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.”

To meet deadline, an obligation that political commentators, no less than news reporters, are enjoined by editors against toying with, I have to write this column today -- which just happens to be May 15, the time each year when Palestinians, along with sundry Arabs, commemorate the Nakba, the day in 1948 when Palestine was dismembered and Palestinians were expelled from home and homeland.

Commemorative events in the life of a nation are a central pursuit that lies at the core of that nation's assabiya, to borrow a term here from Ibn Khaldoun. It generates possibilities of collective apprehension, a consensus of perceived values and a communal sense of historical reference. We commemorate in order to remember, for memory is as indispensable to modern identity as modern identity is indispensable to memory. With memory, each generation judges anew. It marshals and weighs. It shapes it notions of self and history.

For those who sit back to remember that day, they find the Nakba diffused everywhere in the repertoire of their consciousness. For me it was, as a seven-year-old child, the refugee exodus along the coast road between Haifa and the Lebanese border, an event whose evocations have resounded around every corner of my being ever since.

But I was not there in Deir Yassein when the bodies were dumped in the village well. I was not there when our people were expelled en masse — herded like cattle — from the twin cities of Lydda and Ramleh. I was not there when the villages in southern Palestine were razed to the ground and their inhabitants arrived in Gaza (many of them children who had no adults' hands to hold), rent in spirit and whistled clean of everything they had laboured to build.

Yet, what happened during that catastrophic day of mayhem, when history had set savagery at the Palestinian people's heels, remains an indivisible part of my identity. How could I not remember events whose goal was to hound our name, our identity, our history, into oblivion.

And I remembered them on our day of the Nakba, so vividly, ever so vividly, 64 years after the fact, much in the manner of a man who had lost his sight at an early age and continues to recall his surroundings in remembered images.

And in our exile, where we forever lived close to the door for easy eviction, we recognised each other when we met. Perhaps by the unique accent we kept (for accent is identity), perhaps by the stateless travel documents we held, perhaps by how we had learned to resign ourselves in our diaspora to those gusts of exasperation directed at us for just being who we were.

Heavy cargo

Or perhaps by the casual hubris we affected at times in order to compensate for our sense of alienation. But above all, we recognised each other by that certain darkness we projected from inside our inner selves, by that heavy cargo that history had made us carry on our backs.

Meanwhile, when avatars of Arab nationalism, such as Jamal Abdul Nasser, Hafez Al Assad and Saddam Hussain, along with others before and after them (avatars more spellbound by self-aggrandisement than spellbinding by leadership skills), who professed the Palestine cause to be sacrosanct in their political canon, resented us, it was because we were their conscience. We nagged at them. We left them guilty serfs to ambitions they could not achieve.

We all remember — yes, that word again — when close to half a million Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait in 1991; when the entire Palestinian community in Libya was kicked out of the country in 1995 and placed in camps by the Egyptian border; when that community's counterpart in Iraq, whose members had lived there for decades, was equally unceremoniously shown the door in 2003, where they found themselves stranded at the Syrian border, with no Arab country willing to take them in. (Iceland, bless its Nordic soul, welcomed some of them as permanent residents, mostly single-parent families with small children.)

In the Arab world, Palestinians are to be, if not eliminated, then banished. Their existential being is inadmissible precisely because they are a constant reminder of how Arabs had failed the challenges of modernity. Don't make a man uncertain inwardly, don't remind him of his inadequacies. After all, to be made to feel inwardly uncertain, inadequate at marshalling enough resources to confront that Zionist enemy ensconced in the heartland of your world, builds unbearable hatred within you, not just for the enemy, but for he who torments you daily of your condition. For an Arab, lest we forget, Palestine is the fulcrum, the test case, of the assabiya of the entire Arab world, just as it was in July, 1099, when European marauders established the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Oh, yes, the Arab world would have been better off had there been no Palestinians there, with their incessant demands on that world's conscience, or if Palestinians had simply stopped being Palestinian. But how could Palestinians stop being Palestinian? I could no more sever that immemorial intimacy I had with my native land, that I had brought with me as a child on that day of Nakba in 1948, than my parents — who died in exile with a sense of ‘at homeness' eluding them every miserable morning of their lives there — could have severed themselves from the memories they had had of the sky that sheltered the earth, rock and ash of their acre in Palestine.

