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.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday the Palestinians were seeking membership in the United Nations so they could enter negotiations with Israel as equal partners.

Abbas said during a visit to Barcelona, Spain, that once the Palestinians gain membership in the UN, they would return to the negotiating table with Israel.

“We want to go to the UN and the Security Council to ask for membership of Palestine in the UN,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA quoted Abbas as saying.

“If we get a positive response, we will surely resume peace talks with the Israeli side over the various sticking issues, including borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, water and security.”

Abbas said the Palestinians “believe in freedom and the right to self-determination, and want to achieve a state through negotiations.”

Abbas’s adviser, Nimer Hammad, reiterated on Thursday there was no return from the decision to go to the UN in September to ask for a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

He also called on the Arab world to “double its diplomatic and political efforts to back the PA’s statehood bid.

“The decision to go to the UN is an Arab decision,” Hammad said, referring to last week’s decision by the Arab League foreign ministers to submit the request to the UN on behalf of the PA.

Hammad said if the PA wins the support of two-thirds of the UN members “it would be in a better position even if the US resorts to the veto in the Security Council. In this case, the status of Palestine in the UN would be similar to that of the Vatican.”

Hammad also dismissed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent statement that he was ready to meet with Abbas without preconditions as insignificant.

“Netanyahu did not bring anything new,” the adviser said. “We don’t accept meeting for the sake of photo-ops.”

Hammad added that the Palestinians would not return to the negotiations unless Israel halted construction in the settlements and accepted the 1967 “borders” as the basis for the peace process.

He cautioned that the settlements and the creation of facts on the ground were jeopardizing the two-state solution.

PA accuses group of double talk regarding stance on Goldstone report.

Talkbacks (4)

The Palestinian Authority on Sunday accused Hamas of double talk regarding its stance on the report of the UN fact-finding mission into Operation Cast Lead.

Hamas initially said that it regretted the death of Israeli civilians from its rockets, but later backtracked, denying it had made any apology.

The initial Hamas response to the UN report said that the movement “feels sorry for what might have happened to any Israeli civilian and hopes that the Israeli civilians will understand that the continued targeting of Hamas by their government is the starting point and the rockets are a poor response.”

Hamas’s regret was part of a 55-page report which its representatives delivered to the UN office in the Gaza Strip over the weekend. It came in response to the Goldstone Report’s allegations that Hamas had perpetrated war crimes by targeting Israeli civilians during the three-week IDF offensive.

Several Hamas representatives on Sunday denied that their movement had apologized for targeting Israeli civilians during the war. The denial came after Hamas’s opponents accused it of double-standards in dealing with the Goldstone Report.

“There was no apology or expression of regret,” claimed Hamas’s Minister of Justice, Mohamed al-Ghul. “On the contrary, we held Israeli occupation responsible for for all the crimes that were committed during the war.”

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior PLO official and close adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, accused Hamas of “playing with words” and “deception.”

Hamas, he charged, “thinks that it’s being very clever when its leaders play with words. They think that this is an element of basic policy, but they don’t know that this method belongs to the Middle Ages and does not earn the movement any respect or recognition.”

Abed Rabbo said that Hamas had no reason to be ashamed of backtracking from its mistake.

“Hamas must be honest with the international community,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with admitting to making mistakes. This policy of double-talk will only cause further damage to Hamas.”

Hamas believes that its initial response to the UN, where it had expressed “regret” over the civilian casualties, was leaked to the media by Fatah with the purpose of embarrassing the movement.

One Hamas spokesman pointed a blaming finger at Fatah’s Muhammad Dahlan, who previously served as a security commander in the Gaza Strip and is seen as one of the movement’s arch-enemies.

Dahlan and Fatah are involved in a campaign aimed at defaming and undermining Hamas, the spokesman said. He said that this was “not the first time that Dahlan and his men had distorted Hamas’s position.”

The Hamas spokesman claimed that his movement could not have apologized for the civilian deaths, “because no civilians were killed in Israel during the war.”

