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.”

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak huddled for four hours yesterday with former senator George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Middle East peace, seeking to resolve an impasse between their two governments over the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

President Obama has demanded that Israel fulfill a commitment in the 2003 "road map" peace plan for a full settlement freeze, including a halt to expansion to accommodate "natural growth." The Israeli government has responded with a series of counterproposals, including a temporary freeze with caveats, none of which the administration has accepted.

"We have not changed our position at all," a senior administration official said yesterday after the Barak-Mitchell meeting. "Nor has the president authorized any negotiating room."

An Israeli official who accompanied Barak to the meeting in New York characterized the talks as positive. He said a meeting between Mitchell and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which was canceled last week, will probably take place this month.

Barak, the official said, emphasized to Mitchell the efforts he had taken in recent weeks to ease West Bank roadblocks and move against unauthorized settlement outposts, as well as plans for economic development and a regional peace agreement. "In this context, settlements are an issue, an important issue, but not an isolated issue," the official said.

U.S. officials view Israeli action on a settlement freeze as a way to break the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, leading to confidence-building efforts by Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbors.

There are more than 120 settlements in the occupied West Bank that are legal under Israeli law but not internationally. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel ratified in 1951, forbids an occupying power to transfer "parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies," but Israel disputes that this provision applies to settlements. Israel seized the West Bank and other territories in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Thirty years ago, the State Department legal adviser issued an opinion in response to an inquiry from Congress: The establishment of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories "is inconsistent with international law."

The opinion cited Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Israel has insisted that the Geneva Convention does not apply to settlers and broadly contests assertions of the settlements' illegality.

Despite the passage of time, the legal opinion, issued during the Carter administration, has never been revoked or revised. President Ronald Reagan said he disagreed with it -- he called the settlements "not illegal" -- but his State Department did not seek to issue a new opinion.

But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is unlikely to bring up the U.S. opinion when she meets today with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the State Department. Lieberman lives in a West Bank settlement, Nokdim, that was established in 1982 as a tent encampment of six families and now has more than 800 residents.

Despite repeated inquiries over the past week, State Department spokesmen declined to say whether the 1979 legal opinion is still the policy of the U.S. government.

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlements," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly, echoing President Obama's speech this month in Cairo. Israel has an obligation "to freeze all settlement activity," he added, but he avoided questions about the 1979 legal opinion.

The Obama administration has also declined to answer questions about whether a letter that President George W. Bush issued in 2004 is still the policy of the United States. Bush stated that Israel could expect to keep large settlement blocks in any peace deal.

The administration has preferred to act as if the slate has been wiped clean, but the president's tough stance suggested that the 1979 legal opinion might have new relevance.

"As far as I know, I don't think it has ever been rescinded or challenged by any legal officer of the United States government," said Herbert J. Hansel, the former legal adviser who wrote the opinion. "Ronald Reagan expressed his opinion. But whatever you think of him, he was obviously not a lawyer. It still stands as the only definitive opinion of the U.S. government from a legal standpoint."

Israeli Embassy spokesman Jonathan Peled said the opinion has been overtaken by events. "There have been many developments in the region since the 1970s, including a series of agreements that have stipulated that the issue of settlements will be discussed and resolved in permanent status negotiations with the Palestinians," he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a speech Sunday, declared the West Bank to be "the land of our forefathers" but noted that "within this homeland lives a large Palestinian community."

Aaron David Miller, a former peace negotiator, said successive U.S. administrations generally have chosen to dance around the question of the legality of settlements. President George H.W. Bush briefly considered declaring the settlements illegal in 1989 after he believed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had lied to him about a settlement freeze, but he was talked out of doing so by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, according to Miller, at the time a Baker aide.

"Baker thought it was a diversion," and instead, he could pressure Israel on settlements more effectively with diplomatic tools, Miller said.

George J. Mitchell, U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace, said yesterday that the administration is sticking to its demands that Israel halt settlement activity. He dismissed as "highly inaccurate" media reports in Israel that the administration is close to a deal that would allow for "natural growth" of settlements within current boundaries.

Mitchell repeatedly ducked questions about the administration's definition of "natural growth." He said the most common definition he has heard is "babies," but then would not say whether that is the administration's definition. An administration official said later that Mitchell declined to offer a definition because the administration rejects the concept. "You don't define an exception because we are not offering any exceptions," he said.

In his speech Sunday, Netanyahu rejected the demands for a freeze. "We have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating additional land for existing settlements," he said. "But there is a need to enable the residents to live normal lives, to allow mothers and fathers to raise their children like families elsewhere."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

"We have the negotiating record, that is the official record, that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration," Clinton told reporters after meeting with her Turkish counterpart in Washington. "There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements."

