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.”

A luxury housing project in southeast Jerusalem with panoramic views of the Temple Mount is attracting dozens of wealthy American Jews looking to have a foothold in Jerusalem. But some real estate experts in the capital say that the developers are intentionally unloading the project on eager, but ignorant, overseas buyers who do not necessarily understand the city's geography, the political implications of such a move, or the fact that landowners in the area have appealed to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to stop the project.

Apartments in Nof Zion, in the Jabel Mukaber area of East Jerusalem, are fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars from buyers overseas with promises of exclusivity and a view reminiscent of the days when King David walked the city. With its first stage slated for completion by October 2007, Nof Zion is advertised as a gated community with 400 spacious apartments facing the Old City. A five-star hotel, a shopping center, a country club, synagogues, a mikveh and other amenities suited to their clientele of predominantly wealthy religious American Jews are being planned as well.

The project's Web site describes the location as being near the "Israeli Arab village of Jabel Mukaber" and "just a 10-minute drive to the city center, Great Synagogue, King David Hotel and other major sites." So far, the project - which is also described as "a real bargain considering its extraordinary location" - has been marketed only to Jews from abroad.

"In all of Jerusalem, you can't have a view like this and that's a fact," says Yehuda Levi, director general and one of the owners of Digal Investments and Holdings Ltd, the publicly traded company behind Nof Zion. "Our buyers are not political and we're not political - these are people who want beautiful, modern, spacious housing with incredible views of the Old City and the Judean desert. They've been here before, they've seen what they are buying, and politics has nothing to do with this."

But the project, formerly known as Nof Zahav, is located just past the Goldman Promenade in an area that Jerusalem lawyer Daniel Seidemann, who is affiliated with the Israeli NGO Ir Amim, describes as "downtown Jabel Mukaber." And residents of the village, which is within Jerusalem's municipal borders, are not "Israeli Arabs." They hold Jerusalem identity cards, not Israeli citizenship, and as such, will be voting in the Palestinian Authority elections next week.

Building for Nof Zion has already begun and the project is situated on a slope, two sides of which will border on homes in Jabel Mukaber. The building site lies below the Goldman Promenade; to the south is East Talpiot, or Armon Hanatziv, the growing Israeli neighborhood that Nof Zion promoters point to as part of an expanding Jewish presence in this part of Jerusalem.

It's not a second Rehavia

Mohammad Gbara, a lawyer representing some of the villagers in homes adjacent to the building site, insists that the foreign buyers do not realize that their dream apartment will be "in the heart" of an Arab village.

"Nof Zion is described as a Garden of Eden, or as a second Rehavia, but what's not advertised is that it's part of East Jerusalem," Gbara noted. "No one tells them [the foreign buyers] that they will be in the middle of Jabel Mukaber and very close to Arabs." (Upscale Rehavia is one of Jerusalem's oldest Jewish neighborhoods.)

So far, one-third of the 91 apartments in the first building stage have been sold, all of them to Jews from abroad, with prices ranging from $350,000 to $560,000. Buyers are mostly religious professionals - doctors, lawyers, and accountants - who live throughout the year in urban Jewish centers, like New York, Miami and Los Angeles.

"Most of our buyers are familiar with this area," insists Levi. "People don't buy apartments over the Internet."

But some real estate developers say that the foreign buyers are unaware of the politics in this divided city, and as a result, are buying into a project they don't really understand. "Israelis won't buy property there and so they're dumping it on the American market," said one prominent real estate developer, who asked to remain unnamed. "Americans buying [in Nof Zion] don't understand where they're putting their money and they are intentionally being 100 percent misled. This is a project that's all about people wanting to make money off the American fad of buying apartments in Israel. The Nof Zion buyers are investors who don't understand the politics of what they are buying. They come, they see fabulous views, they're told that the Arabs are happy, and so they buy. It's not a political statement, because for them, it's the same thing as Talbieh, but cheaper. The problem is that the project is being marketed as mainstream."

Apartments in Nof Zion, the source added, are "being sold by a woman in Miami who has never even lived in Israel."

One potential American buyer, who also asked to go unnamed and is still considering purchasing a Nof Zion apartment, said that several friends in his modern Orthodox community had already bought apartments in the luxury development. "It's a chance to get an apartment in Jerusalem at a price I can afford and it seems like a good investment," said the potential buyer, who was not told about the legal proceedings regarding the project.

