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.”

It’s been almost three years since Shams Kalboni renamed herself. She grew up with the modern Hebrew name Revital, which means “quenched thirst.” It was given to her by her Arab parents in the hope it would pave her way to an easier life in Israeli society.

And as Shams walks past blossoming purple bougainvillea plants, up the stairs and onto the veranda of her grandmother’s house in Jaffa, calls of “Revital” and “Revi” still greet her as she is embraced by aunts and cousins.

But to the outside world she is Shams, Arabic for “sun.” Her new name is her way of announcing to the world, and particularly Jewish Israelis, that she is not one of them. Instead she is, as she says, a “Palestinian Israeli.”

“When we define ourselves and say we are Palestinian Israelis they [Jewish Israelis] get freaked out,” says the 35-year-old Shams, pushing back her long reddish brown curls as she nestles into one of the white plastic chairs.

“Arab Israeli is a definition I refuse to accept because an Arab can be Egyptian or Iraqi, also; it’s not part of a nation. The nation I am part of is Palestine,” says Shams. She is a member of a young generation, fluent in Hebrew, steeped in Israeli culture and bold about demanding its fair place in a country many feel has relegated them to a status of second-class citizens.

Olive skinned with a pair of expressive large dark eyes, she wears snugly fitting dark shorts and a turquoise T-shirt, the same color as her long, dangling earrings. In her neighborhood in Tel Aviv, where she lives in a one-bedroom apartment just a block from the beach, her dress is not considered modern or provocative. In more conservative Arab Jaffa, it sometimes is.

With a name like Revital, the looks of a young sabra and accent-less Hebrew, everyone always assumed she was Jewish. So one encounter with discrimination came as a shock. In 2006, she found a nice flat on a shady, central Tel Aviv street in a building owned by a progressive lawyer. When Shams faxed a copy of the lease to the landlady, she was asked if she had any additional income. Shams, still going by Revital, proudly replied that she had started working at an Arab-Jewish dialogue group. “I am the Arab facilitator,” she added. The phone line went silent. When the lawyer spoke again she told Shams she could not rent the apartment to her because other residents would complain that she had rented to an Arab. The words, she used were, “They will be upset that you are from another culture.”

Shams recalls bursting into tears. “It felt like a knife,” says Shams, who has many Jewish friends and frequents the bars in Tel Aviv. “I felt so rejected. It made me feel like I did not belong here. Until that point, I felt very much Israeli. I had not yet started defining myself as Palestinian as well. But after this, I did not feel I was ‘Revital’ any more.”

Shams is quick to add that she sees no contradiction between her Israeli citizenship and the assertion of her Palestinian peoplehood. “I want to make the future. I want to fight for it. I am not waiting for it. If you want your rights you have to demand them,” she says, her slightly raspy voice rising. And she sees American Jews as a model: “They want to be American and have a Jewish identity, which is also a national identity related to Israel. Well, that is also what I want. I want to remain Israeli and have the same equal opportunities but stay here while identifying with a Palestinian state.”

She reflects a new dynamic among young members of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab minority in which there is a simultaneous process of two seemingly opposite trends, what are referred to as “Israelization” and “Palestinization.” Members of Shams’ generation are well-versed in the ways of Israeli society and more deeply integrated than most of their parents and grandparents.

“We studied in Israeli universities and, despite discrimination, proved ourselves, and we’re more confident. We’ve been released from the fear of previous generations,” says Ali Khaider, co-executive director of Sikkuy—“chance” or “opportunity” in Hebrew—a nongovernmental organization that promotes equality between Arab and Jewish citizens on issues such as government budgets, hiring policy and land usage. “It is very clear this generation has high expectations of the state and takes its citizenship seriously,” he says.

Especially since the outbreak of the second intifada, young Arabs in Israel have become more outspoken about their feelings of kinship with their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, and increasingly alienated from a state that defines itself as Jewish—a definition they claim is incompatible with a democracy responsible for delivering equal treatment for all of its citizens.

Shams’ views of herself and her relationship with the state of Israel are relatively new for the country’s Arab citizens. She is at once more Israeli and more Palestinian than her mother, Mariam Edris, 53, and her grandmother, Zeinab Edris, 85. The three generations of women in the family symbolize the changes in identity of Israel’s Arab citizens.

