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.”

Some residents of Gaza were taken from their homes and shot in the legs or feet. Some were brutally beaten, and some were simply murdered, sometimes after hideous torture. If you are expecting -- based on everything that has happened -- that the awful Israelis did this, guess again. It was Hamas, the authentic and genuine government of Gaza. Well, no one's perfect.

The information about the shootings is taken from a report issued yesterday by Human Rights Watch. It says that "Hamas security forces or masked gunmen believed to be with Hamas" executed 18 people, most of whom were accused of collaborating with Israel, sparing the expense and bother of a trial. Others were shot, maimed or beaten, not for allegedly collaborating with the enemy -- or, as is often the case, having a house or woman that a snitch covets -- but for belonging to the opposition political party, Fatah.

Many of these murders and assaults took place during Israel's recent pummeling of Gaza. Yet, as Human Rights Watch goes to some pains to document, at no time did Hamas's security forces lose control of Gaza, so the murders and maimings were not a consequence of chaos but of government policy. Whatever the case, the murders, shootings and beatings continued even after the hostilities ended. Since then, at least 14 more people have been executed extrajudicially, which is to say murdered. Some were also tortured.

You can only imagine what would happen if Israel dealt with its internal political enemies or dissenters in such a fashion. Last month, for instance, Israel got a heap of criticism and abuse when it was reported in the Israeli media that some Gaza civilians had been unjustifiably shot by Israeli soldiers. The report was widely cited, not just for its shocking allegations but also because it was supposedly indicative of the sort of place Israel has become. The government said the allegations were based on hearsay. We shall see.

No doubt the Human Rights Watch report will be ignored or dismissed in the greater cause of demonizing Israel. This has been the trend of late. No doubt, too, some will excuse Hamas's criminality as the inevitable result of Israeli actions -- the Officer Krupke School of Behavior made famous by the singing gang members of "West Side Story." But as much as some would like to criticize Israel -- and I have done so myself -- they still have a minimal obligation to acknowledge the difference in core values between Israel and its enemies.

This does not mean that Israel is above criticism. After all, it has made life unbearable for some Palestinians, supported illegal settlements in the West Bank, been too harsh in squeezing Gaza, and, maybe most important, it ought to get out of the West Bank -- for reasons of justice and for its own sake. Still, it remains unimaginable that Israel would murder its domestic critics or silence dissent with the occasional kneecapping. These are the tactics of thugs.

Read the Hamas charter. It is not some uplifting cry of a downtrodden people seeking its freedom but a repellent anti-Semitic screed. It sees the Jews behind every major world event since the storming of the Bastille: "They were behind the French revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions . . . for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests." The Rotary? The Lions? Why not Welcome Wagon?

When Israelis talk of the practical difficulties of pulling out of the West Bank, they mean the likelihood that Hamas will oust Fatah and launch rockets into Israel. They are both concerned and appalled by a Hamas charter that, in part, reads like it could have been written by Hitler. Withdrawal is necessary and right, but it cannot be done naively and without the participation of the United States. It's going to take American peacekeepers. It is that simple. No Israeli can trust Hamas to keep the peace.

Human Rights Watch is to be commended. It does not have one standard for Israel and another for Hamas, Hezbollah or the other despotic regimes of the Arab world. That is more than can be said, though, for critics who vilify Israel, romanticize Hamas and clearly have never had the inexpressible pleasure of living in a place where a chance remark can get your legs riddled with lead. Say what you will, but that place could never be Israel.

A strange thing happened to me while reading "The Israel Lobby" by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. I went from nodding at the obviousness of it all -- of course there's an Israel lobby, and of course it's effective -- to a mounting irritation at the supposed unrelenting mendacity of Israel and the unrelenting assurance of the authors that they supported its existence. By the time I put down the book, occasional critic of Israel though I am, I was ready to burst into "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem.

The book, which almost instantly made Amazon's list of bestsellers (right below the Harry Potter paperback boxed set, when I last checked), has produced the sort of intellectual and emotional storm you don't have to be Jewish to understand -- but it sure helps. Mearsheimer and Walt have been called anti-Semitic by the New York Sun (among others), and they have been praised as gutsy truth-tellers by elements of the British press (among others), an irony we shall return to in a moment. My own reading of the book found no evidence of anti-Semitism but also no evidence that either man has an ounce of sympathy for Israel. They swear they support its existence, but if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, I doubt they would reach for the hankies.

That's okay. No one has an obligation to love or admire Israel, and it is undoubtedly true, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, that the Jewish state is no longer a strategic asset to the United States, if it ever was. It is, after all, a tiny country with no oil that is loathed by neighboring countries that have lots of oil. Not only that, but these neighboring countries also produce many of the world's terrorists, and while it is debatable whether Israel is always their No. 1 concern, it's certainly way up there. For the United States to remain Israel's wingman can hardly be characterized as being in our self-interest.

