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.”

What a timely article, “Israel and Palestinians have conflicting visions for village's future.” April is a good month for recalling the abandoned homes, towns and destroyed villages of what was once Palestine. It was the month in which my own family was forced to leave our home in Jerusalem. Contrary to the official Israeli version, still largely believed, that the Palestinian exodus of 750,000 people -- without which there would be no Israel today -- happened in the fog of war, people like me are living proof that many of us had been forced out of our homeland months earlier.

The Israeli version claims that during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, the Palestinians fled, as happens in wars everywhere, or were panicked into leaving by their leaders. For more than 60 years, this has served to absolve Israel of its culpability for that tragedy.

In fact, between January and May 1948, thousands of us were already leaving because of the violence and the deliberate tactics of the Jewish leadership intent on creating an empty space in which to erect a state. As a child, I remember seeing a poor Bedouin man walking down our street shot dead by Jewish snipers from an empty house opposite ours.

The people of Lifta (the village that The Times features), which is just three miles from my old neighborhood in west Jerusalem, were already fleeing in December 1947. The Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah and the Stern Gang, a Jewish dissident group, attacked the villagers with guns and hand grenades. By February 1948, most houses on the edge of the village had been demolished; the inhabitants fled in terror.

The same fate was intended for Katamon, where we lived. Increasing attacks on our street and its vicinity had the same desired effect as in Lifta. After January 1948, when the Semiramis Hotel on a street near ours was bombed by the Haganah, killing 26 people (a nightmare of horror that I dimly remember), the attacks against our neighborhood escalated. Families started leaving, fearful for their children and believing it would be a temporary evacuation. By the time we left, hardly any of our friends remained. The increasing danger around us forced my parents to leave. We took nothing with us, convinced it would not be long before we returned.

Terrible as this was when I look back, at least our street and our house still stand today. They were taken over by Jewish settlers and underwent various changes, but they largely remain. Yet I do not know which is worse: the hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel wiped out after 1948 and whose previous inhabitants can only hope to find through faded memories; the dozen villages left such as Lifta, still standing but ruined and depopulated; or, as in my case, my house being in the possession of strangers (New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner lives in an upper story added on later), who do not recognize my history or my right to my family home.

On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land. The physical destruction of the villages, the replacing of Palestinian names with Hebrew ones and the wholesale takeover of Palestinian culture, whether in food -- "Israeli falafel" -- or in the traditional Arab dabke dance, renamed the Israeli "hora," were all aimed at making the world forget there had ever been anyone other than Jews in the Holy Land.

Through the work of Israeli filmmaker Benny Brunner, I have discovered another refinement of this cultural theft: the takeover of private Palestinian book collections, including ours. After 1948, Israeli officials took what books they found from abandoned Palestinian homes. Tens of thousands were looted in this way. Some of them remain in the Israeli National Library today, designated abandoned property. Brunner is currently making a film of this, "The Great Book Robbery."

Palestinians have never accepted our enforced oblivion. We are fighting to tell our history, win a future of political freedom and secure the return of refugees forced from their homes and never allowed to return. For these reasons, the battle to preserve Lifta must be won -- its remains a physical memorial of injustice and survival.

What an irony that the Palestinians' arch-enemy, Israel, should also be their saviour. There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the needs of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades, if not for ever.

Fortunately this will not happen as long as Israel's obduracy can be relied on to save the Palestinians from such an outcome.

Time and again, when Israel was thrown a lifeline by Arab neighbours that could have ensured its legitimacy and security, its folly and greed lost it those opportunities. But, since they came at great cost to Palestinian rights, Israel's obduracy had the perverse effect of safeguarding those rights.

All peace proposals after 1967 were based on maintaining Israel as a regional power and forcing the Palestinians to settle for less than they were entitled to. They were repeatedly offered paltry colonies that legitimised Israel's hold on most of their land and undermined their right of return. Had Israel agreed, the Palestinian cause would have been lost long ago.

Israeli refusal

When in the 1979 Camp David negotiations Egypt sought to give the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza a basis for a future independent state, Israel refused. It spurned a succession of Arab peace proposals, most recently the Saudi plan of 2002, offering Israel peace and recognition in return for a Palestinian state. And when, in the 1993 Oslo Accords, the PLO finally capitulated and accepted Israel's occupation of Palestine's remnants so long as it would end and enable the establishment of an independent state on this morsel, Israel responded by taking more land.

Decades of Israeli rejection and the reality of Israel's power with western support finally persuaded the Palestinian leadership to get what it could, in this hostile environment. Where once Palestinians fought against dispossession and for their right to reparation and return, today's browbeaten leadership has settled for a set of aspirations that bear little relation to rights or justice. It is this defeated leadership, reportedly under US pressure to attend or have Palestinian Authority funding withdrawn, which will take part in the talks.

