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.”

A United Nations panel voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn Israel for a recent armed incursion in the Gaza Strip that claimed more than 120 lives, many of them civilian.

Thirty-three member countries of the 47-seat UN Human Rights Council endorsed the resolution, which accused Israel of war crimes in its ongoing battles against Palestinian militants in Gaza.

Those in favour of censuring the Jewish state included China, India and Russia. Thirteen countries abstained, among them seven European governments.

But one nation stood alone against the denunciation of Israel, and that country was not the United States – Israel's leading foreign supporter – or even Israel itself, for neither country has a seat on the human rights body.

Instead, the lone dissenter was Canada.

"We're very happy that we see things in a similar way," Carmela Shamir, deputy director of the North America division at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an interview last week.

"Canada has adopted several times in recent months very brave positions."

People are beginning to take notice.

"There is a widespread impression that Canada's position is more pro-Israel than it has been in the past," said Peter Jones, an assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

"It is a bit of a departure."

A tilt toward Israel was becoming apparent under Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, said Jones, but the shift has become even more pronounced since Stephen Harper's Conservative government took power in Ottawa in 2006.

In January, for example, Canada announced it was pulling out of a UN anti-racism conference slated for next year in Durban, South Africa, out of concern the meeting could degenerate into a binge of Israel-bashing, which was what happened at a similar gathering there in 2001, in the view of some participants.

"Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it," Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said in January.

"We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance."

Just one other country – Israel itself – has so far withdrawn from the Durban conference, but the Israelis waited until Feb. 25, a month after the Canadian decision, before announcing they, too, would be staying home.

"Dialogue between our two governments is very good, very open," said Shamir.

To a considerable degree, it always has been.

Like other Western governments, Ottawa has fully supported the existence of Israel since its creation in 1948, and there are close cultural, political, and social ties between the two countries.

Since 1997, Israel and Canada have had a free-trade agreement, and two-way commerce has more than doubled during that time.

But the moral and political complexities of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict frequently oblige even Israel's most ardent backers – including the United States – to temper their support with sometimes blunt criticism.

During a visit here in January, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out clearly against continuing Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem on land it annexed in 1967 and now occupies illegally in the eyes of most of the world.

But, only days later, on a visit of his own, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier seemed to muddy Ottawa's position on the same issue by declining to express specific opposition to Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem.

Like the United States and Europe, Canada has traditionally drawn no distinction between Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem and its settlements in the West Bank, opposing both.

Following Bernier's visit, however, some ambiguity seems to have crept into a once straightforward Canadian policy.

"The ambiguity raises questions," said Jones at the University of Ottawa. "I don't know what it means."

At least some other people think they do.

"I think the Harper government made a deliberate calculation," said Mohamed Boudjenane, executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation. "They are reaching out to the Jewish vote. I can't see any other reason."

Whatever its stance toward Israel, Ottawa has not abandoned the Palestinians.

Canada maintains a diplomatic office in Ramallah, the West Bank capital and disbursed $39 million in economic assistance to the Palestinian territories in the fiscal year 2006-07.

Canada fully supports the eventual establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Maybe so, says Boudjenane, but Ottawa under Harper's leadership has nonetheless adopted a "negative" tone toward Arabs and Muslims.

For example, he said, the Canadian Arab Federation recently requested a meeting with Kenney to discuss Ottawa's decision to withdraw from next year's anti-racism meeting in South Africa. But they were refused.

"This is our government, too," he said. "You cannot decide to boycott one group."

Other observers see different factors at work in what they regard as Canada's increasingly forthright backing for Israel, the sole functioning democracy in a region of authoritarian Arab states.

"Most people you talk to tend to take the view it's an ideological feeling by the Harper government," said Jones, who attributes the shift largely to a personal decision by the Prime Minister and his immediate staff.

"Certainly, around Ottawa, there's a general feeling that the (Prime Minister's Office) and the (Privy Council Office) have taken a greater interest in this part of the world."

Shamir regards the change less as an overt show of support for her country and more as a reflection of shared principles.

"I would say this government, on issues like fighting the war on terror, has a similar analysis of global trends as the Israeli government has," she said.

"I would put it in terms, not of supporting Israel, but of taking positions concurrent with Israeli ones."

Whatever its cause, one test of Ottawa's shifting Middle Eastern vision is the practical effect it stands to achieve in a region of stubborn hostilities, great suffering, and abiding fears.