The argument can be made also that America's policy of supporting almost anything the Israeli government does -- from permitting West Bank settlements to launching disastrous wars such as last summer's in Lebanon -- is no good for Israel, either. Certainly, the so-called Israel lobby, mostly funded and controlled by conservative elements in the American Jewish community, has done Israel no favor by not criticizing West Bank settlements or the harsh treatment of Palestinians. Friends don't allow friends to build settlements.

All these points are made by Mearsheimer and Walt -- and bully for them. Where Israel is wrong, they say so. But where Israel is right, they are somehow silent. By the time you finish the book, you almost have to wonder why anyone in his right mind could find any reason to admire or like Israel. It is always doing the most dastardly things and then looking to Uncle Sam either for money or muscle. It is, no doubt about it, a brat among nations.

Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent foreign policy realists. Realists bring out the scales for every problem, weighing every element. They are forbiddingly rational -- all mind, no heart. To their credit, they were right about opposing the invasion of Iraq, arguing that Saddam Hussein was no threat to America's national security and that his purported link to al-Qaeda was concocted. And in their fashion they are right, too, about Israel; it is a strategic liability.

But so, in a way, is Britain. Who needs that soggy isle, scepter'd or not? In a fight, it would be of little consequence. In 2006, Britain spent about $60 billion on its military. The United States spent $529 billion. You could argue, therefore, that Britain is a strategic burden -- and some made precisely that argument in the run-up to World War II.

There are factors, though, that move the scale not at all but have an incalculable weight nonetheless. Who and what are we as a nation if we measure everything by self-interest? Who and what are we as a nation if we abandon our friends, blowing empty kisses to them as we cut them loose? Who and what are we as a nation if we don't calculate the incalculable: Values? Principles? For me, the answer is plain. This would be an emotionally arid place. I don't know the national anthem for oil.

In the end, Mearsheimer and Walt disappoint. They had an observation worth making and a position worth debating. But their argument is so dry, so one-sided -- an Israel lobby that leads America around by the nose -- they suggest that not only do they not know Israel, they don't know America, either.

The lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel here looks as it always has. The reception desk is to the right, the jewelry shop is off to the left, and straight ahead is the lounge area -- no hint that back in 2005, suicide bombers walked into this and two other hotels here and killed 59 people. Since then, nothing much has happened. Call it the quiet after the storm -- or, more likely, the quiet before the storm resumes.

Jordan, this oil-less concoction of a Middle East state, is as good a place as any to grasp the extent of the American debacle in Iraq. Jordan is also a place to understand that the debacle is not solely an American one and that the debate in Washington -- cut and run, stay the course, surge, don't surge -- has a meaning here far beyond domestic politics or even international morality. Soon, this country could have an awful fight on its hands.

Here is the scenario: The implication of a U.S. withdrawal/defeat would not be lost on any of the region's many extremist groups -- Hamas in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; al-Qaeda all over the place; and Iran behind the curtain, the puppet master of much regional terrorism. A withdrawal would empower, enthuse and just plain excite these groups. If America can be defeated in Iraq, then why not Jordan in Jordan or Egypt in Egypt -- to name just two pro-American regimes in this neck of the woods -- followed, of course, by the final battle with Israel? This is not the way the so-called war on terrorism was supposed to go.

Of course, it may not. The end of Jordan's Hashemite monarchy has been predicted with absolute assurance for as long as Hashemites have sat on the throne. The same holds for the House of Saud, just over the border in Saudi Arabia, or Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt. They have all endured. Among the lessons learned in Iraq, one hopes, is modesty. Predicting what will happen in this region is the work of fools.

But in the region itself, there is obvious nervousness. One can sense it in the language used by well-placed Jordanians -- the recurrent use of phrases such as "time is running out" and, in unguarded moments, a fusillade of invective directed at Washington. At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea, contempt for America was palpable. We have not just lost a war. We have lost our rep.

In a dank cave somewhere, Osama bin Laden must chuckle. He attacked New York and Washington and we, for some reason, not only attacked Afghanistan but an Arab state as well. Islamic radicals of all stripes can only consider such stupidity a gift from God. Now an emboldened movement can march on to attack the regimes it loathes the most -- Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. What's more, Israel -- another archenemy of the Islamic movement -- came a cropper in Lebanon last summer. It went after Hezbollah with a vengeance, but as someone here said with monumental satisfaction -- and some exaggeration -- where once Israel could go to Beirut at will, this time it got bogged down south of the Litani River. Hezbollah was hurt, not eradicated. And Israel never did get back its kidnapped soldiers. The region's two superpowers, America and Israel, have been severely humbled.

