Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

If the Obama administration accepts the myth that dismantling settlements is impossible for Israel, there are no prospects for peace. The settlements are illegal under international law. Yet settlers have been pampered for more than 40 years, and their violence against Palestinians is consistently tolerated. Peace depends on the Israeli government rectifying the problem they and their predecessors created.

The settler enterprise is a deliberate strategic creation of Israel, beginning with the occupation in 1967. This enterprise has been indulged and enlarged by every Israeli government since then.

From the outset, this was a project to colonize and control Palestinian land. It still is. As Ariel Sharon said in 1998: "Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them.”

Today, there are nearly 500,000 settlers living illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The U.S. has only occasionally and timidly objected. This irresoluteness, coupled with millions in tax-exempt funding, amounts to complicity in the 40-fold expansion of settlements since 1972.

The U.S. and Israel demand that the Palestinians engage in everything short of civil war (including torture and repression) to protect Israel's security, and yet American leaders fail to demand that Israel confront its own Frankenstein. While a minority of settlers may resist a peace deal requiring their departure, many are there because of generous government subsidies. These settlers would leave if provided with suitable incentives. The U.S. could withhold some of the $3 billion given to Israel as military aid annually and divert it toward housing settlers within Israel's own borders.

But so long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fails to break with settler leaders, including his own foreign minister, and the U.S. vacillates on this issue, a just peace is far away.

NEARLY everything you've been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza's air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

THE BLOCKADE Israel's blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.

The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment - with the tacit support of the United States - of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.

THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction20in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.

WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

This war on the people of Gaza isn't really about rockets. Nor is it about "restoring Israel's deterrence," as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming "Sowing Cris is: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."

The "Palestine Question" has been with us for sixty years. During this time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question solved the previously perennial "Jewish Question" is once again open to debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an entirely different one.

It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy. Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their national catastrophe, al-Nakba--the expulsion, flight and loss of their homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago--is thus considered not in terms of this seminal event's meaning to at least 8 million Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic cleansing.

It is ironic and tragic that the resolution, if indeed it was a resolution, of a Jewish question should have created a Palestine question. It is even more ironic that the former should have been resolved not where it arose in its most acute form, in the West, or at the West's expense, but rather in Palestine, and to the detriment of Palestine's people. This was in large part the result of the efforts of a West stricken by a (fully justified) sense of guilt for centuries of suffering inflicted on European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, a West that compounded its sins by helping to inflict further suffering, this time on Palestinians. It is also tragic that beyond the harm that was done to the Palestinians by the growth of Zionism and the establishment of Israel, these same developments should have led to the uprooting of the world's oldest and most secure Jewish communities, which had found in the Arab lands a tolerance that, albeit imperfect, was nonexistent in the often genocidal, Jew-hating Christian West.

A few things seem clear sixty years after 1948. One is that if the Jewish question has lost its saliency, perhaps more as a consequence of the enormity of the atrocities of the Nazis than for any other reason, the creation of Israel has raised different questions and problems for its supporters and others. To the extent that Zionism has succeeded in winning acceptance of its assertion that all Jews are part of a national body whose nation-state is Israel, it has linked the status and circumstances of Jews everywhere not only to the fate of that state but to every facet of that state's policies and actions. Insofar as some of those policies and actions may be unacceptable, their very existence must be denied or elided, and reality bent to suit the tender sensibilities of supporters of Israel: for example, the rank discrimination against the 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel who are not part of the Jewish ethnicity in whose name and for whose interests the state was created and exists; or the collective punishment inflicted on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip imprisoned for months on end; or the systematic torture and humiliation inflicted on the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have passed through the Israeli prison system. We see the results of this bending of reality in the travesty that passes for news coverage of Israel and Palestine in the American media.

Where reality cannot be bent and such violations of basic human rights and dignity cannot be denied or elided, they are justified as necessary for the "security" of the Jewish state. This argument carries weight after centuries of profound Jewish insecurities, but it masks the fact that these oppressive and unjust policies and actions sow resentment that guarantees Israel's eternal insecurity. Even worse, some of Israel's supporters in the United States and elsewhere apparently feel obliged to become general partisans of discrimination and racial profiling, or collective punishment, or torture, or imprisonment without due process, or all of the above. Thus, if the Jewish question is resolved through the establishment by force of a Jewish state in what was an Arab land, then the maintenance of this state in the face of the natural, understandable resentment of those harmed in the process involves its supporters not only in justifying the unjustifiable in Israel and Palestine but by logical extension also in justifying it in the United States, in Guantánamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a sad result not only for those who have sought a remedy for an age-old problem but also for those dismayed at the new problems this solution has created and the ripple effect of this solution far from Israel or Palestine.