"I didn't realize that it was a problematic location. We were told that it would be `the place to live' and that within five to eight years it would be the center of things, a much better neighborhood than it is now. We were also told that the apartments will more than double in value within five years, and will be worth over a million dollars," he said.

Nof Zion is slated to cover some 115 dunams, part of which belonged to Jewish landowners, and part of which the Jerusalem municipality expropriated from several Arab landowners in the Jabel Mukaber area. Though some of the residents have already been financially compensated, two major landowners appealed the expropriation on grounds that it was illegal, since it was only Arab land, they claimed, that was taken for "green areas" and set aside for public use.

The case was brought before the Jerusalem District Court, which ruled in favor of the municipality's expropriation. Lawyers for the two landowners filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, meanwhile, in a last-ditch effort to stop the building. The parties currently are in the process of mediation.

"Claims of unlawful expropriation have been rejected by the court," said Jerusalem Municipality spokesman, Gidi Schmerling.

Once the issue is resolved in mediation, all that remains to be obtained are the final approvals for constructing the residential buildings, which Levi, of Digal, expects in the "coming days."

As part of the sales pitch, overseas investors are told that Nof Zion is a welcome addition to the predominantly Arab area. The access roads are being improved and widened, trees will be planted, green parks with benches and walkways will be added to the landscape, and the well-maintained Promenade will be extended into the Jabel Mukaber area.

According to the investors behind the project, the villagers welcome the new development, since Nof Zion will bring improved services for water, electricity, and sewage.

`No one is happy about it'

But a brief stroll around Jabel Mukaber revealed that residents bordering on the building site are hardly waiting with open arms.

"No one is happy about this project," says Hassan Zehayka, who runs a grocery store near Nof Zion and wears his kaffiyeh as a scarf. "They say that we'll get better services like water and plumbing, but I doubt that anything will change. If there's an improvement, it will be only for the Jews."

Further down the road, Mahmoud Bedat agrees. "It's like putting an Arab village right in the middle of Rishon Letzion," Bedat, a long-time Jabel Mukaber resident, says of the project. "They say that we'll get better roads, but who needs good roads if our children won't have anywhere to live?"

Projects like Nof Zion are part of a larger real estate boom in Jerusalem fueled, in large part, by overseas buyers looking to invest in the Israeli economy, while gaining a vacation home here in the process. Prices have increased in some cases by as much as 40 percent in central areas like Talbieh, Rehavia, Katamon, the German Colony and Baka, driving many Israelis out of the city in search of more affordable living. In Talbieh, for example, apartments are being sold for about $10,000 per square meter. Prices in Nof Zion, meanwhile, are a third of that, estimated to be about $3,000 per square meter.

"People have the impression that American buyers have limitless pockets, but that's not true," says Paysi Golomb, director of Kehillot Tehilla, a non-profit organization that helps North American buyers purchase homes in Israel and is also promoting Nof Zion. "In Jerusalem, the most sought-after spot is close to the Old City, without too many stairs, and with a sukkah balcony. There aren't too many of those kinds of apartments left at reasonable prices."

Nof Zion, he says, has "one of the most beautiful views in the world" but also costs "significantly less" than some of the other projects. It's an attractive combination for overseas buyers with limited funds, he says. "Potential buyers come and see the place, and for some the location bothers them and for others it doesn't," he added.

In their pitch to American buyers, Nof Zion promoters have pointed to Abu Tor, the mixed Jerusalem neighborhood with Jewish and Arab sections.

"Many of our buyers don't understand the layout of Jerusalem and so we explain to them that the city is like a checkerboard, in terms of Arab neighborhoods and Jewish neighborhoods," says Yaakov Simkovitz, an agent for Anglo-Saxon Real Estate who is selling apartments in Nof Zion. "We'll take them on a tour of Abu Tor and then show them Nof Zion, which isn't very different."

Next month, local advertising for Nof Zion will begin, with the hopes of creating a mixed Israeli-American community that won't stand empty after the tourists have returned home. The foreign investors, meanwhile, have been told that Israelis will buy the lower floors at lower prices, leaving the breathtaking views of the Old City available on the higher floors for the project's American clientele.

"We're trying to get a balance of half Israelis, half foreign buyers," Simkovitz, the Anglo-Saxon agent, said. "It's important to us that Nof Zion does not become a ghost town."

