rest of the world, just as it did in Iraq. Iran, the non-Arab country that is now the main state patron of Arab radicalism, was quicker than any Arab government to offer money to the new Hamas regime. An intrinsic part of Iran's wider strategic and nuclear ambitions, Palestine now ranks among its top foreign-policy priorities. PA President Mahmoud Abbas says that Hizbullah and Al-Qaeda are already active in Gaza. From where, if not from such outsiders, have come the long-range Katyusha rockets that have begun to target southern Israel from Gaza? And it goes without saying that if Hamas were driven from office, it would go underground again, resuming, with a vengeance, the "resistance" it has currently suspended.

As for the Arabs, they would be at least as subject to the fallout from Palestine, the pan-Arab issue par excellence, as they are from Iraq's. Their discredited regimes hardly know what to fear more: the example of a Hamas democratically installed or undemocratically ousted. The first would encourage the ascension of their own Islamists; the civil war liable to result from the second would arouse even more dangerous passions among them. Broadly speaking, Hamas has Arab, especially Islamist, public opinion on its side, and, the more Arab regimes defer to the US in its anti-Hamas campaign, the greater the discredit they will face.

For columnist Rami Khouri, the Palestine cause now risks being transformed from a "national" into a "civilizational" one, with "potentially dangerous linkages between events in Palestine-Israel and the rest of the Middle East." As he sees it, "[h]undreds of thousands of young people will feel duped and betrayed. The wellspring of support for Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-style democratic engagement will slowly dry up, in favor of more intense armed struggle. They will stop wasting their time trying to achieve a redress of grievances through peaceful democratic politics or diplomacy, and instead fight the larger civilizational battle they see before them. Bringing down the Hamas-led Palestinian government will bring further radicalization, resistance and terrorism across the region."

Well aware of this far-flung resonance, Palestinian Finance Minister Omar Abd al-Razeq has warned that "the entire region will catch fire if the Palestinian people are pushed to a situation where they have nothing to lose."

Suddenly, last month, the Bush administration seemed to grasp something of the perils it was courting: Those US-engineered privations of Gaza were too scandalous to ignore. At a meeting of the Quartet, it offered $10 million in emergency medical aid. The largesse was paltry and grudging, but at least it seemed to indicate that the US had given up hope of bringing about immediate regime change via economic ruin. Gideon Levy, a pro-Palestinian Israeli commentator, was moved to say: "Hamas is winning."

Hardly. For the only truly substantive way in which it could be said to be winning would be if the US started drawing the right conclusions from the spectacularly unwelcome results of Arab democratization, the most important of which is that, were it not for America's own policies, Hamas would never have won the elections in the first place.

But that would require a fundamental, a revolutionary, change of heart toward Israel. So the fear must now be that, long before such a thing happens, the Middle East's "dangerous linkages" will assert themselves even more dangerously than before; that those two ongoing crises - Palestine and Iraq - which the American attachment to Israel did so much to engender, will be joined, and fused into a single mega-crisis, by a third, if, on its protege's behalf, the Bush administration goes to war against Iran.

David Hirst was for a long time Middle East correspondent of The Guardian, and is author of "The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East."

George Bush's policies helped build Hamas; now a dangerous linkage with Iran and Iraq threatens a mega-crisis

Patients with chronic kidney disease dying for lack of their routine dialysis; 165,000 employees of the Palestine Authority unpaid for two and a half months; women selling jewellery for fuel or food ... the "humanitarian crisis" of the West Bank and Gaza is not a Darfur. And what most shocks Arabs and Muslims is that it stems from a conscious political decision by the world's only superpower. First, they say, you give us Iraq, now on the brink of civil war. Then this: the starving of a whole people. The psychological and strategic linkage between Iraq and Palestine is far from new. But its latest, most intense phase began with the US invasion of Iraq - conceived by the Bush administration's pro-Israeli neoconservatives as the first great step in their region-wide scheme for "regime change" and "democratisation", whose consummation was to be an Arab-Israeli settlement. Indeed, professors Mearsheimer and Walt argue in their study, The Israel Lobby, that there very likely wouldn't have been an invasion at all but for Israel and, above all, its partisans inside the US.

