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.”

To the catalog of missed opportunities for peace in the Middle East, we can add a tantalizing if also depressing chapter: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s secret offer in 2008 to create a Palestinian state that would feature international control of holy sites in a divided Jerusalem – a concession many Israelis have said was impossible.

Condoleezza Rice discusses the Olmert proposal in her new memoir, “No Higher Honor.” She writes that as she listened to Olmert’s plan during a May 2008 visit to Israel, she asked herself (and the emphatic italics are hers in the text): “Am I really hearing this? … Concentrate. Write this down. No, don’t write it down. What if it leaks? It can’t leak; it’s just the two of us.”

As Rice tells the story, Olmert developed a comprehensive plan, which he presented secretly to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, in the summer of 2008. By September, the details of Olmert’s offer included:

Israeli transfer of sovereignty of 94.2 percent of the West Bank to the new Palestinian state. He offered additional swaps of land, and a corridor linking the West Bank and Gaza, that would bring the total Palestinian land area to 100 percent of the pre-1967 borders of the West Bank.

A formula for dividing Jerusalem that would give Arab neighborhoods to the Palestinians and Jewish neighborhoods to Israel, with negotiators working out the status of mixed neighborhoods. Each country would have Jerusalem as its capital; there would be a joint city council with an Israeli mayor and a Palestinian deputy mayor.

The Old City would be administered by an international committee with representatives from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the European Union and the United States. Questions of sovereignty in Jerusalem would be fudged, with each side rejecting the other’s claims.

The “right of return” for Palestinians would be limited to about 5,000. To compensate other Palestinian refugees, a fund of several billion dollars would be created, under Norwegian administration.

The U.S. would protect Israel’s security not just with American power but by training a reliable Palestinian security force.

And what happened to this miraculous package? Because it’s the Middle East, you know the answer: It died, with the U.S. on the sidelines hoping and praying, but Olmert and Abbas too weak politically to take the leap.

The collapse came the moment it seemed to become real. In September 2008, Olmert showed Abbas a map charting the boundaries of the new state. According to Rice, he asked Abbas to sign the deal on the spot, but Abbas balked and asked to consult his experts first. Olmert wouldn’t let him take a copy of the map, and the follow-up meeting never happened.

President GeorgeW. Bush tried to revive the deal when the leaders separately visited Washington in November and December, but by then Olmert was under investigation for corruption charges, and Abbas apparently decided he could get a better deal with a Democratic president. “The conditions were almost ripe for a deal on our watch, but not quite,” writes Rice.

What followed this near miss? That’s the most depressing part of the story. Rice kept mum, but she gave the new administration details of Olmert’s offer, including a State Department version of the map. She hoped the U.S. would use Olmert’s plan as a building block for negotiations – and perhaps even submit it to the U.N. Security Council.

But in one of President Barack Obama’s biggest mistakes, he decided to start talks all over – and to demand an Israeli settlement freeze as a test of wills. What a mistake. He was outfoxed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister. Three years later, the peace process is a lifeless corpse.

Rice says she decided to go public with the Olmert plan now because “we’ve gone so far backward” that the peace process seems like “a lost cause.” The lesson of the Olmert gambit, she explained in an interview, is that “an Israeli-Palestinian deal is doable, but they can’t keep missing opportunities.”

Back when she organized the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007, Rice was criticized as overoptimistic. But there was more to the process than many commentators realized. I suspect all the parties would like to rewind the tape to Annapolis – most especially, the Israelis.

Olmert’s map, now dust in the wind, may be the best formula we’ll ever get for the peaceful creation of the Palestinian state that will cement Israel’s own security.

As Washington buzzes about yet another restart for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, I have been reading a book that summarizes the past 44 years of botched peacemaking, blown opportunities and, sometimes, sheer folly.

The book is a posthumous memoir by Jack O’Connell, a former CIA operative who was for many years King Hussein’s “case officer” in Jordan. Yes, you read that right: When O’Connell was station chief in Amman from 1963 to 1971, he dropped off monthly envelopes of cash at the palace as part of a long-running CIA covert action code-named “NOBEEF.”

O’Connell was one of the savviest Middle East hands I ever encountered. He was a burly guy from South Dakota who had gone to Notre Dame to play football. Like so many smart young people in the 1950s, he found his way to the CIA. He was soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, like the king, but O’Connell was as clear-eyed about the Middle East as any American I’ve known. (We first met at a conference in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, and talked occasionally after that.)

O’Connell first went to Amman in 1958 to help the king (then just 22) crack a coup plot uncovered by FBI wiretaps on the Jordanian Embassy in Washington. They got confessions from 22 conspirators – not by using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of recent years but through prison interviews, deception and outright bluffs.