Another thing has become clearer and clearer over these sixty years: a just resolution of the Palestine question will be far from simple, if it is indeed possible at all; and if it is ever to be resolved, this will depend in large measure on the Palestinians themselves, whose current status is perhaps as desperate as it has been since 1948. Such a resolution will not be simple, because the now universally applauded two-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel's actions in the occupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been expressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form impossible. This is true whether those actions involve the unending process of the meticulously planned and state-supported colonization and effective annexation of slice after slice of the West Bank, the isolation of Arab East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West Bank, the systematic confinement of more than 2 million Palestinians living there in smaller and smaller and ever more hermetically sealed cantons, or the cancerous growth of what might be called an Israeli prison-industrial complex. This military, security, state and private apparatus controls most of the important decisions in the lives of the nearly 4 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are about to enter their forty-second year of military occupation, and it has harbored a Palestinian prison population of about 10,000 since 2000.

In principle this juggernaut is, of course, not unstoppable. There is, however, no sign that its momentum has slowed in the past seventeen years (since the Madrid conference) of the cruelly misnamed "peace process," let alone recognition of its vast power, or a willingness to confront and reverse it, on the part of most Israeli, American or other decision-makers. The deceitful, feeble silence of US policy under three administrations about this juggernaut, and the mass media's attitude that the emperor's clothes look just splendid, would be nauseating if one was not already accustomed to this sort of feckless, insouciant irresponsibility on the part of Washington, and of the American media's complicity with it.

While the two-state solution is thus deeply flawed--if it has not become unrealizable--there are also flaws in the alternatives, grouped under the rubric of the one-state solution. How can most Israelis and Palestinians be persuaded to forgo their aspirations for a state of their own, and to overcome their dislike of each other such that they can contemplate living together in one state, whether binational, federal, cantonal or unitary? How would it be possible to reverse the ideological triumph of Zionism, which convinced Israelis and others that the main lesson of the Holocaust is that there must be a Jewish state (while in the same breath they are told that this state will have to fight for its existence against an environment rendered permanently hostile by the conditions of its establishment and maintenance)? How would it be possible to reverse the process whereby all Palestinian political formations of any consequence have gradually become wedded to the idea that the establishment of a Palestinian state in 22 percent of historic Palestine--via the reversal of forty-one years of Israeli occupation practices carried out with the acquiescence of the United States and that render the creation of such a state virtually impossible--would be an acceptable solution to the question of Palestine? This was true first of Fatah, and then of more radical Palestinian groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and is now true even of Hamas.

Moving toward a two-state, or a one-state, solution or toward any other resolution of the Palestine question--that is, getting the Palestinians out of the parlous state they are currently in--is dependent on a reversal in the dynamic of the Palestinian polity. For several years, this has been spiraling downward, and it now seems to be nearly in free-fall. Only when the Palestinians were united, when they had some sense of what their national strategy was, and when they chose tactics appropriate to that strategy, did they have any success at all, minimal though it has been, over the past forty-one years, the past sixty years--indeed, over the past ninety years. The Palestinians were most emphatically not united around a clear strategy and appropriate tactics during the British Mandate until 1948 or during the two decades afterward, nor have they been for the past decade or so, both periods that have been disastrous for them. Even during the era from the heyday of the PLO in the late 1960s through the first intifada of 1987-91, when the Palestinians gained broad international legitimacy and sympathy, and grudging recognition from Israel, this unity and strategic clarity were flawed in many ways.