President Obama in recent weeks has pushed Israel to halt settlement growth, including expansion that results from population growth, on the grounds that it violates commitments made by Israel in the 2003 "road map" peace plan. Israeli officials have protested, saying that they had reached a series of understandings with Bush administration officials -- some written, some spoken -- under which growth was permitted under certain conditions.

The Washington Post documented some of those understandings last year, quoting Dov Weissglas, one of the Israeli negotiators; at the time, the Bush White House insisted that no such understanding existed. But last week former White House aide Elliott Abrams acknowledged that there had been unwritten understandings between Washington and Jerusalem.

Weissglas detailed this week in an opinion article for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot some of the talks, though he noted that "the Americans completely denied the existence of such understandings."

If such understandings were reached, "they did not become part of the official position of the United States government," Clinton said. "And there are contrary documents that suggest that they were not to be viewed as in any way contradicting the obligations that Israel undertook pursuant to the road map. And those obligations are very clear."

The peace plan plainly states that, in the first phase, Israel "freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." The Israeli government in 2003 accepted the plan "with reservations," including on settlements, and the Bush administration issued a statement saying it agreed that "these are real concerns" and that it would "address them fully and seriously in the implementation" of the plan.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak began a round of meetings with top U.S. officials yesterday in a bid to head off an increasingly sharp dispute between the United States and Israel over the expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory.

Israeli officials have been stunned by the demands of top Obama administration officials that Israel halt settlement growth throughout the West Bank, and Barak was said to be carrying compromise proposals focusing mainly on dismantling unauthorized settlement outposts. He met in New York yesterday with special envoy George S. Mitchell, and will meet with Vice President Biden, national security adviser James L. Jones and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the coming days.

Barak, the leader of the Labor Party, is a former Israeli prime minister who during the Clinton administration nearly achieved a peace deal with Palestinians. But he is part of a government that is skeptical of efforts to create a Palestinian state and has resolutely rejected President Obama's demands on settlements.

The Bush administration, under a secret agreement with Israeli governments, spoke publicly against settlement growth but tacitly accepted natural population growth in settlements that Israel expected to keep in a peace deal with the Palestinians. The Obama administration has refused to accept such arrangements and has instead demanded a complete freeze.

Obama said yesterday in an interview with National Public Radio: "A two-state solution . . . is going to require that each side -- the Israelis and Palestinians -- meet their obligations. . . . I've said very clearly to the Israelis, both privately and publicly, that a freeze on settlements, including natural growth, is part of those obligations."

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rejected Obama's demand in a meeting yesterday with his country's parliament [World Digest, Page A7].

The Obama administration has also indicated it does not consider itself bound to the terms of a 2004 letter that President George W. Bush gave then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saying Israel could expect to keep major settlements in a peace deal. Late Friday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly issued a statement pointedly declining to reaffirm that the letter carried over to the current administration. He instead reiterated that there must be a "stop to settlements."

A meeting in London last week between Mitchell and Israeli envoys went poorly, Israeli sources said, with Mitchell rejecting compromise proposals floated by the Israelis. "Our position hasn't changed one bit, and they know that," said a senior U.S. official after Mitchell's meeting with Barak. "We want them to stop settlement activity."

A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said one factor in the administration's determination is that satellite photos indicated that Israel had not held to the private bargain it had made with the Bush administration.

"In Israel, we are a bit alarmed at the statements coming out," one Israeli official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. "It is a bit too much too soon." He wondered if the comments were intended to ease the way for Obama's speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, since Israeli settlements are frequently denounced by Arab governments.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian negotiator who is advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, said the Obama administration's unity and toughness on the issue have been impressive. "The president has put his own prestige on the line," Omari said. "The thing to watch is whether he will apply a similar amount of pressure on the Arabs" on such issues as financial support for the Palestinian Authority.

In focusing on Israeli settlements, Obama has identified an Achilles' heel in the strong support for Israel in the U.S. Congress, where there is increasing angst among lawmakers that settlements are a hindrance to peace efforts.

There are more than 120 settlements in the occupied West Bank that are legal under Israeli law but not internationally. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel ratified in 1951, forbids an occupying power from transferring "parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies," but Israel disputes that this provision applies to settlements. Israel seized the West Bank and other territories in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Israel in 2003 committed itself to removing 26 unauthorized outposts. Israeli and Palestinian organizations say dozens of other settlements are illegal, or include structures that should be taken down.