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.”

Speculation about the Obama administration’s preparations to launch its own Israel-Arab peace plan began on April 7 with an op-ed article by David Ignatius in The Washington Post and a similar New York Times web-post by Helene Cooper.

Both articles cited discussions led by National Security Advisor James Jones with several predecessors, in which President Barack Obama himself recently participated. Those discussions appear to have taken as their point of departure the well-founded assessment that US peace efforts thus far have gotten nowhere and that renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, direct or indirect, are almost certain to fail.

Both articles were probably the result of calculated administration leaks destined to test the wind regarding the US peace plan idea. And test they should, because jumping from the current stalemate to the idea of dropping an American peace plan on the parties is a dangerous presumption. This fallacy was perhaps best expressed in a confident quote from the Ignatius article: “‘Everyone knows the basic outlines of a peace deal,’ said one of the senior officials, citing the agreement that was nearly reached at Camp David in 2000 and in subsequent negotiations.”

In fact, no one knows the basic outlines of a peace deal concerning the issues of Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem’s Holy Basin. On these core or existential issues, Israelis and Palestinians remain as far apart as ever. The views expressed over the years on these issues by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are blatantly contradictory. Abortive final-status negotiations undertaken on these issues in 2000 and 2008 merely highlighted the gaps. An attempt, through an American plan, to bridge these gaps would be artificial and would provoke angry rejection by both parties.

Furthermore, an American peace plan, to be in any way effective, would have to encounter Israeli and Palestinian leaders strong enough politically not only to negotiate but to make deals. Neither Abbas nor Netanyahu meets this criterion today.

Discussion of a last-resort American plan seemingly implies that all avenues for negotiated Middle East peace have been exhausted. In fact, this is not the case. Rather, the Obama administration has wasted more than a year on a settlement freeze as a prelude to renewed (and almost certainly fruitless) Israel-Palestinian Liberation Organization negotiations, while ignoring or under-valuing parallel opportunities that could reinforce Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects.

One of these is Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Another is the need to reassess failed strategies regarding Hamas in the Gaza Strip and look for better ways to stabilize the situation there – a sine qua non for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Then, too, there is the Fayyad plan for Palestinian state-building.

The Fayyad plan brings us full circle back to the question of a unilateral American diplomatic initiative. Clearly the Obama administration, like its predecessors, needs to be seen to be advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace, if only to maintain a degree of regional stability and advance US strategic agendas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. This is the immediate political meaning of the recent statement by General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, linking a failed Israeli-Palestinian peace process to American difficulties elsewhere in the region. And clearly, too, Israelis and Palestinians are not up to the task.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad intends to complete his state-building initiative by August 2011 and present the international community with the fait accompli of a Palestinian state apparatus capable of delivering on security, law and order and economic development but devoid of control over sufficient territory to be viable.

Assuming (a safe assumption under current circumstances) that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have still made little or no progress, this will then be – as it is today – the only successful game in town. Note that a solution to the refugee and Holy Basin issues is not part of the Fayyad plan, which deals with the territorial and sovereignty questions.

If the Obama administration is going to take an initiative that has any chance of success, this would be the time and these would be the circumstances: sponsor Security Council recognition of this Palestinian achievement, anchor it in the 1967 borders (with appropriate land swaps) and invite Israel and the new Palestinian state, with the support of the Arab Peace Initiative, to negotiate territorial modalities.

This notion of where the American contribution might lie is not divorced from current thinking in Washington. On April 15, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace that “the United States supports two tracks in the Middle East – negotiations between the parties aimed at reaching a two-state solution and also institution building that lays the necessary foundation for a future state.”

If Clinton can put the two tracks on a par, and in view of the obvious chasm separating Fayyad’s success thus far from the abject failure of the US-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli track, then the Palestinian state-building project is where an American initiative should plan to focus.