Zeinab Edris lives on the first floor of what was once the home of a wealthy Jaffa family. It still has a grand air, with high ceilings, geometrically patterned tile floors and a wrought-iron gate with “1933,” the year it was built, intertwined in its design. She is sitting in one of the house’s sun-drenched bedrooms, light pouring through narrow high windows, her traditional galabia gathered around her and hair tucked neatly under a white headscarf. A Muslim, she is devoutly religious, unlike most of her children, rising at dawn every morning to pray. Widowed 20 years ago, she now basks in her role as the family matriarch overseeing a close brood of 10 children, 37 grandchildren and over 80 great-grandchildren, several of whose photos are tucked into a small glass display case.

Zeinab was born in a farming village called Bassa in the western Galilee. Bassa is one of some 400 Palestinian towns and villages that disappeared after the Israeli War of Independence; its fields and orchards were destroyed, eventually becoming part of the village of Shlomi, established in 1963 for new Jewish immigrants and now home to about 4,000 people.

“We had land, groves of olive trees,” recalls Zeinab, puffing on one of a chain of cigarettes, her voice trailing off. “The deed is still in the city of Acco.”

Her most vivid memory, though, is of 1948, soon after David Ben-Gurion declared independence and fighting between Arab and Jewish militias turned the bustling port city of Haifa, where she had been living since the age of 10, into a battleground. At the time, she was a young mother of three small children, including a newborn.

The Haganah defeat of Arab forces was quick. There were bursts of gunshot and mortar-fire, firebombs thrown into homes, and a haze of black smoke hanging in the streets. “Jewish fighters came at night and shot into houses, and 36 people in our neighborhood were killed, but we escaped. My daughter was one week old and I grabbed her. My husband took our six-year-old Fawzi, and our three-year-old son Ibrahim was already hiding with my mother’s family,” says Zeinab. Throwing her hands in the air, she says, in a voice that still recalls the mayhem six decades later, “It was a war. I was escaping. I was afraid, terrified actually.”

She found refuge in a neighbor’s home farther away from the fighting. A few days later she and her husband returned to their house and loaded their belongings onto a truck her father-in-law had rented. “We took mattresses, blankets, only basic things. We thought we were going to come back. We thought we would only be away for about two weeks,” she says. “But we did not go back.”

The family made its way east to Umm-el-Fahm, a town then untouched by the war, where Zeinab had relatives. At first they lived in a tent but soon rented a house and ended up staying for six years.

On the eve of the 1948 war, Arabs made up about 67 percent of the population in the area that would become the state. By the time the fighting was over, 780,000 had either fled or been driven out of their homes by Jewish militias. Approximately 150,000 remained in the country, among them Zeinab and her family, who, like many others, had become internally displaced.

The Edris family settled in Jaffa in 1955. Before the war Jaffa had been a cosmopolitan hub of Palestinian urban intellectual life alongside Haifa and Jerusalem, but now only 3,000 out of 100,000 remained. The family was part of a war-weary and disoriented Palestinian population that tried to make sense of its situation in a newly born state in which it was suddenly a minority. The bulk of its upper and middle classes, including its leaders and intellectuals, had fled, leaving behind a largely poor and agrarian population that needed time to regroup.

Although Arabs were guaranteed equal rights under Israel’s Declaration of Independence, their lives were separate and far from equal. Based on 1945 emergency regulations set by the British, military restrictions were put in place largely to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and land, says Shira Robinson, a professor of Middle Eastern history at George Washington University. Until military rule was repealed in 1966, Arab citizens were subject to curfews and needed difficult-to-obtain passes to travel between cities, including for work. Political organizing was restricted and newspapers censored. It was also a period of large-scale land confiscation. The majority who had made their living as farmers now had to take low-paying service jobs.

“The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of tremendous uncertainty for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike,” writes Robinson in her study of Israel’s military rule in the Negev Desert, the Galilee and the “Triangle” area in central Israel on the border with the West Bank. “The establishment of the state had been announced, but what that state would look like, how it would function, and the meanings people would make of it, and in it, were still open questions.”

