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.”

Experts like to clutch statistics in their hands, but there are some statistics which grab journalists by the throats, especially some “marginal” statistics from the last Gaza War. These less-known statistics include the fact that 88% of the population of the Gaza Strip has become dependent on food assistance, and that 600,000 tons is the approximate weight of the rubble from destruction.

Why did I describe those numbers as “marginal?” One of the most obvious is that they are quoted among the smaller news headlines whereas the “main” statistics are the number of the dead and injured. As of the latest counts, these are 1,440 dead and 5,380 wounded and still rising.

Beneath the folds of the headlines of some national newspapers, I read a somewhat cynical calculation which is that the number of Palestinian births in Gaza during the weeks of the war exceeded the number of deaths. If a poet were to write the epic of the noble struggle of the Palestinian life, it might be bracketed between the roles of the midwife and the executioner. In revolutionary political slogans they say that “blood triumphs over the sword,” and in the literature praising the resistance they talk about “the hand that resists the awl.”

Regardless of the weight of these statistics, they cannot obscure the ugly and despicable numbers from the United Nations Bureau of Human Affairs that say that 88% of the population of the Gaza Strip has been reduced to begging “Give us this day our daily bread.” Then consider the “technical mistake” which was committed then rescinded when UNRWA food supplies and blankets were stolen. Such mistakes multiply the human and national degradation because 88% of Gaza Strip residents need food assistance for their daily needs.

Not one speaker at a “Gaza Victorious” rally dared to claim that the steadfastness of Gaza caused the collapse of the government of Olmert. Instead, it fell for reasons that have nothing to do with politics or with an investigation into the failures of the Gaza War. And the leader of the Kadima Party Tzipi Livni failed in her efforts to form a government because she would not yield to the blackmail of the Shas Party rabbis who wanted to adjust the budget of the State of Israel to give their party more privileges and monetary favors.

In less than a month there will be a donor’s conference in Cairo whose sole objective is the reconstruction of Gaza and most probably the funds will languish in the absence of an agreement on the plans and the projects. This will be influenced by two factors: the result of the indirect negotiations that Egypt is conducting between Israel and Hamas to achieve tahdiya, and then Cairo’s ability to break the impossibility of direct negotiations among the Palestinian factions in the direction of forming a coalition government of national consensus that would be called a unity government.

There is a just anxiety that the parties in Israel will beat us to the formation of a coalition government as a result of elections while the Palestinian division gets more deeply mired in the conditions for the consensus government over the conditions for the resurrection and activation of the PLO.

While Gaza is keeping us busy balancing the numbers of the dead and wounded, the rubble and the food packages, the government in Ramallah found a way to introduce the 2009 budget to the civil society sectors in the absence of the never-activated Legislative Council which is waiting for an activation prescription in the form of general elections.

This way the racist Israeli democracy will have gone to the ballot boxes twice since the Gaza coup while Mr. Meshal is calling us in another victory rally “… Gaza Victorious” to Damascus to replace the PLO or activate it through free elections. There is a Greek saying “This here is Rhodes, so jump here.” We can paraphrase the same arbitrary determinism and say: here is your opportunity for free elections to activate “The Divine Victory” in Gaza, and hence to activate the PLO’s institutions.

In the real world, the care taking government of Mr. Fayyad is busy activating the reconstruction of Gaza with an emergency program worth $600 million, through the help of international organizations, by transferring the salaries of 70,000 government employees while the salaries of the West Bank employees wait. Hamas wants a consensus government resulting from the choice of the resistance which made the economic situation in Gaza consume all the assistance while the economic growth in the West Bank is growing at 8% for the year.

Maybe “armies march on their bellies” as Napoleon said and maybe people march to their freedom on their blood, but the speeches of the rallies “Gaza Victorious” march on the empty heads of their makers.

“Another victory like this one?!”

I gently pressured my colleague, Abd Al-Naser Al-Najjar, to continue the third part of his field investigation into the realities and problems of the Jordan Valley, and the ways to solve them. His excuse is that he's busy as an editor in chief, a weekly columnist with additional editing duties during the summer time, and, soon, the director of the Media Center at Birzeit University.

But I have my reasons, not only as a reader and a citizen but also as a journalist, because every good editor and heavyweight writer needs, from time to time, to go out into the field and write a solid investigative piece to set an example to his fellow reporters.

In reality, the Palestinian-Israeli relationship is almost entirely defined by crossings, checkpoints and walls; they cast a shadow over any future political relationship. And so, a four-party international regional project (involving Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Japan) may add a new practical reality to the ones imposed by the crossings, checkpoints and walls, that is a "Peace Path" project, which plans to establish a joint industrial-agricultural zone to export Palestinian agricultural goods, both fresh and processed, through a special airport in the Jordanian part of the Jordan Valley, to the Gulf states and Japan, as well as to Palestine, Israel, and Jordan.

This project, sponsored by Japan and to be launched at the beginning of the new year, will parallel joint Palestinian-international projects to create industrial zones on Palestinian lands that are close to the crossings between the West Bank and Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has benefited from the geographical locations of the industrial zones, which have mostly been built on lands that are not entirely under Palestinian control (now considered Area A), with the goal of spreading its authority and influence to zones that must be recognized as Palestinian lands in any political agreement (Areas B and C).

Theoretically, and in the regional and international conferences, Israel accepts that a Palestinian state must border the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. But it undermines this in practice since most of the Jordan Valley is closed to Palestinian political, security, economic, and constructional activity, and Israel is monopolizing the water resources of the Jordan Valley.

Some of the international projects to develop the Jordan Valley appear to be very ambitious, like mining the Dead Sea for minerals, a planned canal between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, and the plans to use water from Turkish rivers diverted though Syria to rejuvenate the Jordan River and Dead Sea.

The "Peace Path" project in the Jordan Valley appears to be realistic and practicable, and may be a test for more ambitious projects if the economic dividends are matched by political dividends, in other words by also developing peace negotiations and agreements.

Japan has sponsored a project to develop the Allenby Bridge, and the roads leading to it. Jordan and Israel benefited form the project, while the Palestinians didn't benefit at all, even though the project widened the only bridge connecting them to Jordan. Crossing the bridge remains endless and exhausting, especially during the summer, both when it was under symbolic Palestinian control of the bridge, and after Israel took complete control over the bridge.

Some Palestinians fear the internationalization of the Jordan Valley, especially since crossings, checkpoints and walls were initiated during the start of the Oslo peace process, and reached a peak after the Camp David summit. They fear for the project of creating a Palestinian state, specifically since the original plan for the separation wall meant the building of an eastern wall to isolate the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank, and because Israel is active in separating the network of roads used by the settlers from the network of roads used by Palestinians.

The Peace Path project includes restoring the Al-Muajrat Road and the northern entrance to Jericho, which is a dangerous and narrow mountainous path. The Al-Nar Valley road, which is the only road connecting Ramallah to Bethlehem and the northern part of the West Bank to its southern part, is also undergoing repairs. And until the issue of Jerusalem is resolved, Palestinians are obliged to endure and develop within their current situation, and that includes the shared industrial zones and the "Peace Path" project.

Palestinian economic, development and security realities do not mean that Palestinians are sentenced to develop a political reality that oppresses people's rights and disregards the Palestinian national interests of sovereignty, water resources, and geography.

If Palestinians accept the challenge of creating a democracy while under occupation, they are also obliged to meet the challenge of building the essentials for growth while under occupation.

That will ensure that if political peace emerges, there will also be in place the essential elements of a viable, independent state, able to stand on its own.

[Translation by Mike Husseini of ATFP]