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.”

Every time the events of Gaza are discussed, one must not forget the magnitude of the massacre perpetrated by Israel there. An unprecedented massacre during which the Hebrew State set an extremely serious precedent as the advanced military machine pulverized civilians to compel fighters to stop rocket attacks. The world has beheld scenes it had thought would never happen or recur. Every time the events of Gaza are discussed, one must not forget that all solutions will remain temporary or incomplete as long as the long tragedy and bitter conflict do not reach an end through a just and comprehensive peace.

The Gaza tragedy wouldn't have taken place had the successive Israeli governments been serious about the peace choice. It is the absence of a will for peace that prompted Israel to foil any serious Palestinian attempt at promoting the peace option. We only have to look at how Israel dealt with a partner called Yasser Arafat, whose legitimacy as a leader shouldn't have been questioned. This is not to mention how Israel dealt with the elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. It is not an exaggeration to say that Israel's behavior towards Arafat and Abbas has weakened the advocates of negotiations and has spread an atmosphere of despair to the benefit of the camp opposing negotiations.

The first lesson we must derive from the Gaza tragedy is that only comprehensive and just peace can prevent such massacres from recurring. Neither military dominance nor international measures can impose a permanent ceasefire. In the absence of a just peace, there will always be a side that is seeking to fight and that will assuredly find an opportunity to do so. This has been shown by the past years experience and was confirmed by the recent Gaza events.

The parties to this conflict must draw this lesson along with the new US administration. The Arab-Israeli conflict might not be the only crucial issue in the Middle East. But ending this conflict would certainly curb the cycle of earthquakes that hit the region on the backdrop of the prevailing feelings of despair and frustration. Hence, Obama's administration must take rapid action to revive hope in a just and comprehensive peace, one that necessarily entails the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian State.

The second lesson is for Israel not to harbor the illusion that it can repeat the Gaza crushing scenario or replicate it elsewhere. Israel must not imagine that by paralyzing Hamas' ability to fire rockets, the movement will simply retire, confining itself to Gaza.

As for the third lesson, it is related to the Hamas movement and its choices in the coming phase. The movement must carry out a quiet and responsible reading of what took place - especially that the crime perpetrated by Israel exacted a heavy toll on the Gazans in terms of casualties and infrastructure. We say this because Hamas is not merely a resistance movement in Gaza but also an authority, regardless of the conditions that have turned it into an absolute authority in the Strip. This kind of power involves great responsibility and precise calculations.

After the end of the aggression and the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, Hamas will be faced with difficult questions. Did Israel manage through its repeated aggressions to drag the Islamic movement into a confrontation at an inappropriate time for it on both the Israeli and American levels amidst Arab and Palestinian divisions? What about its future relations with the Palestinian Authority recognized by the whole world? What about the inter-Palestinian dialogue and the conditions of its success? Other questions will relate to the movement and whether it misread the balances of power and underestimated Egypt's role, among others.

Every time the events of Gaza are discussed, one must not forget who committed the massacre. And yet, to ensure that no other such massacre will recur, lessons must be drawn. This task requires first and foremost the restoration of the Palestinian house.

A human being will usually need someone to save him from his defeat, or help him overcome it. Hamas' position today is different; it needs someone who will save it from its victory. The movement made the mistake of a military victory on June 14th in the streets of Gaza. It won against the Palestinian Authority and its apparatuses, namely Fatah, and now, two months later, it needs to be saved from the burden of its triumph.

This statement is not an exaggeration. Ismail Haniyeh can hold numerous meetings within his government. He can state repeatedly that his is the only legitimate government. He can remind people of the justifications for conducting what its detractors call a "bloody coup". He can talk about the chaos that used to pervade Gaza, and the corruption that permeated through the ranks of the Authority and Fatah. He can lay the blame for the blockade on the Israeli enemy, and he can denigrate the biased position of the United States. But Ismail Haniyeh knows that repeating these words will not change a thing.

The opposition can distribute dreams and propel fantasies, but it is also forced to deal with figures. Haniyeh knows that 70% of the families in Gaza are living under the poverty level. He knows that unemployment is 60%, and that approximately one million people are dependant on outside assistance to live. He can go back to what Filippo Grandi, Deputy Commissioner General of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said in Gaza. He said, "Gaza risks becoming a virtually 100 per cent aid dependent, closed down and isolated community". Haniyeh does not need someone to supply him with additional details; Gaza's economy is in the verge of a breakdown, and the situation is a warning of tumultuousness that will multiply the feelings of despair and open up the way for the emergence of Al Qaeda and similar groups.

Two months after its military victory, Hamas is discovering that it has become the only authority in a place that is besieged and booby trapped. It is discovering that it does not possess the ability to break the end the blockade, that its victory has effectively placed it in a state of isolation, and that its traditional alliances cannot help it emerge from this predicament. It is not capable of inflaming Gaza in the face of Israel because the price is high; neither is it capable of a long wait. In this context, perhaps one can understand Haniyeh's statement in which he said he would be willing to sacrifice his premiership for the sake of national unity.

There is one man who can save Hamas from its victory, and that is Mahmoud Abbas. After what happened in Gaza, Abbas has become stronger than he ever was before. He is stronger in terms of addressing Fatah and the apparatus leaders that have fallen, and in terms of addressing Hamas which has fallen into a game of cease and desist and which has recorded a victory with no horizon. He is stronger in addressing the international community which considers him the only acceptable negotiator.

Mahmoud Abbas cannot deal with the Hamas conundrum according to purely Fatah-centric calculations or deceptive politics. On the road to the international conference which George Bush called for and on the way to laying the actual foundations for two states, he must get past the wounds of yesterday. He cannot resign the fate of Gaza even if it is in the throes of Hamas. In return, Hamas cannot rest on the idea of a "Republic of Gaza" and cannot bet that it is capable of facing this impediment alone.

Mahmoud Abbas cannot deny Hamas' sacrifices, nor can he ignore its characteristic of representation or its influence in the Palestinian arena. However, Hamas cannot deny the quagmire it has propelled itself into regardless of its justifications and of the circumstances and activities of its opponents. It was not prepared for the electoral victory that it accomplished, and it is not capable of administering the military victory it seized.

The Palestinian reality is extremely complicated, and the direction of the Arab and international winds is known. Hamas once again need the cloak it tore off. It needs Abbas' cloak, and it has to pay the price in return for salvation from its victory.