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 has been a tough peace for Ali Salem. His plays don't have a stage. Intellectuals shun him; the writers union refuses to pay his pension. He sits in a cafe window, typing on his laptop and defending his choice long ago to cross the border into Israel and make friends.

Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, but that treaty remains as agitating to Egyptian artists and intellectuals as a sliver of glass beneath the skin. Most of them don't accept it, and those who do are often vilified, their artistic voices muffled by condemnation.

"Producers are afraid to come near me," said Salem, who in 1994 drove his car across Israel and wrote what critics considered a sympathetic book about the journey. "I anticipated there would be a strong reaction, but I didn't expect it would be so mean. It's hard and this is the wound."

Salem, a columnist for Al Hayat newspaper and a co-founder of the Cairo Peace Movement, added: "Peace is the right idea. But Egyptian intellectuals are afraid and can't get rid of their ancient fears. They still think Israel and the U.S. will inflict something bad upon us."

There are degrees of resistance among intellectuals toward rapprochement. Many oppose improving relations until Palestinians have their own state; others support limited peace but are guarded when discussing the passions around the Arab-Israeli conflict; a few have visited Israel to interact with their Jewish counterparts.

And, occasionally, an artist unwittingly becomes the target of screeds and opinion page vitriol. Filmmaker Nadia Kamel’s recent documentary about her mother's Jewish roots was attacked as a call to "normalize" relations with Israel. Opera singer Gaber Beltagui had his membership in the musicians union suspended in 2007 when he sang at the 100th anniversary of a Cairo synagogue.

"How can he go sing at a synagogue while they [Israelis] are killing our sons?" Mounir Wasseemy, the head of the Musical Artists' Syndicate, said, denouncing Beltagui. "What glory was he seeking?"

The Cairo synagogue is "officially recorded as an Egyptian monument," said Beltagui, who has filed suit against the union. "I did not expect this reaction. I did nothing wrong. I had even asked permission from the state security services before I sang."

Similar furor has engulfed Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the grand sheik of Cairo's Al Azhar Mosque, the leading Sunni institution in the Islamic world. Writers and newspapers have called for Tantawi’s resignation after he was photographed shaking hands with Israeli President Shimon Peres at a recent international conference on religious understanding sponsored by the United Nations.

The sheik said he had not recognized Peres, and has called his detractors "lunatics."

Gamal Ghitani is one of Egypt's best novelists. He covered the 1973 war as a correspondent and is curious to see the land of his enemy. That is not likely to happen soon; Ghitani's refusal to travel to Israel has not wavered in more than three decades.

"Cultural exchange can't be fruitful unless Israel achieves peace on the ground," he said. "How can I be at peace with this peace if Israel relies on its military superiority, builds fences and settlements and keeps kicking Palestinians out? Politics can follow the path it wants, but we as intellectuals must follow our conscience."

A chat with him on a recent morning rolled through history and present-day dangers. Ghitani, a polished man in a blue blazer, equates radical Zionists with Palestinian mujahedin, and he draws a distinction between individual Jews and the actions of a Jewish state. His conversation was laced with nuance and shifting politics; he said he opposed the criticism directed at opera singer Beltagui as "a form of extremism."

Yet he promised not to budge on making his own peace with Israel.

"This will take time," said Ghitani, editor of the literary journal Akhbar Al-Adab. "We can't go to Israel while they are killing Palestinians."

Salem was as rumpled as Ghitani was meticulous. Sitting in a cafe in a flannel shirt, Salem, a big man with rounded shoulders, leaned forward, his voice rattling like the growl of a loose muffler.

He was an established playwright when Cairo was ostracized by the Arab world after President Anwar Sadat traveled to Washington to sign the Camp David peace accords with Israel's Menachem Begin.

His open support of that peace, and his befriending of Jewish intellectuals, has cost him. The Egyptian Writers' Union stopped paying his pension in 2001 and he hasn't had a play produced here in years. So he has turned his newspaper column into a kind of one-man theatrical show. It's not the same as a production, but it allows him to vent.

"Peace will not come to you; you have to make it, you have to sculpt it," he said. "The intellectuals here always pull Israel from the bottom of the drawer and set it on the table. They can't move beyond it.

"But you know, business deals lead to peace, not 'enlightenment' from writers and intellectuals. . . . If you ask any Egyptian businessman, he will tell you there is peace with Israel. There's real cooperation on security, commerce and politics."

In November, Salem was awarded the $50,000 Civil Courage Prize from the Train Foundation, a New York-based trust that promotes tolerance and resistance to extremism, which recognized his commitment to peace with Israel and opposition to Islamic radicalism. When Salem discussed the prize, there was a shine in his eyes, the kind a man has when he gets one over on his critics.

