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.”

"Our dispute is not personal", Farouk Kaddoumi told a group of Palestinians assembled at the Preparatory Conference of the Palestinian Diaspora, held at a hotel near the airport in Geneva, Switzerland, this past weekend. "The man who organised the Oslo Accords is governing now, and he believes the Intifada is the wrong way, and that military resistance is wrong. There is a big difference between our two political ideologies," he said.

Kaddoumi, the new leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The rift in the Palestinian body politic is out on the table. In interview, when asked about reports that he is planning to go to Gaza, Kaddoumi replied, "It's early to say, but we should go back next year." One of his colleagues, standing beside him, added, "That's in a few weeks."

Two of the most important Palestinian leaders, both of evident good will but who have two different approaches, neither man is among those whose names are most frequently mentioned in connection with corruption in an intensely frustrated Palestinian political atmosphere. Yet a random sampling of Palestinians questioned in casual conversations in the West Bank during the past year shows that not all of them are worried about aid money being wasted on patronage, or jobs given to the relatives of high-ranking officials. Engaging in unequal or unfair peace negotiations is as corrupt, to some.

This weekend's meeting was the third time that representatives of communities and organisations of Palestinians living in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas (North and South) had come together in Geneva. They had previously met in August 2004 and in June 2005. This time, they hoped to forge a common "framework" within which they could speak to the PLO, to the PA, and to the world, on "the justice of the Palestinian issues," according to one of the meeting's documents.

In the meeting this weekend, Kaddoumi recalled the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his appearance before the UN General Assembly in 1974, when he raised an olive branch in one hand and said he had a gun in the other hand, and implored the gathered diplomats: "Don't let the olive branch drop from my hand." Kaddoumi remembered that the Palestinian leader negotiated and resisted, both at the same time, and had always said he would die as a martyr -- "Shahiidan, Shahiidan, Shahiidan."

Yet, one of the papers being presented at the Geneva meeting this weekend, by Khalid Barakat on behalf of a North American delegation, suggested that present problems go back to Palestinian decisions taken "since the early 1970s". One major shift of direction in that period was the Palestinian National Council's 1974 decision to establish an independent state on any inch of liberated Palestine.

The split between Kaddoumi and Abbas went public when the latter resigned in frustration in September 2003 from his position as Palestinian prime minister. At that time, Abbas told the Palestinian Legislative Council that he had signed the Oslo Agreement because "Our foreign minister and the head of the PLO Political Department refused to go and refused to accept and did not recognise Oslo [saying] that the agreements do not match with his ideas." Abbas went on to describe at length the dilemma of having had two different foreign ministers; one from the PLO (Kaddoumi) and one from the PA (at that time, Nabil Shaath). Arafat was the one who achieved balance and kept things together.

Resurrecting past struggles last weekend, Kaddoumi criticised the present peace process, without categorically rejecting it. He focused on honest implementation. Kaddoumi outlined what he believes is a changed world under the George W Bush presidencies, warning that Palestinians should not expect that Europe will offer more than it already has. Europe has said the Palestinians have the right to self- determination and to establish an independent Palestinian state, but that's all. Europe would not support sanctions against Israel, Kaddoumi told the meeting.

Many of those present in Geneva were intellectuals, writers and teachers. All live "outside" the occupied Palestinian territories, in the "Diaspora". The word is unblushingly borrowed from the narrative of forced Jewish exile, precisely in order to create the parallel. Kaddoumi was one of those who did not return to Palestine under the conditions created by the 1993 Oslo Accords. At first, it was said to be politically expedient to have the PLO minister of foreign affairs based outside. In that way, he was free to communicate with Arab states and other countries that opposed the Oslo process. As time went on, however, with marble-clad ministries constructed in the occupied territories and donor demands progressively accommodated, Kaddoumi was increasingly sidelined.

Much of the focus of the Geneva meetings is on how similarly displaced Palestinians can break back into the political arena, express their views, and have a hand in the determination of their future as Palestinians. Meanwhile, Kaddoumi, speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly, explained his own presence in Geneva in broader terms: "It is necessary to unite all efforts of the Palestinians in this special situation or circumstances, because all international efforts are focused on the PA, which might harm the whole cause," he said.

"The Palestinian cause is for the whole Palestinian people, and not just those in the West Bank and Gaza," Kaddoumi added in interview with the Weekly. In a quite different meeting on Saturday held in the Vatican, PA President Abbas agreed with Pope Benedict, the Roman Catholic Pontiff, that the peace process should involve "all components" of Palestinian society. "It is necessary that international public opinion realise," Kaddoumi stressed, "that the refugee problem is the most important question, and the core of the subject -- not only the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, we should pass on information about the so-called withdrawal from Gaza and put pressure on the United States and Israel to remove Israeli forces from the West Bank. We have accepted the peace process, but unfortunately they have distorted the whole [roadmap] plan."

Some major political actors clearly wish that the Palestinians living "outside" would just accept their circumstances. "This is ancient history", American negotiators were quoted as saying, during and after the Camp David II talks in late July 2000, about United Nations Resolution 194 of 1948 -- colloquially known as the "right of return resolution". Israeli negotiators had said that Palestinians could return to the Palestinian state that is to be created in the West Bank and Gaza but adamantly ruled out any "large- scale" return of Palestinians to Israel.

According to a document prepared for the Geneva conference, the gathered representatives of Palestinian communities and institutions committed "to study all the initiatives and negotiations which neglect the right of return of the Palestinian people." To whom the "right of return" refers is another question. In an enormously complicated legal patchwork, not all Palestinians living outside the occupied Palestinian territories are refugees. Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are also not refugees, though they may have originated in one and be living now in the other. There are also "Israeli Arabs" -- Palestinians who did not leave or who were not expelled in 1948 but rather surrounded the creation of the state of Israel -- displaced internally, evicted from homes and villages, but not considered refugees.

Approximately half of all officially "registered" Palestinian refugees live in neighbouring Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Those living in refugee camps, inside or outside the occupied Palestinian territories, face hard and discriminatory conditions. In some camps, there is still no sewage system, and wastewater runs in the streets. The Web site of UNRWA -- the UN agency mandated to ease conditions for the Palestinian refugees -- describes camps in Syria where poverty is so deep that practically no one from outside will marry the inhabitants. Nearly four generations of intermarriages has given rise to a high level of genetic disorders in newborns.

Meanwhile, one camp in the West Bank has alleyways so narrow that corpses must be passed from house to house through windows before they can be taken out to a cemetery for burial.