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.”

One of the most urgent tasks for the international community in 2013 must surely be to lift Israel’s cruel siege of Gaza, now entering its sixth year, and end the misguided boycott of its Hamas government.

There is hardly a more flagrant example of injustice in the world today than the situation of the 1.6 million inhabitants of this hugely overcrowded Strip — many of them refugees driven out of Palestine by the new Israeli state in 1947-48. They must be allowed to live a normal life — to travel, to manufacture, to trade, to educate their children — free from the constant danger of Israeli air strikes.

A French scholar, Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor at the prestigious Institute of Political Science in Paris, has published an important 400-page history of Gaza, from ancient times to the disturbed present. His Histoire de Gaza is the most comprehensive book ever written on the subject and should be read by all those concerned with the long agony of the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood.

It is impossible in a short article to do justice to Filiu’s sweeping narrative, meticulous research and detailed findings, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that he lays blame for the as yet unresolved and indeed worsening crisis on three main actors — first and foremost on Israel, concerned only with its own security and brutally indifferent to Palestinian life; secondly, on Fatah and Hamas, those old rivals, still locked in a fratricidal struggle as if unaware that their national cause is slipping away before their eyes; and thirdly, on the humanitarian aid provided by the international community which has kept Gaza’s population alive but has also, paradoxically, prevented Gaza’s economic development and its efforts at self-sufficiency.

Statistics about Gaza make grim reading. In the five years, June 2007 to June 2012, nearly 2,300 Palestinians were killed and 7,700 injured by Israeli forces, two thirds of them during the murderous ‘Cast Lead’ offensive of winter 2008-9. Over a quarter of Palestinian fatalities were women and children.

In the same period, 37 Israelis were killed and 380 injured in attacks from Gaza, 60 per cent of them military personnel. Some 35 per cent of Gaza’s farmland and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israel’s siege.

Projections are equally gloomy. The UN has warned that living conditions in the Strip could become unbearable by 2020 – a mere seven years away. The Gaza population is expected to reach 2.1 million by then — a density of more than 5,800 people per square kilometre — putting an intolerable strain on supplies of drinking water and electricity.

Over 90 per cent of the water from the Gaza aquifer is unsafe for human consumption without treatment. Damage to the aquifer, the major water source, is in imminent danger of becoming irreversible. Some 90 million litres of untreated and partially treated sewage are dumped in the sea each day. The UN says there will be a demand by 2020 for 440 additional schools — 85 per cent of schools already run on double shifts — as well as 800 hospital beds and more than 1,000 doctors.

When Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, Israel closed the Erez terminal to Gazan labourers, who had made up some 70 per cent of the Strip’s work force. When the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian fighters, Israel shut down the Karni terminal, the main crossing for goods, and prevented the use of the Rafah terminal for passenger traffic.

And when Hamas seized control of the Strip from Fatah in June 2007, Egypt, in turn, shut the Rafah terminal. In January 2008, having already cut food supplies in half, Israel announced a total blockade on fuel to Gaza by both land and sea. Gazans abandoned cars for donkeys. As the siege intensified, employment in Gaza manufacturing fell from 35,000 in 2006 to 860 by mid-2008.

With no electricity, no food and no water coming from outside, the Gazans built clandestine tunnels to Egypt. From a few dozen in 2005, the number of tunnels grew to at least 500 by 2008, and to some 1,500 today, becoming Gaza’s primary source of imports. But the cost in lives has been heavy.

Since 2007, at least 172 Palestinian civilians, most of them child workers, have been killed in the tunnels, and 318 injured. For the latest information on Gaza’s predicament, I would recommend two remarkable articles in the summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies: Nicolas Pelham’s Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: the Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege and The Politics of International Aid to the Gaza Strip by Tamer Qarmout and Daniel Béland.

What is to be done about this scandalous situation? This coming year will either see Barack Obama back in the White House or his place taken by his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. One or the other will need to address the simmering Arab-Israeli conflict, which erupts periodically into violence, poisoning relations between the West and the Arab and Muslim world.

As Jean-Pierre Filiu says in his final words, Gaza, “the womb of the fidayin and the cradle of the intifada,” lies at the heart of Palestinian nation-building. “Only in Gaza will peace between Israel and Palestine take on sense and substance...”

Some hope for a breakthrough lies in the coming to power of Egypt’s new President Mohammad Mursi, a leader who has already given proof of his independence and resolve. Speaking in Turkey on October 15, Mursi pledged to keep open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. “Egyptians,” he declared, “can never stand by helplessly when they see the people of Gaza under siege.” There is talk of opening the Rafah crossing to two-way trade and establishing a free-trade zone straddling the border. But, for the moment, this remains little more than a project as Mursi has to balance his pledge to the Palestinians with his concern about security in Sinai, as well as with his need to avoid putting Egypt’s delicate relationship with Israel under too great strain.

Mohammad Al Baradei, an unsuccessful Egyptian presidential candidate and former director–general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, used to say that Mubarak’s collusion with Israel in enforcing the siege was a stain on the forehead of every Egyptian, indeed of every Arab. In truth it is a stain on the conscience of the international community which has allowed Israel’s blockade to continue unchallenged and unpunished.

Israel is due to hold elections next January, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely expected to win. A fresh parliamentary mandate would give him freedom to break the stalemate of the past. It would provide a unique opportunity to free Israel from the burden of hate and guarantee its long-term future by making peace with the Palestinians — and with the entire Arab world.

By demonstrating real statesmanship, Netanyahu has the chance to win a place in history next to that of the founders of the Jewish state.

Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing an unprecedented challenge. As Israel’s longest serving prime minister, who has been in office for more than three years, he had come to seem immovable. But leading figures of Israel’s security establishment, as well as prominent American Jews, have started openly to contest two of his most fundamental policies: his portrayal of Iran’s nuclear programme as an ‘existential’ danger to Israel, raising the spectre of an imminent Holocaust; and his steady expansion of Israeli colonies in Occupied Territories, with a view, as many suspect, of creating a ‘Greater Israel.’

The challenge to Netanyahu could have far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it appears to have removed any likelihood of an early Israeli attack on Iran, such as Netanyahu has threatened and trumpeted for a year and more; for another, it has revived the possibility of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a solution many had thought moribund, if not actually dead.

Netanyahu’s most virulent critics happen to be some of Israel’s most decorated army and intelligence chiefs. For example, Yuval Diskin, recently retired as the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, told a meeting in late April that he had ‘no confidence in the current leadership of the state of Israel, which could lead Israel into a war with Iran or a regional war.’ He accused Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak of taking decisions “based on messianic sentiments... I saw them up close, they are not Messiahs... These are not people whose hands I would like to have on the steering- wheel.” Far from ending Iran’s nuclear programme, Diskin predicted that an Israeli attack on Iran could result in “a dramatic acceleration of Iran’s nuclear programme.”

Israel’s current Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, is another senior officer who has openly contested Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric. “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people,” he told the Haaretz newspaper in April, adding that he did not believe Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would “want to go the extra mile” to acquire nuclear weapons. Mossad’s current chief, Tamir Pardo, has also contradicted Netanyahu by stating that Iran did not pose an ‘existential threat’ to the Jewish state. For his part, Meir Dagan, a celebrated former Mossad chief, has ridiculed Netanyahu’s war-mongering by saying that the idea of attacking Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” and that a pre-emptive Israeli strike would be ‘reckless and irresponsible.’

In an interview with Ben Caspit of Ma’ariv on April 27, he also inveighed against the small parties in Netanyahu’s coalition which, with their own narrow agendas, rob the prime minister of any real freedom of action because, to keep his coalition alive, he must bow to their wishes.

Dagan was particularly critical of the Haredim, members of the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism, who do not serve in the army, pay less tax than other Israelis, and seek to promote sex segregation in Israel — and also in New York! Dagan believes that ‘the spirit of the law’ demands “an equal distribution of the burden among all the citizens.” The Haredim, he declared, should be compelled to serve in the army, while the Arabs of Israel should also serve, if not in the army, then in the police, the fire brigade, or in Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. Ephraim Halevy, another former Mossad chief, has also stated publicly that “ultra-orthodox radicalisation poses a bigger threat than [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad.” He, too, has declared that Iran poses no existential danger to Israel.

Two-state solution

Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff and defence minister and now the new head of Kadima, Israel’s centrist party, said recently on television that an attack on Iran could be ‘disastrous.’ Netanyahu, he argued scathingly, “wants to create an image that he is the protector of Israel.” He accused the prime minister of using Iran as a tool to divert attention from last September’s protests, when 450,000 Israelis poured into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand social justice.

Such recent statements by Israel’s former and current security chiefs show how seriously Netanyahu’s views are being challenged and how impatient many Israelis are for change.

On the Palestine question, two remarkable articles, published in the International Herald Tribune on April 25 (reproduced from the New York Times), also point to a wave of new thinking among prominent Jews. In one article, Ami Ayalon, a former commander of the Israeli Navy and a former head of Shin Bet, advocates a “radically new unilateral approach” to the Palestine problem, which would set “the conditions for a territorial compromise based on the principle of two states for two people, which is essential for Israel’s future as both a Jewish and a democratic state.”

To promote his ideas and rally supporters, Ayalon has created an organisation called ‘Blue White Future’. He argues that Israel does not need to wait for a final-status deal with the Palestinians. Instead, it should renounce all territorial claims east of the West Bank barrier, end all colony construction there, as well as in Occupied East Jerusalem, and plan to re-locate to Israel 100,000 colonists who live beyond the barrier. Israel, he says, should ‘enact a voluntary compensation and absorption law for colonists east of the barrier.’ In the absence of an accord with the Palestinians, he believes Israel should begin to create a two-state reality on the ground.

On the same page of the International Herald Tribune, Stephen Robert, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and former investment banker, now chairman of the Source of Hope Foundation, calls for a ‘reset’ in Jewish thinking. Israel, he argues, is no longer ‘a vulnerable little state’. It has become ‘the most powerful military force in the Middle East.’ Its existence is threatened, however, by the fact that it “has occupied the territory of 4 million Palestinians for over 40 years. Virtually imprisoned the Palestinians lack freedom of movement and civil or political rights. They are subject to imprisonment without charges. They often lack water and jobs and are citizens of nowhere...”

In a passionate appeal, he added: “Israelis must understand that in liberating the Palestinians they will also liberate themselves... A state that persecutes, deprives and denies its neighbours in a manner so similar to what our tormentors did to us cannot be acceptable.”

Peter Beinart’s recent book, The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books 2012) provides yet another indication of the growing realisation among Jews that Israel has taken a wrong turn and must urgently change course. Beinart advocates boycotting products from Israel’s illegal colonies in the Occupied Territories — as a UK supermarket chain, the Co-Operative Group, the country’s fifth largest food retailer, has just done.

At a time when Israel is celebrating its 64th birthday, something like a wind of change is blowing through the minds of its most senior security officials and some of its most fervent overseas supporters. The Palestinians, and the Arab world as a whole, should hurry to respond positively to this most welcome development.

Although it is too early to make a judgement, it looks as if Israel's Iran policy has back-fired and may result in a very different outcome from the one Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought. Israel's thinking these past three years has been that punitive sanctions, cyber warfare and the assassination of Iran's nuclear scientists must eventually force a crippled Islamic Republic to agree to ‘zero enrichment' of uranium — that is to say to dismantle its entire nuclear programme.

To bring about sufficiently severe pressure on Iran, Israel's strategy has been to threaten to attack. It calculated — rightly as it turned out — that the US and its allies would not dare call its bluff. Instead, to head off an Israeli attack, which they feared could trigger a regional war with unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences, they worked to bring Iran's economy to its knees.

Israel's strategy was working. Everything seemed to be going its way. Punitive sanctions on Iran were beginning to bite. Impatient for regime change, pro-Israeli propagandists in the United States had even started to call for covert action in support of the Iranian opposition.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign affairs chief, then stepped into the fray. Confounding the hawks, she made an offer to Iran to restart negotiations, using a conciliatory tone quite different from the usual hectoring heard from Washington, Paris and London, and wholly at odds with Israel's relentless sabre-rattling. Iran responded positively to Ashton's invitation. Its first meeting with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) took place in Istanbul on April 14, and, by all accounts, was a surprising success. Saeed Jalili, the chief Iranian negotiator spoke of ‘a positive approach.' As a framework for the talks, Ashton listed a number of principles, which must have reassured the Iranians and caused Israeli hawks to grit their teeth.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, she declared, must be ‘a key basis' for the talks. But the NPT allows signatories to enrich uranium on their own territory up to 3.5 per cent, for power generation and other peaceful purposes. Ashton thus seemed to be sending a signal that Iran's right to do so would be recognised. It looked as if the P5+1 had dropped Israel's demand for ‘zero enrichment'. Instead, the suggestion was that the focus would be on getting Iran to stop enriching uranium to 20 per cent, once it was guaranteed supplies for the Tehran Research Reactor, which needs uranium enriched to this level to produce isotopes for the treatment of Iran's cancer patients.