He made his 1994 trip to Israel -- his first -- after the Oslo accords. His book about the journey, "My Drive to Israel," reportedly sold 60,000 copies and angered Egyptian intellectuals, as did his honorary doctorate from Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

"When I went to Israel, I just wanted to see who are these people and what are they doing," he said. "The writers union still wants me to repent. But they will never forgive me if I retreat. That's when the real attacks would come, because deep down they know I speak the truth."

Former President Carter told a university audience here Thursday that the treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military was "a crime" but that there were "officials in Israel quite willing to meet with Hamas" and that may happen "in the near future."

Carter spoke to students and faculty at American University in Cairo after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and a separate three-hour meeting with Hamas officials. The Bush administration and Israel have set rules to not talk to the militant Palestinian group, which controls the Gaza Strip, but Carter said, "I consider myself immune" from such restrictions.

He added that he wasn't acting as a negotiator or mediator, but hoped that he "might set an example to be emulated" by others.

The former president's meetings with Hamas in recent days have outraged Israelis, but Carter was undeterred, even suggesting that his recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," was aptly named because apartheid "is the exact description of what's happening in Palestine now."

He spoke to a mostly appreciative audience, except for one American student from Amherst, Mass., who suggested that Carter was giving legitimacy to terrorists by meeting with Hamas. A murmur went through the crowd.

The former Georgia governor said he told Hamas officials that "the worst thing" they were doing to their cause was firing rockets into Israel, which he called "abominable and an act of terrorism." Before the student could agree, Carter did his own mathematics of bloodshed. He said that for every Israeli killed in the conflict, 30 to 40 Palestinians died because of Israel's superior military and "pinpoint accuracy."

His white eyebrows bright in the spotlight, Carter then slipped back into diplomatic mode: "I'm not blaming one [side] or the other. . . . Any side that kills innocent people is guilty of terrorism."

Carter said Hamas officials told him that they would allow a referendum on the fate of Palestinians if Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the rival Palestinian Authority, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reached an agreement. Carter added that Israelis must be assured that Hamas would stop rocket attacks and suicide bombers.

"I think it's an atrocity what is being perpetuated as punishment" against the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, Carter said. He added that the situation was "a crime" and that people were being "starved" to death living behind walls in prison conditions.

It was almost 30 years ago that Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made peace at Camp David. Thursday, Carter took a moment to remember those times. He drew applause when, with a jab at the Bush administration, he mentioned that he didn't wait until his final days in office to try to find a way to peace.

This week's Middle East conference in Annapolis, Md., has highlighted Arab unease over the ability and will of a weak U.S. president to deliver peace. At the same time, it has stoked fears that Israel has scored a public relations coup while refusing to concede on such core issues as Palestinian refugees and the fate of Jerusalem.

Arab nations, most notably Syria and Saudi Arabia, had been reluctant to attend the U.S.-sponsored talks, which are meant to set the framework for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Now, with their prestige on the line, Arab officials are returning to their capitals with two tasks: convincing their populations that the summit was a crucial step toward a Palestinian state and keeping pressure on the U.S. and Israel to deliver on that goal.

It is a politically risky situation marked by skepticism and mistrust as well as occasional resolve. Arabs were encouraged that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was, at least temporarily, moved to center stage. But turmoil in Lebanon, war in Iraq and a rising Iran have complicated Middle East politics beyond the nuances of what unfolds between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Such instabilities, however, are often inextricably linked to the quest for a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Arab leaders worry that if Abbas is perceived to have gained little from Annapolis, it will strengthen Iranian-backed militant groups, such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. One of the main reasons Sunni Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia agreed to participate in the summit was to counter Iran's political involvement across the region, including its alliance with Syria and influence in Iraq.

"Stagnation in the peace process has increased the appeal for extremist ideologies. Feelings of despair and frustration have reached a dangerously high level," said Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal. "It is time to bring this conflict to an end, and to enable the people of the region to divert their energies from war and destruction to peace and development."

State-controlled Iranian media seized on the Annapolis conference to assert that neither an Israeli-Palestinian peace nor a wider Middle East calm was possible without the blessing of Tehran, which Washington did not invite to the summit, partly in protest of Iran's nuclear program. Also not invited were Hezbollah or Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip in June, driving out Abbas' Fatah movement.