Still, the United States remains the essential player when it comes to forging any sort of deal between Israelis and Palestinians. This is why Jordan still looks to Washington in the vain hope that somehow the flat-footed Bush administration, until just recently smugly refusing to play the role that Bill Clinton did, will still manage to bring Palestinians and Israelis to the bargaining table. This might defuse tensions in the area, because the persistent humiliation of Palestine is felt keenly in Jordan. It is by far not the only problem, but its psychological and cultural significance cannot be overstated. At the Dead Sea forum, a Palestinian mother's recitation of what it was like just to take her child to school stirred -- and angered -- the audience. No Israeli was present to describe what it is like to be subjected to rocket fire from Gaza.

On the day I am writing this, the front page of the local newspaper reports many dead in fighting in Lebanon to the north, still more killed to the west in Gaza and more American soldiers dead to the east in Iraq. The region is in turmoil, maybe convulsing -- not what President Bush either promised or intended but surely what he abetted. He can take scant comfort from Jordan and its apparent tranquility. The lobby here, for example, looks just swell -- just as I remembered it before a suicide bomber walked in from reality and blew it up.

In Iran, the government overturned the convictions of six men who, among other things, killed a young couple because they were walking together in public. In China, local authorities seized about 60 women and forcibly aborted their pregnancies. In Russia, the Putin government expanded its control of the media. In Cuba . . . oh, well, you already know. But what you may not know is that given such a vast palette of injustice and depredations, the British National Union of Journalists made a truly original move: It singled out Israel to boycott.

The boycott, mind you, is not a journalistic one. Instead, it will extend to lemons and melons and that sort of thing. The boycott was issued as "a gesture of support for the Palestinian people," some of whom, as it happens, abducted a BBC correspondent, Alan Johnston. One group has claimed that it executed him, although no proof has been offered. Suffice it to say the situation is dire.

What possessed the journalist union's board -- in a vote of 66 to 54 -- to take such action? The question is worth posing because it followed a similar vote last year by British academics (later rescinded) to avoid, under pain of death or something, their Israeli colleagues. And, more important, it is yet another bleat, in Europe and in this country, from people and organizations that, for good reasons and bad, have simply had it with Israel. Why won't the pushy Jewish state shape up?

In some sense, it is a fair enough question. The wrongful and counterproductive occupation of the West Bank is now in its 40th year. Settlements continue to go up, and the government of Ehud Olmert, weak and hapless, is unable or unwilling to contain them. The government proved its incompetence in the Lebanon war of the summer past, managing to enhance Hezbollah's standing and not managing to retrieve the two captured soldiers in whose name the war was launched in the first place. For Israel -- but really for Lebanese civilians most of all -- the war was a disaster.

But Sudan kills by the score in Darfur and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe beats his opponents to a pulp, and in almost all of the Arab world there is no such thing as freedom of the press. In Israel there not only is, but the press is as rambunctious as can be found anywhere.

The British journalists say they are moved by the plight of the Palestinian people, and they are right to be. But the misery of a Gazan or a West Banker is not solely Israel's doing. The government of Gaza is the political arm of a terrorist organization, and if the West Bank is suffering -- and it is -- the cause is not only Israeli land lust but also a morbid Israeli fear of terrorism. British journalists would no doubt approve similar measures if London's city buses had not once but repeatedly been blown to smithereens by passengers with the exact fare and belts of explosives.

So what explains this fury at Israel -- and only at Israel? What explains this need to denounce, to boycott? Some of it surely comes from the uncritical support that Israel gets from the United States, which to lefties all over the world is a vile state, maybe worthy -- if it were not for jeans, movies and hip-hop -- of a boycott itself.

Some of it no doubt reflects frustration from the efforts of Jewish organizations to suffocate any criticism of Israel and to hurl the epithet "anti-Semite" at anyone with an odd bent to his thinking. But some of it, surely, is anti-Semitism itself, a rage at the impudent, pushy Jew and this state created in the midst of the Arab world. Forgotten, conveniently and appallingly, is history itself and the reason for Israel's creation. This does not excuse injustice to Palestinians, it merely explains. But it is an explanation so soaked with the blood of Jews as to seem utterly concocted: It cannot be! But it was.

The British journalists, like the academics before them, dare to tread where an army of goons has gone before. If they do not recognize the ember of anti-Semitism still glowing within them, they ought to park themselves before a mirror and ask why, of all the nations, they single out Israel for reprimand and obloquy. This business of assigning to Jews a special burden, for seeing in them more of mankind's bad qualities and less of its good, has a dark and ugly pedigree: the Chosen People, again -- and again in the wrong way.