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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illegal annexation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extreme poverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The settlers from Yitzhar had left their mark on the "Suleiman" house: Stars of David spray-painted in black on the walls. They'd come down the hill into the Suleimans' village, Asira al-Kibliyeh, on Saturday morning, September 13, after a Palestinian burned down an empty Yitzhar bungalow, stabbed a nine-year-old boy and fled into the village. (The young victim, Tuvia Shtatman, suffered two superficial wounds, one of which required stitches, and spent a day in the hospital.)

After the stabbing and arson, scores of Yitzhar settlers - who had been at synagogue during the Palestinian's attack - effectively commandeered Asira al-Kibliyeh, throwing rocks and firing guns. They wounded several Palestinians, pushed a parked car down the hill and smashed windows and balcony furniture. The IDF soldiers on the scene appeared to be mainly standing around, occasionally steering a marauder away.

That night, Israelis watched scenes from the melee on television. It was caught on video camera by a member of the Suleiman family standing at a window inside their house. The camera was provided by B'Tselem, the Jerusalem-based human rights organization, as part of its high-profile "Shooting Back" project of Palestinian "video activism" in the West Bank.

"I've complained to the army and police at least a dozen times about the settlers throwing rocks down at us, shooting at the house. But nothing was ever done; they always told us they had no evidence," says the mother of the Suleiman family a few days after the house was attacked. She's on the rear balcony talking to Red Cross workers, a Palestinian reporter from a foreign news medium and B'Tselem field-workers.

The black Stars of David were spray-painted in spots that had already been repainted in white; this was not the first time the settlers had marked their territory here. So a couple of months ago, the Suleimans decided to take one of B'Tselem's video cameras and come up with some stronger evidence.

The footage they took that morning, seen on TV, shows settlers dressed in Shabbat white streaming down the hill, throwing rocks at the village as soldiers stand next to them, doing nothing. Gunshots are heard.

In a sequence filmed by the Suleimans that wasn't broadcast, a settler is seen running up to the family's window. The person inside holding the video camera abandons it - but the sound is left on.

A soldier is heard shouting at the settlers: "Stop throwing rocks!" Then, to a fellow soldier, "I can't stop them!" In a relatively calm voice, a settler tells the soldiers to "go get them," evidently meaning the Suleimans inside the house. "If you don't go after them, we will," he warns. A soldier asks the settlers to stop throwing rocks for "a minute." A settler replies, "You have a minute to throw them out." Another settler starts counting.

Two or three settlers at the window suggest destroying the Suleimans' plants, their marble counter, a plumbing pipe. Then one says, "Guys, there's a camera here." One of the settlers suggests they "break the videotape from the side." Another says, "No, let's take it out."

However, the camera is sitting behind the barred window, so they can't get to it easily. One of them comes up with an idea: "I have some pepper gas. He'll open the window and we'll spray him."

The young men from Yitzhar didn't get the Suleimans' video camera or videotape. Neither did they get the camera or videotape from the nearby "Radwan" family, who filmed a crowd of settlers surrounding the house of the neighboring "Darwish" family, and pushing the Darwishes' car toward the edge of the hill. The Darwish family also had a camera, but it was taken by either settlers or soldiers, according to the father, who says he mislaid it when he went outside to throw rocks back at the settlers.

Police from the Judea and Samaria (Shai) station were nowhere to be seen in Asira al-Kibliyeh that morning, but they soon showed up afterward at B'Tselem's office at the edge of Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood. "We turned to B'Tselem to get their videotapes, and we're using them in our undercover investigation," says Danny Poleg, spokesman of Shai station. "We haven't made any arrests yet; we still haven't identified any of the rioters, but we hope that from the videotapes we'll be able to make out faces and body shapes and bring in suspects." (No arrests have been made in connection with the Palestinian arsonist/knife assailant, either, he says.)

ON THE REAR balcony of the Suleimans' house, the mother, holding a little baby, is handed a fresh videotape by one of the B'Tselem workers. Everyone is smiling and shaking hands; the mood is victorious.

The Shooting Back project began in the summer of 2006 with one camera in the hands of a 14-year-old girl, Fida Abu Ayesha, whose family home borders the Tel Rumeida section of the Hebron settlement. The house is known as "the cage house" because of the screened bars surrounding the entrance. Abu Ayesha filmed settler children cursing the family and throwing rocks at the door as soldiers made only faint, futile efforts to keep them away. Then in August 2006, Abu Ayesha filmed a scene that chilled viewers in Israel and around the world.

