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.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Sunday that several Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank would always remain part of Israel, a comment that upset the Palestinians even as the Obama administration’s Middle East envoy was trying to coax them back into peace talks.

Although Israel has long insisted on maintaining a permanent hold over certain groups of settlements, including those Mr. Netanyahu referred to Sunday, his remarks struck a jarring note on a day when the American envoy, George J. Mitchell, shuttled between Israeli and Palestinian leaders on a so-far unsuccessful mission to restart negotiations that have been stalled for over a year.

Mr. Netanyahu took the opportunity of the approaching holiday of Tu Bishvat, a Jewish arbor day, to reaffirm Israel’s claim to the Etzion bloc of settlements just south of Jerusalem. “Our message is clear,” he said during a tree-planting ceremony there. “We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here. This place will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel for eternity.”

The Etzion settlements were settled by Jews before the Israeli state was established in 1948. The area became part of the West Bank under Jordanian control after the 1948 war, and the settlements were destroyed. Some settlers returned there immediately after Israel captured the territory from Jordan in the 1967 war, and the settlements were rebuilt.

Earlier, in remarks before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu said he would also plant saplings in Maale Adumim and Ariel, two large settlement-cities that Israel also intends to keep.

He also said that Mr. Mitchell, with whom he had just met, presented what he described as “some interesting ideas” for resuming the diplomatic process with the Palestinians.

“We are very much interested in doing so, and I expressed my hope that these ideas bring this about,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

But Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who met with Mr. Mitchell in Jordan on Sunday, said that it was “premature to talk about a real breakthrough,” according to the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.

Mr. Abu Rudaineh added that Mr. Abbas had reassured Mr. Mitchell of his commitment to peace.

But the spokesman also condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s tree-planting as “an unacceptable act that destroys all the efforts being exerted” by Mr. Mitchell, The Associated Press reported.

The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, as well as Gaza and East Jerusalem, for a future Palestinian state, although they have expressed readiness for minor border adjustments in return for commensurate swaps of land.

Mr. Netanyahu has offered to begin peace talks without preconditions, and in a gesture to get the Palestinians to agree, in November he announced a halt to all new residential construction in the West Bank settlements for 10 months. The move infuriated Jewish settlers, but the Palestinians dismissed the moratorium as insufficient because it allowed for the completion of about 2,500 homes already under construction and because it did not include East Jerusalem. They continue to insist on a total Israeli freeze before resuming talks.

Speaking to foreign reporters in Jerusalem last week, Mr. Netanyahu said that the Palestinian leaders had “climbed up a tree” and “they like it up there.”

Palestinian officials contend that in addition to continuing to build in the settlements, Mr. Netanyahu is trying to dictate the outcome of talks before they begin. Mr. Netanyahu has already stipulated that he will only entertain the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state with limits on its sovereign powers.

In the session with the foreign reporters on the eve of Mr. Mitchell’s visit here, Mr. Netanyahu said that the threat of rocket smuggling into the Palestinian territories would require Israel to maintain a presence “on the eastern side of a prospective Palestinian state,” meaning along the border with Jordan.

The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, responded that “the only remaining obstacle to negotiations” was “the conditions Mr. Netanyahu continues to impose.”

The Israeli demands, he added, erode “any foundation of hope for the two-state solution.”

Passions ran high on Sunday in this Palestinian village in the northern West Bank two days after arsonists, presumed by Palestinians and many Israelis to be Jewish extremists, set fire to the central mosque.

A delegation of Jewish religious leaders and activists, including some from West Bank settlements, tried to reach the village to express their abhorrence of the attack. But the Israeli Army prevented the group from entering Yasuf for security reasons as enraged villagers proclaimed that the visitors would not be welcome.

“The people will not allow it,” said Wasfi Hassan, a local farmer. “It is like killing a man, then going to his funeral.”

An acrid odor hung in the air outside the mosque on Sunday. Inside, a pile of cinders marked the spot where holy books had apparently been emptied off library shelves and burned; words were still legible on some loose, singed pages of the Koran.

The walls were charred, and a black groove snaked across the carpet of the prayer hall to a back wall, following the arsonists’ gasoline trail. Hussam Abd al-Fattah, the muezzin at a small nearby mosque, said that worshipers spotted the fire on Friday as they returned from dawn prayers, and that neighbors rushed in to help extinguish the flames.