The aim is a two-state settlement, which will supposedly end the conflict. The parameters are familiar from past peace proposals, and grossly unfair to the Palestinians. Historic Palestine will be partitioned roughly along the 1967 lines into a Jewish state on 78 per cent of the land, plus an undefined area of the West Bank also to become Israeli, and a Palestinian state on the remainder — less than 20 per cent. How much of occupied East Jerusalem will go to the Palestinians has not been determined, and there will be no return of refugees. Israel's prime minister has set conditions before the talks. Israel will keep the Jordan Valley, occupied Jerusalem will remain Israel's undivided capital, and the Palestinian state must be unarmed, with its borders and airspace under surveillance. Nothing will happen unless the Palestinians first recognise Israel as Jewish and guarantee its security.

Despite such preliminaries, the indications are that Israel is not serious about a deal. Its moratorium on colony building, which in any case excluded occupied East Jerusalem, will end on September 27. Israeli commentators are sceptical about Binyamin Netanyahu's intentions. Moty Cristal, a former Israeli prime ministerial adviser, believes he "is buying time, looking for ways to stay away from action on the ground". Nonetheless, President Obama, with mid-term elections looming, lacking a foreign policy success and focused on Iran, is determined to see a result.

How could that be achieved, within the constraints of an Israel that cannot be pressured and a weak, unrepresentative Palestinian leadership that excludes Gaza and Hamas? And since Israel's position rejects all the main Palestinian requirements — land, occupied Jerusalem, refugees — progress, if any, can only be made by demanding more concessions from the weaker side. This will mean less land available for the putative Palestinian state, reducing its viability. Hence Jordan's and Egypt's presence at the talks to work out a deal that provides an extension for the West Bank into Jordan, and Gaza into Egypt. No other permutation is possible. Israel will lose very little, but even this may be too much for its "greater Israel" proponents.

If some version of this scenario were to happen and the Palestinian side were bamboozled into agreeing, it would destroy the Palestinian cause and wreak havoc within Palestinian ranks. Such an outcome haunts many Palestinians, who neither trust nor respect the negotiators and think they might sign away Palestinians' rights. This may be unfair, but they can rest assured that if there is any possibility of a peace deal emerging from Washington, the Israeli side — if not theirs — will never let it happen.

Ghada Karmi is author of Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Imagine the scene: the United Nations General Assembly meets to discuss a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Unlike previous resolutions, which have been based on a Jewish state in most of historic Palestine with Palestinians relegated to the remnants, this one calls for a new state, covering what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the present and former inhabitants of which are equal under the law. Such a resolution has, in fact, already been drafted and discussions have begun to place it on the agenda at the UN.

The one-state solution is now part of mainstream discourse.

Increasingly, Palestinians -- and some Israelis -- support it as the only alternative to a Palestinian state subordinate to Israel. One-state groups have sprung up and conferences and studies are under way.

A UN resolution is the logical next step, underlining the issue's global importance and exposing the inequity and dishonesty of the two-state solution, replacing it with something fairer and more durable. It would be encapsulated in the following clauses, part of the draft UN resolution for a one-state solution, which has been under discussion for six months. Its principal authors are my fellow Palestinian Karl Sabbagh and myself:

"The general assembly notes the failure of recent efforts made by regional and international parties to resolve the conflict through the creation of two states; recalling the recent history of the former [Palestine] Mandate territory as a land where Arabs and Jews shared equal rights of habitation; reviewing Israel's non-compliance with UN Resolution 194, requiring Israel to repatriate the Palestinian refugees and its illegal conduct in the occupied territories.

"Calls upon representatives of Israel and Palestine to agree on behalf of their peoples to share the land between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan ... by setting up a state which is democratic and secular, in which the rights of all people living within its borders to freedom of worship, security, and equality under the law are enshrined in a new constitution, to replace the separate forms of government that apply in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza."

The two-state adherents will not approve. The United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary David Miliband, at his party conference last week, continued to argue for a two-state solution and Mahmoud Abbas is petitioning George Bush for the same thing. Both are on a hiding to nothing.

The pace of Israeli colonisation, unimpeded since 1967, redoubled after the Oslo accords, demonstrating Israel's aversion to a two-state solution.

By 2007 the West Bank Jewish settler population had reached 282,000. In East Jerusalem it rose to 200,000, massively Judaising the city and precluding it as a Palestinian capital. Today the West Bank is a jigsaw of settlements, bypass roads and barriers, making an independent state impossible. Gaza is a besieged enclave. In 2006 the UN special rapporteur in the Palestinian territories concluded that "a two-state solution is unattainable". Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg told Israeli daily Haaretz in June that time was running out for the two-state solution.

Scores of others have articulated the same view. The peace process predicated on the two-state solution is stagnant and a momentum has started towards the obvious alternative -- a unitary state. This month a new forum, encompassing Palestinian personalities from the occupied territories and outside, published a petition in the Arabic daily, Al-Hayat, to halt negotiations, annex the territories to Israel and demand equal rights in one state. This echoes many recent Palestinian demands to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and start an anti-apartheid-style campaign for equal rights.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has referred us to Robert Serry, the UN official responsible for the peace process, who stated that UN policy must conform to the Palestinian formal position, the two-state solution. A change in that position is not unthinkable. For our resolution to be discussed at the UN, a member state would have to present it and several are privately known to support our aims.