That is what the Day of the Nakba is all about. It's about memories. We remember selectively, but we remember. Memories evoked, glossed, stumbled over, exchanged, judged anew. Memories resurrected from the attic of our subconscious. Memories that link the conjugation of verb ‘to be' to our core being.

Today I sit here, in my confortable, safe haven in the US, and remember. For not to remember, and to place on my children's backs that same burden, is to tear up the tree, root and branch, from which our history grows.

The much-trumpeted diplomatic effort that went into high gear around this time three years ago, when President Barack Obama made the Palestinian-Israel two-state solution his administration's first foreign policy priority in the Middle East, has ground to a pathetic halt, its hollow promise now preserved in the archives like an insect in amber.

It is obvious that Palestinians, and other Arabs to whom the Palestine question has historically been of paramount significance, owe themselves some hard thinking on the issue. What now? What is to be done now after a military occupation that has lasted 45 years and a colonial enterprise that has foisted 400,000 Jewish colonists on Arab land? Is the two-state solution still viable, or were Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) folks in the old days, who had called for a one-state solution in the late 1960s ("a secular, democratic state") for both Jews and Arabs in the land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, on to a prescient idea? How possible, how probable, indeed how inevitable, is that outcome?

Columnists are meddlesome creatures who see themselves engaged in the business of leaving no question unanswered, no answer in doubt, an annoying habit similar to that of someone offering gratuitous advice at a card game. Yet sometimes we score. Consider those few of us who called on the Palestinian movement as early as 1972 to accept the idea of a "separate state" in the West Bank and Gaza, when a mere handful of Jewish colonists were ensconced there, an idea though that PLO officials at the time saw as anathema and close to an act of treason.

Now we are at an impasse. The 1948 Green Line, separating Israel from Palestine, has virtually disappeared. Israel's colonial expansion over the last 45 years has cracked the mirror and blurred the image. Historical Palestine has morphed into a latter day South Africa under apartheid where Palestinians, effectively disenfranchised citizens with no say in determining their political destiny, no control over their natural resources and no sway over their daily lives, are governed by laws ‘apart' from those that govern Israelis.

Bigoted view

No less than former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned recently about how Israel one day soon "may descend into apartheid and xenophobia". I beg to differ: Israel has already descended into that mould. The 400,000 colonists in the West Bank, along with their substantial number of supporters among Israeli and American Jews, have established what amounts to an ethnocracy, a political culture that celebrates a bigoted view of Palestinians as the "other" — much in the manner that white Americans in the Deep South had viewed their black counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s — and sees the West Bank, in its entirety, as the new and permanent frontier of "Eretz Israel".

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, who has not concealed his disdain for the American president and his administration, has agreed to go with the two-state solution only on paper. No further. As the prime minister's own father, a reactionary right-wing historian, was reported to have said gleefully about his son's putative consent to the Palestinians' call for a separate state: "He supports it under conditions that they will never accept".

But there is more: The United States, the "honest peace broker", has given up on the idea of putting its foot down and instead knuckled under to Israel's pernicious practices, having decided to form an alliance with Netanyahu and his cohorts, of brisk vulgarisation of the Palestine question. It is all evident in the diplomatic language used by the White House and the State Department — gobbledygook such as "settlement [colony] expansion is unhelpful to the peace process" — a language governed by a law of etymology that hinges on dissembling, or polysemy, where words are twisted around to mean different, even opposite, things. To us humble mortals, who string words together for a living, a statement where land-grabbing, a violation of international law, could be dismissed merely as "unhelpful", is known as cant, or at best as jargon. I have met people who flunked out of Hopkinsville University, in Kentucky, with better semantic skills than that.

All the more unfortunate, since Washington has constantly hammered into us the notion, at least since president Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, that human rights are the lodestar by which America guided its conduct of foreign affairs. And why not? While it is true that America did not invent human rights, let's face it, human rights invented America. Thus by its decision to go along with Israel's excesses, the United States has no less than subverted the American political compact, and the very value of universal human rights.

