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 is looking into possible amendments to the designation of national priority regions in Israel, while one of his main coalition partners, the Labor Party, is expressing its displeasure with the scheme.

The PM is looking into various proposals presented to him, the PM's Office said Thursday evening in the wake of harsh criticism of the plan.

The national priority designation, which includes the settlements, has irked the Labor party, with Defense Minister Ehud Barak announcing that he will attempt to delay a government discussion of the issue.

Barak highlighted his disagreements with Netanyahu by stating that despite the PM's decision, Labor will not be endorsing extra investment in the settlements.

"The Labor party believes in the Galilee, in the Negev, and in border line communities," he said. "We're making an effort to minimize government investment in other locations.

Some of the harshest criticism stemmed from the prime minister's decision not to include the southern town of Ashkelon, which was targeted by rockets from Gaza in the past two years, as a national priority town.

On Wednesday, the PM's Office presented government ministers with the new national priorities plan, ahead of future cabinet deliberations on the matter.

The plan defines the general outline of governmental benefits and incentives in the fields of education, housing, urban development, employment and infrastructure; it also applies to the 110,000 Jewish residents of the West Bank who live outside the settlement blocks.

Israel's efforts to reach understandings and achieve reconciliation with the Vatican have failed for the time being.

The talks between Israeli officials and the Vatican have hit a dead-end, Ynet learned Thursday. The failure mostly stems from disagreement in respect to the Vatican's demand for sovereignty at the Last Supper Room on Jerusalem's Mount Zion. The Vatican also upheld its objection to the confiscation of Church land across Israel for public purposes.

Israel's delegation to Rome was led by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who engaged in talks with his Vatican counterpart, along with expert teams on legal and financial issues.

Israeli officials hoped that Thursday's meeting would end a crisis that has persisted for almost 15 years. During this period, the Church resisted any confiscation of land by Israel and refused to pay taxes to the State. Moreover, the legal and social status of Church officials in Israel has not been fully arranged.

'We still want dialogue'

Israel's team headed to Rome in the wake of lengthy preparation work. Officials expressed optimism over the prospects for agreement, yet after seven-hour discussions Thursday the sides failed to reach a breakthrough. Moreover, Israel says the parties are back to square one after the Vatican annulled previous understandings.

"We can definitely say that there is a certain crisis," Deputy Minister Ayalon told Ynet. "We decided not to call it quits, and rather, to agree to disagree. Yet there is no doubt that following today's meeting we feel that we stepped back, and all the agreements we reached ahead of the meeting were in fact annulled."

"Yet despite the sense of rift, I urged the Vatican to engage in diplomatic dialogue with Israel anyway," Ayalon said. "We are interested in talking to them about the issue of global anti-Semitism, the war on terror, and Islam's radical factions. I invited my counterpart to visit Israel in order to discuss these issues."

A senior political source defined Monday Sweden's attempt to declare Jerusalem the capital of Palestine as an "underhanded move by Stockholm, a mere moment before its term as head of the European Union is over. We are making efforts to thwart this move at the highest diplomatic levels."

The European Union's foreign ministers are scheduled to convene in Brussels later Monday, ahead of the EU meet scheduled to take place in the city on December 10.

The agenda for the second day of the conference is said to include the Balkans, the Middle East peace process and Iran.

As part of the discussion about the Middle East, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is expected to put forward a pro-Palestinian motion which includes an article declaring east Jerusalem the capital of the future Palestinian state.

Such a declaration would radicalize the EU's traditional stance, calling for Jerusalem to become the capital of both Israel and Palestine.

Sweden's new stance has enraged Israel: The Foreign Ministry launched extensive diplomatic efforts to counter the move, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have discussed the matter with their colleagues.

Jerusalem sources would not venture a guess as to the EU conference's final decision at this point, but senior political sources said that the majority of the 27 European representatives were against such an extreme move by the EU, especially where Jerusalem is concerned.

According to the sources, those opposing the decision have accepted Israel's position stating that this is not the time to make any statements which may discourage the Palestinians from resuming peace talks.

"This is an underhanded move by Sweden, as its term as EU president draws to an end and in light of the strained diplomatic relations with Israel," a source at the Foreign Ministry said.

"We were not taken by surprise," added the source. "After all, this is still a traditional European position, even if an extreme one."

Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon added that "the Europeans will not dictate the results of the (Israeli-Palestinian) peace process. The Swedish initiative is dangerous and it may hinder the efforts to resume negotiations by radicalizing the Palestinian stand.

"This initiative is also against the principles of the international community and the Quartet's decision calling on both sides to hold direct negotiations."

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman expressed his satisfaction Friday with the results of the United Nations General Assembly vote on a report which accuses Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. "On the whole, we are satisfied with the fact that 18 countries, which are a moral majority, supported Israel's stance and 44 abstained and did not vote with the automatic majority," he said.

The General Assembly on Thursday night endorsed the Goldstone Report and called on the UN secretary-general to transmit the report to the Security Council. The resolution, which was backed by 114 countries, was later rejected by Israel as being "detached from reality".

The adopted resolution includes several clauses: The endorsement of the report by the UN Human Rights Council; a call on the UN secretary-general to transfer it to the Security Council; a call on Israel to launch a reliable independent investigation, in accordance with international standards, into serious violations of the international humanitarian law and human rights laws; and a similar demand from the Palestinians.

Foreign Minister Lieberman knew in advance that there was no way to beat the automatic majority in the UN, which includes Arab countries and the non-aligned countries. He believes Israel's diplomatic work on the eve of the General Assembly vote led to fitting results.

"It's not a trivial thing that 18 countries, including those from the first line of the Western democratic world, would vote against the resolution," he said.

"The automatic majority of countries like Saudi Arabia and Somalia at the UN is, unfortunately, a given situation. These are not countries which will teach us about morals; they are the ones we expect salvation from. They will not teach us the values of warfare. Once again it has been proven that the UN is not an arena we can fight in," the foreign minister added.

Throughout the day before the vote, the group of Arab countries had attempted to reach an understanding with European and other countries which opposed the resolution. Western countries tried to moderate the Arab wording, but failed. The Arab countries decided to have the proposal voted on and win the automatic majority of most Muslim states and other non-aligned countries.

Even before the resolution was adopted, Jerusalem launched diplomatic efforts to curb the report at the Security Council. The Foreign Ministry still expects the United States to veto a one-sided resolution against Israel at the UN body.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has confirmed that there is a "silent understanding" with the US that it would not let the Security Council endorse such a resolution.