Yossi Alpher is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and was a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletter publishing contending views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I continue to believe that a bilaterally negotiated two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization is the optimal outcome and is possible. But not under the leadership currently in power in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza, Cairo and last but not least (on the basis of its 10-month performance) Washington. In the absence of credible hope for a near-term solution, a number of alternative paths to progress present themselves. Two are reflected in evolving realities on the ground, hence appear to be the most pragmatic. They are not mutually exclusive.

One is Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s plan to create the institutions of Palestinian statehood in the course of two years. If, by August 2011 when those two years have elapsed, Israel and the PLO have not successfully negotiated a solution, the Palestinians would turn to the United Nations for recognition and third-party international intervention.

This is “bottom up” state-building that has proven itself thus far. Fayyad, with international help, is successfully creating security, economic and governance institutions. His efforts are not incompatible with those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding “economic peace.” They have already produced the best security situation in the West Bank in years. There is something to work with here. Besides, as of today this is the only constructive game in town.

Obviously, to make Fayyad’s scheme work, state-building must be paralleled, in real time, by serious negotiations. If these negotiations are tried but, almost inevitably (like all their predecessors), fail due to a lack of agreement regarding core final-status issues, then at least by August 2011 the international community will have something substantive to sink its teeth into: namely the makings of a Palestinian state on the ground, along with clearly defined gaps between the two sides’ positions to be bridged through international intervention.

But Fayyad’s scheme, along with other variations on unilateral or partial peace process themes being discussed today, applies to the Gaza Strip only in theory. Assuming Egypt’s prolonged efforts to bring about genuine Palestinian geographical and political unity continue to falter, any peace and state-building achievements that emanate from Ramallah will not apply to the Gaza Strip and Hamas. This brings us to the second non-bilateral process that can be characterized as an evolving reality: the existence of two separate Palestinian proto-state entities or, in political shorthand, the three-state solution.

As matters stand, whatever Fayyad accomplishes and whatever Israel and the United States contribute in parallel toward Palestinian state-building and Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, this will not directly affect Hamas in Gaza. The current international attitude toward Gaza can be characterized as non-benign neglect. Israel, Egypt, the Quartet and the PLO all prefer to do nothing about Gaza in the blind hope that the reality of the territory will either “go away” or at least not bother them too often.

The economic blockade of Gaza continues; the military situation can be characterized as quiet for the time being, but only for the time being; all Arab parties are paying lip service to non-existent Palestinian unity; and Egypt’s mediation efforts are tailored to suit its own agenda of making sure that Gaza remains Israel’s problem, not Egypt’s.

This situation will not last forever. Anyone who hopes that success in the West Bank – economic, political, diplomatic or all of the above – will somehow bring Hamas rule in Gaza crashing down rather than inspire the movement to invoke serious acts of sabotage – is gambling against the odds.

Better to recognize that the strategies for the Gaza Strip have not succeeded and must be revised if disaster is to be averted. For example we must recognize that the economic strategy applied to the territory has been downright counterproductive, inflicting collective humanitarian punishment on Gazans without producing any political progress in return.

We must also recognize that Israel is the only party in the Middle East talking to Hamas exclusively through Egyptian good offices, and is getting nowhere (if there is a breakthrough on prisoner exchange, it will apparently be thanks only to the good offices of Germany). And we have to recognize, as well, that the international community and Israel need to offer to talk to Hamas directly about long-term coexistence if a productive solution for the West Bank can be deemed sustainable.

Yossi Alpher is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and was a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletterpublishing contending views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Obama administration tried to jump start the Israel-Arab peace process and inject new energy into additional areas of US activity in the Middle East by instituting a settlement freeze in the West Bank. Regardless of the words Obama's people have chosen to soften the impact, this initiative has failed. The immediate fallout is the apparent resignation of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and an inability to get final status negotiations moving again.

This drama is unraveling against an extremely complicated backdrop of variable factors that makes it difficult to assess not only where we might be going, but even where we are today. Most of the question marks are on the Palestinian side.