Jaffa was only briefly under military rule, but Zeinab, like most other Arabs, had little time for politics. She was focused on making a living and creating a stable environment for her growing family. “We have had a good life,” she says. “The economy did well, there was peace at first, people started to work but then the wars began,” she said, referring to the Six-Day War in 1967. “The Jews wanted to expand, and war destroys everything.”

Still, Zeinab bears no grudge, saying she feels blessed with her 10 children and the fact that Israel’s monthly social security payments ensure that she is provided for. She remembers the Jewish militias telling Haifa’s Arabs that if they did not rise up and fight, the war would pass peacefully for them. “We were not angry about the Jews. My grandfather used to say this state will be like America. We will benefit from it. He thought it sounded as if it would become a good, modern place,” she says. “Overall I believe my grandfather was right.”

The smell of strong, cardamom-roasted coffee wafts through Zeinab’s living room. With its stuffed maroon velveteen couches and walls hung with Koranic verses, the room is a favorite gathering place for her children and grandchildren. I join Shams on the veranda, where she tells me more about her life.

She grew up in Jaffa, amid its run-down streets, gangs of drug dealers and overcrowded schools, and felt privileged to attend a private Christian school run by French nuns. Most of the students, like her, were Muslim, but there were also Christians and even a few Jews. An avid reader, nicknamed “the professor,” Shams excelled in school and wanted to go on to higher education. But she came from a family where almost no one had been to university before and felt compelled to support her family financially, so she took a job at a local jewelry factory. In her five years there she earned a nice living and advanced to the position of manager. But she felt something was missing and applied to study at Tel Aviv University for a degree in Middle Eastern studies and Islam.

She started classes in 1999, a year before the second intifada erupted. “There was still hope after Oslo,” she says, referring to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. “We were in a state of euphoria. I thought I would study to become a bridge between Palestinians and Israelis.”

As the only Arab citizen in the department, she attracted a lot of attention. “There was not a moment that I ever sat alone in the cafeteria. I was a curiosity. I helped others with their Arabic translation assignments and because I had started to become politically active on campus, I could give them a different perspective from what we were reading in our books.”

It was in university that she took the first steps of her journey. “Everything was new to me,” she says. She joined the small Arab student association on campus. It also became increasingly clear that her degree would not lead where she had hoped. She realized that most people who graduate in Middle Eastern studies join either the Mossad or the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. She was contacted four times by Israel’s defense ministry, which hoped to hire her.

For the newly politicized Shams, working covertly for the state would be akin to being recruited as a “collaborator.” The term, laced with connotations of betrayal of one’s own people, is perhaps the darkest in the Palestinian lexicon.

“Being approached like this only caused me to feel separated from what until then was a very Israeli identity,” she says. “I felt like I was being told that the only way you can work in your field and be a welcome citizen is to collaborate. I had felt so proud of myself with my degree and was anxious to see what my worth would be in the market. Then the bubble burst in my face and I did not know what to do,” says Shams. Deflated, she decided to return to the world of jewelry.

The worst job interview experience of her life began well enough, with smiles and handshakes: She impressed the managers of a firm in Tel Aviv’s diamond district, known as the “Bursa.” But when one of her interviewers ran into her at a beauty salon and learned that Shams was not a Jew but an Arab, the woman’s face instantly dropped. “She looked shocked,” says Shams.

She returned for a previously scheduled second interview only to be informed the job was not a suitable fit. When she inquired as to whether she had been turned down because she was an Arab, she was curtly told that the results of her handwriting analysis—an arcane practice that has survived in Israel as a common tool of potential employers to screen job candidates—had come back. “‘The analysis said that you are sensitive and if there was a suicide bombing or attack, people might talk about Arabs in a harsh way and you could get hurt,”’ the woman executive, a Russian-speaking immigrant, told her. “I was devastated,” Shams says.

She gave up on the jewelry business and drifted through several waitressing jobs at Tel Aviv restaurants and bars, ultimately landing a position as an assistant at a left-wing law firm where the partners were aware that she was Arab and welcomed her. Difficulty finding a job that matched her qualifications was not unique to Shams: According to 2008 Central Bureau of Statistics figures, 12.5 percent of Arab college graduates are unemployed, compared to 3.5 percent of Jewish graduates.

As the Jewish world turned its back on Shams, she began to look in a new direction. “I started pulling away from my Jewish circle of friends,” she recalls. “I wanted distance. I wanted to get to know Palestinian friends and with them, I found out I was not alone in undergoing an identity crisis.” She began to hang out in Jaffa, where she met Palestinian students from all over Israel. “I felt empowered,” she says. “But after a while I felt less connected to them as well.”

Unlike Shams’ apolitical tight-knit working-class family, these young Palestinian men and women came from highly politicized families from the Arab Galilee, many of them long-time activists in the Hadash—the Communist party—or Arab parties. And their Arabic was more literate. Having grown up in Jaffa, so close to Tel Aviv, hers is jumbled with Hebrew phrases and words, and her written Hebrew is better than her written Arabic. “I could connect to them but I did not feel a sense of 100 percent belonging,” she says.

As she grew more politically aware, she started feeling isolated from her family. Finally, she found a job at a nonprofit organization called Windows that promotes interaction between Jewish and Arab youth. Shams, the administrative director, works with director Rutie Atsmon, a Jewish woman, and helps oversee the magazine her young charges produce in both Hebrew and Arabic. The 12- to 16-year-olds tackle thorny issues that they must write about together, such as the shared anniversary of Independence Day and the Nakba [“catastrophe” in Arabic] and the recent war in Gaza.

With time, and through her work at Windows, she has gained a clearer sense of who she is: “I am a mixture of everything and that’s okay. It’s a result of how history evolved—I have a new identity and that’s okay,” she says.

Shams has inherited her mother’s deep olive skin and ropey curls and the glints of hazel in her brown eyes, but not her even temperament. Mariam Edris moves languidly from room to room. A smoker like most of the family, her low voice has a raspy huskiness.

Born and raised in Jaffa, Mariam grew up largely unaware of military rule and its restrictions, although her father, Khaled, must have worked hard to convince the authorities to grant him permits to move from Umm-el-Fahm to Jaffa. She remembers an idyllic childhood growing up in the streets of Jaffa, where Arab children—both Muslim and Christian—mixed seamlessly with Jewish children whose parents were recent immigrants from countries like Bulgaria, Syria and Morocco.

“There was no discrimination. There was naïveté. There was fun. We played together—jump rope, hopscotch,” she tells me, smiling at the memories as she dishes out generous portions of her mother’s maklube chicken (a traditional Palestinian dish that includes rice and pine-nuts) from an industrial-sized metal cooking pot.

Mariam’s teachers were almost entirely Jewish immigrants from Iraq who could teach in Arabic, since most native Arab teachers had left in 1948. “What helped me be so open to the world is that I grew up in such a mixed setting,” she says. As for the trauma of war her parents had experienced less than a decade before her birth, she says they didn’t speak about it much.

“They did not say it, but we knew where we had come from and why we were now here,” she says. “But who really suffered? Not us, but the refugees who left the country and were left without money, without homes. I would sometimes think that it could have been me who ended up in Lebanon.”

Having grown up in a traditional home, she was taken out of school when she reached puberty at age 12. “My parents were scared someone would look at me the wrong way and do something bad,” she says. Mariam was relieved when her father refused a marriage offer for her when she was 13, the age her mother married.

But at 18, when the handsome and fun-loving Ahmed Kalboni, a local restaurant owner, asked for her hand, she was ready to marry, seeing it as her ticket into the world. After 14 years of marriage and four children, they divorced, a fairly uncommon occurrence in Arab homes, even more modern ones like theirs.

Since then she’s been employed as a nanny for Jewish families and is especially close to the couple for whom she has worked more than 11 years, helping raise their twins. She jokes that her left-wing employers are more political than she is.

“It’s not that I don’t see what goes on here, and sometimes it does outrage me, but I don’t want to leave the country,” she says. “I don’t want to feel foreign somewhere else. My life is good here. But yes, I see the discrimination. I see it in education, that my neighbors don’t always have a place to live, that in the workplace there are places that prefer Jewish Israelis. But when I come for a job interview I always identify myself as an Arab. I’m proud of it, it is who I am.”