It shows Yifat Alkobi, a Hebron settler, leaning against the cage, cooing, "Sharmuta, sharmu-u-u-uta" - Arabic for "whore" - at Abu Ayesha's mother. The mother is screaming for Alkobi to stop, but the settler continues. "You're a whore, and your daughters are too," she tells Abu Ayesha. "Stay inside your cage, don't come out." A soldier standing guard does nothing.

"When we first saw the footage, about 10 of us were watching it in the office, and everyone was just stunned," says Yoav Gross, a Tel Aviv documentary filmmaker and a prime mover in the Shooting Back project. "What made it so powerful was that you see it all from the point of view of the Palestinian; the video puts you in the Palestinians' shoes, instead of in the shoes of Israeli or foreign cameramen, which is how you usually see what goes on in the occupation."

Gross says B'Tselem gave that film to Yediot Aharonot's Ynet Web site, and after it was broadcast there, it was picked up right away by all the Israeli TV stations and then the foreign ones. "Within two days it was on BBC, CNN, it was even shown in Japan," says Gross, driving through the West Bank in B'Tselem's old jeep.

Several Knesset members railed against the actions of the Hebron settlers and the inaction of the IDF. "A committee was set up to investigate, but of course nothing came of it," says Gross. Alkobi was questioned by police about a number of violent attacks against Palestinians, but nothing came of that, either.

Yet the video gave dramatic support to claims by Palestinians and Israeli doves that the Israeli presence, especially in Hebron, allows settlers to abuse Palestinians with impunity. It was a victory in the "information war" for anti-occupation forces and an embarrassment for Israel, the IDF and the settler movement.

Shooting Back became a fund-raising draw for B'Tselem, and the organization began distributing video cameras, which cost about $300 each, to several Palestinian families in Hebron, then to others in the southern Hebron Hills, then to others near Nablus - wherever Palestinians live close by the most radical, violent settlements and heaviest IDF presence.

Some 100 cameras have been distributed in the West Bank, with 50 more to be given out soon, and an additional 150 next year, says Gross.

The "sharmuta" videotape wasn't the only Shooting Back production that has made waves nationally and worldwide. Last June, a Palestinian woman filmed four hooded settlers near Sussiya brutally clubbing members of her family, including a woman in her 50s, who is heard screaming on the videotape.

"We used that footage," says police spokesman Poleg. "We arrested three people, settlers from the southern Hebron Hills, but the court decided to release them to house arrest."

B'Tselem collects about 50 hours of videotape a month from Palestinian volunteers and its own field-workers in the West Bank, most of the footage showing settlers, not soldiers, in action. However, the videotape that caused the greatest stir, even more than the original "sharmuta" tape, was taken by a 17-year-old Palestinian girl using a video camera given to her not by B'Tselem, but by her high school, which intended her to film her graduating class's party.

Last July 7, Salaam Amira turned that camera on the anti-security fence protest taking place at her village, Ni'lin, and captured a soldier shooting a blindfolded, bound young Palestinian man in the foot at point-blank range. Two weeks later, a B'Tselem field-worker learned about the videotape, it became international news and the IDF had a major scandal on its hands.

The army rebuked the soldier who did the shooting and the battalion commander who gave the order - and who also held the victim, Ashraf Abu Rahme, 24, in place to be shot. The army also reassigned the battalion commander. But charged them only with "conduct unbecoming a soldier," a charge B'Tselem and other civil rights organizations are appealing.

For all the attention Shooting Back's work has gotten, however, the question is whether it has any long-term effect - whether, after the initial storm caused by its most dramatic videos, there's been a reduction in human rights abuses by soldiers and settlers.

The answer isn't clear.

At B'Tselem, they're very sober about the impact they're having. In individual Palestinian complaints against soldiers or settlers, the videotapes provide vital evidence, says Gross: "Without this documentation, it's the Palestinian's word against the soldier's or the settler's, and Israeli authorities tend not to take the Palestinian's word."

B'Tselem has given police and the IDF scores of videotapes to accompany Palestinian complaints, but full investigations have resulted in only five cases, according to the organization - the "sharmuta" incident in Hebron, the settler clubbing in the south Hebron hills, the IDF shooting of the blindfolded Palestinian in Ni'lin, the recent riot by Yitzhar settlers and an assault by a disturbed Israeli on a B'Tselem field-worker. Except for the last, all of these incidents had been broadcast on TV.

