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.”

Dedicated to the memory of Tamam Qous, an eternal resident of Jerusalem, Palestine

The time has come to face the facts. It is invariably a very painful and traumatic moment, when the City of Peace becomes a venue of intolerance and strife. Jerusalem has once again become a battlefield. Unlike the crude conquests, massacres, large-scale wanton destruction and expulsions of olden times, it is now a subtle and constantly shifting battlefield of bureaucratic expulsions, of tortuously slow ethnic cleansing: one house and one family at a time.

But again, it is about religion and ethnicity. During the western European crusades of one thousand years ago, Jerusalem was to be rid of its Muslim and Arab population, and that is perhaps the closest historical parallel to the present battle. But it is even more about ethnicity this time. Atheist and agnostic Jews are very welcome indeed in Brave New Jerusalem, but atheist and agnostic Arabs are being expelled en masse along with their religious Arab brothers and sisters.

Once again, the large-scale wanton destruction is there, but it is piecemeal and it is hardly ever noticed by the outside world. The destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem by monstrous Israeli army Caterpillar bulldozers takes place at night so that it can not be filmed or photographed easily. And it is only happening one or two houses at a time, so that it hardly even gets a brief mention in the local newspapers. The excuse given by the destroyer is usually “unauthorized building”. Israel annexed Jerusalem illegally in 1980 and decided to only issue building permits to Jews from then on. Tens of thousands of strategically placed houses, illegal under international law, have been built for Jewish settlers since then, in illegal settlements on illegally occupied, i.e. stolen Palestinian territory in Jerusalem, but Palestinian neighborhoods are strictly prohibited from growing. In fact they are prohibited from doing just about anything but decrease in size and population.

Meanwhile, Israel’s illegal Annexation Wall continues its snakelike and destructive slithering through Palestinian neighborhoods, breaking up additional Palestinian buildings, roads and communities on its way, destroying the livelihoods of countless Palestinians. Only three weeks ago the best pizzeria and sandwich store in North Jerusalem closed, in Beit Hanina, because the Wall was built on its doorstep, brutally cutting off the business from the bulk of its customers in Al-Ram. The neighborhood of Al-Ram starts only twenty meters away, but now its inhabitants might as well reside on the moon, as far as the business owners and the employees are concerned. Similarly, there is hardly any night life in east Jerusalem. Restaurants and pubs are closed down systematically by the Israeli occupation authorities using far-fetched and petty readings of the perplexing multitude of regulations and laws.

The excruciating lack of freedom of movement for Arabs is one of the chief Israeli means of wearing out the Palestinians. Jerusalemites are increasingly prohibited from visiting the rest of the West Bank. And Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank can hardly ever get permission to visit Jerusalem nowadays. Just to move from one Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhood into another, even if the Wall is not yet there, can take hours due to the deliberately and humiliatingly slow processing of IDs, and to body searches, car searches, and luggage searches at the numerous Israeli army checkpoints sprinkled throughout the eastern part of the city.

International law and human rights are also being bulldozed and trampled into the dust by the Israeli scheme to rid Jerusalem of its millennia-old non-Jewish traditions. According to the Quran, Mohammad, the last Prophet, ascended to heaven from the Noble Sanctuary in east Jerusalem 1,401 years ago. Jesus was the first Palestinian Christian, but he was not the first Palestinian. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others, have been expelled from Jerusalem before, both because of their religions and their ethnicities. This is a kind of phenomenon to which progressive forces in the world have tried to put an end, for instance by the establishment of international law, or the United Nations’ various human rights bodies. Discrimination due to religion or ethnicity is forbidden. Around the world.

But now, the main executive powers in charge of upholding international law globally, the UN Security Council and its member countries, are doing nothing. If the current developments are allowed to continue further, Jerusalem will soon only exist in Palestinian hearts. But that does not mean it will cease to exist. To Palestinians, most of Jerusalem has already been lost, but, like all changes of ownership or control over territory, it is never for ever.

And so, this is how the legendary songstress, Fayruz, dealt with the loss of east Jerusalem to Israeli military conquest in 1967:

For you, city of prayer, I say my prayers,

For you with your graceful mansions, oh flower of cities,

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city of prayer.

Towards you our eyes travel every day.

Wandering through the temple’s porticos,

Embracing the ancient churches,

And wiping the tears from the mosques . . .

The child in the cave and his mother Mary:

Two weeping faces,

For those who were scattered,

For homeless children,

For those who defended and were martyred at the gates.

Peace was martyred in the land of peace.

Justice fell by the gates . . .

The gate of our city shall not be locked,

For I shall go to pray.