We don't know whether Palestinian elections will really be held on January 24. If they are, we don't know who will run. If they aren't, Abu Mazen may remain Palestinian president indefinitely. We don't know whether Hamas will yield to the January 24 ultimatum and sign on to Egypt's proposed Palestinian unity framework, thereby postponing elections (and leaving Abu Mazen in office) until June--if indeed Fateh and Hamas can successfully negotiate all the modalities of the unity framework by then. We don't know whether and under what leadership the Palestinians might, as indicated by various press leaks, seek to obtain international recognition of their statehood aspirations and create a dramatic new fait accompli.

In stark contrast, we cannot be certain that Abu Mazen's departure, coupled with the absence of final status negotiations, won't lead to the outbreak of a new intifada that radically reduces the likelihood of any political process. Nor do we know whether Hamas will, failing a unity agreement, sit quietly by or fall back on violence of its own to sabotage West Bank elections, the selection of a new Palestinian leader or, for that matter, renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

On the Israeli side, there are two significant unknowns to factor into our assessment. We don't know whether PM Binyamin Netanyahu has embraced the two-state solution merely as a tactic to deflate American pressure, or has truly understood the vital need to create a viable Palestinian state in order for Israel to survive as a Jewish state. In other words, we don't know whether he would take a peace process, if and when we get there, seriously. And we don't know how heavily Abu Mazen's threat of departure weighs on Netanyahu; my guess is that Netanyahu himself, who lives politically from day to day, doesn't really know either.

Then there is the American side. Did the Obama administration really think that "engagement" would be sufficient to generate a settlement freeze? Did it really believe a settlement freeze would be sufficient to create a successful peace process? Having failed, will it now radically revise its approach? Secretary of State Hillary Clintons' announcement (after the embarrassment of welcoming Netanyahu's settlement freeze feints as "unprecedented") that "baby steps" would now be invoked does indeed look like a radical revision--a kind of bottom-up approach that seemingly dovetails nicely with both Netanyahu's "economic peace" and PA PM Salam Fayyad's "two-year state-building" program. But this is hardly sufficient to satisfy Palestinian and other Arab political aspirations, and it is not likely to persuade Abu Mazen to remain in office.

If Washington now has something more dramatic in mind, such as a move to create a Palestinian state unilaterally within the 1967 borders, we may soon find out. If such a new initiative is handled as ineptly as the settlement freeze, Netanyahu has a lot less to worry about than Abbas.

This brings us to the crux of the interaction among Washington, Jerusalem and Ramallah over the settlement freeze. Netanyahu's success in deflating the settlement freeze demand and Abu Mazen's threat to resign over it reflect a far more astute understanding of the Washington scene and how to manipulate it by Netanyahu than on the part of the Ramallah leadership.

This is hardly the first time the Palestinians have been outfoxed by Israel in Washington. Yet they still don't get it. They still don't understand that in an era of Arab disarray and impotence, and particularly when confronted by a less than coherent new American policy departure, their smartest strategists should be traveling to Washington, not (with all due respect) to Cairo, Amman and Riyadh.

The real lesson of the settlement freeze fiasco concerns who understands Washington better, Netanyahu or Abu Mazen.

Israelis want peace but don’t believe it’s possible. That is the cumulative finding of a host of opinion polls, and it is critical to any effort by President Barack Obama to create a new momentum toward peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

For many Israelis, the peace with Egypt and Jordan has not appeared sufficiently beneficial, despite the added security it has brought, to pursue peace with the Palestinians or Syrians.

After all, many people note that the Golan frontier with Syria is Israel’s quietest border even though there is no peace agreement with Damascus. And the two existing peace pacts have not brought anything approximating “normalization” — large and important sectors of the Jordanian and Egyptian publics continue to hold strong anti-Israeli views.