Most days, Lee Gargagliano of Brooklyn hitchhikes and then takes the bus from his hosts' home in a small village outside Beit Sahour to Bethlehem, where he volunteers at an orphanage. A participant in the Palestine Summer Encounter (PSE), he then spends the rest of his day learning Arabic, taking day trips around the West Bank and getting to know his host family, who compel him to consume unimaginable quantities of food and hot tea.

Gargagliano, like some of the other PSE students, could have chosen the birthright program that offers all Jewish college students a free trip to Israel and saved a few thousand dollars in the process. But the 20-year-old college student finds the idea of being able to travel for free, simply because of his Jewish heritage, "appalling."

Indeed, PSE offers a new alternative for a different sort of American college student who wants to get a closer look at the political and social situation here - but isn't interested in programs that gloss over life beyond the Green Line. Like birthright, PSE aims to humanize the conflict beyond media images, but it also tries to familiarize students with the Palestinian plight, a narrative that the students say is simply harder to access in the United States.

And unlike the ISM (International Solidarity Movement), participants are not sent to the front lines at demonstrations and house demolitions, but are more involved in social activities in the communities that host them.

PSE, then, presented the perfect opportunity for the 50 students who arrived three weeks ago to study Arabic, live with a Palestinian family, volunteer in the West Bank, and essentially get up close and personal with an issue they've only been exposed to - however fleetingly - on television.

"It's much easier to get the Israeli side of things at home," Kim Crane, a 20-year-old from Virginia explained last week during the group's visit to the Jerusalem headquarters of B'Tselem, a human rights organization. "In the media, we hear about bombs going off and people being killed - but not much about ordinary Palestinians trying to rebuild their lives."

"I go to a conservative school that doesn't really have a large minority population and what we hear in the media is basically what we believe and what we think," added Allison McGhee, who recently graduated from James Madison University. "I think we're all trying to go beyond that."

Already in its second year, PSE is growing and registration has nearly doubled since its inaugural session last summer. Run by the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, together with the Middle East Fellowship program, which is based in the U.S., the program has attracted students from Sweden, Japan and Norway.

Though half of the participants are practicing Christians -both the Holy Land Trust and Middle East Fellowships are religious organizations - PSE has also attracted a number of Jews, as well as Arabs. Many are majoring in conflict studies, Middle Eastern history or political science. Some are active in the Free Palestine groups on their campuses, while still others are just curious. For most, however, living with Palestinians in and around Bethlehem is their first exposure to Palestinians or Israelis.

"Everyone comes with an open mind and our opinions are definitely not set in stone," said one student, who preferred to go unnamed and wears a necklace with a Palestinian flag spread across the outline of the State of Israel.

As part of the program, participants travel around the West Bank and often into Israel to meet with Israeli human rights activists. Their trip to the Jerusalem office of B'Tselem last week allowed them to ask questions about UN cooperation, the response of the Israeli public, and the somewhat precarious position of a human rights organization that invariably finds itself at odds with the military establishment.

As part of the program, participants are also paired with host families. They share meals, take part in family celebrations, and take advantage of their host's free Arabic homework help. Most of all, though, the participants say they are able gain intimate knowledge of an average Palestinian family's routine living under military occupation.

"Sometimes, we'll be having a normal dinner conversation and then they'll start talking about a friend who had the wrong permits and died of heat exhaustion, or they'll talk about having to go through checkpoints to get to school," explained Kim Crane, who is studying economics and had never been to the region before. "It's kind of strange because then we'll got back to talking about everyday stuff, and have normal dinner conversation. Before I came here, I thought about occupation as a physical thing, but living with my host family has made me realize that it's also psychological."

Participants also spend a large chunk of their day volunteering in the community at places like the Palestinian Prisoners' Society in Bethlehem, the YMCA in Beit Sahour or the municipality in Beit Jala.

"Organizations like the ISM send their participants to the front lines and while we're okay with that, we're more interested in listening to other needs of the Palestinian people," explained Joshua Keaney, travel coordinator at the Middle East Fellowship. "Those needs can be playing basketball with kids at a summer camp, writing a grant for a Palestinian organization or helping out at a physiotherapy clinic. There's a lot that's needed on a social, and not political, level."

Both participants and administrators insist that PSE is mostly nonpolitical and advocates, above all, international human rights.

"Our goal is really just to create a linkage between Palestinians and internationals throughout the world," George Rishmawi, co-director of the program said in a telephone interview from the offices in Bethlehem. He could not get a permit to join the group's visit to B'Tselem in Jerusalem last week.