I shall knock at the gates,

And I shall open up the gates . . .

With our own hands we shall restore the glory of Jerusalem

With our own hands, we shall bring peace to Jerusalem

Peace shall come to Jerusalem

paper presented at the conference, ‘Mass Media in the Arab World and Beyond: Politics and Ethics’, organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, the Media Department at Bir Zeit University, and the Modern Media Institute at Al-Quds University, Ramallah, February 19-20, 2005; published in Arabic in Al-Ayyam newspaper, March 21, 2005.

One of the most famous photos in the world is one that only few people have ever seen. It is the last photo taken of Princess Diana alive. She was snapped as she lay dying in that car wreck in Paris in 1997. One of the paparazzi, who were chasing her car on motorbikes and in cars as it crashed, took the picture. It was sent to an agency immediately after the crash, but it was never published. Why? Mainly, it seems, because of the huge outpour of sympathy towards the princess and what I consider wise decisions to protect her dignity, even after her death, or perhaps especially after her death.

In comparison to Diana – after her death – there is not much protection of people’s dignity in today’s mass media, certainly not in the Arab and the Palestinian mass media. But not just there: during the last 25 years or so, red lines keep getting crossed in this regard all around the world.

Let us get back to the paparazzo. Did he do the right thing? Should he not have spoken to Diana words of comfort? Should he not have asked her what he could do for her? And if she was unable to speak, should he not have held back the other photographers to give her some peace and quiet? She had massive chest wounds and she was haemorrhaging. That these were the last moments of her life must have been obvious.

The categorical imperative of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), demands that we should always act so that the rule according to which we are acting may be elevated to universal law. Jesus of Nazareth said: Do unto others what you would want them to do you. That is, according to Kant, another way of saying the same thing. Before Jesus, both the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chinese, including the philosopher Confucius, expressed the same idea in negative terms: Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. Kant wrote that there are in fact infinitely many ways of formulating the categorical imperative. Another one is: Don’t treat people as means, as instruments, but always as goals in themselves.

Reality is seldom as clear-cut as moral philosophy. I believe it is possible that the photographer who took her last picture first treated Diana as a means for his own job and career, snapping what is really a kind of pornographic picture, and then – after second thoughts – held back other photographers and curious people to protect her and her dignity, treating her as a goal in herself.

But I also think we would all feel antipathy towards him if it turned out he just took the photo and then did not care about the woman, lying there in front of him, dying. I do not know, but I believe the vast majority of us would also suffer from some prickings of conscience had we acted in that way.

That is one of the reasons it is called the Golden Rule. It finds resonance among most people, perhaps even among all people. The ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, a late ancient Palestinian, and an early modern East Prussian all made substantial philosophical contributions to the idea. It is perhaps the most global of all values.

But it is also a very demanding moral. We can all probably think of times when we have treated other people as means, as instruments. In fact, some of the paparazzi were charged on two counts, of pursuing the princess's car and involuntarily causing it to crash, and also of not helping her after the crash but concentrating on taking pictures. Both of those actions could be interpreted as callously treating people, in this case Diana and her fiancee, Dodi Fayed, who also died in the crash, as means, as instruments. In 1999, however, the charges against the photographers were dropped.

It would obviously be very hard to turn the categorical imperative into law. It is a duty. Journalists and people in general, however, probably prefer to consider their rights rather than their duties. Journalists have a basic right to freedom of expression, to press freedom. Duties, on the other hand, are restrictions of those rights, and restrictions come especially in the form of legislation.

Yet almost all media commentators agree on the necessity of the existence and observance of some kind of ethical code. And ethics can still play an important role in the media beyond legislation, for instance in self-regulation. That is where we find more references to ‘dignity’ than in media law. Media self-regulation is usually formulated as imperatives or duties and appears prominently in two forms, as an in-house ethics code for a particular media outlet, or as a media ethics code in a wider journalistic community, usually a country.

My second example comes from Al-Jazeera and from Palestine. It played a role in prompting Al-Jazeera to adopt an in-house ethics code last year. During the Rafah incursion last spring, a Palestinian cameraman was zooming in on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who had been hit by Israeli tankfire. There were bodies on the ground and much blood. As the cameraman zoomed in on two particularly bloody bodies, he realized they were the bodies of his mother and his sister. The horror that he felt when he realized this is unimaginable to me. He was doing his job, catering to a kind of voyeurism among audiences, certainly to be blamed on the audiences, but also on the media that provide the goods. And the cameramen are part of the media. Again, the bodies on the ground were just means to him, that is, until he realized who they were.

