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.”

It seems that the era of relative peace between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel is over. Ever since Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, secured an amnesty for senior members of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fateh, on condition that they lay down their weapons and join the official security forces, calm has prevailed in the West Bank.

That calm is in danger after Israel, in recent days, seized and imprisoned three officers of the PA’s security forces. Israel has charged the three with membership in the brigades in what would appear to contradict the agreement it had reached with Abbas two years ago.

Israel is clearly trying to regain some momentum after having flailed in the wind badly in the past months, surprisingly, considering its otherwise deft management of public opinion.

It had to happen, of course. No amount of clever public relations can ultimately hide the fact that Israel is occupying another people’s land and does all manner of outrageous transgressions of human rights in order to maintain that occupation.

Israel’s deeds are finally beginning to catch up with it as the smokescreen gradually lifts and the spell that the West seems to have been under, especially the US, begins to fade.

It is of course in times like these that the fog of war comes in handy. Time and again, throughout its bloody history, Israel has managed to obfuscate through violence, either by provoking outright wars or simply by escalating a situation so dramatically that all other judgements are momentarily suspended.

That process is beginning all over again now. First, Israel tried with the easy target. The military incursions into Gaza in recent weeks were designed to do just one thing at a time of complete calm on the Gaza border, namely provoke Hamas. It’s an easy target, because Hamas has few strings to play at the moment and the tune of resistance is always a fallback position. Thankfully, and wisely, the movement has so far conducted itself with admirable restraint.

Now it is the turn of the West Bank. Here the incitement is subtler. It has more to do with rendering Abbas illegitimate in the eyes of his own people. If agreements reached between him and Israel no longer provide security, why would anyone believe them?

Israel, angry at Abbas’ refusal to play ball, is trying to start a new game.

Next, undoubtedly, will be Lebanon, where Israel has already laid down the opening card by accusing Syria of providing long-range missiles to Hizbollah. Sooner or later, Israel will provoke someone into retaliation, and then, as Jordan rightly fears, we will have a full-blown conflict again.

But let no one be fooled: it will be, as it always has been, a conflict fought on Israel’s premises and for Israeli reasons and interests.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak seems to have suddenly had the revelation that unless there is peace with Syria, war with it could easily happen, with the potential of escalating into a wider armed conflict.

What Barak has just come to realise has been common knowledge in the region for the past four or five decades, including the time when he was prime minister of his country. Maybe he can also remember that it was he who scuppered the peace accord with Syria during the term in office of US president Bill Clinton.

It is well documented how a peace deal between Israel and Syria was within reach at the time, but foundered at the last moment because Barak was not able to go through the motion. To say now that peace with Syria is a basic prerequisite for regional peace is strange and a bit suspect. Not that it weren’t the truth, only the timing is dubious.

The Arab world has been saying for years that key to a peace accord between Israel and the Arab world is the conclusion of a peace agreement with Syria. The exclusion of Damascus from the peace process in the Middle East has been a main reason for lack of progress on the peace front, including, of course, with the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

If Barak can be believed, a volte face of this defence minister is welcome. Perhaps he can convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to pursue the path of peace with Syria alongside the projected peace talks with the Palestinians.

If it does, Israel has to be prepared to withdraw from the Golan Heights as the price for peace with Damascus. This is a contentious issue, but doing so will prove that Israel is serious about arriving at peace with its neighbours.

Unless the Arab territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war are returned to their rightful owners, no amount of pious talk by Israel can be taken seriously.

Israel is not only talking down peace prospects in the Middle East, it is also behaving aggressively towards Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, and has made clear its intention to strike at Iranian nuclear capabilities.

A few days ago, an Israeli minister said that the battle against Hizbollah, in southern Lebanon, is not over. He was clear in describing the Israel war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006 as unfinished business, saying that it is only a matter of time before his country will wage war again on Lebanon.

Israel claims that Hizbollah is rearming with long-range, sophisticated rockets that can reach its heartland. Earlier, an Israeli source had said that Israel intends to strike deep into Syrian territory if Damascus facilitates the transfer of missiles to Hizbollah.

At the same time, the war rhetoric against Hamas in Gaza never stopped, with calls heard for an end to the so-called Hamas threat once and for all.

This belligerent posture vis-à-vis a number of Arab parties and Iran does not bode well for the region. If indeed these Israeli threats are serious, and they should be taken as such, the summer of 2010 might witness a period of increased Israeli military acts that could turn the entire region into a war zone with incalculable consequences.

US President Barack Obama’s admission - and on him much hope was pinned that he would convince Israel to talk peace instead of waging war - that the Arab-Israeli conflict has proved to be much more complex than he thought and that the solution to the Palestinian question is not within reach, greatly diminishes the chance of defusing Israel’s military threats.

In view of such prospects, and especially given the continued deadlock in the peace process, the possibility of another Palestinian Intifada is not remote, and that would only compound the situation in the Middle East.

The psychology of war seems to be overtaking that of peace in the region, which makes the likelihood of aggression quite possible, the war scenario plausible.

Strong international intervention may help defuse the situation, but that needs the political will to do so. So far, there is no sign of such determination on the part of the international community, which means the region will be left to its own devices once again.

The Palestinians are right to refuse a return to negotiations with Israel unless there is a total halt to settlement construction in the occupied territories.

To continue negotiations as Israel continues devouring Palestinian lands to build and expand settlements means having less and less land to negotiate over.

It is highly disingenuous for the US to suggest otherwise, as Hillary Clinton did Friday in Washington. After all, it was Washington that quite logically and properly demanded that Israel cease its construction in the occupied territories last year. Just because the US administration has since come up against the power of the pro-Israel lobby does not mean that that position was wrong. It certainly does not mean that the Palestinians should abandon that position.

Palestinians were advised to focus on negotiating over borders even as Israel continues to build settlements, and once negotiations are over, any area that falls within the agreed upon border, including the settlements, can be taken by the Palestinians as part of their future state. But Clinton on Friday said the two parties have to agree to land swaps, meaning settlements on Palestinian lands would most probably become part of Israel, thus justifying Palestinian fears that settlements are eating up whatever is left of the lands they are negotiating over to set up their future state, which would certainly be a small part of the historical land of Palestine.

Settlements make this part of Palestine look smaller and smaller, and the Palestinian pursuit of a state on their national soil a distant reality.

Washington’s just stated position means that Israel’s continued imposition of facts on the ground through settlement building and the erection of the segregation wall in the West Bank will win it the lands it wants.

If Israel is allowed to continue building, it will continue building. That in and of itself changes the parameters for negotiations, and is unacceptable. Ergo, Israeli settlement construction while negotiations are under way is unacceptable. It brokers no argument. It is an understandable and consistent position in line with international law and people’s expectations.

What makes sense now is to have Washington take the advice of its special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, who suggested, in an interview with PBS last week, imposing sanctions on Israel to press it to make concessions in the peace negotiations.

Naturally, this suggestion drew Israeli fire. It also made Israel attempt to put the onus on the Palestinians to change their positions, blaming them for the impasse.

The US should not bend to pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the lobbyists and should, instead, insist on a complete halt to settlement activity and an immediate return to the negotiation table.

This is a position that makes sense and that must not be deviated from.