But it had always been crystal clear that the more authentic any democracy Arabs or Palestinians did come to enjoy, US-inspired or not, the more their conception of a settlement would collide with the US-Israeli one. The point was swiftly proved, in the wake of Hamas's assumption of power, when President Bush declared: "We support democracy, but that doesn't mean we have to support governments elected as a result of democracy." And his administration set about engineering Palestinian "regime change" in reverse.

Its strategy found more or less willing accomplices - Europeans, Arab governments, the Palestinians themselves. But it was always going to be a perilous one; the more vigorously it was pursued in the face of the opposition that it was bound to encounter, the more likely it was to make of Palestine a crucible of trouble for its own people, the region and the world - very much like the one that other quasi-colonial western intervention had already made of Iraq.

The idea was to get the Palestinians, through collective punishment, to repudiate the very people they had just elected. Some do blame Hamas. But most of those blame America much more. If anything, sanctions have had the opposite effect from that intended, encouraging people to rally round the new government. Buoyed by its own popularity, on top of its electoral legitimacy, Hamas won't easily relinquish power - "not without a war", said Iyyad Sarraj, a Gaza psychologist.

Even if the US did succeed in bringing Hamas down, it would, like the overthrow of Saddam, be a catastrophic kind of success - plunging Palestine, too, into the chaos and internecine strife that is the antithesis of the modern, democratic, pro-western Middle East order the US is trying to build. It is clear that, with President Mahmoud Abbas's bombshell proposal for a referendum on the nature of a final peace raising the political stakes and with skirmishes in Gaza raising the military ones, war between Hamas and Fatah is eminently possible. It is far from clear that America's "side" could win. "If Fatah couldn't fight Hamas while it was still in power," said General Ilan Paz, the former head of Israel's civil administration in the territories, "how could it gain control with Hamas in power and itself disintegrated?"

Furthermore, chaos in the territories would open the way to militants, jihadists and suicide bombers from the rest of the world, just as it did in Iraq. Iran, the non-Arab country that is now the main state patron of Arab radicalism, was quicker than any Arab government to offer money to the new Hamas regime. An intrinsic part of its wider strategic and nuclear ambitions, Palestine now ranks among Iran's top foreign-policy priorities. Abbas says that Hizbullah and al-Qaida are already active in Gaza. From where, if not from such outsiders, have come the long-range Katyusha missiles that have begun to target southern Israel from Gaza? And if Hamas were driven from office, it would go underground again, resuming with a vengeance the resistance it has suspended.

As for the Arabs, they would be at least as subject to the fallout from Palestine as they are from Iraq's. Their discredited regimes hardly know what to fear more: the example of a Hamas democratically installed or undemocratically ousted. The first would encourage the ascension of their own Islamists. The civil war liable to result from the second would arouse even more dangerous passions among them. Broadly speaking, Hamas has Arab, especially Islamist, public opinion on its side, and the more the regimes defer to the US in its anti-Hamas campaign, the greater discredit they will fall into.

For Rami Khouri, a leading Beirut columnist, the Palestine cause risks being transformed from a "national" into a "civilisational" one, with "potentially dangerous linkages between events in Palestine-Israel and the rest of the Middle East".

"Hundreds of thousands of young people will feel duped and betrayed. The wellspring of support for Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-style democratic engagement will slowly dry up in favour of more intense armed struggle. They will stop wasting time trying to redress grievances through peaceful, democratic politics or diplomacy ... Bringing down the Hamas-led Palestinian government will bring further radicalisation, resistance and terrorism across the region." Well aware of this resonance, the Palestinian finance minister, Omar Abdul Razeq, warned: "The entire region will catch fire if the Palestinian people are pushed to a situation where they have nothing to lose."

Suddenly this month the Bush administration seemed to grasp something of the perils it is courting. And those US-engineered privations of Gaza were too scandalous to ignore. At a meeting of the Quartet (the EU, the US, the UN and Russia), it offered $10m in emergency medical aid. The largesse was paltry and grudging, but at least it seemed to indicate that Washington had given up hope of bringing about immediate "regime change" via economic ruin. Gideon Levy, a pro-Palestinian Israeli commentator, was even moved to say: "Hamas is winning."

