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.”

Looking to next week's Palestinian legislative elections, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged all those eligible to participate and voiced hope that this milestone will set the stage for peace and Statehood.

“You deserve a free, fair and peaceful election,” Mr. Annan said in a message to the Palestinian people released in New York. “Your electoral commission is doing outstanding work under difficult circumstances.”

He stressed that action at the ballot box will help set the course for the future, encouraged all to vote on 25 January and pledged that the UN “will remain steadfastly committed to helping you to achieve a state of your own.”

Noting that the international community is working with the Palestinian Authority to help it to ensure law and order, he stressed the importance of everyone taking part in the polling. “We believe that whether you live in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, you must be able to exercise your democratic rights,” he said.

The election will mark “an important milestone” in the long and difficult history of the Palestinian people. “I hope it will set you on the path to a more peaceful future, in which you at last have your own State and can live at peace with all your neighbours,” he said.

The UN, he said, is determined to help the Palestinian people to peacefully achieve an end to the occupation, and a viable, contiguous, democratic State of Palestine, living at peace with a secure Israel.

“To achieve that goal, the Palestinian Authority must pursue the path of reform and peace,” he said, stressing that the PA must establish its monopoly on the use of force.

The UN is part of the diplomatic Quartet, which also includes the United States, the Russian Federation and the European Union, working for peace in the Middle East. The Quartet has welcomed the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections as a positive step toward consolidation of Palestinian democracy and the goal of a two-State solution.

The diplomatic Quartet made up of the United Nations, United States, Russian Federation and European Union today welcomed the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections as a positive step toward consolidation of Palestinian democracy and the goal of a two-State solution to the Middle East conflict.

In a statement the Quartet called on the Palestinian Authority and the Central Elections Commission to ensure a free, fair, and open process in accordance with Palestinian law.

Noting the continued importance of security, the Quartet called on the Palestinian Authority to ensure law and order, prevent terrorist attacks and dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism. The Palestinian Authority was also called on to assure the security of polling stations and electoral personnel while enforcing laws like those banning the public display of weapons.

The Quartet repeated its earlier assertions that “those who want to be part of the political process should not engage in armed group or militia activities, for there is a fundamental contradiction between such activities and the building of a democratic State.” It called on all participants to renounce violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and disarm.

The Quartet said it was “encouraged” by the negotiation of a Code of Conduct governing participation in the election scheduled for next month and called for full adherence to it. The Palestinian Authority’s invitation to international election observers was also welcomed.

The Palestinian Authority “should take additional steps to ensure the democratic process remains untainted by violence, by prohibiting political parties from pursuing their aims through violent means, and by moving expeditiously to codify this as Palestinian law,” the four diplomatic members said.

A future Palestinian Authority Cabinet “should include no member who has not committed to the principles of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism.”

Calling for an immediate and direct dialogue between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to coordinate preparations for the elections, the Quartet pointed out that proactive measures are essential to the movement of voters, elections committee staff and materials, and international observers throughout the election process.

“Both parties should work to put in place a mechanism to allow Palestinians resident in Jerusalem to exercise their legitimate democratic rights, in conformity with existing precedent,” the Quartet said.

With a $25 million grant to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Israeli government made its first donation to a UN agency that will give the Palestinian territories an economic boost following Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip.

UNDP’s Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People (UNDP/PAPP) announced today that it had received the Israeli funds to clear and rehabilitate sites in the Gaza Strip that had been occupied by evacuated Israeli settlers. The money will be used to clear and recycle more than 1.2 million tons of debris and rubble that will be milled and recycled for use as road paving and building materials.

The entire project, which will employ several hundred Palestinian workers, should be wrapped up in 18 months. UNDP has promised to move as quickly as possible so Palestinians can begin rebuilding on the evacuated sites by June 2006.

“This project is important because it not only paves the way for Palestinians to be able to use the land as soon as possible for their development plans, but also because it will generate hundreds of jobs for unemployed Palestinian laborers, contributing to the fight against the rising tide of poverty in the Gaza Strip,” said the acting head of UNDP/PAPP, Minna Tyrkk.

The Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and the Office of the Special Envoy for the Quartet, James Wolfenshon, asked UNDP to undertake the rehabilitation project. “We are very pleased with the trust that all parties have place in UNDP/PAPP to carry out this task,” added Ms. Tyrkk.

With only 10 days left before the expiration of the original deadline of the Middle East Diplomatic Quartet’s so-called Road Map peace plan for a final and settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a top United Nations official stressed today that the plan is still the agreed framework for reaching a lasting peace in the Middle East.

“This is surely an occasion for all parties to reflect on what more they can do to ensure that Road Map obligations are met,” UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari told the Security Council, in his regular monthly briefing, regarding the plan sponsored by the Quartet consisting of the UN, European Union, United States and Russia.

Mr. Gambari said that two prime areas of concern during the delicate period before January’s Palestinian elections were the Palestinian Authority’s inability to exercise control over its territory and Israel’s sustained policy of settlement expansion and barrier construction.

The Israeli policy undermined Palestinian leaders running for office on a platform of peaceful negotiation with Israel. He said the Quartet supported the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to quickly stop armed groups from impeding law and order.

Mr. Gambari also stressed the importance of the Agreement on Movement and Access that was signed last month between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority. While some aspects of the pact have been implemented, he said that World Bank officials recently reiterated at a meeting in London that continuing restrictions imposed on movement of goods and people were a major obstacle to Palestinian economic growth.

He noted that the 15 December start of convoys between Gaza and the West Bank were suspended despite efforts of the United States and Quartet Special Envoy James Wolfensohn to ensure that Israel’s security concerns were met. He hoped that discussions to break the impasse would continue.

He said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported a slight increase in the roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank and discussions are ongoing to develop a plan to reduce obstacles to movement there.

At the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee meeting held in London on 14 December, the Palestinian Authority, the Government of Israel and donors met to discuss the economic, fiscal and humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territory and assess progress in Palestinian reform, Mr. Gambari reported.

A key theme of the meeting was the need for the Palestinian Authority to adhere to the reform agenda and re-establish fiscal discipline, he said. The authority’s deficit increased from 14 per cent to 17 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the past year and will reach 19 per cent of GDP in 2006.

“The Palestinian Authority’s fiscal situation is so acute that there is real concern that the December salaries may not be paid,” Mr. Gambari told the council. He said the Committee hoped to hold a pledging conference during the first half of 2006 to mobilize the target sum of $3 billion, as agreed in principal at the G8 Summit in October.