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 League of Arab States has re-adopted its six-year-old peace initiative, offering comprehensive peace and normal relations with Israel by all its members in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and a resolution of all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians. This initiative is to be commended, but it has a major flaw: it is addressed to the international community at a time when the Arab League really needs to focus on the Israeli public.

The initiative, reaffirmed in Damascus at the meeting of several Arab nations, was aimed at showing the world that Arabs are concerned about finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Muhammad Sobeih, the Arab League assistant secretary general for Palestinian affairs, told reporters.

But any such political initiative must garner wide popular support in Israel to be successful. An element of drama – like directly addressing the Israeli public, as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat did 30 years ago – could be a transformative step.

Sadat captured Israelis' imagination and trust, addressing them from the Knesset over the heads of skeptical Israeli leaders in November, 1977. I was a high school junior at the time, studying Arabic in Jerusalem. I remember how excited my classmates and I were when our teacher had us translate Sadat's speech into Hebrew as a homework assignment. I had never been so happy about homework.

Israelis actually thought that comprehensive peace with the entire Arab world was within reach at the time. It was not then, and it still isn't today, but the current Arab peace initiative shows that it could be in the foreseeable future, if Israelis and Arabs try hard enough.

Israelis, as well as Palestinians, could very much use a Sadat-like initiative to re-inspire them, to re-establish their faith in peace. Recent public opinion polls show that although most Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution to the conflict, most also think such a solution – or any peaceful solution, for that matter – is impossible in the near future.

Granted, in the current atmosphere, it is difficult to expect Arab leaders to follow in Sadat's footsteps. It would be a great challenge to go to Jerusalem and address the Knesset when the Arab public is so livid about Israel's policies. And understandably, Arab leaders do not want to be perceived as having normalized relations with Israel before the Israeli government makes significant progress toward resolving the Palestinian problem.

But I would argue that a direct address to the Israeli public is hardly normalization. It's a signal, a challenge, an invitation. And it could transform Israelis' attitude toward active support for a robust peace process. Besides, those "marketing" the initiative could be members of the Arab League who already have peace accords with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan.

There are also other things Arab leaders could do – short of addressing the Knesset in West Jerusalem – to demonstrate to Israelis that accords based on withdrawal to the 1967 lines will be followed by true peace and normal relations with all members of the Arab League. It could be a televised address. It could be an appearance at an Israeli university.

Since it was adopted six years ago, the Arab League's peace initiative has never received the attention it deserves by Israelis. No credible Arab leader has ever presented the plan directly, publicly and forcefully to the Israeli public. Not even through a televised speech or an interview. As a result, Israelis paid very little attention to the plan. They were deterred by the misperception that the proposal demands the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel.

A direct appeal to the Israeli public could give a new lease on life to the initiative. It could go a long way toward cracking the thick veneer of cynicism, skepticism, indifference and despair that are so commonplace in Israeli society today (as well as among Palestinians) in relation to the peace process. By showing Israelis that investment in peace with the Palestinians would have enormous dividends, Arab leaders could make an invaluable contribution to the peace process.

The first full day of meetings on the annual mission of APN's Board to Israel, exposed the complexities and challenges that the new situation on the split Palestinian front poses for Israel and the United States.

The policy that America and Israel are devising - engaging with Fatah's leadership in the West Bank while containing and isolating Hamas in the Gaza Strip - is beginning to take shape. Members of the Board heard in detail how the U.S. is already engaging with the newly formed government of Fatah leaders and independent technocrats, headed by Prime Minister Salam Fayad. America's consul general in East Jerusalem, Jacob Walles, found time on a day full of meetings with Palestinians in Ramallah and coordination calls with Washington, to brief us on this new policy. In Washington, at the same time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, officially announced the lifting of all the restrictions on contacts with the Palestinian Authority that were introduced following Hamas' victory in the elections of January 2006. The United States will provide aid to the new government, encourage financial institutions and American companies to engage with the Palestinian Authority, and will fully cooperate diplomatically with Fayad's government, we were told. Israel will also resume diplomatic contacts and release withheld Palestinian funds.

The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip will get none of that, although both Israel and the U.S. promised to prevent a humanitarian disaster there. The Bush administration will grant an extra forty million dollars to the U.N. agency that cares for Gaza's vast population of Palestinian refugees. Israel will not cut water, electricity and other vital supplies to Gaza, not even as a punitive step in retaliation for Gazan violence against Israel, we were told. Gasoline supplies, which had been cut off by Dor Alon (a private company), were restored Monday under pressure from the Israeli government. But both Israel and the U.S., together with their international allies, will do their best to deny Hamas the ability to take credit for life-as-usual in the Strip.