This is no coincidence, says Gross. "The army and police aren't interested in rigorous self-examination. As a rule, they only act on one of our videotapes when the public has seen it and it's an embarrassment to them."

"That's not true," Poleg insists, "at least so far as the police is concerned."

An officer in the IDF Central Command, which includes the West Bank, also denies Gross's charges. "You look at how many internal investigations are conducted by the IDF and Israel Police - believe me, B'Tselem doesn't have much to do with it. We don't need B'Tselem for us to open an internal investigation."

Then there is the question of the project's effect on public opinion. "When one of our videotapes in shown on TV and covered in the media, it has a short-term impact, as long as the media remain interested. But as soon as the media lose interest, which usually happens in a day or two, the public loses interest, too," says B'Tselem activist Michael Zupraner.

At the Suleimans' house in Asira al-Kibliyeh, a Palestinian reporter for a foreign news medium says the exposure of the videotaped incidents "is really embarrassing for the Israeli government. I think in the long run the project may bear fruit by bringing pressure on those who break the law."

AND THEN there is the question of whether B'Tselem gives a fair picture of what's going in the West Bank. After all, it does not have video activists filming Palestinian terrorism, which is certainly a big part of the picture. It has no videotape, for instance, of the Palestinian who stabbed the boy in Yitzhar prior to the settlers' rampage. Nor does it have videotape of the Palestinian woman who recently threw acid in the eye of a soldier at a checkpoint.

Gerald Steinberg, head of NGO Monitor, which accuses B'Tselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and similar organizations of being consistently biased against Israel, says the organization's video activism does a lot more harm than good.

"The IDF shooting of the bound Palestinian was clearly immoral, and in that specific instance it was good that it was captured on film. The army did respond, although one can argue whether the response was sufficient or not," Steinberg says. But the problem, he maintains, is that this is all B'Tselem shows the Israeli public and the world of IDF behavior in the West Bank, and audiences, especially overseas, come away with the impression that soldiers do nothing but brutalize Palestinians.

"Shooting Back reinforces the false image of Israel as the world's major perpetrator of war crimes and a systematic violator of human rights," Steinberg says, "when the fact is that the vast majority of soldiers are the opposite, and we know that much of the army goes out of its way to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and does take human rights seriously."

And by not showing Palestinian terrorism, Shooting Back presents a grossly imbalanced image of reality in the West Bank that makes Israel look purely guilty and the Palestinians purely innocent, he says.

Gross, however, insists that B'Tselem is doing the opposite - it is trying to bring a little balance to an image of Israel's West Bank presence that is skewed radically in Israel's favor.

"Even if you include all the acts of Palestinian terrorism, the overwhelming majority of the human rights violations committed in the West Bank are committed by Israeli settlers and soldiers against Palestinians," he says. "Whenever there's any violence by Palestinians, or any attempt at violence, the government, the politicians, the settlers, the IDF, the police and the Israeli media all go into action to publicize it. There's no need for B'Tselem to publicize Palestinian terror; the whole Israeli establishment already does it. But without B'Tselem, how would the public know about Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians?"

But Steinberg points out that by far the largest television audiences for Shooting Back's videotapes are not in Israel, but abroad - and for audiences overseas, the footage of Palestinian victims is not balanced by footage of Palestinian terrorists. "The IDF and the settlers do not get their message across in foreign countries," he says. "You're not going to see coverage of the soldier getting acid thrown in his eye; it will get no international attention, and this is an example of the imbalance of the image created overseas by B'Tselem's work."

Gross, though, argues that foreign audiences, particularly Americans, get plenty of exposure to Palestinian terror, especially since 9/11, which roughly coincided with the start of the Palestinian suicide bombings of the second intifada. He adds that when B'Tselem began publicizing its work during the first intifada 20 years ago, all its reports were in Hebrew. "We only started approaching the foreign media after we saw that the Israeli establishment wasn't reacting to our reports in Hebrew, that nothing was changing," he says.

Furthermore, while the videotapes do serve B'Tselem's explicit goal of undermining Israel's political effort to sustain the occupation, they also "bring credit to Israel as a democracy," says Gross. "They show that in Israel you can criticize the government, you can criticize the army and the settlers, you can film them and the films will be broadcast, and that's good for Israel's image in the world."