If anyone sought proof that President Mahmoud Abbas was planning to return to the negotiating table with Israel in the near future, it was provided by the results of “public opinion” polls published in the past few days by a number of Fatah-controlled media outlets and an interview he gave to Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The polls are seen by many Palestinians as an attempt to prepare local public opinion for the possibility that the Palestinian Authority will soon resume the stalled peace talks with Israel.

One poll went as far as claiming that 65 percent of the Palestinians living under Hamas in the Gaza Strip support the resumption of the talks and believes in peace with Israel.

In the interview with the Guardian, Abbas hinted that he was inclined to accept the latest proposals from the US regarding the resumption of negotiations with Israel. Abandoning its previous demand for a total and unlimited cessation of settlement construction, Abbas said a three-month suspension would be sufficient to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

Chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat explained that Abbas’s new stance stemmed from his conviction that the Israelis and Palestinians would be able to reach agreement on all final-status issues, such as Jerusalem, refugees, water, settlements and borders, within three months.

The assessment that Abbas would agree to the resumption of the talks was reinforced on Monday when the PA president announced, following a meeting in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said that the Palestinians would return to the negotiating table if Israel “halted settlement construction” and accepted the 2003 road map for peace in the Middle East.

Abbas did not repeat his earlier condition for a complete and unlimited cessation of construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Nor did he repeat his previous demand that the international community recognize the June 4, 1967, boundaries as the future borders of a Palestinian state.

Since Israel has already suspended settlement construction in the West Bank and has no objections to the road map, Abbas will have no problem justifying a decision to resume the talks.

Later this week, he is scheduled to give his final response to the latest “ideas” presented by US Middle East envoy George Mitchell regarding the revival of the peace talks.

PA officials have described Mitchell’s proposals as “positive,” saying they could pave the way for Abbas to start his descent from the tall tree he had climbed when he set a series of conditions for returning to the negotiating table.

According to the officials, the latest American “ideas” include placing additional territories in the West Bank under the exclusive control of the PA, the release of Fatah prisoners from Israeli jails and halting IDF “incursions” into PA-controlled communities.

The officials said that Abbas was under heavy pressure from the Europeans, Americans and some Arab countries to accept Mitchell’s proposals and resume the peace talks with Israel.

“The president wants to resume the peace negotiations, but he doesn’t want it to look as if he has succumbed to the pressure,” said one official in Ramallah. “The resumption of the peace talks needs to be done gradually and one idea is to begin with low-level or indirect talks between the two sides.”

Hamas said on Thursday that although it has reservations about the latest Israeli prisoner exchange proposal, its leaders will continue the negotiations.

The announcement came as sources close to Hamas talked about divisions in the movement over the proposed prisoner swap agreement.

The sources said that Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip appeared to be more flexible, while the movement's senior leadership in Syria was refusing to make any concessions.

A Hamas legislator in the Gaza Strip said the main unresolved issue regarded the release by Israel of four prominent prisoners: Fatah's Marwan Barghouti, Ahmed Sa'adat of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the commanders of the armed wing of Hamas, Abdullah Barghouti and Ibrahim Hamed.

The legislator said that Hamas had rejected Israel's demand to deport more than 140 prisoners after their release.

A Hamas delegation headed by Mahmoud Zahar, Nizar Awadallah and Khalil al-Haya returned to the Gaza Strip earlier in the day following talks in Syria with leaders of the Islamist movement on the proposed deal.

On their way back, the Hamas men stopped in Cairo, where they briefed Egyptian government officials on Hamas's position regarding a swap. The three are also believed to have relayed Hamas's position to the German mediator who has been overseeing the negotiations between the movement and Israel.

"The door has not been closed to a deal over the release of [IDF soldier] Gilad Schalit," Zahar told reporters upon his return. "Hamas has reservations [about the latest Israeli offer], but its leadership will continue to negotiate. Hamas will announce its final position in the next phase."