Hardly. For the only substantive way in which it could be said to be doing that would be if the US started drawing the right conclusions from this spectacularly unwelcome result of Arab democratisation - the most important of which is that, were it not for US policies, Hamas would never have won the elections.

But that would require a fundamental, revolutionary change of heart. In the opinion of Mearsheimer and Walt, the extraordinary US attachment to Israel - that moral and strategic "burden" - makes such a change impossible any time soon. So the fear must now be that, long before this could happen, the Middle East's "dangerous linkages" will assert themselves even more dangerously than before, and that those two ongoing crises - Palestine and Iraq, which the attachment did so much to engender - will be joined, and fused into a single mega-crisis, by a third: when, on its protege's behalf, the Bush administration goes to war against Iran.

David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to 2001

So, with Hamas taking control of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions, the destiny of the Palestinian people is once more in the hands of a party that believes in the dissolution of the Israeli state and in violence as a way of achieving it. Israeli, American and in good measure European governments remain appalled and perplexed at this political earthquake. Indeed the Israelis, who are now applying the first of their economic sanctions, and Americans - planning the same - hardly disguise their ambition to subvert it. This is despite the fact that, retrogressive though it may have been, it has impeccable democratic credentials. It comes, as Ghassan Charbel put it in the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat, "from inside the logic of the new world order". That is to say, from the very democratisation that is the central mission of the Bush presidency, from its "war on terror" and all those sicknesses, such as despotism and religious extremism, which nurture it. This democratisation is also meant to contribute mightily to that other strategic US purpose, Arab- Israeli peace, because democratic states are said to automatically make good neighbours of other democratic states.

Yet nothing like this electoral triumph of the Hamas "terror organisation", and America's reactions to it, could have so dramatically illustrated the blind spot at the centre of the US's Middle East policies. Ever present, this blind spot has been brought to its apogee under the Bush administration, with its proselytising zeal on the one hand and unsurpassed devotion to Israel on the other. What US administrations seem habitually unable to see is that Palestinians, and Arabs in general, happen, like other peoples, to possess national or patriotic feelings. When these feelings are transgressed they react more or less aggressively in response. Since Palestine is the place where those feelings are most systematically flouted, it is also where democracy, as both reflection and instrument of the popular will, is most likely to be belligerent rather than peaceable.

"Democracy," said Joseph Samaha, a Beirut columnist, is not "an alternative to patriotism. It is one of its tools. The mound of western theories and sleights of hand will collapse. The mound quivered in Iraq, and Palestine turned it into ruins. Give us democracy and take resistance." Or, as Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister-designate, put it, "We will go for arms and a parliament, for there's no contradiction between the two."

If the Hamas assumption of power is truly a watershed, it will be an Arab and Muslim, not just Palestinian, one. It has long been said that in so far as Arabs and Palestinians ever formally accommodated themselves to Israel it was Arab despotism, not democracy, that made it possible. To be sure, Arab public opinion might have been moving away, if only in the weariness of repeated defeat, from the all-pervading "rejectionism" of the conflict's earlier stages, but never far enough for those rulers who did make peace with Israel to do so with anything seriously resembling a popular mandate. "Israel," said Aluf Benn in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "could always do business with Arab dictators, a barrier protecting it from the rage of the 'Arab street'. That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon. But those days are over. Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored - Arab public opinion."