"The U.S.-hosted peace conference has been heavily overshadowed by Iran and its powerful allies and as a result no specific goals are expected to be achieved by the conference," wrote Iran's hard-line Kayhan daily newspaper. "This is another victory for Iranian diplomacy. The main objective of the conference is to take the Palestine conflict out of Iran's hands. However, no one knows how this will happen."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters Wednesday that the conference would be "fruitless" because Hamas, "the real representatives of the Palestinian nation and Palestinian resistance groups, did not attend the meeting and the rights, votes and will of this nation were not recognized."

Some Arab commentators,however, sought to downplay the tensions between Shiite-dominated Iran and its Sunni neighbors, fearing that bickering and divisions among Muslim governments would shift attention away from Israel's decades-long suppression of Palestinian aspirations.

"The notion that there is a moderate camp and an extremist camp, and that the Kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] and Israel, together with others, are in the first, while Iran, Hamas, Syria and Hezbollah are in the second -- is false," Jamal Khashoggi, a political analyst, wrote in the Saudi daily Al Watan. "The Kingdom, Iran, Syria, Hamas, together with Egypt, Jordan and every other Arab state, are part of a single camp linked by history, religion, language and the East. Israel is something different altogether."

Still, some commentators said there had already been a cost to the Arab nations that attended the Annapolis session.

"The Arabs paid the price of the conference in advance by going there," said Gamal Abdel Gawad, an analyst with the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "What they got out of the conference is promises, which I don't think are credible enough." Arab representatives underscored that attending the conference would not constitute "normalization" of ties between Israel and the Arab world unless Israel agreed to a negotiated peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia's Faisal and other officials were careful to avoid what they felt would be a public relations disaster: a photo op or public handshake with Israelis at a U.S.-sponsored summit held with lowered expectations.

"Israel is . . . focusing its efforts on achieving normalization with the Arab states, which it insists on, even before taking any real steps toward peace," said an editorial in Al Watan. "This runs totally counter to the official and public Arab position, which refuses any normalization before settling the major issues. It is true that a faint light seems to glimmer at the end of the tunnel. But the path toward achieving an honorable peace . . . remains thorny."

Erfan Nizameddin, a commentator for the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, was more blunt: "How can we be optimistic if we witness the world's biggest deception process, whereby the fundamental issues are put on hold for the sake of a conference to show off and have pictures?"

The Arab world still appears a bit confused over the Bush administration's new initiative to restart the Middle East peace process after seven years of near-inaction. Some in the Middle East media have referred to it as "the U.S. awakening."

Arab commentators credit Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's diplomacy in bringing together the conference, but then they quickly ask what can be done as Bush enters his final year in office and Abbas and Olmert have lost the confidence of their publics.

"Arab leaders have no illusions about what the conference would achieve for them," wrote Sateh Noureddine, a columnist for the Lebanese Arab nationalist newspaper As Safir. "It is understood that domestically Bush, Olmert and Abbas have many problems and cannot lead the way into any major breakthroughs."

American ally Saudi Arabia and other nations suggested they would abandon the peace process started at Annapolis if the U.S. didn't pressure Israel to make concessions that include allowing the return of Palestinian refugees, freezing Israeli settlements and resolution of the future of Jerusalem. Damascus said the talks must be broadened to reach settlements on related matters such as the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War.

"Despite the centrality and importance of the Palestinian cause, focusing on part of the problem and disregarding the other elements of peace would be wrong. In fact, it could be disastrous for peace itself," wrote Issam Dari in Syria's Tishreen newspaper. "Peace that is not comprehensive and does not include all the other tracks will be a deal that may disappear and evaporate with the first breeze."

The upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace conference resembles a dinner party with a less-than-inspiring menu and a bunch of well-tailored yet exasperated guests who, if they show up at all, doubt that anyone will go home happy.

Posturing and recrimination often characterize such negotiations, but Arab nations, including Washington's closest allies, are criticizing the November conference as a miscalculated photo op by a Bush administration desperate to repair its image in the Middle East.

"This is not an effort to save the Palestinians, it's an attempt to prop up the administration's very low standing in the Arab world," said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. "Saudi Arabia and other Washington allies will lose a lot of credibility if this is just to take part in an American show."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans a visit to the region this week aimed at persuading Arab countries to send at least ministry-level officials to the meeting in Annapolis, Md. But analysts and media in the Middle East complain that the U.S. has not done the diplomatic legwork needed to advance peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Preliminary talks between the two sides are at an impasse.

"Everybody knows what's at stake," said Mohammed Sayed Said, an analyst with Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "But the conference is very mushy. It is far from certain how outstanding issues such as the Palestinian question, the Arab-Israeli peace and other concerns like Palestinian refugees will be addressed."