How can that be done? No one seems to have a convincing plan.

Furthermore, experts on Palestinian affairs say that giving more economic and political support to the Fatah-led West Bank and less such support to Hamas' Gaza is bound to backfire, as long as support for the moderates is not accompanied by a promising peace process. Fatah was defeated politically in last year's elections and militarily in Gaza last week because it did not deliver a viable peace process, said Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz Daily's chief analyst on Palestinian affairs. Without a real peace process with Israel, the new Fatah-dominated government "is doomed to fail again," he told us. Professor Emanuel Sivan of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, agreed.

The danger, said Professor Naomi Hazan, a former Knesset member from Meretz and a leading political scientist, is that without a peaceful political horizon, West Bank Palestinians will be disappointed with their new government. A trickle up of Hamas to the political surface there is just a matter of time, she cautioned.

We heard some encouraging words from Minister of Construction and Housing Meir Sheetrit, one of the leading doves in Ehud Olmert's Kadima party. Sheetrit, who has been calling for many months to explore the Arab League's peace plan, told us that he urged Prime Minister Olmert to raise the Arab plan with President Bush and encourage the President to arrange for a meeting between Olmert and Arab League leaders. Olmert, he said, agreed for the first time that this was a good idea. Sheetrit advocates negotiating with the Arab governments over the future of the West Bank ("I believe that the Arabs can lead the Palestinians to make the right decisions," he said). Israel should be assertive and proactive in pursuing a regional effort for peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world, he said. Only peace could give Israel a chance to tend to its pressing domestic challenges, he said. "Time is not on side." Once the government launches and leads a regional peace initiative, the Israeli public will follow, he predicted.

Today, Tuesday, we will observe the situation on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and meet with members of Israel's Knesset.

As she makes another effort to create a "political horizon" for Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be well advised to take a good look at their states of mind. The picture that Ms. Rice is trying to draw, illustrating ways to resolve the core points of disagreement between the two peoples, cannot be an abstraction. It must be a vision that would reverse the confrontational dynamic.

Most Israelis and Palestinians have experienced only a relationship of bloody conflict. A majority on both sides has not tasted a different reality.

Consider the following figures, which Americans for Peace Now recently received from Fafo, the Norwegian Institute for Labor and Social Research, widely considered the most credible authority on Palestinian demographics. According to Fafo's most recent polling data, 51.3 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are 20 years or younger. That means that more than half of the Palestinians in these territories were born into a milieu of on-again-off-again warfare with Israel that started with the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987.

An even more striking figure is that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population, 80.3 percent, is less than 40 years old. That means that four out of every five Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have lived their entire lives under Israeli occupation, which began after Israel's victory in the 1967 war with the Arabs.

Israel's population is significantly older. However, more than one-seventh of Israel's population arrived in the country after 1990, mainly because of the large influx of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Accounting for the 1,010,900 immigrants who arrived in the past 17 years, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics data show that 52 percent of Israelis were not around 24 years ago (there are no available data for 1967) and 84 percent were not around 44 years ago.

These figures help explain some long-standing features of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, including the perception, in both societies, that the stalemate is chronic, unavoidable and, worse, irreversible.

Because most on both sides have been socialized within the reality of ongoing armed conflict, they have come to accept an adversarial relationship as normal, as default. They lack the personal frame of reference to imagine any other relationship. Recent polls of Israelis and Palestinians show that although majorities in both societies support a two-state solution, majorities of the same proportions think this desired solution is unattainable.

Both sides demonize the other. Most, on both sides, have never interacted with members of the other community in situations that are not adversarial. Most Palestinians are too young to have ever visited Israel.

Certainly, most Israelis have never seen the Arab towns, villages and refugee camps of the West Bank or Gaza. Indeed, most Israelis don't even know where Israel ends and the West Bank starts. Israel's minister of education is now fighting to have the 1967 "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank marked on maps in schoolbooks.

Scarred by a generation of alienation and violence, both societies are awash with hatred and vengeance. Both are cynical. Many in both societies have despaired of ever living in peace with the other.

It will not be easy to change the mindset of two populations that are to such a large extent a product of occupation and conflict. It will require a reversal in attitudes and values, which means dedication and commitment over time - perhaps over a long period of time.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas consistently say that they have not despaired. And although Israel has refused to deal with the Palestinians' new unity government because of the militant group Hamas' refusal to recognize the Jewish state, Ms. Rice is pushing ahead to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process moving again. She leaves for the Mideast today.