"In terms of just Canada, per se, it probably does not have that great an impact" said Jones.

"But it has a diplomatic and moral impact."

Shamir welcomed the apparent shift, even though it comes from a country that is not exactly a powerhouse of international influence.

"Canada is part of the G-8," she said. "It's taking part in the global war on terror. The size of the population is not relevant."

But Boudjenane surveys the same trends and laments what he sees as a loss of Canada's once vaunted moral stature.

"We used to be one of the most respected voices," he said.

"We were seen as a peace-making nation. It was Canada's trademark. That perception unfortunately is now tainted."

At least one line of business still seems to be booming in this benighted land, and it does not involve firing rockets.

It involves tinkering with cars.

"We are under siege," says Ali Awad, 48, an automobile mechanic who is especially adept at a certain procedure ideally suited to the strapped circumstances that nowadays prevail in the Gaza Strip, where punitive sanctions imposed by Israel have crippled an already stumbling economy.

"We have to survive. We cannot just go out and steal."

Instead, Awad and tradespeople like him are performing a kind of modern-day alchemy, somehow keeping cars on the road in a territory where just about every gasoline station has been closed for weeks, owing to an acute and persistent shortage of fuel supplies.

Gasoline for automobiles has been especially hard hit, and not by accident.

"As far as I'm concerned, the residents of Gaza can walk," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last month, "and they will not get gasoline because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that does not allow the residents of southern Israel to live in peace."

Olmert was referring to Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and condones the almost daily firing of mortars and improvised rockets, known as Qassams, toward Israel. For that reason, and also because Hamas refuses to formally recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state, Israel imposes a severe economic blockade on the territory, limiting the entry of most goods and sharply restricting the supply of fuel, especially gas for automobiles.

As a result, almost all of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants should probably have blisters on their feet by now from so much walking.

But they have been at least partly spared that particular hardship, thanks in no small measure to mechanics like Awad, men who have mastered the trick of converting cars to run on a pressurized and flammable concoction that still manages to find its way into Gaza, albeit in diminished quantities.

It is called cooking gas.

For 1,000 shekels – about $275 – Awad can convert an automobile to operate on a combustible source of energy better known for its role in the preparation of dinner. He does an average of one conversion a day.

The job takes about eight hours to complete and involves running a fuel line from the trunk or back seat to the engine, where a specially designed pump is installed near the radiator. When the job is done, the vehicle's operator can choose to burn conventional gasoline or the cooking stuff by flicking a switch on the dashboard.

"For me, as a mechanic, it's easy," says the grizzled owner of Our Carburetor Shop, a concrete-block structure with a corrugated zinc roof tucked amid an array of similar enterprises on Salahadin Road.

"Older cars are easier to convert. Newer ones are really difficult."

Fortunately for Awad, the automobiles that ply Gaza's dusty, rutted boulevards, weaving in and out among the donkey carts and sway-backed horses, tend to be machines of a certain age.

Despite Awad's best efforts, there has been a noticeable reduction in the volume of automobile traffic in Gaza in recent weeks, especially now that local fuel distributors are on strike – a paradoxical protest against the Israeli-imposed shortages. But the territory's streets are nonetheless surprisingly busy when you consider the almost complete absence of gasoline here.

Apart from trucks and taxis, which mostly run on diesel fuel – still sporadically available – it's probably a safe bet that most of the cars still seeing action in the gas wars of Gaza have a canister of cooking gas hooked up in the back seat or trunk.

The conversion of cars to run on cooking gas is by no means unique to Gaza. It is popular in India and many other countries because it offers improved fuel economy and a cleaner-burning engine.

The difference in Gaza is that, here, the procedure is being used to help circumvent a hostile blockade.

In other words, it's tantamount to an act of war, albeit a peaceful one.

This is the way Awad looks at it.

"You can steal," he says, "or you can work with honour."

And drive with cooking gas.

It is not the volume of traffic, much less the issue of distance, that puts a pair of dents each day into the life of Mouse Hindi.I

It is the city of Jerusalem.

"There is no limit to the time it takes," says the 40-year-old Palestinian consulting engineer. "It could take two hours. It could take three hours. We don't know."

The round-faced husband and father of five is talking about the daily journey he makes from his home in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem to his office in Ramallah.

Both communities are located in the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank, and only a modest expanse of real estate divides them.