In particular, Palestinians lacked clarity about the moral, legal and political disadvantages in the use of violence against an Israeli polity able to mobilize in defense of its actions, however unspeakable, the most powerful tropes of victimhood in modern Western culture. This confusion among some Palestinians exists although farsighted thinkers like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad understood decades ago that nonviolent resistance was integral to Palestinian success; although the greatest successes of the Palestinians were won by the unarmed popular protests of the first intifada; and despite widespread (but underreported) peaceful joint Palestinian-Israeli protest movements against Israel's illegal wall inside the West Bank. Many Palestinians understandably cling to the legitimate right of any people under occupation to resist their oppressors. They see only the extensive, continuous violence directed by Israel against the Palestinians, much of it structural and integral to the maintenance of the occupation. They cannot understand that because of Israel's cloak of permanent victimhood, its massive violence remains either invisible or justified in the West, while every Israeli casualty seems to be mourned there with infinite sadness and is taken as another sign of the inherent barbarity of the Palestinians.

Today we are witness to the spectacle of two feeble and clueless Palestinian political movements, both lacking strategic vision and bereft of the selfless patriotism that would lead them to bury their petty differences, fighting like two cocks on a garbage heap, as the Arabic expression has it. They do so although overwhelming majorities of Palestinians have consistently demanded that they compromise with each other in the interest of national unity. The Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority has abandoned any idea of popular mobilization, any last shred of an ethos of service to the people, any sense of the vital importance of national unity if even minimal Palestinian objectives are to be achieved, any respect for the democratic process that brought its rivals in Hamas into power in January 2006, and any sense of the danger of hitching the Palestinians to the bankrupt policies of a lame-duck American President who heads the most pro-Israeli Administration in US history.

The blindness of Hamas is as bad: neither able to fight nor to negotiate effectively, neither able to compromise with Fatah nor to govern on its own, and no more able to break free of the clutches of its external backers than is Fatah vis-à-vis its own foreign backers, Hamas has lurched from disaster to disaster since its unexpected victory in the 2006 elections. Undermined by the refusal of the United States and Israel even to attempt to negotiate with a Hamas-dominated government, last summer it made the fatal mistake of taking over the Gaza Strip in response to preparations for a US-supported coup by Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. Hamas reached a low point in April, when a poll showed that it enjoyed the support of less than 18 percent of Palestinians (versus 32 percent for Fatah, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, however, is even more unpopular than Ismail Haniya of Hamas: 11.7 percent to 13.3 percent). The ideological bankruptcy and the degree of popular rejection of both of the formations that dominate Palestinian politics are illustrated by the fact that together they enjoy the support of barely 50 percent of Palestinians.

If there is to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, it depends on the Palestinians' understanding the massive disadvantages they labor under in fighting a struggle for liberation against the heirs of the victims of the Holocaust, in the growing shadow of worldwide Islamophobia. It depends on their unity and on their adopting the appropriate strategy and tactics for this difficult task, in mobilizing the powerful moral force of their cause and the remarkable strengths of Palestinians under occupation and in the diaspora who have withstood extreme pressures but have neither submitted nor despaired. These strengths must be deployed not just for a defensive steadfastness but for a positive goal of liberation, peace and justice, one that can change the terms of the conflict and the way it is understood, and win over enough of their opponents and enough of the outside world to change the unfavorable balance of forces that today keeps them scattered, dispersed, confined and imprisoned sixty years after the destruction of Arab Palestine.

Most Americans think that our role as a world power began with World War II, the "good war," and then continued with the similarly noble Cold War. We like to think that the United States acts in the world exclusively in the name of ideals such as freedom and democracy.

So it may come as a bit of a shock to learn that the United States has had an uninterrupted military presence in the Middle East for 65 years, dating to 1942. Most Americans would also bristle at the idea that this presence, from the arrival of GIs in North Africa onward, has essentially become a continuation of nearly a century and a half of European military adventures in the region. But history shows a disturbing continuity between what the European colonial powers did in the Middle East, starting with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, and what the United States is now doing in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed, the United States has managed in a few short years to do more damage in the region than did the hated colonial powers that were finally driven out only a few decades ago.

Of course, the European powers did not stint in their use of force in the Middle East. As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has shown, Napoleon's troops savagely repressed Egyptian resistance even while the French proclaimed the ideals of their Revolution. Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture -- these were the weapons of Europe's takeover.

But Britain and France understood that naked power was not enough to achieve lasting imperial control. They learned that they also needed expertise, a knowledge of local languages and culture, and some form of indirect rule that eventually removed their military forces from direct contact with the local population. And although they faced decades of stubborn resistance in an arc running from Morocco to Iran, they managed to hold onto the reins until World War II shattered their economies and unleashed the changes that brought independence to all these countries.

