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.”

The Civil Administration issued the declaration after rejecting eight appeals by Palestinians against the move. A ninth appeal was accepted, and the land covered by this appeal was consequently removed from Efrat's jurisdiction.

However, construction is still a long way off. First, the Civil Administration must formally allocate the land to the Housing Ministry, which, under new rules adopted by Ehud Olmert's government, cannot be done without approval from both the prime minister and defense minister.

Then the Housing Ministry must give Efrat's local council a permit to start the usually long planning process, which involves securing permits from various agencies. Only then can the work of building some 2,500 housing units in the Givat Ha'eytam neighborhood begin.

Since the outcome of the elections makes it likely that the next government will lean more to the right than the current one, Efrat plans to wait until the new government takes office before submitting its request.

Efrat, with around 9,000 residents, is the largest settlement in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, and Givat Ha'eytam is the last unbuilt hill of the seven within the town's jurisdiction. Despite being the hill nearest Jerusalem, Ha'eytam lies outside the planned route of the separation fence, which has yet to be built in this area.

Gush Etzion is one of the settlement blocs that all Israeli governments have said they want to retain under any final-status agreement with the Palestinians.

"The state of Israel has become the enemy of the people and the land of Israel," settler rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe said Tuesday during an emergency meeting on the state's plan to evacuate a house in Hebron whose ownership has been at the center of a bitter dispute for over a year.

The four-story building became a flash point for tensions when settlers moved in early last year after claiming to have purchased it from a Palestinian. But the Palestinian denies the claim and Israeli authorities have not recognized the sale as legal.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday said the settlers will be evacuated from the building, but that defense officials will sit down with them first to try to persuade them to leave voluntarily.

The Supreme Court has given the settlers until noon Wednesday to leave the house. They say they aren't budging. The court says if the settlers do not leave willingly they will be evicted within 30 days.

The court ruled that the settlers must turn the house over to the state until a different court decides who the legal owner is.

"Anyone who tries to raise a hand at the peace house in Hebron will long for Amona, and will find that Amona was nothing," MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union- National Religious Party said, referring to the violent riots during the 2005 disengagement when Israeli authorities evacuated the Gush Katif settlement of Amona.

Some 1,000 Kiryat Arba residents attended the emergency meeting Tuesday, held at a local youth center, after the High Court on Sunday gave settlers three days to voluntarily vacate the house or force will be used to evacuate them.

Immediately following the meeting, participants accompanied four new families into what has been called by some the "house of contention."

Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, the head of the Nir yeshiva in Kiryat Arba, responded to rabbi Wolpe's remarks, saying "the state of Israel is not the enemy of the people of Israel. She belongs to us, to every last Jew. Stop this nonsense. We are fighting against those who want to enforce lies and perversions of justice, those who have disconnected themselves from Judaism and Zionism and the land of Israel, against those who have ceased to believe in the natural justice that Israel belongs to the Jewish people."

During the meeting, several attendants spoke out against the High Court. Orit Strock, one of the leaders of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, compared the High Court ruling to the laws of Sodom, saying "they bent everything that was bendable and completely ignored the fact that the seller of the house faces death threats, as if it is a given."

MK Uri Ariel (National Union-National Religious Party) said that the court's ruling was political and biased, saying "we will be there, I will be there with my fellow MKs. We will protect this house the way any man protects his home. There is no need for violence, but if anyone hits us, we will protect ourselves."

The Israel Defense Forces were gearing up to forcibly evacuate the house on Tuesday, presuming its residents continue ignoring a court order to vacate the premises. The deadline expires at noon Wednesday.

The "shelf agreement" that the Israeli government has proposed to the Palestinian Authority, whose details were released Sunday, would leave within Israel some 220,000 settlers living in 48 settlements in settlements blocs. This area, west of the separation fence, more-or-less overlaps the seven percent of land in Judea and Samaria that Israel will annex according to the "shelf agreement."

Another approximately 70,000 settlers in 74 settlements east of the fence will have to leave their homes, according to the agreement. Most of these settlements are hard-core ideological communities where opposition to evacuation is likely to be strong and perhaps even violent.

A 20-year resident of the northern West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and father of 10, Yigal Amitai, says he and his friends "don't need to be loved, and therefore the evacuation of Yitzhar will look like the evacuation of Umm al-Fahm [would]. "Remember, for example, Land Day," he said, referring to the sometimes violent protests in that large Arab city in central Israel.

