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.”

The IDF risked the lives of Palestinian civilians in order to minimize the risk posed to its soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, the Independent quoted "a high-ranking" IDF officer as saying in a report published Wednesday.

The officer, who reportedly served as a commander during the war in Gaza, acknowledged that following the heavy casualties in the Second Lebanon War, the IDF went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimize military casualties.

He reportedly said that he "did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as 'means and intentions' – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters."

The Independent claimed that the officer described the IDF rules of engagement to a Yediot Ahronot reporter, but that the paper chose not to publish the article although it was ready five months ago.

When IDF soldiers operated in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, "whoever is left in the neighborhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn't have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon," the officer reporteldy told Yediot. "A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us."

A more junior officer, who reportedly served at a brigade headquarters during the operation, described the new IDF policy as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".

Another IDF soldier told the Independent that the army's conduct in Gaza, particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets, had "taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head."

Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, "first you take him down, then you look into it," he was quoted as saying.

According to the Independent, the IDF declined to comment on the claims and directed all inquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 Foreign Ministry document 'The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.'

PA president suggests 3-month J'lem building freeze to get negotiations going.

Talkbacks (5)

Direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians would be possible in exchange for a three-month settlement freeze which would include Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview with the Guardian published Sunday.

Abbas told the UK paper that he had reached agreement with former prime minister Ehud Olmert on issues beyond those which had been broached during the time of former PA chairman Yasser Arafat and former US president Bill Clinton.

He added that while he did not understand why the US had rescinded its demand that Israel freeze construction in both West Bank settlements and east Jerusalem, he himself would be open to the “proximity talks” suggested by US Middle East envoy George Mitchell.

“If there is any substance in the response from the Israeli side – for example, if they accept the framework of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders ... then there will be progress,” Abbas was quoted as saying.

The PA president stressed that Israel's expansion of settlements on Palestinian territory constituted an alarming step toward what he termed “the one-state solution, which we reject.”

He went on to promise that the Palestinians would not return to armed resistance under his rule, saying that violence would “destroy our territories and our country.” In a fierce counter-argument against rival Palestinian faction Hamas, Abbas stated that despite answering to “outside” influences, even the government in Gaza was “talking about peace and a truce with Israel.”

But even as he promised to work toward quiet in the West Bank and reconciliation between Palestinian leaders, Abbas said that he would carry out his threat of resigning if progress was not made on the Israeli-Palestinian track. “I will have to tell our people there is no hope and no use in my staying in office,” he told the Guardian, hinting that violence could erupt in the void created by his absence.

Abbas's term was recently extended until elections could be held in the Palestinian territories.

During the interview, the Palestinian leader also spoke out in support of Egypt's construction of an underground metal wall to block tunnels whereby weapons are smuggled into the Gaza Strip. “I support the wall ... Legitimate supplies should be brought through legal crossings,” he said.

Abbas made the comments after meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in London on Sunday.

Construction is continuing in the Samaria community of Kiryat Netafim despite the government's ten-month building moratorium in West Bank settlements, Army Radio reported Friday morning. According to the report, development has continued on some 15 illegal structures.

The report said the ongoing construction appeared to be in defiance not only of the freeze, but of a High Court of Justice ruling of a year ago.

In answer to an inquiry from grassroots left-wing organization Peace Now, the government responded that its civilian monitoring unit was lacking in manpower to enforce the court's decision.

But Peace Now was unwilling to accept the government's answer, the Army Radio report quoted Peace Now General Secretary Yariv Oppenheimer as saying.

"There must be action against the settlers violating the law over and over again," he said, adding that "we expect the Defense Ministry to act decisively and resolutely against everyone who violates a Supreme Court order and to bring those responsible for this to justice."

Oppenheimer, the report went on, said that there could not be a situation in which certain communities had illegal structures demolished while others were able to continue building at will.

Samaria Regional Council head Gershon Mesika explained that work was being done only in order to enable residents reasonable lives.

"Those buildings were inhabited prior to the decision of the High Court of Justice, and in cases in which a family was living with an unfinished roof, it was finished. Work was not executed beyond that carried out for safety reasons or which enabled families to get through the winter," the report quoted him as saying.

The state said that the monitors had acted efficiently even though they were unable to carry out all their assignments.

Fatah Central Committee member and former security commander Muhammad Dahlan is optimistic that peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel will resume in the coming weeks, according to an interview with Al-Hayat published on Friday.

Dahlan revealed that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have been holding intense contacts with the Quartet (representing the US, the UN Secretariat, the EU and Russia) in efforts to formulate a unified position regarding the resumption of peace talks.

The PA hopes that Israel accept the new proposal, Dahlan said. "We hope the struggle of chairman Abu-Mazzen (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) against the previous negotiating mechanism will bear fruit already in the coming weeks," Dahlan was quoted as saying by the London-based newspaper.

However, Dahlan reportedly went on to stress that "the Palestinian people prefer to be cautious when it comes to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu."

He reiterated the PA's demand that Israel freeze settlement construction before talks are renewed and warned that the situation could deteriorate quickly. "The current settlement [activity] in Jerusalem is aimed at taking it [the Jerusalem issue] off the negotiating table," Dahlan said.

"All we seek is a year or 10-month building freeze, during which a permanent agreement will be achieved," Dahlan said.

The PA will insist that the '67 borders be the final borders of the future Palestinian state, he said, stressing that the Palestinians "will not accept any manipulation on this issue."

Despite the clear demands the PA was prepared to reach a compromise in order to achieve a comprehensive peace deal. "Each side is insisting on its demands, but we are prepared to make painful decisions. Any compromise will be at the expense of all sides," Dahlan told Al Hayat.