O’Connell became the young king’s closest adviser and sometimes the only person Hussein fully trusted. When O’Connell left as station chief, he became the king’s personal lawyer in Washington. He tells a lot of secrets here, especially about Hussein’s diplomatic machinations, but he took many more to the grave when he died last year.

I recommend “King’s Counsel” not just as a cautionary tale about peacemaking (to which I will return) but as a reminder of what the CIA is really all about. This week, we are so enamored of the CIA-led commando operation that killed Osama bin Laden that it’s easy to forget that a spy service exists primarily to collect intelligence, not to conduct paramilitary operations.

O’Connell was old-fashioned in that sense. He hated political “covert action” and the fancy Ivy Leaguers who ran it, whom he derides as “phony elitists.” He thought congressional oversight would never work, and that the CIA had never recovered from the public flaying of the 1970s. Discretion was all: He had hundreds of pictures of Hussein, he notes, but not one of them together. O’Connell always stayed in the shadows.

What anguished O’Connell was watching Hussein struggle in vain for four decades to recover the West Bank from Israel. The sorry tale began with the king’s foolish decision to ally with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser on the eve of the June 1967 war, which gave the Israelis a reason to attack. O’Connell warned the king that Israel would strike, and the king passed the intelligence to Nasser. But they were too infatuated with Arab propaganda to take the warning seriously. The king also had advance warning of the 1973 war, again for naught.

The bungles continue, year to year: Hussein allows the Palestine Liberation Organization to put down deep roots in Jordan, and is repaid with a civil war in 1970 that nearly topples him; he charms a string of Israeli prime ministers in secret meetings, who want peace with him but balk at returning territory; he tries to placate Arab radicals, most disastrously by allying with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein on the eve of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait; he beseeches U.S. presidents to help him recover territory but they never deliver. The diminutive monarch is like Charlie Brown kicking the football, making a brave run each time only to see Lucy pull it away.

At the king’s funeral in 1999, O’Connell met Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad chief who was also, in his way, Hussein’s case officer. “You had a leader here with his hand out,” he bluntly tells Halevy. “I think you blew it.” Reading this book, it’s hard to disagree with that judgment.

What’s the lesson of O’Connell’s memoir for today, when President Barack Obama is contemplating a speech soon laying out one more American peace plan? Simply this: Don’t play games. State the U.S. parameters for negotiation as clearly and unambiguously as possible. The heart of this deal is the same as it was in 1967: An exchange of occupied territory in return for a just peace that recognizes Israel’s right to exist. Get it done this time, or don’t try.

Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR.

Governments make mistakes. But if they’re smart, they learn from them. If the Israeli government is sensible, it will use the uproar provoked by its attack on a flotilla of relief ships to rethink its policies for Gaza and the region.

Israeli commandos stormed the ships early Monday in an effort to enforce their blockade on the Gaza Strip and thereby weaken the grip of the Hamas movement there. But like many of Israel’s hard-nosed operations lately, this one backfired, and it’s useful to think about why.

Let’s start by conceding all the obvious points made in Israel’s defense: It is combating a terrorist adversary in Gaza; its friends in Europe and the United States are increasingly unreliable; its key Muslim ally, Turkey, is buddying up with Iran; and the Turkish organizers of the Gaza relief mission have links with the Israel haters in Hamas.

All true, and from an Israeli standpoint, infuriating. But it’s a situation where a wise leader should hedge his bets rather than roll the dice with a showy commando operation at sea.

The immediate problem for Israel is that the Gaza blockade is not sustainable. It is producing the opposite of the intended outcome: Hamas strengthens its control in Gaza while Israel becomes more isolated internationally.

Worse, the blockade invites challenges from pro-Hamas militants and well-meaning humanitarian groups alike. The ships boarded on Monday were carrying 10,000 tons of relief assistance, plus hundreds of activists and peaceniks from across Europe armed with cell phones and video cameras. And more such voyages are said to be planned.

Recognizing that the flotilla would be a public-relations problem, the Israelis had been talking with the Turkish government about how to deliver the supplies without a confrontation. Evidently, that compromise approach failed and the commandos staged their attack in international waters, about 112 kilometers off the Israeli coast. The passengers onboard fought back, the shooting started and at least nine of the activists were killed.

Why did Israel choose such a high-risk option? The answer is that over many years, Israel has become accustomed to unchallenged freedom of military action in the Middle East. Operating boldly and often far from home, it has attacked and intimidated its adversaries. This confrontational approach worked brilliantly when Israel’s foes were backward guerrillas and incompetent Arab armies, but it has been less successful in the era of the internet and missile proliferation. And military supremacy tempted Israel into ever-greater risk-taking. A prime example is the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which many Israelis would argue left their nation less secure than before.