If he could make the trip in a fairly straight line, as used to be the case, Hindi would need to travel just 30 kilometres between his house and his place of work, a journey that would last about half an hour, depending on the traffic. But because of Israeli security concerns and other stern political verities, he cannot do that any more.

For Hindi, as for most Palestinians in the West Bank, getting from point A to point B in the land they call home has become an arduous and unpredictable ordeal.

On this route, between Bethlehem and Ramallah, there stands what has become a formidable obstacle, a topsy-turvy conglomeration of limestone buildings and human beings that is known in Arabic as Al-Quds, in Hebrew as Yerushalayim, and in English as Jerusalem.

For most West Bank Palestinians, the holy city is forbidden territory.

"People can come from anywhere in the world and go to Jerusalem," says Hindi, "but I cannot."

In order to travel from Bethlehem to Ramallah, or vice-versa, it is nowadays forbidden for most Palestinians to travel through Jerusalem, as once they could.

Instead, in compliance with Israeli security restrictions, they have to go around the city, and that is a much longer trip.

What's more, the journey is nowadays punctuated by three permanent checkpoints operated by Israeli authorities, in addition to temporary checkpoints that appear one day and disappear the next.

It's a good thing the scenery is so striking: a Middle Eastern collage of Bedouin Arab encampments scattered along the banks of ancient wadis, of pine groves clinging to broad stony hillsides, of slender minarets poking above limestone villages clustered, like so many sun-baked Lego bricks, upon the nearly treeless slopes of a storied land.

But even gorgeous vistas can grow tiresome over the course of time.

"Before, we could travel freely," says Hindi. "Now, we are going more than 180 degrees around Jerusalem." As a result, what was once a straightforward trek has become a circuitous journey that costs about $4.50 each way and extends more than 50 kilometres.

"I checked it in my car," says Hindi. But the Palestinian entrepreneur does not make the trip by car any longer. He travels by minibus, partly because he feels more secure having travelling companions close at hand. He confides that he once wound up in an Israeli prison after being arrested without explanation at the Jordanian border.

That was in 1997, and he was released after three months without ever being charged. Understandably, the experience has left him wary of travelling alone.

Right now, Hindi is ensconced in the rear seat of a yellow Ford diesel minibus piloted by 31-year-old Jihad Esmekha. The bus is pulling out of the central terminal in Ramallah, with six other passengers.

It is 8:45 on a weekday morning and, rather than going to work, Hindi is heading home after spending the night on a cot in his office, a familiar experience for him.

"Last night, I worked until 9:30," he explains. At that hour, there is no point in even trying to get from Ramallah to Bethlehem. "Unfortunately, there is no transportation."

Now, sporting 24 hours' worth of dark stubble, Hindi is heading home to Beit Sahour to freshen up before keeping a midday business appointment not far from his house, which he shares with his children and his Filipina wife, Rosemary, whom he met while studying for his engineering degree in Manila during the 1980s.

After departing Ramallah, the bus follows a succession of arteries before turning onto Highway 437, which meanders first south and then southeast. At the junction with Highway 1, the bus swings right and bears southwest, before peeling off onto Route 417 toward the town of Bethany. Here, the vehicle turns due south on to the first of a series of narrow, winding byways.

Already, the bus has passed through two Israeli checkpoints without a hitch. Only one remains, the oddly named "Container" checkpoint near the Arab village of Al-Sawahreh Al-Sharkia. (The checkpoint is so called because a local merchant once operated a business in a shipping container near this spot.) Here, there is a hold-up, but it lasts only 15 minutes or so.

During the slowdown, Hindi climbs out of the minibus to stroll alongside the vehicle as it creeps forward in a long queue. Meanwhile, he enjoys a morning cigarette in the blazing sunshine.

Beyond this checkpoint, the journey continues along the Valley of Fire Rd., an impossibly serpentine route that eventually winds past the town of Al-Ubeidiya and veers west toward Bethlehem.

Hindi is at last deposited near his home in Beit Sahour at precisely 10:05 a.m., following a journey that has lasted one hour and 20 minutes – a quick pace until you consider that, on a good day with little traffic, he used to be able to make the same trip in half an hour or so.

But he is pleased.

"This is my lucky day," he says.

And maybe it is.

When Israel makes good on a recent pledge to free 250 Palestinian prisoners, it is a fair bet their ranks will not include a certain inmate by the name of Marwan Barghouti.

"I would be very surprised if they release him," says Tamar Hermann, director of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University. "That would be a big move. Releasing him would have signalled that Israel is serious (about peace)."