The degenerative nature of the status quo necessitates strong, decisive leadership. The status quo, bleak as it may be, should not suggest, however, that leadership and effort would not pay off. Palestinians and Israelis yearn for hope. And a promising glimmer of hope, resulting from Ms. Rice's trip, could dramatically transform the gloomy atmosphere on both sides.

Ori Nir, former West Bank correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz, is the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, a Zionist organization that promotes Israel's security through peace.

The Bush administration could do a great service to Israel by clearly saying that it does not oppose peace negotiations between Israel and its neighbors.

Active support in facilitating such negotiations would, of course, be an even greater service, but a simple statement saying that America does not oppose such peace talks could be the first step for Israel to secure peace on its northern border.

This doesn't sound like too much to ask, does it? After all, America has always actively supported -- even shepherded -- Arab-Israeli peace agreements, right? Well, it seems as if this is a lot to ask from a U.S. administration that expects its allies to adhere to its policy of not talking to unfriendly regimes. Israeli politicians, analysts and journalists say that it is this policy that holds back Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government from exploring repeated public calls by Syria's President Bashar Assad for immediate, unconditional bilateral peace negotiations.

The debate about whether Israel should take Assad up on his offer has been the most heated political discussion in Israel over the past few weeks. Curiously, it has received very little coverage in the U.S. media, although America plays a key role in this novel debate. For the first time in recent memory, Israel seems to be under American pressure NOT to enter into peace talks with an Arab neighbor rather than being under U.S. pressure to do so.

In the past three decades, ever since Israel misjudged Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace overtures in the early 1970s, a key foreign policy tenet of the Jewish State has been to never reject an Arab leader's plea for unconditional peace talks.

Repeatedly, such pleas have been heard from Damascus in the past few months, made by Assad and other senior Syrian officials. Last month, in an interview with Italy's La Repubblica, Assad challenged Olmert to call his bluff if he believes that Syria's intentions are insincere.

Why is Olmert rejecting the Syrian overtures? Because of another tenet of Israeli foreign policy: Never act in a way that contradicts the policies of America, Israel's chief ally. President Bush is trying to isolate Syria, punish it and possibly topple Assad's regime because he considers Damascus a part of the "axis of evil." According to several press reports, the White House even communicated to Jerusalem its disappointment that Israel did not attack Syria during its war against Lebanon's Hezbollah last summer.

Everyone in Israel, a state with many military secrets but very few political ones, knew for months that Olmert was dismissing Assad's overtures mainly because Bush expects Israel not to break ranks and engage with Syria. Israeli politicians, according to numerous press reports, confirmed the American pressure in private but declined to do so publicly.

Until last month. At the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting (held behind closed doors but -- in a typical Israeli fashion -- leaked verbatim to the media), Olmert reportedly said: "Bush has a clear position on this issue. One should ask whether, when the president of the United States, Israel's most important ally, is struggling on every front -- including the internal front -- against those who are trying to thwart his policy, it is appropriate for Israel to say the opposite." Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres reportedly said: "The worse thing we could do is contradict the United States, which opposes negotiating with Syria." And following the meeting, Interior Minister Ronni Baron told a television reporter: "When the question on the agenda is the political legacy of Israel's greatest friend, President Bush, do we really need now to enter into negotiations with Syria?"

These statements elicited an avalanche of criticism by Israeli commentators, both doves and hawks, who griped that Israel is not a "vassal-state" and must pursue policies that serve its own interests. "We've always said that our arms are extended in peace. That is, unless the Americans twist them," protested the Tel Aviv newspaper Ma'ariv's hawkish columnist, Ben-Dror Yemini. "Why should Israel suspend one of its paramount national interests -- peace with its neighbors -- for the sake of the pleasantness or unpleasantness of its relations with a foreign government?" asked famed Israeli novelist Amos Oz in a Yediot Ahronot newspaper article.

Last month, Olmert tried to put the genie back in the bottle, telling foreign ambassadors in Jerusalem that Bush did not ask Israel to avoid talks with Syria. That curious statement only compounds the confusion, which could come to a close with a simple, unequivocal White House statement saying that Israel should feel free to talk peace with Damascus.

That is the least the Bush administration should do. Obviously, if Bush wants to go the extra mile in helping his strongest ally in the Middle East bolster its security, he should heed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, and join Israel in exploratory talks with Assad that could compel the Syrian leader to turn from militancy to moderation.

Ori Nir, former Washington correspondent for Israel's Ha'aretz Daily, is the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now.