A unitary state is inevitable. Establishing an exclusive state defined along ethnic-religious lines and excluding its previous inhabi­tants was unjust and ultimately unsustainable. No political acrobatics will alter this. The sooner the UN, which unwisely created Israel in the first place, takes charge of the consequences, the better it will be for Palestinians, for Israelis and for the region as a whole.

Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, UK. (Originally published in the Mail & Guardian Online – www.mg.co.za)

During a conference in California in May of this year I was surprised to receive an invitation from two American activists to join their group, the Free Gaza Movement, on a boat trip to Gaza in August. They spoke of their determination to break the inhuman Israeli siege of Gaza by facing it head on. They would sail directly to Gaza's shores in boats laden with humanitarian supplies. At the time I thought them well meaning but unrealistic, even naïve, and I was sceptical about the success of their enterprise. I thought it unlikely it would ever take off, and an Israeli colleague, also invited, judged the Israeli navy would turn them back as soon as they sailed anywhere near to Gaza's shores.

I could not have been more mistaken. Undeterred by our hints of problems they might encounter, these determined people pressed on vigorously with their preparations over the months, and this week they set sail in several boats as planned from Cyprus to Gaza. All are unarmed volunteers, some 60 people from 17 countries, amongst whom is an 81-year-old nun and an 83- year old Holocaust survivor, as well as journalists, human rights activists, religious leaders and others. Tony Blair's sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, is one of them, determined to go where Blair, Middle East special envoy and peacemaker since 2007, has still not dared to penetrate. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Carter Center have both given the project their support. What risks the volunteers are taking and what dangers are ahead, we do not yet know. But even if this brave fleet of boats is forced to turn back and never reaches Gaza, the enterprise will be a monument to human decency and compassion that few of the apathetic millions who watch Gaza's tragedy from afar have shown.

The point that struck me most forcibly about this mission was that its organisers were non- Arabs. Filled with revulsion at the Warsaw Ghetto Israel has created in Gaza, they told me they felt driven to act. But this ghetto is Arab and sits in Arab land. So where were the Arab activists in this? Why was this not one of many Arab- organised attempts at breaking Gaza's siege? Where was the Arab refusal to stand by in the face of such oppression and injustice? The plight of Gaza almost beggars belief in its horror, a man-made catastrophe of starving people and malnourished children, without adequate fuel, electricity or medicines. All these depredations are well documented by humanitarian organisations, the United Nations and numerous eyewitnesses. President Jimmy Carter, quoted in The Guardian newspaper 8 May, summed it up: "The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished."

No one can deny Israel's signal role in creating this tragedy, nor the deplorable complicity of the US and its European partners in maintaining it. But we need to recognise the Arab role also in this victimisation of Gaza's people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Rafah crossing. Gaza's borders have been controlled by Israel for over 40 years. In June 2007, Israel sealed these borders almost completely. Soon after, it reduced humanitarian aid entering Gaza to a minimum and then cut off fuel and energy supplies to the Strip. The only window onto the outside world for the besieged Gazans opened through Rafah into Egypt, a fellow Arab country where surely they would find relief. Or so one might believe.

Following Israel's evacuation of its settlements from Gaza in 2005, a peculiar regime over the operation of the Rafah crossing was agreed whereby Egypt and the Palestinian Authority would control exit and entry. European representatives would monitor the crossing, coordinating with Israel, which had the power of veto over goods and people passing through. The Palestinian side tolerated this absurd and intrusive surveillance to attain some freedom of movement. This, however, never happened. The Rafah crossing is closed most of the time and when the Gazans in January this year, driven beyond endurance, broke through the wall shutting them off from Egypt, the latter quickly re-built it.

People and goods are routinely held up on both sides of the border. In the last two weeks, a consignment of 1.5 tonnes of medicines donated to Gaza by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign -- an organisation with modest means -- has been stuck at Rafah, denied entry by the Egyptian authorities, despite Scottish entreaties from parliamentarians and others. Earlier this month, five Palestinians were killed when Egyptian authorities blew up a tunnel under the border that they were using to smuggle supplies into Gaza. Though it is alleged that such tunnels are used for arms smuggling, the major traffic through them are ordinary provisions. Cutting those channels amounts to cutting any connection Gazans have with the outside world.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab world looks on, unable or unwilling to help the people of Gaza. Arab communities in the Diaspora are little better. They make charitable donations or support aid agencies, and talk about the tragedy of Gaza. But none has taken the bold and fearless action this emergency needs. Much has been written and said about Arab inertia in the face of blatant injustice, often at the hands of dictatorial regimes. Yet this cannot explain or justify the Arab position on Gaza. This should have been the rallying point for all Arabs to unite in rejection of a vicious punishment unjustly imposed on an innocent people. It could have been the first move to reinstate Palestine's cause to where it had been, at the heart of the Arab world. Not one, but a fleet of Arab ships should have visited Gaza daily to break the siege. It is an indictment of us all that it took a foreign crew and foreign volunteers to breach the walls of Gaza's prison and defy its cruel jailers.

The writer is a professor at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and author of Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine. (Originally published in Al Ahram Weekly – weekly.ahram.org.eg)