According to the official at IDF Central Command, B'Tselem's Palestinian video camera operators "only show the action they want to show. For instance, they didn't show how [IDF soldiers] in Asira al-Kibliyeh pushed the settlers back to Yitzhar. They didn't show that we confiscated two guns from the settlers, which was the first time in years that we've taken guns away from settlers during a confrontation."

For their part, B'Tselem's people say soldiers frequently try to stop camera operators from filming. In a videotape taken in July that showed the IDF intervening in a land dispute between settlers and Palestinian shepherds, B'Tselem field-worker Nasser Nawajah asks the army battalion commander in the Hebron region, "Can I ask you a question? I am a cameramen with B'Tselem." The battalion commander, Udi Ben-Moha, answers, "You're a cameramen with B'Tselem? Then you're under arrest, too." Nawajah was detained for several hours, then released.

"I know about the videotape with Udi Ben-Moha," says the Central Command officer. "I don't feel the need to comment on every specific event."

ANOTHER CRITICISM of Shooting Back was raised recently in a Jerusalem Post op-ed by Jim Hubbard, a University of Southern California communications professor, who argued that giving cameras to Palestinian youth to film acts of aggression by settlers and soldiers could expose them to danger.

"B'Tselem staffers have reported that they have been verbally and physically attacked. Has it not occurred to them that a similar fate might await the kids given the cameras to film abuses?" wrote Hubbard, who started a project called "Shooting Back" in Washington DC in the 1980s for "disenfranchised people, mainly youth, to document their lives."

The issue of danger is a critical one for B'Tselem, says Gross. The camera operators - who tend to be Palestinian women, the men usually being out at work - are trained by the organization's field-workers "to try to film in full view, not in hiding where the camera could be mistaken for a weapon," says Gross. Also, B'Tselem directs camera operators to stay away from hot spots after their tapes have proved particularly embarrassing to the IDF or to settlers, the better to avoid the possibility of "payback." After the infamous incident at Ni'lin, B'Tselem told its camera operators to stop filming the protests there for two weeks.

Out of this fear of payback, some Palestinian communities refuse B'Tselem's offer of video cameras. Asked if any civilian video activists had been "punished" by settlers or soldiers, Gross mentions a couple of shopkeepers whose stores had been stoned by settlers - "but their stores had been stoned before they got the cameras, too." He couldn't think of any civilian who'd run into trouble only after he'd begun filming.

One cameraman, though, who has paid the price for his efforts is Issa Amro, B'Tselem's field-worker in Hebron, and he's got the evidence on tape. On August 1, a Palestinian wedding procession passing near the Hebron settlement was stoned by settlers, who in turn were stoned by Palestinians, says Gross, and afterward Amro was on the scene with his camera. In the tape, soldiers are seen telling Amro to stop filming and to move along, yet Amro insists he's acting within his rights. A settler comes up and takes a swing at him, saying, "Issa, get out of here with your camera." That time Amro's camera was broken.

In the video he took on May 17 near Hebron, an Israeli man, not a settler, described by Gross as mentally disturbed, calls Amro "garbage, son of a whore," and takes a swing at him. That time Amro's nose was broken - and an IDF investigation was opened against the assailant.

In January, Amro was filming at an IDF checkpoint and a soldier tried to stop him, striking him in the process and arresting him for striking a soldier, says Gross. He adds: "Afterward, Issa showed the army the film, which proved that he was the one getting hit, and they let him go."

As for Hubbard's charge that B'Tselem endangers Palestinian youths by giving them cameras to take to conflict hot spots, he says that not only hasn't this proved out in the field, the claim is misguided to begin with. "It's not as if Palestinians live in a peaceful, quiet suburb and we're suddenly throwing them into a war zone. They live in a war zone in their daily lives. They're already in danger."

In fact, for some of the shebab, or Palestinian street youth, the video camera is an alternative to the rock or the Molotov cocktail. "We're showing them a non-violent means of resistance," says Gross.

But as to whether the presence of a "hostile" video camera and the knowledge that they are being filmed acts as a deterrent with settlers or soldiers inclined toward violence, Gross says it cuts both ways. "In many cases the camera seems to act as a deterrent," he says, "but sometimes it seems to be taken as a provocation."

THE B'TSELEM crew arrives at another village in the Nablus area, where a shepherd has asked about getting one of their cameras. Outside the house, a young man from the family points out the lay of the land. "On that hilltop is [the settlement] Har Bracha, and on that hilltop over there is Bracha."