My third example is also from Gaza. It aired on CNN, on 15 January this year. It showed Reuters footage from the aftermath of a clash between demonstrators and the Israeli army. Three or four men were swiftly carrying a wounded boy, apparently unconscious, possibly dying. The footage showed the group approaching from a distance, during perhaps five seconds. They ran right past the camera crew along a narrow road. And I asked myself, what if the camera crew had been standing a metre to the left? Then they would have slowed down the group and possibly endangered the boy’s life – unnecessarily. I believe ethical consciousness played a major role in making the cameramen position themselves so that they would not block the passage. Again it can be seen as an instance of the categorical imperative. If we were in that boy’s situation we would not have wanted camera crews to block our passage to an ambulance.

Perhaps the categorical imperative can be partially reformulated in a more attractive way for journalists. The German media theorist, Michael Kunczik, has said an international ethics of journalism must include an absolute duty to report human rights violations, regardless of the consequences. It would not solve all the complicated ethical problems that I have hinted at in my three examples, but it would at least solve the Gaza examples. It was, after all, right to film the consequences of the Israeli attacks. In the first instance, the Al Jazeera footage, the way in which the victims were filmed left room for improvement. Perhaps words alone would have done a better job. But all of these journalists were in fact doing their jobs well. In Diana’s case, it is much more questionable if the journalists were doing their job well. It could well be argued that they were acting immorally in a way or two.

To report human rights violations, regardless of consequences, is seldom mentioned in existing media ethics codes, but I think it belongs there, along with the usual negatives: not to be discriminatory against people with regard to sex, race, social class, religion, etc., not to take bribes, not to invade privacy, not to incite violence.

The most prominent duties in existing ethics codes are commonly to report the truth, in an objective, unbiased, balanced, and fair way. That is of course fine. It relieves the paparazzi of having a legal obligation to help Diana, among other things. Journalists are first and foremost observers. But we expect a little more from journalists. They cannot just be recording devices when it comes to reporting issues like human rights violations. They are human beings, too. We even expect them to risk their own lives, especially in conflict zones. So we must be cautious and not ask too much of journalists.

The minimum rights that journalists may demand, particularly in conflict zones, are: freedom of expression, freedom to live, freedom from torture, and freedom of movement. The last three were suggested by Peter Singer as minimum rights for anthropoid apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utans, etc. They were actually proposed as legal rights for anthropoids in the parliament of New Zealand. New Zealanders had been horrified by painful and lethal experiments on chimpanzees for research on HIV-AIDS, and eventually this kind of research was banned.

It is indeed very sad that journalists in Palestine may perhaps only demand or ask for the rights of chimpanzees, plus the freedom of expression, but it is perhaps something to remember in difficult situations. Especially the last right, freedom of movement, is denied Palestinian journalists habitually by the state of Israel, but so, of course, are all the other three. What I am trying to convey is that freedom of movement may be a partially forgotten right of journalists, partially also forgotten by the journalists themselves, because they are so used to being restricted in this regard – particularly in this region.

Journalists even have special rights to freedom of movement. In most European countries today, journalists can break into government offices, and even into private law firms, with impunity; that is if they can later prove that it was in the public interest. In Austria, the new conservative government recently tried to outlaw this special right. But the journalists fought back and won. They were able to argue that every single political scandal that has been exposed by the media during the last 30 years in Austria, has been exposed through the use of this impunity. If Palestine wants to call itself a democracy or a transparent and honest society, I suggest that journalists claim this right here, too.

Lastly, I would like to return to death and dignity with regard to Palestinian media, and how improvements could perhaps be made. During the last six months Miftah has been monitoring the Palestinian media for incitement to violence, bias, de-humanization, and de-legitimization of the other part in the conflict. Expecting de-humanization of Israelis, we were a little surprised to find many more cases of de-humanization of Palestinians by the Palestinian media.

My last example comes from the Palestinian newspaper, Al Ayyam (24 November, 2004). It is a photo depicting a girl after she was shot 20 times by Israeli soldiers while on her way to school in Gaza. The large colour photo was shown in the newspaper without any reporting on any of the aspects of the girl’s humanity: her interests, her wishes, her life. There was no indication that her family or friends had been contacted by the paper. In fact she is reduced to her corpse – to mere matter – in this article. It is perhaps an indirect kind of incitement to violence, at least to anger, but more importantly, it is de-humanization. And this trend, to de-humanize people, should in Miftah’s opinion be prevented, freedom of expression notwithstanding. Neither this girl – Iman al-Hams, 13 years old – nor any other victim deserves to be treated as an instrument or a means, neither during her life, nor after her death – in any case not so soon after her death.