On the front stoop of the mosque, the vandals left graffiti in Hebrew that read, “Price tag — Greetings from Effi.”

Price tag is the name of a provocative policy developed by some radical settlers last year. It calls for settlers and their supporters to respond to any move by the Israeli authorities against the settlements or illegal outposts, usually by attacking Palestinian property. The villagers assume the attack was meant as revenge for the Israeli government’s recently declared temporary moratorium on new building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Effi, a Hebrew nickname for Efraim, is also an acronym for a far-rightist group.

Munir Abbushi, the Palestinian Authority governor of the Salfit region, which includes Yasuf, a village of about 2,000 people, said there were at least 23 settlements built in the region. He said the Israeli government “supports the settlers day and night.”

Mr. Abbushi rejected the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could turn into a religious struggle. “It is a national conflict. We want an independent state, without settlers,” he said.

But Palestinian schoolchildren brought to demonstrate in Yasuf on Sunday shouted, “Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud,” evoking a legendary battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the Khaibar oasis, who were forced to surrender.

Over the weekend Israeli leaders harshly condemned the attack on the mosque. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was “no place for violence of any sort, neither Jews against Palestinians nor Palestinians against Jews.” He said he had ordered the security services to try to “apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice as quickly as possible.”

President Shimon Peres called the arson a “grave act” that “stands against all the values of the State of Israel.”

The chief rabbi of Israel planned to visit Yasuf on Monday.

Mainstream settler leaders also condemned the desecration of the mosque. But the Samaria Regional Council, which represents the northern settlements, questioned the widespread assumption that it was perpetrated by Jews.

In Yasuf, villagers recounted years of problems with settlers in the area, blaming them for a range of ills, including what they said was the poisoning of a spring and the theft of sheep.

Since the Jewish delegation could not enter the village on Sunday, Mr. Abbushi, the district governor, went to the nearest army checkpoint to meet them. Led by Rabbi Menachem Froman of the settlement of Tekoa, a fervent advocate of Jewish-Arab coexistence, the group sang a traditional song of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, which is being celebrated now, about banishing the darkness.

The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, on Sunday ordered the removal of a religious seminary in the Samarian settlement of Har Bracha from a government-approved program that combines army service and Torah study, because the rabbi of the seminary encouraged his students to refuse any orders to evacuate settlements.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to change Israel’s map of national priority areas to include several isolated West Bank settlements, along with large areas populated by Jews and Arabs in the country’s north and south. The plan has been sharply criticized by the Israeli left because of the inclusion of the settlements, which will now be entitled to additional government financing.

Many Israelis saw the adjusted map as an attempt by the government to appease the settlers, who are furious about the building halt.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the new map “serves as a blueprint for future settlement expansion.”

He continued: “It reveals the extent to which Israel’s ‘settlement moratorium’ is a sham.”

Jewish nationalists and Palestinians clashed in an East Jerusalem neighborhood on Tuesday after the Israelis took over a house by court order in a predominantly Arab area. The confrontation further strained tensions in this contested city, where competing Israeli and Palestinian claims have become a sticking point in the Obama administration’s efforts to restart peace talks.

The house at the center of Tuesday’s flare-up is in Sheik Jarrah, a district just north of the Old City, where three Palestinian families have been evicted from other houses in the last year after losing a lengthy legal battle in the High Court and lower district and magistrates courts.

A Jewish association won its claim to historical ownership of the land in question, and has plans to build a large Jewish housing complex there. The Palestinians fear that the Jewish presence in Sheik Jarrah is part of a larger project to cement Israeli control of the eastern part of the city and to push Palestinian residents out.

The latest Jewish residents to move into the area were escorted by the police and private security guards and immediately removed furniture from the property, which was built by a Palestinian family headed by Refka al-Kurd, 87.

The small, one-story structure was built about 10 years ago as an extension of the Kurds’ original home, but it was unoccupied, having been sealed by the authorities after it was determined to have been constructed without the proper permits.

“The authorities took our keys to the property because we built it without permits,” said Nabil al-Kurd, 66, who lives in the original house. “But it seems the settlers can live here without permits because they are the sons of God,” he said bitterly, referring to the Jewish newcomers.