"We want to introduce a human face of the Palestinians, which is rarely encountered in the media. Of course, participants will encounter politics, just by being here, but we certainly don't encourage them to be activists. If they want to go back to their campuses and do something, then it's their choice," he said.

But participants say that just two weeks into the program, they've already begun to cement their plans for the return home, a time when they think they will be able to make the most "difference."

"I'll be making presentations to my school and to my church," promised one participant. "It's amazing what college students can accomplish - if you can just make them a little aware and active."

Leading members of the Anglican church will recommend that their decision-making body adopt an anti-Israel divestment policy similar to the one the Presbyterian church passed earlier this summer. The announcement, made yesterday in Jerusalem by representatives of the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN), came at the close of the delegation's 10-day tour of the region.

"We will return home and recommend that the Anglican Consultative Council [the church's decision-making body] adopt a resolution calling for divestment from Israel, and if our delegation is representative of the larger Anglican sentiment, then I'd say we're in good shape," Dr. Jenny Te Paa, who led the APJN delegation, told Haaretz yesterday.

The 30 or so delegates in the APJN, who were appointed by region and represent the church's extensive global network, will make their official recommendation to the Anglican Consultative Council [ACC] in June, when the body meets formally in Wales.

Ahead of that in February, delegates will also address an international meeting of archbishops in London, to convince spiritual leaders such as the archbishop of Canterbury that divestment is a "moral" imperative.

"The church has become increasingly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians," said Te Paa, "and the chances of the ACC accepting our recommendation are quite high."

The delegation, which arrived here last week, toured extensively in the West Bank, and met yesterday with Yasir Arafat in Ramallah. Delegates insisted that they made sure to schedule time with Israeli leadership as well, and pointed to a meeting with MK Azmi Bishara last Wednesday.

"The word draconian barely even begins to describe what we saw," Reverend Brian J. Greives, who represents the U.S. church, said of his experience.

Like others in his delegation, Greives intends to recommend that the church adopt divestment "to bring an end to the conflict."

He stressed, though, that consultations with leading figures in the American Jewish community who were "deeply distressed" by the precedent the Presbyterians set in late July would be key in the decision-making process.

Archdeacon Taimalelagi Tuatagola-Matalavea, the Anglican observer at the UN who was part of the delegation, said that she too would advocate for divestment and an increased cooperation with the Presbyterian church, "so that Christian faiths can bring peace to this land."

Reverend Naim Ateek, an APJN advisor who is active in the Palestinian Christian liberation movement, agreed, adding that the church needs to seek peace, and political or economic pressure is a necessary means to achieve that.

The Anglican Peace and Justice Network represents 75 million Anglicans and Episcopalians worldwide.

Max, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement and a student at Bir Zeit University, is hardly a poster child for birthright israel - a program that offers young Jews a free trip to Israel in an effort to strengthen Jewish identity and a connection with the Jewish state.

But as a 21-year-old Jewish university student who had never been to Israel on an organized trip, he qualified, despite the fact that his goals clashed, to put it mildly, with those of the program's organizers.

"I was afraid that they would uncover my intentions," Max, who wears a bracelet of the Palestinian flag, admitted this week over hummus and Coca Cola at a restaurant just outside of Damascus Gate. "But the interview was short, and there was no way of them knowing about my activities on campus."

During winter break last year, Max went on birthright israel and spent 10 days touring places like the Western Wall, Safed, and Massada. Afterwards, he stayed on another two months attending rallies and protests as an ISM activist in the West Bank village of Budrus. The free birthright trip, he admits, presented him with an opportunity to continue his pro-Palestinian activism.

Max is now back with the ISM for the summer and spends his mornings studying Arabic at Bir Zeit and his afternoons in the ISM media office in Ramallah, doing interviews, researching, and disseminating information.

He is just one example of a trend among young Jewish pro-Palestinian activists, who see birthright israel as their free ticket to ISM headquarters in the West Bank. Both birthright and ISM openly concede that young Jews have used the Zionist program to get to Israel. Birthright officials say they know of at least six cases in which participants have come on their program and then joined up with ISM. Max says he knows of a dozen such cases, but believes the number is considerably higher.

Max and Jessica, another recent birthright graduate who volunteers for the ISM in Az-Zawiya outside of Salfit in the West Bank, asked that their family names be withheld, for fear of trouble from Israeli immigration officials and harassment from right-wing activists.

According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the ISM, which was founded in 2001, is "at times... under the auspices of Palestinian terror organizations." The ISM, which describes itself as a non-violent resistance group against the Israeli occupation, denies the charges.

Volunteering for ISM wasn't an easy decision for Max, who comes from an upper middle class family with a traditional Jewish background. "My parents told me that what I was doing was dishonorable," he says of the decision to apply to birthright with the intention of using it to facilitate his ISM work. But after weighing the options, he explains simply, he came to the conclusion that "not going would have been more dishonorable."

Max says that he was reticent to "assert" his political views on the trip, simply because he "didn't want to hurt or offend" the participants or some of the soldiers that had accompanied their tour bus. On one night, though, during a question-and-answer session with the soldiers who had recently returned from an operation in Gaza, he asked if they had ever thought about what it was like to be a Palestinian. "The soldier didn't answer because he said that the question was political," the philosophy major recalls. "But the whole trip is political."

Jessica, a recent graduate from Duke University and one of the leaders of her campus' divestment campaign, was so nervous that birthright would uncover her activist past that she applied through a Chicago office, rather than on her North Carolina campus, where her name is well-known. But she insists that "no one ever said you have to be a Zionist or that you have to agree with the program's politics."

Like Max, Jessica qualified for each of the program's three prerequisites; she is Jewish, is between the ages of 18 and 26, and has never participated in an organized trip to Israel before. "I asked if it was okay to volunteer after the trip and they said yes," she adds.

Jessica, along with a friend who also went on to become an ISM activist after the free 10-day trip, was one of 11,000 birthright participants to visit Israel this summer alone. "For the first few days, we played undercover," recalls the 22-year-old, who helped erect a mock wall on campus last year as part of a protest activity against the separation fence Israel is building in the West Bank. "We listened, took notes, and got to know people. One day on the bus, they asked us about anti-Israel activity on campus. We talked about it, but we didn't say that we were also behind it."

"When we felt comfortable, we began to ask critical questions, and they saw where we were coming from politically," she says. "They talk about birthright as a family, and at the end of the trip, we were very much part of that family." The leaders of her trip, she adds, "were very encouraging."

For Jessica, who says that she joined birthright for a window into "Jewish nationalism," the free trip was a perk, but certainly not the driving force behind her decision. Also, unlike Max, she came to birthright knowing she wanted to do volunteer work, and though ISM was a definite option, she says she was exploring other options as well. Knowing her political inclinations, one birthright leader encouraged her to look into working with the Israeli political left, but ultimately, she says, ISM "offered the most useful role." The Israeli jobs, she explains, consisted mostly of office work.

And so, instead of faxing and photocopying, Jessica spent her summer attending protests and demonstrations. She says she's been chased, harassed, and called a self-hating Jew, but she says that it's her Jewish identity that brought her to the region in the first place. "Israel tries to speak for me and for all Jews," she says, "and so it's my responsibility to be here and be active."

The ISM Web site advises potential volunteers "to have a really good story about why you are coming... [and] play it as though your visit is for other, Israel-based reasons, like tourism, religion, visiting an Israeli friend, etc." But Huwaida Arraf, a spokesperson and one of the founders of ISM denied that the organization was actively encouraging its Jewish activists to go on birthright. Nevertheless, she said, "I don't see anything wrong with it, because if birthright is supposed to show the state of Israel, occupation is a part of that." Arraf is also the wife of Adam Shapiro, the Jewish New Yorker who made headlines last year after being holed up in Arafat's Ramallah compound for 24 hours.

According to Gidi Mark, the international director of marketing for birthright israel, the program's selection process has already denied applications which they deemed unfit. "Our goal is to strengthen Jewish identity, the connection with Israel and its people, and to show solidarity, and if we suspect that people are applying for impure reasons, we do a thorough check," he says. "Birthright is a Zionist program and we want the students to go back to their campuses and be able to answer questions from a Zionist perspective. There's a lot of gray area, because we want to be pluralistic, but at the same time make sure that people aren't taking advantage of us."

His estimates put the number of birthright ISM volunteers at some half a dozen of the program's 70,000 birthright participants. "It's important to keep this in perspective," he added.

In the meantime, both Max and Jessica admit that the birthright experience affected them deeply - even if it wasn't what birthright officials may have hoped for. Max, for one, says he saw the soldiers as human beings, not simply as "symbols of militarization and occupation" as he had viewed them before. And Jessica says that she developed a "greater sympathy for Jewish nationalism."

They joke about starting a new program for young activists like themselves: "We're thinking of calling it birthleft."