Thus, the more democracy spreads, the more militancy in Palestine will find like-minded support in the whole region. Hamas began life as the Gaza chapter of the region-wide Muslim Brotherhood movement. Nowadays Arab democracy will mean the ascendancy of Islamism and its rejectionism almost everywhere. After the Muslim Brothers, despite gross obstructionism, won a fifth of the seats in Egypt's recent parliamentary elections, their leader said that his movement didn't recognise Israel and proposed that the 1978 Camp David peace treaty be put to a popular referendum; they are now using their pan-Islamic connections to raise emergency funds for the sanction-threatened Palestinian people. And why is it that, just as the Americans' well-known hankerings after "regime change" in Damascus seemed to be taking a purposeful turn, Israel suddenly took to urging them against it? Because it seemed better to preserve Bashar Assad, classical anti-Israeli nationalist despot though he may be, in his weakened condition than to unleash the demons of democracy, including the prospect of Syria's Islamists, a powerful subterranean force, clamouring for the liberation of the Golan Heights, which for 30 years has been the quietest of all Arab-Israeli fronts, thanks to the efficacy of the despot's repression. Some argue that Hamas will be forced to go through exactly the same evolutionary process, from militancy to moderation, that Arafat and the secular nationalists did before it; that it already is, in fact, with its language of "truces" whose legitimacy goes back to the prophet Muhammad himself. That might well be. But Hamas has made it clear that it will not, cannot, metamorphose itself overnight as Israel and much of the west, with their conditions for engagement with it, seem to expect. That would negate much of the basis on which it was elected. So the plain fact now is that Arab democracy will not merely impede further advance in the Arab-Israeli peace process, it will endanger what the process has already achieved.

It will certainly do so, at least until America and the west, undergoing a long-overdue metamorphosis of their own, decide that Israel should become democratic too. Not for its Jewish citizens, which essentially it always has been, but for the Palestinians, at whose expense it came into being and has perpetuated itself ever since. If there is a chance of checking the resurgence of Palestinian and Arab rejectionism, it is by checking the persistent rejectionism of the other side and getting Israel to accept what in practice it never has: that very partial restitution of Palestinian national rights embodied in the Oslo accords and their two-state formula. Arafat and his now-fallen Fatah leadership persuaded his people to accept that historic concession, and reports from the occupied territories suggest that, in spite of Hamas, they still largely do. But that is not much use so long as Israel fails to honour the historically much less onerous, reciprocal concession that the world should now be urgently demanding of it.

David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to 2001.

At a conference in Cairo last month, Egyptian delegate Kamal Khalil excoriated the "torture, poverty, unemployment, corruption, tyranny and despotism" of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime - then added that the "liberation of Jerusalem starts here with the liberation of the people in Cairo."

This linkage between domestic reform and the external foe dramatized the quandary lying in wait for U.S. President George W. Bush's crusade for "freedom and democracy." Bush believes in the God-given rights of all peoples, and in the Middle East sees these as the panacea that will, among other things, end international terror and induce Arabs to make their peace with Israel. So what, in this era of American-sponsored diplomacy and reconciliation, could Khalil, a self-styled Egyptian democrat, possibly have meant by reverting to the militant rhetoric of yesteryear?

The extent to which Bush is contributing to the winds of change now blowing across the world's last monolithically tyrannical region is passionately debated by the Arabs, perplexingly confronted as they feel themselves to be by two Americas, the new, "missionary" one of Bush's second term and the old, unrepentant superpower. The U.S. as a promoter of democracy is a far from new idea. But the scope, fervor and lofty expectations Bush has invested in it is. Yet, at the same time, never has "imperial" America, with which the missionary one is inextricably intertwined, been as rampant and detested as it is today. For Bush didn't embark on this radically interventionist, quasi-colonial phase of America's relations with the Middle East only, or even mainly, to confer democracy on it. He did so for other reasons, too, that had far more to do with the traditional drive for strategic and economic dominance - as well as with an Israel whose influence on U.S. policy, via Bush's neoconservative henchmen, has reached unprecedented levels.

In fact, the rationale for Arab democracy comes largely from Israel itself, in the person of the rightwing zealot, Natan Sharansky, whose thinking, says Bush, is "part of my presidential genes;" the thinking being that, since democracies are inherently peaceable, only a democratic Arabia will take Israel to its bosom.

This contradictory America feeds the contradiction between two broad camps inside the Arab world: on the one hand that of old-school nationalists and Islamists who in recent times have supplanted them in mass appeal; and, on the other, newly-emergent democratic forces who blame post-independence nationalist regimes, in their despotism, for the region's ills. As ever, the nationalists and Islamists give priority to external problems - imperial America and Israel - while the democrats give it to internal ones, and to ways in which "missionary" America might be used in their reformist cause.