Shmulik Ben-Ruby, the spokesman for the Jerusalem police, said his force acted in line with the court decision that determined that the property “is owned by Jews.”

Blood spattered the forecourt on Tuesday after a Jewish man was hit on the head by Palestinians who attacked the new residents with clubs and stones. Later, after a day of scuffles, a Palestinian woman, Nadia al-Kurd, was taken to the hospital with what was thought to be a heart attack.

The United Nations said in a statement on Tuesday that the “secretary general has expressed his dismay at the continuation of demolitions, evictions and the installment of Israeli settlers in Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem.”

“Provocative actions such as these,” it continued, “create inevitable tensions, undermine trust, often have tragic human consequences and make resuming negotiations and achieving a two-state solution more difficult.”

Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, including the eastern part that it annexed after conquering it from Jordan in the 1967 war. The Palestinians demand the eastern section as the capital of a future state.

Last week, after a Jerusalem planning committee approved the expansion of a Jewish district in another part of the annexed territory, the White House said it objected to that and other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including “the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes.”

“At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations,” the White House added, “these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed.”

The Kurds’ home is adjacent to a site held by Jews to be the ancient tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, or Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest from the days of the Second Temple. A Jewish organization reclaimed the land around the tomb based on property deeds that date from the 1870s. The Palestinians say the deeds were forged.

The Palestinians’ homes were built in the 1950s by a United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees when the area was under Jordanian control. The families say that Jordan gave them ownership of the houses but that the homes were never formally registered in their names.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, condemned what it said was a Swedish initiative to sharpen the European Union’s position on Jerusalem and to have it recognize Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

“This will not help promote the peace process,” said Yigal Palmor, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, of the initiative that was first reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Tuesday. “It will only marginalize the European role in it.”

Sweden is coming to the end of its six-month presidency of the European Union. The group’s foreign ministers will decide whether to adopt the new position at a meeting next week.

Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, instructed his staff on Sunday to recruit dozens of new building inspectors to supervise the government’s temporary construction freeze in West Bank settlements, while some settler leaders vowed to defy the building ban.

Mr. Barak’s hurried efforts and the settler threats illustrated both the government’s seriousness and the difficulty it could face in carrying out its decision to halt new housing starts in the settlements over the next 10 months.

The government announced the construction halt on Wednesday, under pressure from the Obama administration to take steps to help revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But Palestinian leaders said the moratorium did not go far enough because it did not include East Jerusalem and allowed for the completion of up to 3,000 housing units that are already under construction.

The government decision also allows for some public buildings, and Mr. Barak has given approval for 28 new educational and other public institutions to be built during the moratorium.

To enforce the construction freeze, Mr. Barak called for 40 new inspectors to be recruited and trained within two weeks, with dozens more to be recruited later. There are currently only 14 building inspectors working in the West Bank, where some 300,000 Israelis live in about 120 official settlements and scores of unauthorized outposts among about 2.5 million Palestinians.

According to Mr. Barak’s office, the freeze will be enforced jointly by the police, the border police and the military’s Civil Administration in the West Bank.

But when a Civil Administration representative went Sunday to present the freeze order to Gershon Mesika, the leader of the Shomron Regional Council for settlements in the northern West Bank, Mr. Mesika tore up the papers he received, according to David Haivri, a spokesman for the Shomron Council. Moshe Rosenbaum, the leader of another regional council, Beit El, tore up the orders he received on Friday, according to Israeli radio.

Mr. Mesika called the orders “racist,” because they apply only to Jewish building, and declared that he did not “intend to respect them,” Mr. Haivri said.

It was not clear whether settler leaders would turn to illegal building or try to find some other way around the ban. But despite settler outrage at the freeze, there has already been a “positive aspect,” Mr. Haivri said.

The government has stated that buildings that have been approved and whose foundations have been laid may be completed. The settlers, who have been wary of a freeze for months, have been laying as many foundations as they could, both Mr. Haivri and critics who monitor settlement construction have said.

The Shomron Council is said to have signed many more permits so far this year than it did in 2008. Mr. Haivri said the threat of a freeze had “motivated many people here to take advantage of those permits” and to start building homes “before it is too late.”