By attacking the relief flotilla, Israel picked a fight with Turkey, a more dangerous foe than Hamas. The quarrel has been brewing for the last several years, and it’s a huge strategic change in the Middle East. Once Israel’s most important regional ally, Turkey now seeks to challenge Israel’s hegemony as the local superpower. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a Muslim populist with charismatic message: We won’t let Israel push us around. Where Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often a buffoon, Erdogan is a genuinely tough if erratic rival.

The Turkish challenge was voiced Tuesday by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who likened the Israeli attack to “pirates off the coast of Somalia.” He warned at a breakfast meeting of reporters: “Now it is time to decide: Are we in a civilized world, or do some continue to have the law of the jungle? If it is the second, we know what to do.”

How can Israel and the United States learn from mistakes and bend this crisis toward a better outcome? The answer is to use the fact that this has become an Israel-Turkey standoff, rather than just a Gaza problem. Turkey has regional ambitions, but it isn’t a crazy terrorist enclave and it doesn’t spout Holocaust-denying rhetoric. It’s a big, strong country that wants to be a power broker. There should be a way to satisfy Turkey’s hunger for respect without weakening Israel.

The right diplomatic formula should also involve the United Nations, an institution that Israel normally mistrusts, with good reason. Israel has been unable to resolve the Gaza mess on its own; it should turn now to the Security Council for help. That begins with a United Nations investigation of what happened off the Israeli coast. Israel needs to embrace the paradox: Sometimes the best way to manage an intractable problem is to internationalize it.

Israel's new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, seemed perplexed during his visit to Washington this month: At a time when America and Israel agreed on all the big issues -- from Iran and North Korea to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- how could the little issue of Israeli settlements on the West Bank get in the way?

When he met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Lieberman questioned the U.S. demand for a freeze on settlement construction, including the "natural growth" of existing settlements. "We can't suffocate ourselves: Babies are born, people get married. At minimum, we must provide for a normal way of life for these people," Lieberman told Clinton, according to a senior Israeli official.

Israeli protests like this usually have had the desired effect. Administrations called publicly for a halt in settlement construction, but they acquiesced in private to the realities of Israeli politics. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must have assumed that he could play the same game, blunting the White House by appealing to Israel's supporters in Congress.

But this time, the settlements game has been different. The Obama administration has surprised the Israelis by its unyielding insistence on a freeze as a prelude to peace negotiations. And key members of Congress have backed the administration's position.

That doesn't mean any breakthroughs are imminent, however. The more the administration pressures Israel, the more concessions the Arabs seem to want.

The tough line on settlements starts with President Obama, who made clear his opposition from his first days in office. He is backed by Vice President Biden and by Clinton, both former senators and longtime supporters of Israel.

An influential hawk on the issue is Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a former member of the House Democratic leadership. Emanuel has special credibility as a strong defender of Israel's security. His father was born in Jerusalem and was a member of the militant underground organization known as the Irgun.

Emanuel's view is that settlements are not a security issue for Israel but a domestic political problem. According to a senior White House official, Emanuel has argued that if the Israelis insist on expanding settlements, "You're doing it on your own dime. We don't want our credibility to be compromised as you work out your domestic politics. We're not going to pay for that one."

What has surprised the Israelis, says the White House official, is that "for umpteen years, they've been trained to hear one thing from America on settlements but see us do another. It takes some adjustment."

The White House believes that if it comes to a showdown, Netanyahu will compromise. His coalition government, the administration reasons, is too weak to sustain an open break with its key ally, the United States. If Netanyahu defies the United States, his coalition will splinter. The administration is already talking with Ehud Barak, the Labor Party leader and defense minister, who might form a new government if Netanyahu falls.

It's a hardheaded strategy, but it has one big flaw: The Obama team is assuming that if it can pressure Israel into a real settlements freeze, the Arabs will respond with meaningful moves toward normalization of relations -- which will give Israel some tangible benefits for its concessions. But that hope appears to be misplaced.

"What will I do in exchange for a settlements freeze? Nothing," says a senior Arab diplomat. "We're not interested in confidence-building, or a step-by-step approach," he continues. Instead, the Arabs would like Obama to spell out the details of a final agreement, now. "Unless we define the endgame, this will be a road map to nowhere," the Arab diplomat argues.

A settlements halt would produce some limited Arab response. Trade or diplomatic contacts might be revived by countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and others. But Saudi Arabia, the Arab kingpin, probably wouldn't offer major concessions until the negotiating process was further along.

The settlements issue illustrates why the Arab-Israeli problem drives people crazy. Even if you achieve a breakthrough, there's always another snag ahead. White House officials grumble about Israeli intransigence, but they're also worried about "squishy" Arab promises and demands for preconditions. "Don't keep faxing it in, saying I gave you a peace plan in 2002," complains the senior White House official.

Welcome to the Middle East, Mr. President. You said in your Cairo speech that resolving this problem would require patience. You got that part right, for sure.