Sitting in the house, the shepherd, in his 60s, barefoot, with a sunburned, unshaven face, half his teeth missing and a keffiyeh wrapped around his brow, concentrates as Atef Abu al-Rub, B'Tselem's field-worker in the northern West Bank, patiently explains how to operate the video camera. The shepherd's sons watch respectfully, restraining their amusement at their father's encounter with modern communications technology.

The shepherd describes what he's up against. "One day I was in the hills with my sheep, and these settlers started shooting at them. They killed one sheep, then another, then another, and finally they killed the donkey." He and everybody else in the room laugh loudly, a kind of gallows humor, when he gets to the killing of the donkey.

The shepherd's tale of helplessness in the face of repeated acts of settler violence is as common as can be in the West Bank. Following the Yitzhar settlers' attack on Asira al-Kibliyeh, Jerusalem Post military affairs reporter Yaakov Katz wrote that top officials from IDF Central Command and Shai district police had met recently for several hours and "tried unsuccessfully to devise new ways to curb settler violence, which has risen over the past year." Noting that the settlers had shot up the village in the presence of IDF soldiers, yet none had been arrested, the story continued: "Had a Palestinian fired a shot in a street in a Jewish settlement, the army would have shot him dead. Had an Israeli opened fire on a street in Tel Aviv, he would have been arrested, if not shot. Some believe that the West Bank is turning into the 'Wild West Bank,' where settlers are taking the law into their own hands."

At the door, the shepherd says, "I've had so many problems with the settlers, and every time I went to the police, and the police always demanded evidence."

Indicating the camera in his left hand, he says, "Next time, I'll have evidence."

Every year or two a new study about the attitudes of Israeli Jewish youth toward Arabs comes out, and the findings are always depressing. Consistently, a majority of Jewish teenagers in this country is found to view Arabs as dangerous, to dislike them, to consider them unworthy of equal rights as Israeli citizens, and to wish many of them, most of them or all of them, gone.

The charitable interpretation of these survey results is: "What do you expect? Israel is at war with Arabs. Israelis are getting killed by Arabs. Israeli Arabs wish they, not the Jews, were running this country, they identify with Israel's enemies, they're not exactly in love with the Jews, either, so what do you expect Jews to think of them? And if Jewish youth are more anti-Arab than their parents, that's natural - young people tend to be more extreme than their elders, whether to the Left or Right."

For those who are bothered that most Jewish Israeli youth have hostile attitudes toward Arabs, including Arab citizens of their own country, there are two solutions: In the immediate term education, and in the long-term peace. If we teach Jewish youth to see Israeli Arabs as fellow citizens instead of as enemies - and teach Israeli Arabs the same about Jews - then the hatreds will diminish. And this "people-to-people" peacemaking will create a better climate for Israeli and Arab leaders, including Palestinian leaders, to make peace between the nations.

So we're creating a "virtuous cycle": Less hatred means more peace, which means less hatred, which means more peace, and so on. This is the optimistic view. But then last week another one of these opinion polls of Israeli youth came out, this time conducted by researchers at the University of Haifa, and if there was a charitable interpretation and hopeful lesson to be taken from past surveys of this kind, I defy anybody who is troubled by anti-Arab racism to find the ray of hope in this latest one.

This time it wasn't just a majority, but three-quarters of the Israeli Jewish high school pupils surveyed - 800 pupils from 11 schools - who expressed contempt for Arabs. Seventy-five percent said Arabs were "uneducated"; 75% also said Arabs were "uncivilized." And here's the most stunning result: 74% of the Jewish high school students who were polled said Arabs were "unclean." Unclean.

To say Arabs are unclean is not a hard-line political statement. It's not an unduly harsh comment on Arab behavior. To say Arabs are unclean is to evince an irrational, hysterical, impenetrable, absolute hatred for an entire ethnic group - which, in fact, happens not to be unclean, no more than Jews are.

To say Arabs are unclean is an expression of racism in about its purest, most virulent form. "We were not surprised by the outcome of the research," said the Education Faculty's Dr. Haggai Kupermintz, who headed the study. "Anyone who is familiar with the field knows that these warped perceptions exist, but these findings are at the most severe extreme of a disturbing phenomenon."

THE FINDINGS are bad news both for the rightward-leaning Israeli mainstream and the liberal minority. The Right is always saying how Arabs are taught to hate Jews, how it's bred into them at home, in school, in the mosque, in their media. But the Haifa researchers also polled 800 Israeli Arab high school pupils from 11 schools, and found that while their attitudes toward Jews are awful, they're considerably less awful than the Jewish students' attitudes toward them: 27% of Arab pupils thought Jews were uneducated, 40% thought they were uncivilized and 57% thought Jews were unclean.

So who's got the worse attitude problem in this country? Who's more filled with hatred? One other right-wing myth was exposed - again - by this latest survey. For years Israelis have been demanding that the Palestinians remove all the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic references from their schoolbooks and media, because this, you see, is the root of the conflict: They hate Israel because they're taught to as children and encouraged to as adults.

But Israeli Jewish kids don't read in their schoolbooks that Arabs are unclean. They don't hear it in the media, either. Yet that's what three-quarters of them think. So we can stop hocking the Palestinians about their schoolbooks and media; Israeli Jews are living proof that a country can have the most liberal and enlightened schools, TV, radio and newspapers, and the people can still come out racist as all hell.

The bad news for the Left is this: All these endless "encounters" that have been held over the decades between Jewish and Arab youths, all these dialogues and group discussions and role-playing and hugging and crying - the Israeli expression that comes to mind is haval al hazman. A waste of time. A waste of money, too. Jewish-Arab encounters are a cottage industry in Israel. Between the New Israel Fund, the Abraham Fund, the EU, the US, the Ford Foundation and who knows how many other philanthropies, not to mention Israel's own Education Ministry, untold millions of dollars and man-hours have been invested in "breaking down barriers" between young Israeli Jews and young Israeli Arabs, in bringing them "face-to- face with the Other." And after all that, 74% of young Israeli Jews think Arabs are unclean, and 57% of young Israeli Arabs think Jews are unclean.

But then, who knows - maybe if it weren't for all these encounters, the numbers would have been 84% and 67%. So the optimists would counsel: "Let's not lose hope." I'm trying not to. But I don't know. There are all sorts of possible explanations for Israeli racism, and only some of them have to do with war. Others have to do with class, and power, and religion, and many centuries of history, and other reasons I can't think of.

But the fact is that Israel is fertile ground for racism, much more so, for instance, than America, where I grew up. I'm trying very hard to raise my Israeli-born kids not to be bigots, and I have some hope of succeeding. I think a lot of other Israeli parents may also succeed. But even if we do, I'm afraid our children will be in a minority in this country. And, barring some miracle, it will be a dwindling minority.

At last week's conference where the University of Haifa researchers presented their findings, Kupermintz, according to a press release, "further stated that the survey was conducted in October 2004, and that if it was to be held today, he believes the results would be much more extreme." Another Israeli expression comes to mind: Hakol yihye b'seder, rak tagid li matai, v'aich. Everything will be all right, just tell me when, and how.

On one side of the struggle over the disengagement plan is the colossus of Israeli politics, Ariel Sharon, and about 75% of the public. On the other side are the settlers and the rest of the hardcore Right. As far as I'm concerned, this one is no contest – the minority is going to absolutely crush the majority.

Sharon says that by the end of 2005 there will be no Jews living in Gaza; I say that at the end of 2005 there will be more Jews living in Gaza than there are today. The reason boils down to what might be called the "motivation gap."

Ask yourself how many Israelis would be willing to die to stop settlements from being uprooted. If I had to guess, I'd say there are at least a couple of dozen such fanatics, and as Sharon goes forward with his preparations and the struggle heats up, their number will increase.

Now ask yourself how many Israelis would be willing to die so that the settlements in Gaza and a few of them in the West Bank could be dismantled, as the disengagement plan calls for. Obviously the answer is zero.

If you carry this further and compare the readiness on each side to get bloodied in protests, to go to jail, to go on hunger strikes, to block highways – to extend themselves in any of a thousand ways to achieve their political goal – then it becomes clear which political camp has the power and which one doesn't.

In the dispute over the settlements, the will of the majority is not tested over the telephone by pollsters. Three out of five Likud members interviewed in April by telephone pollsters said they supported the disengagement plan, but the only members who counted were those with the will to go out and vote in the May referendum; and of those, three out of five voted "No."

The settler movement's extraordinary victory in the Likud referendum was a preview of what's in store for Israel over the next several months, or maybe a year, or however long it takes the settlers to scare off this latest attempt to roll them back.