So who is to blame independent Palestinians and their supporters around the world — the Palestinian National Authority is so immobilised that it does not know whether it's coming or going — for initiating a campaign to convince the international community, and along with it progressive Israelis, that since the two-state solution has become barren, the only other option is the one state solution in the whole of historic Palestine, where the right of citizenship, regardless of ethnicity, faith and ideology, is enjoyed by all. We are, at any rate, inching willy-nilly in that direction. Otherwise a generation of Palestinians will in time come of age in a miasma of uncontrolled rage.

Oh, yes, the next time, for those you cannot convince by force of reason, you will convince by force of arms.

Consider the case of Khader Adnan, a Palestinian political prisoner held in jail by the Zionist occupation authorities without charge and without any semblance of due process since mid-December.

Adnan, 33, had gone on a hunger strike for 11 weeks to protest his incarceration and that of thousands of other political prisoners. He lost a third of his weight and, according to officials from Physicians for Human Rights who visited him, reportedly while shackled to a bed in his cell, "suffered significant muscular atrophy". He was said to be at "immediate risk of death".

When authorities arrest and hold a man on flimsy charges, even trumped-up charges, that is considered, in jurisprudence, problematic enough, but at least the accused in this case will have his day in court to rebut those charges, ideally with a skilled lawyer at hand.

But when you arrest and hold a man, keeping him incarcerated indefinitely, with no charges brought against him and no prospect of a trial, you are harking back to a judicial system plucked from the Dark Ages. It is not a system characteristic of a society that grandiosely identifies itself as "the only democracy in the Middle East".

No we're not taking about Iraq under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussain or about Libya under the lunatic regime of Muammar Gaddafi. We're talking about the racist regime (how else would you describe it?) of Zionist rulers, a regime whose courts continue to regard Palestinians, much in the manner that South Africa under apartheid had regarded black Africans, as a lower species of men and women to be judged by laws ‘apart' from those that govern Israelis.

Adnan was held under a law called Administrative Detention — applied only to Palestinians, never to Israelis — that seeks indefinite imprisonment of a suspect without charges or trial.

The imprisonment is not imposed as punishment for a known crime the suspect has committed, but in order to prevent him from committing a crime, if that person is deemed, say by an arbitrary occupation functionary, likely to commit one. And so where is George Orwell when you need him?

In civilised society (read, a genuine democracy) no one can be arrested without being told the grounds for such an arrest. Once arrested, a citizen has well-defined rights that include the right of being informed of the criminal charge levelled against him, the right of being brought for a preliminary hearing before a magistrate within a specified period of time, and the right to be represented by a lawyer of his choice. But that applies to an open constitutional democracy.

Israel cannot be defined, by any stretch of the imagination, as one such entity, at least when seen in context of the apartheid laws it reserves for Palestinians. Many of the occupation laws in force in the West Bank, that govern the everyday life of Palestinians, are draconian, but none surely is more draconian than the infamous Administrative Detention Law, under which countless Palestinian prisoners have languished in Israeli prisons for years. Currently, as many as 309 are held without charge.

Not a word from the State Department about any of it — and this is a government department well-known for its much-trumpeted annual Human Rights Report detailing abuses, similar to Israel's, by other countries.

The 2010 report, for example, included a long section on the repressive detention practices of China, berating Beijing for a "lack of due process in judicial proceedings and the use of administrative detention". Israel was not excoriated in the report for formalising exactly the same practices that the State Department was now condemning China for.

Alas, these practices, universally recognised as a defining attribute of despotism, have become normal in Israel, absorbed into the political culture as if by a process of osmosis. That is why the case of Adnan stirred little public debate in the Israeli press.

Irish reflection

Happily, a deal was reached on Tuesday when Adnan called off his fast in exchange for a formal promise by the Israeli authorities to release him on April 17. But had Adnan's hunger strike resulted in his death, as seemed very likely earlier in the week, there would have been hell to pay. (In the West Bank and Gaza thousands had rallied to his cause.) At the very least, Israel would have had a Bobby Sands case on its hands.

When on March 1, 1981, Irish Republican prisoners, in a showdown with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, went on a hunger strike, 10 prisoners ended up starving themselves to death nine weeks later rather than give in. Bobby Sands became the most famous among the group after he was elected as a member of parliament during the strike, which prompted media interest around the world.

The strike, along with its tragic conclusion, radicalised the Republican movement and nationalist politics, and was the driving force that enabled the Sinn Fein to become a mainstream political party. Sands's funeral alone attracted 100,000 mourners and he went on to become an iconic figure in Irish cultural lore. It is true, very true, that when a man dies his life ends, but when a patriot dies his life begins — its impact durable and pervasive.

It was a happy ending for Adnan, a baker by trade and a political activist by inclination. But what about those 309 prisoners who continue to languish behind bars without being charged or brought to trial?

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.

Without seeming to overdo the comparison, I'll say this: Israel is the most isolated — and in certain quarters the most reviled — entity in the world today. Even in the United States, where it has for years enjoyed the status of a sacred cow that commentators would not dare subject to moral scrutiny lest they be branded anti-Semitic, this compelling fact is now beginning to be broached in public debate.

The Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, is convinced, however, that Israel is not isolated at all. In a piece on the op-ed page of the Washington Post recently, he said that "Israel does not stand alone". Far from it. "Many democracies stand staunchly with it", he wrote. And the devil, he posited, with those political analysts in the national media, like John Heilman, Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman, not to mention the newly appointed Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, who asserted recently that Israel is indeed "increasingly isolated" in the international community.

To be sure, Oren is no dummy. Israel always makes sure that its ambassadors in Washington, a pivotal capital for Tel Aviv, are experienced diplomats as well as accomplished academics and intellectuals. The American-born Oren is a former historian by calling and the author of several books, including Power, Faith and Fantasy: A History of American Involvement in the Middle East (2002). A predecessor of his at the embassy was Itimar Rabinovich, yet another academic who had authored several books, including Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (1999).

Darling of the West

All of which brings us back to Israel's beleaguered condition as an isolated state, with few, if any, friends, left to stand by it. The isolation is all too clear. Thus, when someone like Oren avers, with a straight face, that this not a fact for all to see, he is raising very serious doubts — as former prime minister Golda Meir had done in June, 1969, when she claimed that "the Palestinians do not exist" — about the professional skills of his optometrist.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Israel was the darling of the western world, whose establishment in Palestine in 1948 expatiated Europeans of their guilt over the treatment they had meted out to Jewish communities in their midst. And "tiny Israel" was an underdog surrounded by dreadful Asiatics hell-bent on "driving it into the sea". For two decades Israel was seen as a new nation with a pioneering people, alluring and glamorous as they "turned desert into orchard". And why bother consider the fact that any meaningful assessment of Israel's creation could not — should not — be advanced independently of the impact that such a creation has had on the lives and destiny of the native people of Palestine? Then came 1967, and with it came the true face of Israel — the coloniser, the occupier, the warmonger.

The problem for Israel is that, in the post-colonial world, no country does what it has done over the last 44 years and hopes to get away with it. In the olden days, a colonial master could put down, exploit and subjugate the "restless natives" with the swish of a few muskets, with nary an objection from anyone. Not in our time, when colonising another people is seen as an anomaly. But here's Israel, a century after the Wilsonian principle of self-determination was propounded at Versailles, occupying that hazy terrain between colonial values, that suffuse its Zionist tradition, and a modern world that sees those values as anathema.

Well, the 21-gun salutes have stopped. This entity, like the proverbial guest from hell, has long since worn out its welcome. And just as apartheid South Africa found itself a beached whale on the shore in 1994, so is Israel beginning to find itself today. And, yes, it is isolated, alone and beleaguered, precisely because its practices are out of tune with the times we inhabit.

The chilling and violent quest for wealth and power that the Euro-American states conducted beyond their borders in the middle of the 19th century, for example, gave way in the middle of the 20th to a shadowy kind of hegemonic leadership; where a hegemon like the US creates legitimacy by establishing rules for other states to which it also presumably submits — a far cry from colonial times when Britain's consul general in Egypt sent British troops and tanks to surround the Abdeen Palace in Cairo, in 1942, in order to force King Farouk to accept London's choice of a prime minister (from the Wafd Party), at pain of being presented with a decree for abdication. Those times are gone forever.

Not for Israel, though, which continues to draw its weld of sensibility, whether consciously or not, from its archetypal roots in the shtetl, the isolated ghetto communities of Central and Eastern Europe, where Jews lived apart, bedevilled by constant existential fears of an outside world with which they shared a hidden fraternity of mutual loathing. Yes, Israel is beleaguered and isolated. All for good reason.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.