Mariam has seen discrimination firsthand—lengthy questioning at the airport and suitcases searched and returned days later, nasty glances for speaking Arabic, stinging anti-Arab comments during times of unrest and war. During a recent visit to a mall with her niece, a security guard asked to see their identity cards before letting them enter. Her niece, she says, “put up a fuss.” “But it’s all about how you handle things,” she says. “I don’t feel downtrodden.”

Mariam is proud of Shams, her only child with a university degree, although she wishes she had not chosen to work for a non-profit, and especially for a Palestinian-Israeli co-existence organization. She thinks “they,” meaning the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, will not thank her for her efforts. Mariam is also concerned about the Israeli government. “The security services here know everything and now she has all these connections with people from the West Bank,” she says.

She finds it difficult to understand why her eldest child has felt it necessary to take these risks. “I tell her not to get herself into complicated situations,” Mariam says. “She had a good life and has now gone and made it difficult.”

Mariam was too young and sheltered to be deeply influenced by Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War, a pivotal moment in the Arab-Jewish relationship.

After the war, the Arabs in Israel became more politically aware. The government hired them at high salaries to build up the new territories, spurring the growth of the Arab middle class. “Suddenly the Palestinians started having money in their pockets in what was an ironic but important stage in their development,” says Mahmoud Yazbak, a professor of Middle East history at Haifa University and chairman of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, a prominent Arab nongovernmental organization.

They used this money first and foremost for education. By the early 1970s, Yazbak says, the number of Arab citizens going to university soared from no more than 50 new students a year to the thousands. The newly educated bolstered the ranks of Palestinian intellectuals and ushered in an era of activism.

At the same time, Israel’s control of the territories put its Arab citizens into direct contact with their brethren from the West Bank and Gaza for the first time in almost 20 years. It would take nearly a decade, however, for what is considered their political coming of age. On March 30, 1976, a general strike was called to protest government plans to confiscate hundreds of acres of Arab-owned land, and some Jewish land, to make room for Jewish towns and villages, part of a policy to “Judaize” the predominantly Arab Galilee. Six Israeli Arabs were killed by police fire and hundreds were arrested during the unrest that followed. Marches each March 30—now known as Land Day—commemorate the turning point of what is called the “Stand Tall Generation.”

“It was the first alarm bell marking a new era for the Israeli establishment and society,” says historian Elie Rekhess, the head of Tel Aviv University’s Adenauer Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation and the Crown Visiting Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. “It was a sign of national awakening and of the changes that would mark the transition from the 1950s-1960s to the 1970s-1980s.”

Headline-grabbing protests were not the only ways in which this new political consciousness was manifested. Civic organizations all over Israel have formed over the last 30 years to raise concerns from economic equality to Palestinian statehood. Nabila Espanioli, 54, is founder of one such group, Women in Black, a feminist peace group and director of the Al-Tufulah Center for Childhood and Women’s Empowerment. “We have learned,” she says. “We are more sophisticated. We know now if you want to really change democratic systems, you have to use all the means available to you.”

While her mother and grandmother prefer to keep their views to themselves, Shams is part of this evolving political shift. In addition to her job, she established a committee two years ago to prevent further house demolitions in Jaffa. She created it as a local voice of protest against gentrification efforts that are displacing some Arab families in the city.

We walk to a nearby plot of land that has been sold to a group of religious Jews who want to build an apartment building. Shams fears they want to “settle” Jaffa as their peers have settled the West Bank and other mixed cities within Israel like Lod, Ramle and Acco. Their ideological motives are unclear, but Shams believes their goal is to displace local Arabs, and she is defiant: “The first stone that is put here will be removed.”

There’s yet another project that she is pursuing with zeal. Shams is researching the vanished village of Bassa, where her grandmother was born, gathering information to piece together what it looked like and who lived there. She is arranging a trip to bring her grandmother and her large extended clan—dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins—to the Jewish town, Shlomi. While there, she plans to shoot a video of her grandmother in front of the rest of the family and interview her about her childhood. “I feel like our family’s children know nothing about our history,” Shams says.

Zeinab would like to make the trip; she is curious to see if anything of her childhood remains. But she’d prefer that her granddaughter spend her time finding a lucrative job more worthy of her university degree. Shams brushes off her suggestion. It hasn’t been easy, but she finally feels secure in who she is and that she has found her calling.