And there's nothing at all undemocratic about what they're doing. They don't need an assassin in their ranks to prevail; in fact, another assassination by a right-wing extremist, certainly the assassination of Sharon, would take the wind out of the settler movement's sails and light a fire under the pro-disengagement forces.

No, the movement's surefire strategy is psychological warfare, "winning through intimidation." They will be pushing their crying children to the front, holding up photos of their murdered loved ones, shouting about their blood-drenched land, about rewarding terrorists, about expelling brave Jews from their homes, about the beginning of the end of Israel, about another Holocaust.

And they will be everywhere.

No Israeli is going to want to meet their eyes. None but the most committed leftists will go out into the street to campaign for getting out of the settlements, and these will be a polite few, easily outdone by any three or four extremists happy to shout "traitor" and "kapo" at them.

The voice of the pragmatic majority will be intimidated into silence and thus neutralized as a political force. The voice of the settlers and their allies will be the loudest and fiercest in the land by far – much stronger than that of Sharon, who effectively will be fighting on his own, as nobody listens to the Left anymore.

The pragmatic majority – all the Israelis who believe in the path of least resistance– will find that the path of disengagement from Gaza is on fire with resistance. The discomfort that comes from defying the settlers will seem much sharper, and more immediate, than the discomfort that comes from accommodating them. Better to back off, to wait, to let things calm down, to give in. We don't want a civil war, after all.

That's how I see the politics of the disengagement plan playing out at the popular level; at the parliamentary level, the hardcore Right's campaign has already turned Sharon into a prime minister without a party.

Whatever coalition monkey business he succeeds in pulling off, Sharon cannot take down settlements without the Likud behind him; and as push comes to shove, as Likud fence-sitters are being accused and shamed by settler activists wherever they go, how many Likud ministers or MKs will go to the wall for disengagement? For a policy that they may see as a pragmatic necessity but that violates their deepest nationalistic instincts?

Maybe Ehud Olmert, maybe Shaul Mofaz, maybe Tzipi Livni, but that's about it. And once these maverick types see how alone they are, how their Likud colleagues are either campaigning against disengagement or keeping quiet about it, how much fighting spirit will they have?

How much fighting spirit do they have today?

I don't blame the hardcore right-wing minority, I blame the majority: the huge blob of Israeli pragmatists, along with the numbed-out ranks of the Left.

Even with their far superior numbers, they are no match for the true believers who are prepared to do whatever it takes to defend their belief.

The country's internal dispute over the future of the settlements has to do with things like religion, nationalism, land, home, and blood. In such a dispute, pragmatism is strictly for losers.

Two tractors sat at the edges of Ginot Aryeh, slated to be the first of many makeshift, barely-populated West Bank settler outposts soon to be removed in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan." Set up in a rocky field not far from its "mother" settlement of Ofra, the outpost has a population of about 30 religious settlers living in barracks-like mobile homes, or "caravans," one of which has been turned into a synagogue. There are also tents, outdoor toilets and a jungle gym for kids. Asked what the tractors were for, outpost leader Yossi Vardi replied laconically, "They've been clearing the ground to build permanent housing."

Outside the barbed wire fence surrounding Migron, the jewel in the outposts' crown with some 150 residents living in neat rows of caravans with little gardens, tractors have plowed vast stretches of earth for the construction of planned cottages. Noting that a dozen or so families were already paying mortgages on their future homes there, Aviva Winter ññ at 30 the oldest mother in Migron ññ said the government's plan to tear down the outpost was simply a "mistake." She smiled and shook her head at the idea that anybody, even Sharon and the Israeli army, could think they were capable of uprooting her growing Jewish community. "We wouldn't have left a nice apartment in Jerusalem with three kids if we thought we were going to get evacuated, or even if we thought we would have to stay for good in a 40-square-meter caravan," she said.

On the eve of their confrontation with Sharon, their ex-patron, the settlers aren't snarling and they aren't hysterical. Rather, they are so confident of winning that about all they can do is laugh quietly. At the January 11 nighttime demonstration in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square, the speakers were blustering away, but the 100,000 to 150,000 protesters, most of them teenagers in knitted yarmulkes or long dresses, paid no attention.

It was a lively, buzzing social event, and people were enjoying the tumult too much to listen to fiery speeches.