The more imperial America inflames nationalist sentiment, the more this plays into the hands of regimes which appear to stand up to it, meaning the more difficult it is for democrats to work against such regimes. And anyone can see that, after Iraq, Syria has now become a key new target of imperial America, perhaps all the more alluring because, as some in Washington say, it is "low-hanging fruit" that, unlike Iraq, is harvestable by merely political, not military, means. Lebanon's "democratic uprising" furnished a great new opportunity to weaken or bring down the Baathist regime.

Naturally, the Baathists raise the nationalist banner in their own defense. But the more obviously homegrown and authentic, not just American-inspired, the momentum for democratic change becomes, the more nationalism, as a pretext for preserving the despotic existing order, falls away. Indeed, the democrats argue, the nationalism-versus-democracy antithesis is a false one, in that to be democratic - and in seeking to profit from something the U.S. at least ostensibly wants too - is not to be anti-nationalist. On the contrary, as Chibli Mallat, a Lebanese lawyer close to the opposition in his country, recently declared: "Democracy always serves the national interest more earnestly and effectively than despotism ever can. Just imagine the political authority with which Egypt, Lebanon or Syria will be able to oppose Israel's occupation policies once we have democratic governments here!"

So, even if the first Iraqi general elections in 50 years were missionary America's doing, the main point was that, however flawed, most Iraqis, in a collective affirmation of national pride and purpose, took to them with enthusiasm.

Similarly, it is true that the U.S. leapt to Lebanon's support for its own strategic reasons. But that hardly impugned the credentials of a Lebanese movement that, in a single demonstration, put a quarter of the country's population into Beirut's Martyrs' Square, or showed why Lebanon so threatens Syria's Baathist regime through the potential domino effect of its "people power." For could any Syrian fail to grasp that what the Lebanese were rising up against was the extension of what they more drastically endure at home? Namely, the oppressions of a once-revolutionary order that has lost its legitimacy as surely as the now defunct Soviet-style "people's republics" on which it was largely modeled, and whose nationalism has become little more than a rhetorical tool to suppress democracy.

No-one knows how Arab democratization will proceed. In the latest version of the now famous UN-sponsored Arab Human Development Report, the report's Arab authors express the hope for "an historic, peaceful redistribution of power within Arab societies," but also the fear that if the people's "understandable thirst to be rid of despots" goes unquenched, change will come in "chaotic upheavals." Either way, one thing is already clear: imperial America will not like the democratic Arabia that missionary America will have helped spawn.

Already it is uneasy about the kind of Shiites - Islamist-minded and Iranian-influenced - who, in the shape of new Iraqi Prime Minister-elect Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the United Iraqi Alliance, triumphed in the Iraqi elections. It will be even less pleased if Hamas does so well in upcoming Palestinian elections that it demands to form the next government. Secular modernists, dissident intelligentsia and human rights activists are to the fore in demanding an end to the Syrian-backed "intelligence state" in Lebanon, in saying "Enough!" to the electorally irremovable Mubarak dynasty in Egypt, and in chipping away at the Baathist monopoly of power inside Syria. But Islamists everywhere would be the first to profit from their success. Hizbullah would doubtless retain a special place in Lebanon's confessional system. Egypt's Muslim Brothers have now joined the pro-democracy demonstrations as the most popular and organized opposition force in the country. Their heavily repressed Syrian counterparts, sensing that opportunity beckons, recently effectively told the Baathists: With America at the gates you either convene a "national congress of all political parties" that will set up "a democratic republic," or face your own destruction, and perhaps Syria's too.

A democratic Arabia of this kind would soon pose a challenge to what the once American-supported despotic Arabia left behind, with slogans like "liberating Jerusalem by liberating Cairo" leaving little doubt where that legacy would come under heaviest strain. Americans and Israelis would soon find out what an occasional Israeli commentator, contradicting Sharansky, at least implicitly concedes: the Arabs' hostility to Israel never had much to do with their lack of democracy, but much more with the fact that, in its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel remains far from democratic itself.