Like the majority of Arab citizens in Israel, the woman once known as Revital would choose to remain in the country of her birth if a Palestinian state were ever established. Israel is where her roots are, where her life is. Meanwhile she’s going to fight for her democratic rights. If she ever meets Benjamin Netanyahu, she knows just what she will say to her prime minister: “I’ll ask him to commit himself to protect our equality and rights as citizens. All this is good for Israel.”

In a high-rise apartment with a Mediterranean Sea view, the cameraman checks his frame and the interviewer makes sure the slight, silver-haired man is relaxed enough to tell his story.

Then Peleg Tamir, 81, starts recounting his days as a teenage recruit for an underground militia fighting for the Jewish state.

Arrested by the ruling British authorities in 1947, he smuggled himself out of a detention center in a suitcase. “Everyone was shocked when I climbed out,” he said.

Tufaha Natur, 74, lived a very different part of this story. The women from her small Arab village in the Galilee fled when Jewish militias arrived. “A woman who carried her two or three children also carried clothing and food; how could she organize herself?” she said. “There was a woman who forgot her son in the bed, leaving him and taking a pillow instead.”

As Israel celebrated its Independence Day last month — an event that Palestinians call the nakba, the catastrophe — the videotaped accounts of Mrs. Natur and Mr. Tamir are part of efforts to preserve the narratives of both sides of the war that led to Israel’s tumultuous birth in 1948.

While historians debate the reliability of first-person accounts given decades after the event, advocates argue that they give voice to ordinary people’s experiences of historic times.

In November 1947, the United Nations approved partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Infuriated, neighboring Arab states invaded, supported by local militias. Zionist forces fought back. Some Palestinians fled, hoping to return once the fighting ended; others were evacuated or saw their villages destroyed by the Israeli forces.

The different sides tell vastly different stories, and the act of preserving them is itself a political statement in a land locked in arguments over narrative. No battle over the regional historic record is perhaps more contested than the one over the story of Israel’s establishment.

The unresolved questions of that history will continue Monday, as President Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington. Their expected discussion of Palestinian statehood is directly rooted in the events of 1947-48.

On the Jewish Israeli side, an ambitious new project called Toldot Yisrael is trying to reconnect with the Zionist story, which many Israelis feel is overshadowed by the narrative of Palestinian displacement.

Modeled on Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which interviewed about 52,000 Holocaust survivors, the project is collecting firsthand accounts of the arrival of the Zionists and their struggle to create a Jewish state. One account was that of Harold Katz, a Harvard Law student and World War II Navy veteran, now 85, who volunteered to help illegally smuggle Holocaust survivors by ship to pre-state Palestine. “We couldn’t just sit in law school while history was being made,” he said. “We had to do something.”

In testimonies collected on the Arab side, witnesses tell of smoldering remains of villages destroyed in the fighting, and confusion as families fled and became separated.

In an interview with Zochrot, an Israeli organization that promotes awareness of the Palestinian perspective on 1948, Dia Faour, 93, tells how men and women in her village, Sabalan, near the Lebanese border, were divided by Jewish militiamen and told they had an hour to leave the village or be shot.

“I started running in fear,” she said. “My children and I went in one direction, my husband in a different direction. I fled to Lebanon and nighttime fell. It was very cold outside and the children were hungry.” It took her two attempts, dodging military checkpoints with four young children in tow, but eventually she returned and found her husband.

The historian Michael Oren, who was recently appointed the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said videotaped testimony collected by these groups and others would inevitably become part of not only the historical record, but also the political debate. “I have no doubt it will become a weapon on both sides,” he said. “Maybe those documenting don’t have political agendas, but they will be asking different types of questions.”

The Jewish interviews focus “on the struggle for statehood, heroism and sacrifice,” he said, whereas the Palestinian ones are “about pain and uprootedness.”

For Diana Allan, founder and director of the Nakba Archive, which has recorded interviews with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the testimonies are inherently political. The question of who is responsible for Palestinian refugees bears directly on the contentious issue of whether they should be allowed to return to within Israel’s borders. “Our aim has been to but record this critical period of Palestinian history through the voices and personal experiences of those who lived through it in a way that moves beyond the statistical, mythical and anecdotal,” she said.