Since President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Iran would stop producing 20 per cent uranium if it was assured of supplies from abroad, the glimmer of a settlement seemed in sight. Moreover, Ashton also said that the negotiators would ‘be guided by the principle of the step-by-step approach and reciprocity.'

This reference to a gradualist approach and to mutual concessions gave a strong indication that sanctions would be lifted in stages once Iran provided convincing evidence that it was not seeking nuclear weapons and would accept intrusive inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

At the close of the 10-hour Istanbul meeting, Iran and the P5+1 agreed to hold their next meeting in Baghdad on May 23, in what promises to be a prolonged series of talks. Netanyahu's angry reaction was fully in character. "Iran has been granted a ‘freebie' he declared sourly, "to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition. Iran should take immediate steps," he stormed, "to stop all enrichment, take out all enrichment material and dismantle the nuclear facility at Qom. I believe that the world's greatest practitioner of terrorism must not have the opportunity to develop atomic bombs."

This shrill accusation seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Quite apart from its continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians, Israel has a long record of murdering its political opponents, and is widely believed to have been responsible for the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists in the last two years, as well as for introducing the Stuxnet virus into Iran's computer systems — clear acts of state terrorism.

With crucial help from the French, Israel built its first atomic bombs in the 1960s, nearly half a century ago. They were ready for use if the 1967 war, which Israel launched against the Arabs that year, had turned against it. Most experts today estimate Israeli stockpile of nuclear weapons at between 75 and 150 warheads.

‘Existential threat'

Netanyahu claims that the Islamic republic poses an ‘existential threat' to Israel. There is not a scrap of evidence to support this claim. The Iranian president did say something to the effect that Israel would one day ‘pass from the pages of time' — a phrase Israel miss-translated, no doubt for propaganda purposes, to mean an Iranian plan to ‘wipe Israel off the map'. Quite the contrary, it is Iran that would risk annihilation if it ever attempted to attack Israel.

In addition to its large nuclear arsenal and sophisticated delivery systems, Israel has a vastly more powerful conventional military capability than Iran, largely supplied by the United States.

Netanyahu has long opposed talks between Iran and the international community, and no doubt prays for them to collapse. The pro-Israeli lobby in the US will very probably be mobilised in this cause. But if Ashton gets her way, if the negotiations with Iran are successful and the spectre of war is dispelled, Israel may have to live with a small dent in its regional supremacy.

Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.

This past year has dealt a heavy blow — perhaps even a terminal one — to the project, long supported by the international community, of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the basis of two states. When the United States itself proved unable to halt Israel’s relentless land grab, it seemed that nothing and nobody could rein in Israel’s iron-willed ambition to expand its borders towards a ‘Greater Israel.’

What will the immediate future bring? In the continued absence of firm international intervention, the likeliest scenario is that Israel will seek to consolidate its hold over 40 per cent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, either by colony expansion or outright annexation. The main centres of Arab population, such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, would be fenced off, although Israel might allow them corridors to Jordan. This first stage of the project would, of course, be portrayed by Israel as a ‘painful concession.’

If Israel managed to get away with it, the next stage could be a good deal more radical, and could possibly involve the expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians, probably under the cover of war as occurred in 1948 and 1967, so as to complete the creation of a ‘Greater Israel’ between the sea and the river.

