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.”

It is common for people in the Middle East to look around their troubled region and despair when they see so many countries aflame, torn asunder, stressed to near breaking point, or mired in stubborn mediocrity and stalemate, with several power centers simultaneously claiming to be the legitimate government. Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan and Somalia are only the most dramatic examples of distressed and often violent Arab lands, where death by war and politics is common, and a stable, prosperous life is an evasive dream for most citizens. Other Arab lands are sanctioned and pressured by the international community, and others yet suffer rising rates of criminality, corruption, illegal migration, drug use and trade, and other forms of devious and debilitating behavior by once normal and law-abiding citizens.

The tendency in many quarters of our societies is to blame others for all our troubles, to find foreign scapegoats who more often than not are nicely packaged within sinister and long-running conspiracies. The French, Americans, Israelis and British are favorite culprits, partly because of their actual record of generating troubles and sparking conflict in this region. They are not fictitious culprits, to be sure. Yet it is also difficult to believe that all the troubles of the Arab world are the fault of foreign conspiracies. The people and institutions of the Arab world need to work more rigorously to separate the wheat from the chaff of political history and current events, to recognize what is the occasional handiwork of foreign mischief-makers here and there, while acknowledging that the vast majority of our problems are the consequence of our own ineptitudes and mediocrities.

It is easy to point to the presence of the Americans and British in Iraq, the French in Lebanon, or the Chinese in Sudan, and to conclude therefore that our disheveled state is a result of these recurring foreign engagements and their conspiratorial designs. But why do we find these same foreign countries involved in other lands - Singapore, India, Vietnam and Malaysia, say - without evidence of deep troubles and chronic violence? The mere presence of foreign countries in our societies in a sustained way is not necessarily a sign of sinister aims. More likely to blame for the bad times we suffer in this region are the various political systems that we have generated more or less on our own over the past century or so, by our own hands.

Is it not possible for some honest leaders in the Arab world to stand up and acknowledge local responsibility for our shortcomings and weaknesses, which have created our many vulnerabilities and pains? Many of our best young people are leaving the Arab world, finding jobs and personal fulfillment in foreign pastures, where taking responsibility for your own actions often is the starting point for success, and, consequently, a major reason for sustained national progress.

Months remain before the scheduled convening of the gathering to promote Arab-Israeli peace negotiations that US President George W. Bush proposed recently, but it is not too early to start exploring whether this could be a real opportunity for change, and not simply another hoax. Expectations are not high for this meeting, whose participants and agenda are not yet clear. Nevertheless, this could be seen as another marker on a long road otherwise full of disappointment and failed peace initiatives. Bush is on the ropes politically due to Iraq and other problems, and will want to earn a victory somewhere so he does not leave office a discredited and broken man. Arab-Israeli peace-making is a notoriously difficult terrain in which to make one's mark, especially for American presidents who find themselves seriously constrained by pro-Israeli sentiments and forces in Washington.

Yet the Middle East cries out for progress on this issue, and the American people clearly would support a president who pushes for even-handed peace-making. Now is the time to lay the groundwork for progress in the Fall. The Arab world has done its part by relaunching the Arab peace plan and making it clear that it seeks a negotiated permanent peace based on UN resolutions and reasonable compromises. Israel and the US need to make a reciprocal gesture now, so that the Fall meeting can bear fruit.

Israel's foreign minister has asked Arab leaders to "show flexibility" and agree to wider talks on their peace initiative, instead of limiting initial contacts to Egypt and Jordan, two states that already have relations with the Jewish state. Similarly, the United States voiced its disappointment with the Arab decision to limit the circle of exploratory talks until Israel makes a few concessions of its own and shows a modicum of good will.

This criticism is especially ironic coming from the United States, which has adamantly refused to have any contact with Iran and Syria until they meet various conditions that Washington says are needed to regain the confidence of the international community. The Americans ought to understand that a great deal of confidence must be restored among the Arab public before our leaders can be seen engaging in direct talks with Israel.

The beauty of the Arab peace initiative is that it provides the framework through which trust can be built. But the Israelis are so obsessed with what they believe are the specific details of the plan that they have refused to accept it as it is. They have rejected, for example, a clause that refers to the right of return, even though the Arab plan specifically calls on Israel to "affirm" the "achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194" - a resolution that outlines the alternative of either return or compensation. The Israeli people need to do some soul searching and ask themselves, what kind of cruelty does it exhibit to outright reject a "just solution" for refugees, particularly when the document calls for this solution to be agreed upon? Israel's knee-jerk response and inability to conceive of a means of compromise is, quite frankly, both unbecoming and unimaginative.

Israel has proven to be a risk taker in war, and in the past year, the Jewish state has gambled - and lost - on military solutions but has remained unwilling to take any diplomatic risks for the sake of peace. In response to the Israeli request that our leaders be more flexible, we the Arab people ask the Israelis to show a little more good will and a lot more imagination and risk by accepting the principles of the Arab initiative as it stands.

US President George W. Bush likes to remind people that he is on record as officially supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. The most powerful man on the planet boasts, too, that his policy is to work with "moderate" Arabs in order to advance the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. For these reasons and a host of others, his administration's unaccommodating reaction to the intra-Palestinian deal on forming a unity government is profoundly disappointing, if not terribly surprising.

President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya of Hamas reached their agreement at talks hosted by Saudi Arabia, one of the countries credited by Washington with making positive contributions to the cause of regional stability. Others like Egypt and Jordan have beseeched the United States to move quickly lest the current window of opportunity be closed for the foreseeable future. Despite the frequency with which such governments have toed the American line (at great risk to their own domestic and regional credibility), however, it now seems that the Hamas-Fatah deal is insufficient to satisfy America's conditions for recognizing a new Palestinian Cabinet.

This part of the world is intimately familiar with Washington's habit of seeking to impose double standards, and no one has been on the wrong end of such attempts more regularly than the Palestinians, but the Bush administration is breaking new ground in terms of duplicity and inconsistency. Not satisfied with having starved and intimidated a freely and fairly elected government into sharing power at home, the Americans are now trying to dictate the new government's foreign policy as well. Officially stated "respect" for previous interim peace accords signed with Israel, for example, is not enough: The Palestinians must vow to abide in perpetuity by the terms of the Oslo process. It does not matter to Bush that key items of Oslo have been altered (in Israel's favor) under US pressure, that the Jewish state has used the peace process to radically increase the number of colonists living in the West Bank, that it has militarily reoccupied the same piece of land, or that a then-Israeli prime minister has already declared the Oslo Accords "dead." Instead, the Palestinians are expected to follow the rules that their occupiers are paid to flout, to renounce the use of force against a well-armed enemy that frequently kills more children than combatants, and to promise full recognition of a state that refuses to so much as sign - let alone obey - the Geneva Convention on protecting civilians.

Washington's record in the peace process is mostly one of good intentions hamstrung by internal political concerns. Since Bush came to office, though, it has looked and sounded a lot more like deliberate machinations aimed at delaying any progress until the Palestinians either accept a sickeningly unfair agreement or go to war with one another over the question of whether or not to yield. The situation remains perilously close to the latter tragedy, and Bush is actively pushing in the wrong direction.