If a tour of the pyramids or Petra no longer entices most Israelis, why continue striving for that mythical quick drive to Damascus to sample the humus in the old souk?

An alternative version of “regularizing” Israel’s relations with its neighbors, unilateral withdrawal, has been even more disappointing from the standpoint of attitudes toward peace.

True, the Egyptians and Jordanians have a case when they argue that they expected Israel to demonstrate progress on the Palestinian front as a condition for warming up the peace they reached. But when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, its neighbors got all their territory back and repaid Israelis with rockets.

Some of this has to do with the rise of militant Islam in the form of Hamas, Hezbollah and their patrons in Iran. But Israelis also perceive in the response a deep-seated Arab and Muslim rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.

That was not an obstacle to a “cold peace” with Israel’s neighbors, with whom the borders were clear. But when the Palestinians’ quarrel with Israel touches on fundamental issues of ownership, whether in the claims of 1948 refugees or in the competing claims to the Temple Mount, the question of legitimacy comes to the fore.

This is how even moderate Israelis view the public rejection by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s peace offer in 2008 — a set of proposals that Israelis deemed extraordinarily generous.

That rejection followed on the disappointments of Oslo, Camp David II and the unilateral withdrawals. And it dovetailed, in Israeli eyes, with the growing radicalization of the intellectual and political leadership of the Israeli Arab community in its calls for Israel to become a binational state — a formula Israelis view as the effective end of the Jewish state.

Israelis, then, feel that the peace agreements they do have, as well as those they may achieve, are premised at best on an Arab readiness to accept them at a superficial and conditional level, one that is little different from tactical non-belligerency.

This in turn reinforces the sense that Israel’s security depends far more on its military might than on any peace agreement. It strengthens the arguments of those who would seek only “separation” from Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The “north-south” aspect of Israel-Arab relations also reinforces the separation approach. In the early days of the Oslo agreement in the mid-1990s, Israelis were alarmed to discover that thousands of Palestinians and even Egyptians and Jordanians used the opening to migrate illegally to Israel. That raised fears that a peace would further contribute to diluting Israel’s Jewish identity.

Beyond its immediate neighbors, most Israelis have a similar skepticism about the capacity of Arab states to sustain a real peace. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt failing to pull their traditional leadership weight and many other Arab states in a state of collapse or disarray and threatened or ruled by militant Islamists, some Israelis wonder if even some sort of Israel-Arab alliance against Iran and its proxies — one of the hoped-for payoffs of peace — would really represent an appreciable advantage.

Of course, there is much to be said about Israel’s own contribution to Arab frigidity by invading Lebanon in 1982 when the ink on the peace treaty with Egypt was barely dry; by not making a sustained effort to solve the Palestinian issue; by the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and, until 2005, in Gaza; and by alienating Israel’s internal Palestinian Arab community. When the history of the Israel-Arab conflict is finally written, both sides will undoubtedly be found heavily at fault.

One moment will stand out. In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to Jerusalem, told the Knesset “we were wrong to reject you” and stated that 70 percent of the problem was psychological, Israelis responded by abandoning their skepticism and embracing a peace that included giving up the entire Sinai peninsula. Mr. Sadat figured us out: Israel will pay a huge price for acceptance and security. Yet no one has followed in his footsteps. Imagine if Bashar al-Assad of Syria were to do so...

In other words, with the right “marketing,” Israelis can be turned on by the prospect of peace even if this means heavy sacrifices. Peace — even cold peace — is so important that, in the absence of Arab initiatives, marketing should begin at home.

Unfortunately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not seem to realize that the demographic thrust of his settlement policies contradicts his insistence that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state. Yet the real problem is not a hypocritical prime minister, but the support he draws from a skeptical Israeli public.

That leaves Barack Obama. To enlist Israelis he has to address us directly. And he has to deliver not only justified demands about settlements but reassurances regarding Israel’s security and integrity in a less than welcoming neighborhood.