After the experience of the past two years, no one should have the slightest doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is utterly determined to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Bantustans, for a while perhaps, but a Palestinian state, never! Netanyahu is known to be profoundly influenced by his father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, now 101 years old, who was once the secretary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky — ‘the father of Revisionist Zionism’ — and who remains a life-long passionate believer in a Greater Israel. He petitioned against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine of November 29, 1947 because he, and others like him, wanted the whole of Palestine for the Jews. That remains his dream.

Whether Israel seizes the whole of the West Bank or ‘only’ 40 per cent of it, the immediate victim will be the Kingdom of Jordan, which is likely to be swamped with displaced Palestinians. Ariel Sharon, a passionate advocate of Jewish colonies in the Occupied Territories, used to say that ‘Jordan is Palestine.’ Desperately concerned about its future — and with good reason — Jordan recently tried to revive the moribund process by hosting a meeting in Amman of Israel and Palestinians representatives, in the presence of the ineffectual Quartet. Predictably, the outcome seems to have been wholly without substance.

The biggest shock to the so-called ‘peace process’ this past year was US President Barack Obama’s collapse in the face of Netanyahu’s obduracy. Since Obama had raised hopes of a new, more balanced American policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict his defeat was all the more painful. When Israel refused to budge, he simply walked away, showing no hint of steel, not even of that ‘tough love’ towards Israel which many observers of the conflict — including liberal American Jews — had hoped to see. Obama’s failure merely underlined the abysmal record of America’s monopoly of the peace process over the past several decades, which has simply provided cover for Israel’s expansion.

The massive aid — financial, military and political — which the US lavishes on Israel appears to have given it not the slightest leverage over Israeli policies. The influence has been all the other way. It is Israel that has managed to shape Washington’s Middle East policy, rather than the other way round. Rarely in history has there been such a flagrant example of the tail wagging the dog.

The Arabs are in no condition to check Israel’s expansion. The Arab Spring has weakened them. Their leaders, whether revolutionary or not, are struggling to cope with the fall- out from the popular uprisings. There is little time or energy to spare for the Palestine cause. The Palestinians themselves, whether under occupation or under siege, remain stubbornly divided. Amazingly, Fatah and Hamas are still squabbling and seem unable to put up a united front, although their country is disappearing before their eyes.

Little wonder that hard-line Israelis feel that Greater Israel is within their grasp. One more big push, they seem to think, and it will be theirs. This seems to be true of the ultra-Orthodox, who are more than ever concerned to put their fundamentalist stamp on Israeli society, and whose members are making deep inroads in the officer ranks of the army. It is true, too, of religious nationalists and their constituency of violent and fanatical colonists, and it is, of course, also true of hard-line politicians like Netanyahu himself, who seem to believe that weakening and subverting their neighbours — and harnessing American power to their hegemonic cause, principally at present against Iran — will enable Israel to continue to dominate the entire region militarily for the foreseeable future. Peace, territorial concessions and peaceful co-existence are simply not part of their mindset.

Leaders like Netanyahu have been responsible for overseeing very significant changes in Israeli society, including an alarming rise in intolerance, racism and brutality. Even Israel’s so-called liberal middle classes who camped out in tents in their thousands this past year to highlight their economic grievances, seem to show little interest in the hate Israel is piling up by its continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians.

The Arab-Israeli conflict — with the Palestine problem at its core — has been the cause of wars, massacres and countless other violent incidents throughout the 20th century. It now threatens to contaminate this century as well. Israel’s pitiless onslaught on Gaza in 2008-9 may turn out to have been but a precursor of even grimmer things to come.

In a speech at the London School of Economics last October, Dr Tony Klug, a leading British expert on the Middle East, described the growth of Israel’s colonist population from fewer than 5,000 in the early 1970s to more than 500,000 today as ‘one of the longest state-suicide notes in history.’ “Israel,” he declared, “now faces a stark choice: freeze all further growth of colonies in preparation for swift and focused negotiations based on pre-June boundaries with equitable land swaps, or prepare for permanent conflict and indefinite pariah status.”

Is regime change possible in Israel? A miracle cannot be excluded. But there is as yet no sign of the great popular awakening which such an outcome would require. Is it not time for the international community to put together a package of sanctions and incentives, which might induce Israel to change course? The aim must surely be, not only to save Israel from self-destruction, but to spare the Middle East the ordeal of what could be the most terrible war in its modern history.