Sharon, the target of the demonstration, has big plans. He's committed himself to dispatching the army very soon to start tearing down dozens of outposts, then to move on in a few months to some of the 150 permanent settlements. The idea is to clear settlers and soldiers out of the heart of the Palestinian areas, leaving nearly all the Palestinians enclosed behind fortified security barriers, and thereby separating the two warring sides. The settlers, however, have plans of their own. They intend on stopping Sharon and the army at Ginot Aryeh.

On a cold day last week when the wind was blowing the smoky-sweet aroma of incinerated Palestinian garbage across the West Bank hills, a van-load of Dutch and Belgian evangelical Christians visiting Israel made a high-spirited solidarity stop to the outpost, located some three miles east of Ramallah. "Shalom," tour-group leader Bert Woudwijk called out to the sleepy-looking young man answering the knock at his caravan door. "Don't leave this place. God gave you this land," Woudwijk urged him, and the earnestly grinning delegation moved on.

At the door was Oren Rund, 23, an engineering student and security guard who left his family's home in Ofra for the outpost right after his younger brother Erez was killed by Palestinians. The killings of settlers and building of outposts go together. Ginot Aryeh was built three years ago, immediately after the murder of Ofra resident Aryeh Hershowitz. Off the highway near Ofra is the outpost Givat Assaf, named for Hershkowitz's son Assaf, who was killed three months after his father. Nearby is a tall guard tower topped by an Israeli flag marking Givat Tal Binyamin, the outpost named for intifada victims Binyamin Kahane and his wife Talia, the son and daughter-in-law of slain Kach leader Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Asked what he thought of Sharon's plans to erase Ginot Aryeh, Rund said matter-of-factly that it was impossible. "They don't have the manpower," he said, explaining that the army demolition brigade would be met by several thousand settlers who would block their path.

On a bulletin board outside the administrative office in Ofra, a notice carries the slogan, "Ginot Aryeh — for all of us, this is the front."

Referring to the outpost as "a neighborhood of Ofra," the notice warns that the army is mobilizing in "massive" proportions to come tear it down. "This can be prevented only if you and all of us are there," the notice reads. Settlement manager Meir Nahlieli, a husky fellow in jeans and hiking boots, is ready to answer the call. "I'll sit in front of bulldozers, no problem. Let four soldiers come and carry me away."

Asked what he and his neighbors at Ginot Aryeh would do if thousands of determined settlers somehow failed to stop the army's cranes and bulldozers from destroying the place, Rund replied, "Then a week afterward we'll come back."

Dror Etkes, who monitors settlement activity for Peace Now, takes Rund at his word. In the last year, army demolition crews met fierce settler resistance at three outposts: Havat Gilad, Havat Ma'on and Mitzpe Yitzhar. At all three, settlers came back soon afterward and moved into freshly-arrived caravans, Etkes noted. All three are up and running today. "Experience tells us that unless something changes radically, the same thing is going to happen this time around," he said.

Outpost settlers — who number between 1,000 and 1,500, according to Etkes — are convinced Sharon came up with the disengagement plan only because he couldn't stand up to pressure from the Bush administration. No argument for removing the outposts makes a dent in their certainty. They insist that every outpost is legal, that the government and army approved each one, and that the only violation of the law here is Sharon's attempt to destroy their homes. (The settler movement's current Supreme Court challenge to the dismantling of Ginot Aryeh has delayed its destruction by two weeks.)

They promise that the resistance will be non-violent — although at past outpost demolitions many "hilltop youth" duked it out with soldiers and police, throwing stones and slashing the tires of security vehicles. But they are fully prepared to stand, or lie down, in the way of the Israeli army's attempt to carry out an order. "It doesn't bother me, because Sharon is giving in to terror," explained Mindy Tsur, 29, a Schenectady, N.Y.-born mother of five at Migron.

The settlers seem unfazed by years of opinion polls consistently showing that the Israeli people are against them, that at least two-thirds of the general public favors uprooting isolated settlements — to say nothing of allegedly illegal outposts. "That's not the people's true opinion, that's the media telling them what to think," said Tsur.

Added Ginot Aryeh leader Vardi, who heads a religious nationalist youth movement and has advised former Prime Minister Ehud Barak on settlement affairs: "I don't think the people of Israel really understand what's going on here. They think we're living in the casbah in the middle of Nablus, next to the muezzin. What is an 'outpost,' anyway? We feel we are the emissaries of the people of Israel, and that what we're doing is for them."

Source: FORWARD