During the Cold War, neither superpower crossed a red line by deploying large numbers of troops or by occupying parts of the region outright -- until the Kremlin made the fatal, foolish mistake of invading Afghanistan in 1979. That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and of the Cold War era.

But since 2000, no one in a position of power in Washington seems to have bothered to read any history. Believing that the demise of the Soviet Union meant an end to checks and balances at home and to limits abroad, and seduced by the blandishments of shallow-minded theorists who believe that the rules that applied to all previous great powers do not apply to the United States, the current administration has plunged into not one but two land wars in Asia.

Once upon a time, after Korea and Vietnam, the words "land war in Asia" might have inspired caution in Washington. But slaying the "Vietnam Syndrome" that limited the executive branch's power to act abroad was an uncontrollable obsession for the clique that has surrounded several presidents since Richard M. Nixon, including such notables as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These were men who, by and large, had never seen combat, knew little of war and scorned history, geography and expertise based on personal experience. Some of them were probably unaware that Iraq was in Asia, and would not have cared if they knew.

Thus armed with the conviction that theirs were the noblest of purposes and buoyed by the popular support that a president always receives after an attack (particularly one as dastardly as 9/11), President Bush and his advisers ignored 200 years of Middle Eastern history and invaded Iraq, supposedly to spread democracy to the entire region.

As a general rule, democracy does not grow out of the barrel of a gun. Moreover, few prologues are as unpropitious for the establishment of democracy as war, invasion and occupation. Apologists for the Iraq invasion have suggested ahistoric parallels between Iraq and postwar Japan and Germany, ignoring the fact that the latter had been two of the world's most highly developed industrial powers, with large middle classes and established, generations-old traditions of parliamentary government before they gave way to dictatorship in the 1930s.

We are told that Iraq is a recently created, artificial state; and it is, like scores of other states that colonialism carved across three continents. One would think that that would be all the more reason to keep in place the institutions that held Iraq together, but the arrogance of those in charge of the Pentagon and in Baghdad was as limitless as their ignorance, and they swept away the entire Iraqi governmental structure, putting in its place an overstretched American army of occupation to control a vast, devastated country of more than 25 million people with a history of resistance to foreign control.

After the first shock of the invasion wore off, what people in Iraq and all over the Middle East remembered was two centuries of Western powers attempting to bring their countries under imperial control through military force. They recalled decades of Western petroleum companies controlling their oil. And unsurprisingly, the United States quickly became as unpopular as the European colonial powers had ever been.

Iraq has changed everything. In Washington, a city obsessed with the present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular support. It was equally easy to forget that in the last phases of the Cold War, the United States had managed to protect its interests in the Middle East with no land forces on the ground, through an over-the-horizon presence.

Today, al-Qaeda in Iraq threatens the security of entire districts of the country; policymakers hint at a "South Korean" model of an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq; the Pentagon is weighing long-term plans for U.S. bases all over the region; and Washington seems to assume that U.S. national interests require our troops to fight their way across West Asia and North Africa to stop "the terrorists," failing which we will find them crawling up the beaches of Miami and Long Island.

This is madness. People in the Middle East are angry at the United States not because of our values, many of which they share: democracy, free enterprise, even many of our cultural values such as love of family and respect for religion. They are angry at us, essentially, because our forces are doing things in their back yard that we would never tolerate from foreign troops in our own region.

We are the greatest power in world history. But that will make not a whit of difference to the outcome in Iraq. We will not -- we cannot -- force the Iraqis to do what we want, any more than the British could toward the end of their own attempt to rule Iraq, although they managed to hold on for much longer than our doomed occupation will.

Our political leaders must recognize that force does not solve the problem of terrorism. The real terrorists -- those blowing up civilians in marketplaces and office towers, as opposed to Iraqis resisting U.S. occupation -- can be dealt with only by means far more subtle than military might. Dealing effectively with this elusive enemy requires patience and a far more precise, carefully targeted and politically sophisticated toolkit than the mighty bludgeon of the U.S. armed forces.

No true U.S. interest has been served by the invasion, destruction and occupation of Iraq. We have done incalculable harm to that tragic country and to our position in the world. Perhaps we can limit the damage if we substitute a little humility for the blind hubris that led us into this disaster -- an understanding of the limitations of armed force and "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," especially those whose hearts we hope to win.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor

of Arab studies at Columbia University. His latest book is "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood."