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.”

If former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were dead he would be turning in his grave. In the few short months since his incapacitation, the new strategic concept that he championed for the Gaza Strip, like its model on Israel's northern frontier with Lebanon, has been all but destroyed by an Israeli military establishment that was never reconciled to it and by a newly installed civilian leadership that chose not to confront the generals.

Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again is still possible on Israel's Palestinian front, where the betrayal of Sharon's plan, for all the destruction wreaked on Gaza, can be remedied. But Israel's ill-conceived adventure in Lebanon represents sweet revenge for militants in Israel who continue to be seduced by the idea of a Lebanese protectorate first outlined in the abortive May 17, 1983, peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, a fantastic idea that can only be realized, if at all, in the aftermath of a terrible regional war that threatens to unfold.

Say what you want about Sharon, it is near certain that he would never have been bamboozled into the war that the generals, cheered on by Washington, sold his successor Ehud Olmert in the few short hours after Hizbullah forces attacked Israel and captured two soldiers. As the architect of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Sharon saw his grand vision of domination over its northern neighbor, the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a massive transfer of Palestinian refugees to Jordan collapse into an Israeli commission of inquiry that forced him from the Defense Ministry.

Sharon went into what was to be a short-lived political exile, but Israel's occupation of the southern rump of Lebanon continued for 18 long and bloody years. Prime Minister Ehud Barak's 1999 campaign for the premiership was going nowhere until he promised to withdraw Israeli forces from the country. The Israeli public, though not the generals, was sick of sending sons to a foreign land that reliably hemorrhaged Israeli casualties. Israel's retreat across the border in May 2000 was viewed at the time as the end of a sad chapter in Israel's history, never to be repeated.

Barak has been noticeably absent from the parade of Israeli generals and politicians who have filled Israel's airwaves these last weeks. The Lebanese model he fashioned was based upon the following logic: In the absence of a comprehensive peace agreement with Syria, Israel and Hizbullah, each through unilateral moves, established new "rules of the game" to contain their continuing rivalry within acceptable military limits. Aware of the terrible damage that each party could inflict upon the other - in civilian dislocation if not on the field of battle - an uneasy truce held for six years.

Unlike Hizbullah, which articulated limited goals, Israel, nominally lead by Olmert and the cheerleading of the Bush administration, expanded Washington's "war on terror" to include the ruination of an already fragile Lebanese political system - once championed in Washington - that is an inescapable part of the "collateral damage" accompanying the desired destruction of Hizbullah's military and political power. Within days, but not quickly enough for still-suffering civilians in both nations, attainment of these fantastic and radical objectives proved to be beyond Israel's military capacity. Even in the wake of this strategic failure, insistence upon "searing defeat into the consciousness" of Hizbullah and its regional patrons still risks widening the war to Syria, opening the gates of hell to a regional war.

Despite the failure of its overriding objective of employing force to destroy and not merely tame Hizbullah, the strategic concept that Israel is pursuing resembles nothing if not the objectives outlined in the ill-fated May 17, 1984 peace treaty initialed a generation ago. This document, which has yet to be mentioned in the cascade of commentary accompanying the war, represents the last time Israel, victorious on the battlefield, defined its vision for Lebanon. Israel demanded what was then described as a special "security region" including most of Lebanon south of the Litani River overseen by Israel and its local militia, the US, and troops of a pliant regime in Beirut.

The current demand for international supervision of the Lebanese-Syrian border, and the creation of a security zone monitored and enforced by the hapless Lebanese Army and foreign troops reflect ever greater hubris than Sharon showed as he surveyed his conquests from the palace at Baabda.

A more expeditious and less perilous return to sanity can be hoped for in Gaza, where ironically, the stakes are not as high. Here Sharon's strategic concept, retreat from Gaza and the maintenance of an uneasy standoff between Israeli and Palestinian forces of all stripes, can be resurrected, and perhaps even improved. The main ingredients of such a deal are an exchange including Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, and Palestinian politicians held hostage; a more explicit cease-fire entailing an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; an end to its operations there and in the West Bank; and an Israeli readiness to enable a more disciplined effort lead by the Palestinian Authority to "unify the security services" in support of a renewed truce.

These will not in and of themselves signal a stable accommodation between Israel and the ruling Hamas movement. Without them, however, the soldiers on both sides will command the battlefield.

Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, DC.

The policy debate in Washington sparked by the parliamentary victory of Hamas has ended. The decision is taken: support for a soft coup against the democratically elected government of Palestine. There is logic to this policy. The Hamas victory removed the fundamental rationale underlying American support for Palestinian self-government. Institutions such as the Palestinian Authority (PA) and particularly its security agencies were creations of the Oslo era. They were central in consolidating the power of Palestinian organizations opposed to Hamas. Indeed their mandate, at least in Washington's view, was to crush the Islamists who, unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization, were not partners of Israel and the U.S. Certainly, Hamas views its success at the polls as a mandate to reinvent national institutions from Parliament to the PLO to reflect the movement's new status as the democratic choice of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The Bush administration, however, sees no reason to support those it considers terrorists in consolidating their power over institutions conceived to do the very opposite.

The problem with the policy adopted by the United States is that it will not work. Indeed, it is more likely to strengthen Islamists of all stripes and continue the political emasculation of secular Palestinian nationalists.

The historical record of both Israel and the U.S. lends credence to this pessimistic view. It will be remembered that Israel and the U.S. were similarly stunned by the victory of Palestinian nationalist forces affiliated with the PLO in municipal West Bank elections in 1976. Israel, in an effort to undue the results, eventually deported most of the winners. Others were maimed in failed assassination attempts by Israeli right-wing groups. Israel sponsored the organized thuggery of some Palestinian groups like the Village Leagues and supported others like the Islamist forerunner of Hamas in an effort to stem the rising fortunes of the secular nationalists. The one thing Israel and the U.S. never did, however, was to recognize the connection between occupation and Jewish settlement-building in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, and the growing power of those Palestinian groups embodying the popular hope for liberation and sovereignty.

The PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which once embodied these hopes, has now lost the initiative to Hamas. Nostalgia for an era that has passed by is not a policy, but it remains a key expectation of the Bush administration, which is betting that the Palestinians will return Fatah to power if Hamas can be made to fail. However, turning to Fatah as the default option is at odds with the conclusions so famously expressed in Cairo last year by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who declared that the decades- long U.S. policy of supporting autocrats in order to achieve stability had failed.

Let's assume that Washington still believes, despite Rice's pronouncement, that the U.S. can benefit by allying itself to such forces. To the extent that Fatah is seen as America's choice, particularly in an environment where U.S. policy is hostile to the choices Palestinians themselves have made, the organization's rehabilitation in the public's eye and much-needed internal reform are even less likely.

Money is the instrument of choice in this misguided, not to mention heartless, effort to change the complexion of Palestinian politics on the cheap. Washington has made a simple, or rather a simplistic, calculation. If the PA can be starved of cash by Western donors, either Hamas will be domesticated and thus become an acceptable interlocutor; or, more likely, Palestinians will desert an unreconstructed Hamas for secular reformers more deserving of Washington's approval.

It should be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity of the region's history that efforts to use money as an instrument either to improve the quality of life of Palestinians or to punish them, while avoiding more fundamental policy changes, will prove to be particularly crude, unimaginative, and ineffective. Washington is embracing an assumption more suited to the laboratory than to real life - that Palestinians' choices can be reduced to the size of their breakfast.

Full bellies, however, will never solve the problem at the heart of Palestinian opposition to the status quo, and there is no reason to believe that denying Palestinians employment, medical care, sewage systems, or advice on containing avian flu will do so. In fact, such a policy would be exploited by Hamas to mobilize popular support for its refusal to surrender Palestinian rights in exchange for outside assistance. It is difficult to see Palestinians choosing, instead, to vote in accordance with American preferences. Yet this is the operative assumption guiding U.S. policy - a soft coup where bread, not tanks, is used to undermine an elected regime.

This policy turn by the U.S. is also at odds with its own conclusion that the economic rehabilitation of the Occupied Territories, where Palestinian GDP is today 30 percent less than it was on the eve of the intifada in September 2000, is vital to peace and stability.

The Bush administration, by embracing Palestinian insecurity and penury as policy objectives, is not alone in abandoning guidelines it once championed. Israel, by withdrawing from Gaza and pursuing similar policies in the West Bank, and the Palestinians, by electing Hamas, have chosen paths inconsistent with past practice. Each in its own way is looking forward, however, while the U.S. alone assumes there is an advantage in looking backward. Washington is making a fool's bet that its interests can best be served by exacerbating the economic disaster wrought by the occupation, in the hope of restoring publicly discredited and unreformed Palestinian leaders to power.

Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.

As Israel votes today, the country's evacuation of the Gaza Strip in September of last year and the unanticipated parliamentary victory by Hamas in January are related elements of a new political and security environment being built on the ruins of the Oslo era. Israel's unilateralism strikes at the heart of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' absolute reliance on negotiations as the key to independence. Hamas, on the other hand, views Israel's departure from Gaza as a victory for its strategy of "armed struggle."

Israel's security doctrine toward Gaza in this new era offers important insights into Israel's emerging strategy vis-a-vis the West Bank. In the new relationship with Gaza that Israel is attempting to establish, the strip becomes a foreign country rather than an unruly province of the Israeli armed forces, where the rules of war, not occupation, prevail. In post-disengagement Gaza, Israel counts upon its ability to use superior military assets to act when and wherever and with whatever instruments it chooses.

Implicit in this concept is Israel's grudging acceptance of the creation of a Palestinian military capability in Gaza of the kind it had previously opposed. Palestinian groups have not only increased the types and quality of their Gaza arsenals since disengagement, some of them continue to fire an array of missiles and mortars into Israel. Despite its preferences, the Israeli military has presided over the creation of a comparatively benign form of attrition on its border with Gaza.

Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Hamas' legislative victory highlight the paralyzing dilemma for the Palestinian Authority (PA) created by the Oslo agreements. If the PA has a security doctrine, it was one that was turned on its head during the Oslo era. The authority is precluded by design and function from defending itself and its people against Israeli actions. Palestinian security has been redefined to mean the suppression of Palestinian acts of violent resistance against Israel. Abbas lacks a mandate from his own public to outlaw actions of armed groups, even when these descend into terrorism, gang violence and hooliganism.

Hamas opposes the PLO's core strategy of entering into negotiations with Israel without reserving the option of the use of force. And it rejects the decision to elevate the resumption of talks to the level of a strategic objective. As Israel's policy of unilateralism matured and its decision to retreat from Gaza was implemented, Hamas, along with many Palestinians, saw the organization's critical assumptions vindicated. Hamas' decisions to support a truce, to contest national elections, and to explore conditions under which to engage Israel in negotiations are inter-related elements of a design borne of a changing environment sparked by the Israeli disengagement and the implosion of the PA. This trend suggests a willingness to employ instruments other than force or terror in pursuit of national objectives of liberation and domestic rehabilitation. But, in large part because of the failed precedent established by the PLO during the Oslo era, Hamas sees no purpose in surrendering the option to use force.

Hamas aspires to recreate on the Gaza frontier the kind of relative stability that had characterized Israel's border with Lebanon (and still does in the Shebaa Farms area). Hamas supports the evolution of understandings, or "rules of the game," on the Lebanese model, of the kind that have in fact evolved between the movement and Israel since the disengagement.

Hamas is unlikely to dismantle the Palestinian capability to employ force, one of a host of policy changes demanded by Israel and the West in order to admit the organization to polite company. In the movement's view the record of those Palestinian who have done so is not worth emulating. But just as it condemns Abbas for embracing negotiations as a strategic option, it must be careful that support for the use of force not degenerate into an absolute value in itself, and into an undisciplined preference for violence and terror for its own sake. The challenge for all parties to the conflict is to craft a political and diplomatic framework in which tools other than force and violence become the effective option of choice for all concerned.

Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.

Israel's reoccupation of the entire West Bank in Spring 2002 (Operation Defensive Shield) ended many of the limited powers exercised by the Palestinian Authority. Subsequent measures championed by Israel have deconstructed nominally Palestinian territories into an ever-more complex, almost indecipherable maze of administrative, territorial, legal, and security spaces, lacking territorial coherence and administrative transparency.

These physical divisions throughout the West Bank are caused by settlements, their infrastructure, and transportation links. Palestinians and the international community have not effectively challenged Israeli demands to assure the security of settlements and their inhabitants, expansively defined by Israel - even though these demands make the effective exercise and expansion of Palestinian authority across the rump of isolated, disjointed territories which Israel desires neither for settlement or security all but impossible.

The points at which these myriad spaces meet - checkpoints, crossing points, and the separation barrier winding its way through the West Bank and East Jerusalem - highlight the conflicts, inefficiencies, and suffering produced by Israeli policy. These hardships are not the unintended by-product of policies carelessly planned or implemented. Rather, they are the inevitable consequence of an arbitrary and lawless regime of occupation.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intended to solidify the physical separation of Palestinians from settler communities within the West Bank and also between the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Israel in security, territorial, and economic dimensions. The creation of the physical infrastructure to support this policy is well advanced. Should he choose, Sharon's successor will not easily be able to reverse it.

The physical separation of settlers from their Palestinian environment relies on the creation of settlement blocs linked territorially to Israel. This continuity is contrasted by a patchwork of Palestinian areas whose territorial and administrative coherence has been sacrificed to Israeli settlement requirements, and whose linkages to other Palestinian areas, when available, are often limited to narrow corridors of "transportation contiguity."

Palestinian access from the West Bank to Israel is soon to be subject to strict, "hard" border-like controls on the Gaza Strip's Erez model at a limited number of crossing points. Access from the Gaza Strip to Israel will continue to decline, and the creation of a regular and efficient transit route between Gaza and the West Bank, despite Israeli promises to the contrary, will not be realized, certainly not as long as claims for its implementation are based upon premises Israel no longer recognizes as binding.

"Win-Win" solutions of the kind promoted by the international community have been all but impossible to implement. No one today is claiming, as Israel did in the early decades of occupation, that the system Israel is now imposing will revitalize the Palestinian economy, enhance the quality of life, or enable everyone to "live together forever" under benevolent Israeli rule. Israel long ago abandoned its claim that settlers and settlements do not harm their Palestinian "neighbors." Indeed well-intentioned efforts are being made by Palestinians, Israelis, and the international community to reduce the catastrophic economic and social dislocations that the system is producing in a quixotic effort to approximate the creation of a benign economic and territorial space divided into separate and territorially coherent Israeli and Palestinian political entities.

The conceptual framework adopted by the international community - whether in its policy towards settlements, security, or border management - reflects the misplaced notion that a hostile occupation dedicated to the large-scale theft of land for civilian settlement and thus lawless by nature, can be run according to standards that are above all fair.

Internationally-led efforts to encourage a regime of law are a misconceived and ultimately unrealizable substitute for a principled demand to dismantle settlements and to end occupation. For example, a recent World Bank report, "The Palestinian Economy and the Prospects for its Recovery," is guardedly hopeful that the November 15, 2005 agreement on the operation of crossing points from Gaza "has the potential to transform border management - from a unilateral, security-based model to one which is cooperatively managed and seeks a sustainable balance between security and economics." Such a system, if it could be created, would not be an occupation of the kind Israel operates in the occupied territories. But occupation - brutal, arbitrary, and opaque - with settlement at its heart, continues to define relations between Israel and Palestinians today.

Contrary to the claims of Israeli officials, completion of the separation barrier later this year will not materially affect the draconian closure regime that now defines life for Palestinians in the West Bank, as long as the requirement to protect settlers and the maintenance of their "normal lives" remains paramount, and as long as Palestinians resist this state of affairs. As the World Bank report gingerly acknowledges, "as the separation barrier is completed, it can be assumed that threats to Israel will no longer constitute the core rationale for internal closure (any more than it does in fenced-off Gaza), leaving the protection of Israeli movement in the West Bank [i.e., the protection of settlers] as the key factor. Given this, and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, an early return to the September 28, 2000 status quo in the West Bank would seem unlikely."

The international community hopes that the efficient, transparent operation of crossing points will take the harsh edge off continuing occupation. But settlements, as the World Bank report notes, are at the core of the closure regime and the associated restrictions on Palestinian movement that have impoverished the country. "Current GOI [Government of Israel] policy," the report notes, "protects settlements and settler access by restricting Palestinian traffic on key highways, and this conflicts with the need to restore movement between towns, villages and the borders .... The system of closures detailed in the Bank's December 2004 report is still largely in place, and remains the key risk to rapid, sustained Palestinian economic recovery."

The World Bank report also acknowledges that the Palestinian Authority is justifiably concerned that to the extent that international efforts are aimed at tinkering with this system, "a dialogue of this kind between donors and GOI could be construed as acceptance of the legality of settlements." That indeed is Israel's objective: to compel Palestinians and the international community to recognize the legitimacy of its settlement enterprise.

The writer is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, DC.