By the same token, failure to release the 48-year-old Barghouti would suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is not serious about reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians, or not now.

"I don't think peace is on the agenda now at all," says Hermann. "The government is very weak."

The local punditocracy has feasted on Olmert's surprise announcement at a regional summit in Egypt on Monday that he means to grant freedom to more than 200 Palestinian prisoners, a goodwill gesture aimed at shoring up Fatah, the moderate Palestinian faction led by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, a man widely seen as an ineffectual leader.

Israelis seems to support the idea.

An opinion sample conducted Thursday for Israel Radio found that 57 per cent of people here endorse the proposed release of Palestinians; 37 per cent are opposed.

But, factor in the name Marwan Barghouti and public approval takes a sharp plunge. To judge by the same poll, only 28 per cent of Israelis want to see the prison doors swing open for the man some praise as "the Palestinian Mandela" but whom others call a murderer.

Two-thirds of Israelis want Barghouti to stay in jail.

Verdict: the husband and father of four will likely be in prison a while.

"His release doesn't seem likely so far," says George Giacaman, director of the program in democracy and human rights at the West Bank's Birzeit University.

Considering that Barghouti was convicted three years ago of five counts of murder and is now serving five life sentences, his release does not seem imminent at all.

And yet observers on both sides of the abyss that divides Palestinians from Israelis agree Barghouti may be the best hope this region has got for long-term peace.

"Barghouti is the only one who can challenge Hamas leaders as a national leader," says Hermann.

Hamas is the radical Islamist faction whose armed militants seized control of the Gaza Strip earlier this month, after defeating their Fatah rivals, who were numerically superior and better armed. Hamas supports the use of violence against Israeli civilians and does not formally recognize Israel's right to exist.

As a result of Hamas's blood-stained triumph in Gaza, the 3 million inhabitants of the Palestinian territories are now sharply divided between the narrow sea-side strip, where Hamas rules, and the West Bank, where Fatah does.

Barghouti belongs to Fatah. He has spent most of his life in the organization, long a political and paramilitary vehicle for former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004.

Born near Ramallah in the West Bank, Barghouti joined Fatah when he was just 15. Fluent in English and Hebrew, which he learned during periods of incarceration in Israeli jails, Barghouti has divided his political career among prison, Jordanian exile, and grass-roots agitation against Israel in the West Bank.

By 1996, Barghouti was Fatah's secretary-general in the territory.

Many say comparisons with Nelson Mandela are exaggerated, but the parallels do exist.

Like the hero of South Africa's long struggle against white rule, Barghouti joined an established liberation organization and soon began to inveigh against its older leaders' complacency and corruption.

Like Mandela, his initial political credibility arose from his involvement in street-level politics.

Like Mandela, Barghouti was soon captured by a more powerful enemy, charged and convicted of violent crimes and locked away.

Seized by Israeli forces in April 2002, he was convicted and sentenced two years later and has remained behind bars ever since.

"He's a very intelligent, pragmatic person," says Ziad Abu-Zayyad, a lawyer and former Palestinian Authority minister. "He is a charismatic person. I think he is very qualified to become the leader."

Even from prison, Barghouti continues to play a significant role in Palestinian politics.

Earlier this month, he waited several days before giving his conditional blessing to a new Palestinian government established in the West Bank by Abbas – a reconfigured Fatah-led regime purporting to replace the short-lived unity government set up this spring with participation by both Hamas and Fatah.

Many here speak of the urgent need for somebody, or something, to engineer a reconciliation of the two rival Palestinian factions, but others say the reunification of Hamas and Fatah isn't the most urgent issue now. Fatah's most pressing challenge, they say, is Fatah's reunification.

Shaken by internal power struggles at least since the death of Arafat, Fatah has been reduced to a welter of competing interests and egos that barely holds together in quiet times, never mind when the going gets rough.

The organization's recent and abrupt collapse in Gaza illustrates the problem.

"It doesn't exist as a coherent party," says Giacaman. "It's just a name. I think Barghouti could play a role in the emergence of a new Fatah, a more modern Fatah."

But the man who may, or may not, be the Palestinian Mandela will be hard-pressed to fulfill his political destiny from inside an Israeli jail.

"I believe that, sooner or later, he will be released," says Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general.

"Palestinians have many expectations of him. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the usual scenario: when there is a complete lack of leadership, everyone pins their hopes on someone because he is not available."