Regarding evacuation, Amitai says: "When a prime minister is involved with only a few percentage points of support, I am not worried."

Moshe Maiersdorf of Tapuah in the northern West Bank, a settlement previously identified with the extremist Kach movement, says his settlement has a varied population and there will be "no single pattern" of response to evacuation.

"I will personally fight for my home as any normal person would. There will certainly not be any hugs around here."

Emily Amrusi, a mother of two living in Talmon near Ramallah, says the separation fence "humiliates" her, adding: "The decision-makers have placed me beyond the fence, not only geographically, but psychologically. She says that of Talmon's 200 residents, about half have come to terms with the fence but others are less compromising.

She concedes she is torn but "certainly does not" lean toward violence. She also says that she believes even the less compromising "will not lift a hand against a soldier."

Demography Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a member of research teams that prepared the Jerusalem Master Plan commissioned by the Cabinet and the Strategic Master Plan commissioned by the Jerusalem Municipality, believes that it would be wise to "relinquish parts of the city's territory in which mainly Palestinian residents live." DellaPergola wrote this in an article slated to appear in the coming months in a book to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the city's reunification, published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. In the article, he stresses that his statements are based on demographic considerations and the forecast of an additional decrease in the Jewish majority by 2020.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jewish share of the capital's population dropped from 73.5 percent to 66 percent. The current forecast predicts that, in another 14 years, Jerusalem's Jewish majority will dwindle to 60 percent. DellaPergola's advice is to expand the city to include unsettled and settled areas to the West, so that the exodus from the capital's center will remain within city limits. Until now, those who endorsed plans to remove Arab neighborhoods and Palestinian residents from the city limits were mainly leftist politicians and policymakers, who considered this to be a solution to demographic and political problems. The most conspicuous such plan was proposed by Ehud Barak's cabinet at Camp David in 2000. Barak agreed to a sweeping plan: Division of Jerusalem, as outlined by Clinton, such that every area in which Jews live would remain in Israel, and nearly every area in which Palestinians live would be transferred to the Palestinian Authority. Barak was also prepared to divide the Old City and sovereignty over the Temple Mount, but Yasser Arafat rejected the proposal.

Another State

DellaPergola, considered a leading demographic authority, told Haaretz yesterday that he supports relinquishing most of the Arab population, including those who reside in Jerusalem's northern neighborhoods, Beit Hanina and Shoafat. However, he believes that Israel should strive to achieve a solution based on a Vatican model in the Old City and the Holy Basin. "In that area," DellaPergola suggests, "another state will be established that is neither Israel nor Palestine, like the Vatican in Italy." The municipality, which employed DellaPergola in the past, and Israel's current government do not support the division of Jerusalem for demographic or other reasons. In practice, a few Arab, North Jerusalem neighborhoods in which tens of thousands of Palestinians live were already placed beyond the "Jerusalem Envelope" section of the separation fence. Right-wing parties also vehemently oppose division and demand that measures be taken to minimize Jewish emigration from Jerusalem and to attract Jews to the city. In contrast with DellaPergola's position, an American-Israeli research team led by Bennett Zimmerman, Dr. Roberta Seid, Michael Wise and Yoram Ettinger proposed that Israeli policymakers alter their approach to Jerusalem demographics by annexing areas to the east rather than the west of the city, despite the fact that this would mean annexing a Palestinian population. The team maintains that, "Avoiding expanding the city's territory, due to demographic concerns, will increase the housing and employment burden and accelerate negative migration out of Jerusalem."

Need for Annexation of the Periphery

That team re-examines research conducted by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, indicating that the problem is negative migration of Jews from Jerusalem, a result mainly of a lack of housing and employment. The team maintains that these problems derive from the lack of space for traffic infrastructure essential to upgrade housing and employment conditions. An appropriate addition of land requires the city's territory to be doubled, according to the research team. The researchers note that annexing areas in the direction of Ma'aleh Adumim, Givat Ze'ev, and Gush Etzion would increase the Arab population in Jerusalem by about 100,000 residents, but the Jewish population would grow by tens of thousands of residents, due to annexation of Jewish populations on the city's periphery. Annexing territory to increase the size of the capital would increase the number of Arab residents in the initial phase, but it would significantly decrease Jewish emigration from Jerusalem. In the next phase, the city would become attractive to Jews, thus restoring the demographic balance.