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.”

United Nations General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann on Monday likened Israel's policies toward the Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks under apartheid.

Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were like "the apartheid of an earlier era," said Brockmann, of Nicaragua, speaking at the annual debate marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

He added: "We must not be afraid to call something what it is."

Brockmann stressed that it was important for the United Nations to use the heavily-charged term since it was the institution itself that had passed the International Convention against the crime of apartheid.

Israeli ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev in September called Brockmann an "Israel hater" for having hugged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vocal enemy of Israel.

Meanwhile, other diplomatic attacks against Israel were expected Tuesday on the second day of the annual debate.

The event is usually observed on November 29, to coincide with the UN's resolution in 1947 to establish a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.

The Palestinians, along with a group of Arab states, intend to use Tuesday's debate, entitled "the Palestinian question and the situation in the Middle East," for a public campaign directed at the international community about the the suffering of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. They will also denounce Israel as responsible for the lack of a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Speakers at the debate are expected to harshly criticize Israel for its policy in the territories, especially following UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's complaint that Israel refused his request to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

In her address Tuesday, Shalev asked why the UN has turned November 29 into a day of mourning, but does not mention that on this day a resolution to establish two states was adopted with Israel's consent.

"The UN must adopt new content and no longer accept the agenda foisted on it by the automatic majority, which sabotages the peace process' progress in the region," she said.

The two-day event includes several events and ceremonies at the UN headquarters, including movies and photography exhibitions showing alleged Palestinian hardships under Israeli occupation.

The debate is expected to end with the adoption of some 20 anti-Israel resolutions. In the past, these included denouncing Israel for annexing East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in separate resolutions.

Ambassadors from Arab countries and the Gulf states were among the guests at a reception yesterday for outgoing United Nations Ambassador Dan Gillerman, who is completing a six-year tour of duty. One veteran UN reporter for an American television network told viewers he could not recall such an impressive Arab turnout for a diplomatic event for a senior Israeli official.

The envoys from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Oman were seen at the reception, which took place in the official apartment of the Israeli ambassador in Manhattan.

A particular surprise was the attendance at the party of the Palestinian observer at the UN, Riyad Mansour, the senior Palestinian envoy, who usually eschews Israeli diplomatic events and who embraced Gillerman. At a recent Security Council meeting Gillerman and Mansour exchanged heated remarks. In his words of thanks at the reception, Gillerman noted his particular appreciation for the Palestinian representative for coming, despite criticism of his doing so.

Also at the party was Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel and media star Barbara Walters.

Gillerman is to return to Israel at the beginning of August. He will be replaced at the UN by Professor Gabriela Shalev

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz yesterday prohibited the state from cutting off electricity to parts of the Gaza Strip, as the defense minister has threatened to do.

After holding a debate in his office yesterday, Mazuz ordered the defense establishment to reexamine the issue.

The decision followed a petition submitted by 10 human rights organizations, asking the High Court of Justice not to allow punitive measures against the Gaza Strip's population. The petitioners argued that the decision to cut off vital power supplies was illegal and was likely to harm the innocent civilian population in the embattled coastal strip.

The court instructed the state to answer the petition by Friday, but refrained from banning the power cut.

At the end of the debate, Mazuz ruled that Israel had a right to sever economic and commercial ties with Gaza, which Israel declared a "hostile territory" last month, and therefore approved the implementation of punitive measures pending the cabinet's approval.

However, in regard to cutting off electricity, Mazuz said that more research must be done before such a measure can be implemented without causing a humanitarian crisis, as the prime minister promised not to do last week.

Everyone agreed that Israel was responsible for the population in the Gaza Strip and that measures must be taken to minimize the harm caused to it.

The hearing was attended by senior Justice Ministry officials, officials from the High Court of Justice, the Military Advocate General and the legal teams of the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office.

They all agreed that Israel was responsible for the humanitarian condition of the Gaza Strip's population and must do whatever it could to restrict the harm to this population.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on Palestinian militants in Gaza Strip on Monday to stop missile attacks against Israel, but he also asked the Israelis not to take punitive measures that would hurt the civilian population.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's visit to the United States has sparked a war of advertisements among Jewish organizations.

A full page ad in today's New York Times will welcome Olmert. The ad was purchased by the American branch of Kadima, a recently established group of Kadima supporters based in New York.

The ad, which features a large picture of Olmert, says that the American Jewish community stands united beside Israel and supports Olmert's peace efforts. It also wishes Olmert success in his talks with President George Bush and in his appearance before Congress. It is signed by Rabbi Mark Schneier, the organization's president, and his deputy, Mark Mishan.

However, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) published a giant ad in the Washington Post today denouncing the "breathtaking" and one-sided concessions that Olmert intends to make to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. The ad, which will also run in Jewish American weeklies, says that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would endanger the United States' military interests in the Middle East.

The ZOA represents the Jewish community's right flank. Its president, Morton Klein, complained yesterday that he was not invited to a meeting between Olmert and Jewish leaders in Washington due to his hawkish views and criticism of the prime minister.