Eric Halivni, 37, who founded Toldot Yisrael last year, said he was motivated by intense curiosity about the period. “I don’t see this as a political issue but as our history and heritage, so let’s preserve it,” he said.

For the Palestinians, much of whose documentation and libraries were destroyed or confiscated during the fighting between 1947 and 1949, personal testimonies have special value, said Sharif Kanaana, an anthropologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, a pioneer in recording Palestinian testimonies.

“There are some who would say the value of oral history is to establish the facts of what happened in 1948 and the conflict,” he said. “To me, the value is in people, the Palestinian people, refugees in particular, knowing their background, their past and the communities they lived in.”

Today, the larger-scale Palestinian oral history video projects are being conducted inside Israel, collected by Arabs who are descendants of those who lived through the events, as well as among refugees in Lebanon and Jordan.

Sometimes, stories intersect, showing the human paradox at the heart of any complex story.

“An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.”

Embassy officials had intended to move to Kirya Tower in Tel Aviv, partly owned by real-estate company Africa-Israel Investments Ltd but has reversed its decision while it seeks clarifications from the company.

A subsidiary of Africa-Israel, Danya Cebus, has built homes in at least one West Bank settlement, Maale Adumim, but it is not clear what the scope of the company's activities are.

Africa-Israel, which is owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, said in response that the British embassy's perception of Danya-Cebus' operations in the West Bank is "fundamentally wrong," but refused to provide any additional details.

It said pro-Palestinian organisations in Britain have long been trying to promote a "biased, one-sided political agenda" against Israeli business corporations, business people, academics and researchers.

"No leases were signed, and part of the reason was we looked into the issue of Africa-Israel and settlements and settlement holdings and we asked for clarification on those issues," a spokesman for the British Embassy said.

The embassy's decision reflected growing UK and US pressure on Israel to abide by its international pledges to freeze settlement building in the West Bank and dismantle unauthorised outposts.

Mrs Clinton, the US Secretary of State, criticised Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem yesterday, saying it was of "deep concern".

"Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map'," she said, referring to peace efforts between the sides.

Mrs Clinton, on her first foray into Middle Eastern diplomacy since taking her new post, spoke in the West Bank town of Ramallah following a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

She added that she would be raising the issue of the planned demolitions of some 80 homes Palestinian neighbourhood in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem with the Israeli government.

Before the houses were even built about fifteen years ago Israel had plans to turn the land, just beyond the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, into an archeological garden for tourists. Recently the Jerusalem Municipality decided to follow through on those plans.

Jerusalem municipal officials say the homes were built illegally without permits but Palestinians counter that in general it is extremely difficult to receive permits to build in the city and so families have no choice but to build without them.

The future of Jerusalem is one of the key disputes between the sides. The Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as their future capital but Israeli leaders have said the city must remain united as its capital.

Mrs Clinton reiterated the message she sounded in talks with Israeli leaders on Tuesday that a Palestinian state should be established as a way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The US is committed to a two-state solution," she said during a stop at a Ramallah school. "We will work immediately to help solve these problems and I'm very committed to that."

The Palestinian leadership also wants the US to put pressure on Israel to open border crossings into the Gaza Strip which have been only sporadically opened since Hamas militants seized control of the territory over a year ago.

It is also seeking commitments, Palestinian officials said, that Israel halt all construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Nibbling doughnuts and wrestling with computer code, the workers at G.ho.st, an Internet start-up here, are holding their weekly staff meeting — with colleagues on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

They trade ideas through a video hookup that connects the West Bank office with one in Israel in the first joint technology venture of its kind between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Start with the optimistic parts, Mustafa,” Gilad Parann-Nissany, an Israeli who is vice president for research and development, jokes with a Palestinian colleague who is giving a progress report. Both conference rooms break into laughter.

The goal of G.ho.st is not as lofty as peace, although its founders and employees do hope to encourage it. Instead G.ho.st wants to give users a free, Web-based virtual computer that lets them access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. G.ho.st, pronounced “ghost,” is short for Global Hosted Operating System.

“Ghosts go through walls,” said Zvi Schreiber, the company’s British-born Israeli chief executive, by way of explanation. A test version of the service is available now, and an official introduction is scheduled for Halloween.

The Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about 35 software developers, is responsible for most of the research and programming. A smaller Israeli team works about 13 miles away in the central Israeli town of Modiin.

The stretch of road separating the offices is broken up by checkpoints, watch towers and a barrier made of chain-link fence and, in some areas, soaring concrete walls, built by Israel with the stated goal of preventing the entry of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Palestinian employees need permits from the Israeli army to enter Israel and attend meetings in Modiin, and Israelis are forbidden by their own government from entering Palestinian cities.

When permits cannot be arranged but meetings in person are necessary, colleagues gather at a rundown coffee shop on a desert road frequented by camels and Bedouin shepherds near Jericho, an area legally open to both sides.

Dr. Schreiber, an entrepreneur who has already built and sold two other start-ups, said he wanted to create G.ho.st after seeing the power of software running on the Web. He said he thought it was time to merge his technological and commercial ambitions with his social ones and create a business with Palestinians.

“I felt the ultimate goal was to offer every human being a computing environment which is free, and which is not tied to any physical hardware but exists on the Web,” he said. The idea, he said, was to create a home for all of a user’s online files and storage in the form of a virtual PC.

Instead of creating its own Web-based software, the company taps into existing services like Google Docs, Zoho and Flickr and integrates them into a single online computing system.

G.ho.st also has a philanthropic component: a foundation that aims to establish community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. The foundation is headed by Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995.

“It’s the first time I met Palestinians of my generation face to face,” said Ms. Rothman, 31, of her work with G.ho.st. She said she was moved by how easily everyone got along. “It shows how on the people-to-people level you can really get things done.”

Investors have put $2.5 million into the company so far, a modest amount. Employing Palestinians means the money goes farther; salaries for Palestinian programmers are about a third of what they are in Israel.

But Dr. Schreiber, who initially teamed up with Tareq Maayah, a Palestinian businessman, to start the Ramallah office, insists this is not just another example of outsourcing.

“We are one team, employed by the same company, and everyone has shares in the company,” he said.

At G.ho.st’s offices in Ramallah, in a stone-faced building with black reflective glass perched on a hill in the city’s business district, employees say they feel part of an intensive group effort to create something groundbreaking. Among them are top young Palestinian programmers and engineers, recruited in some cases directly from universities.

The chance to gain experience in creating a product for the international market — a first for the small Palestinian technology community — means politics take a backseat to business, said Yusef Ghandour, a project manager.

“It’s good we are learning from the Israeli side now,” Mr. Ghandour said. The Israelis, he said, “are open to the external world, and there is lots of venture capital investment in Israel, and now we are bringing that to Palestine.”

The departure of educated young people mostly to neighboring Jordan and the Persian Gulf states is a major problem for the Palestinian economy and has been especially damaging to its technology industry. Since the Oslo peace process broke down in 2000, a wave of Israeli-Palestinian business ties have crumbled as well.

Political tensions make it somewhat unpopular for Palestinians to do business with Israelis, said Ala Alaeddin, chairman of the Palestinian Information Technology Association. He said the concept of a technology joint venture across the divide was unheard-of until G.ho.st opened its doors. A handful of Palestinian tech companies handle outsourced work for Israeli companies, but most focus on the local or Middle Eastern market.

“It’s much easier to have outsourcing than a partnership,” Mr. Alaeddin said. “A joint venture is a long-term commitment, and you need both sides to be really confident that this kind of agreement will work.”

Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with offices in Israel, invested $2 million in G.ho.st. Michael Eisenberg, a general partner at the firm, said Benchmark was “in the business of risky investments,” but that G.ho.st presented entirely new territory.

Recalling his discussions with Dr. Schreiber, Mr. Eisenberg said: “Frankly, when he first told me about it I thought it was ambitious, maybe overly ambitious. But Zvi is a remarkable entrepreneur, and I started to feel he could actually pull this off.”

The video hookup runs continuously between the offices. Chatting in the Ramallah conference room, two Palestinian programmers wave hello to Israeli colleagues conferring over a laptop in the Modiin office.

“We are doing something across cultures and across two sides of a tough conflict,” Dr. Schreiber said. “I was prepared for the possibility that it might be difficult, but it hasn’t been.”