The summit comes as Washington's allies Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have become less circumspect in criticizing U.S. policy, often doing so publicly. The Iraq war, growing Islamic extremism and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian issue are regarded as U.S. failures whose effects will agitate the region long after Bush leaves office in 2009.

Riyadh, Cairo and Amman have tried, with limited success, to stitch together a unified regional voice to overcome what they see as Washington's mistakes, which have become more pronounced against the specter of Iran's growing influence.

On Saturday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urged a boycott of the summit, saying that it only served to buttress Israel.

"Any gathering held in the name of peace so far has been to the disadvantage of the Palestinian people," Khamenei said. Khamenei is Iran's highest political and spiritual authority.

The crucial question about the conference from the Arab perspective is how, if at all, the U.S. can spur Israel to advance the 1993 Oslo accords and move closer to a Palestinian state. The other issue is the internal strife among the Palestinians, whose allegiances are generally split between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party in the West Bank and the radical Islamic group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The violent break between the two this year, after a brief attempt at a unity government, reverberated across the region, lifting Hamas' stature as a defiant alternative to parties and regimes considered by many Arabs as too close to Washington.

The popularity of Hamas has had consequences for Jordan's King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Both are trying to contain, through imprisonment and rewriting election laws, the influence of the radical Muslim Brotherhood parties in their nations. A peace conference that fails to give the moderate Abbas some sort of Palestinian victory would embolden the political opposition in Egypt and Jordan, where displaced Palestinians account for half the population.

These countries partly blame the U.S. for their current standoffs with the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2005, the Bush administration urged Middle East allies, long criticized for human rights abuses, to enact democratic reforms as a means to counter terrorism. In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood is banned, a loosening of restrictions led to the Islamic organization's members winning nearly 20% of the seats as independents in the parliament. This was not what the U.S. intended, and it resulted in Amman and Cairo cracking down on opposition groups and jailing hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members.

"Being an American ally is already risky for all these moderate Arab countries," said Randa Habib, a writer and political analyst in Jordan.

"The Jordanian regime is concerned that the Palestinian- Israeli conference will take place without preparation and there will be no substantive outcome," Habib said. "This would only again strengthen the position of the Islamic extremists."

She said the Arab capitals and Washington appear to be speaking to each other from parallel realities. Rice is shuttling through the region to draw support for a meeting when many of those she is visiting would prefer to be taken off the list. In fact, Arab officials note, the date of the conference is still not known.

"I think the regimes want to convince Rice, at least as things stand now, that this is not the right time for a peace conference," Habib said. "The whole conference looks very mysterious and suspicious, and that's not good in a part of the world that thrives on conspiracy theories."

The meeting is unlikely to address wider regional tensions, such as Syria's demand that Israel return the Golan Heights, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East War. The U.S. has invited Syria, but President Bashar Assad has said he won't attend unless the Golan Heights is on the agenda. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be the conference's focus.

This limited agenda would increase the chances that Syria and its ally Iran might try to inflame the region by creating a regional conflict, such as upsetting the fragile peace in faction- ridden Lebanon.

"Iran will try to sabotage the conference with its influence in Syria and maybe Lebanon, but it can't prevent it," said Alani, the Dubai-based analyst. He said Saudi Arabia would try to counter such a move, because though Riyadh is wary of the conference, it doesn't want to see even a poorly planned U.S. effort fail.

"The Saudis are the key," Alani said. "Who they send to the conference will reflect their trust and belief in Washington's abilities. There's a vacuum of power in the Arab world, and Saudi Arabia is rising to fill it. The Americans have to understand this. The Saudis want some clear outcome for the conference or it's not worth their participation."

But whom the Arab world will send has become an intriguing bit of gamesmanship.

"The chemistry between Bush and Mubarak has always been bad," Said said. "Mubarak won't go to the conference. It'll probably be a [lower-level] official, or possibly the foreign minister. No one really wants to take responsibility for entirely losing President Bush or to send a negative signal about the peace process."

The strained relationship was underscored last month when Washington criticized Egypt for jailing editors and closing a human rights group. Cairo and Washington have bickered for years over democratic reforms in Egypt, but the timing and tone of the Bush administration's rebuke drew mocking criticism here.

"It is not for the sake of the Egyptian press or journalists that the White House issued that statement with fake 'concern' about press freedom in Egypt," said an editorial in the state-owned Rosa al-Yousef newspaper. "Washington uses those statements of concern as scarecrows whenever it needs something impossible from Egypt. . . .

"The U.S. wants President Mubarak to announce his endorsement of the peace conference in advance . . . even if it has no outcome."