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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illegal annexation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extreme poverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ARMED confrontation in Lebanon between the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and the Shi'ite movement Hezbollah is ending. Hezbollah fighters are withdrawing from the Sunni neighborhood of West Beirut, opening roads once again, and allowing the airport to function.

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A compromise agreement brokered by an Arab League delegation ended the violence. But the specter of recurring civil war is sure to return unless Lebanon's factions end their power struggles and stop foreign powers from fighting for regional dominance through Lebanese proxies, on Lebanese soil.

The Arab League agreement includes "a return to the status quo before the clashes broke out on May 5," withdrawal of armed men from the streets, renewal of a national dialogue, and commitments from all sides to refrain from political violence and language that might incite violence.

Hezbollah leaders hailed the accord as a victory. They crowed about forcing the government to reverse its shutdown of Hezbollah's private phone network and reinstate an airport security chief who had refused to do anything about a hidden camera pointed at incoming planes.

Hezbollah's triumphalist claims contain a partial truth. Its use of force did oblige the government to accept the group's demands. But in Lebanon as in nature, every action causes a reaction. In proving its military muscle, Hezbollah frightened other factions in Lebanon.

A United Nations resolution requires the disarmament of all of the country's militias. Hezbollah has been the only party to reject that demand, and has been getting away with it by vowing repeatedly to use the arms it receives from Iran and Syria only for resistance against Israel. But by turning its guns on fellow Lebanese, Hezbollah has proven its own rhetoric false.

The crisis also revealed the limitations on Hezbollah's ability to achieve political aims by force. Hezbollah fighters encountered hardly any resistance from Sunnis in West Beirut, but they fought bloody battles with Druze militiamen and with Sunni Islamist forces. Hezbollah's leaders got a glimpse of the counterforces they would encounter in the event of an all-out civil war.

The recent violence ought to have shown all the factions that Lebanon's survival as a pluralistic state will depend not only on remaining free of another Syrian or Israel occupation, but also on reviving a Lebanese political compact based on compromise and a balancing of communal interests.

IN A MESSAGE to Syria's President Bashar Assad last week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert affirmed that Israel would give all the occupied Golan Heights back to Syria in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement. This move was belated but wise. It could alter the Middle East chessboard for the better, greatly reducing the chances of a disastrous new regional conflagration.

The Israeli gesture to Syria will have meaning only if the two governments follow it up with serious diplomatic engagement. Recent exchanges between the two have been indirect; indeed, a Syrian cabinet minister said the recent Israeli offer was relayed to Assad by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The last full-fledged negotiations between Israel and Syria foundered in 2000 over a dispute about control of the northern shore of Lake Galilee. Since then, the dangers confronting each side have only mounted. Today more than ever, both countries would benefit from a peace accord that resolves disputes over territory and security, finally ending the conflict between them.

Olmert gave the signal that Assad wanted to hear: that Israel was ready to trade all the Golan Heights for peace with Syria. Both sides accept that there will be no Syrian retrieval of the Golan without an agreement on security issues, and no security pact without return of the Golan.

In any talks about security, Israel will want Syria to stop arming the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah, stop helping Iran to arm and supervise Hezbollah, and stop harboring leaders of Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Above all, an Israeli-Syrian peace deal will have to remove Syria from Iran's sphere of influence. This strategic objective is not unique to Israel. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab Gulf states also want Syria to return to the Arab fold.

The Bush administration ought to be striving for the same goal. Until recently, however, President Bush seemed hypnotized by the neoconservative notion that America need not talk to troublemakers, much less bargain with them. Indeed, Israeli officials have hinted that, until recently, the American administration was holding Israel back from making a serious overture to Syria.

Assad has made no secret of his intent to parlay any peace treaty with Israel into a rapprochement with Washington. But last week, he said that peace negotiations with Israel will probably have to wait until there is a new US president.

The rehabilitation of American foreign policy can not come soon enough.

IF ISRAEL'S aims in striking at Hamas forces in Gaza this past week were to weaken the Islamist movement politically and deter it from continuing to launch rockets into Israel, early signs suggest the operation did not succeed. Before contemplating another such attack against Hamas fighters embedded among civilians in tightly packed urban locations, Israeli leaders ought to ask themselves whether tactics such as these stand any chance of achieving the desired goals.

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If not - if the carnage in Gaza has only served to strengthen Hamas politically and raise new questions about Israel's deterrence capability - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak would be wise to reconsider their options.

Televised images of Palestinian children and women buried under the rubble from Israeli missiles are used by Hamas to justify its methods and objectives. Those gruesome scenes serve Hamas's argument against the peace talks that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been conducting with Israel, and justify what Hamas figures have been calling the Hezbollah strategy - a military war of attrition against Israel.

Israeli leaders must consider the possibility that they have fallen into a Hamas trap, one that Iran had a hand in springing. Hezbollah and Hamas differ in significant ways. Iran has older and closer ties to the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah than to Hamas, but what they have in common is that both are now receiving money, weapons, and training from Iran.

Israel, the Arab states, and the United States share an interest in depriving Iran of Arab proxies that it can use for its own purposes. So Israel should seek to remove Hamas from the Iranian orbit. This was the aim of Saudi Arabia's short-lived initiative last summer to shepherd Hamas and Abbas's Fatah movement into a Palestinian unity government.

There are risks in all Israel's options. But if their decision-making could be insulated from domestic politics, it would make sense for Olmert and Barak to revisit previous Hamas proposals for a cease-fire. Palestinians and Israelis who have had contact with Hamas leaders say there are differences, at least on the level of tactics, between the more pragmatic and the more hardline currents in the movement. Whatever those differences, it would be nearly impossible politically for Hamas to reject a cease-fire that is certain to be welcomed by the Palestinian public, particularly by Gazans living under Hamas rule.

Once a cease-fire is in place, Israel should do everything it can to reach a negotiated two-state peace agreement with Abbas. If put to a referendum, any such agreement is bound to be approved by majorities of Israelis and Palestinians alike. This would be the soundest way to stop the rockets and missiles.

THE CAR-BOMB assassination in Damascus of terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh will mean different things to different parties. But for anyone who cherishes the sunlight of legal justice, Mughniyeh's obscene career and violent end should be emblems of a lawless netherworld where terrorists kill civilians and security services hunt the killers.

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Mughniyeh, who was operations chief for the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah, has a long rap sheet. He was behind the 1985 hijacking of a TWA passenger jet that lasted 17 days and included the killing of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. American investigators hold Mughniyeh responsible for the 1983 bombings of US Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, killing more than 300, and also for 63 more deaths in a bomb attack the same year at the US embassy in Beirut.

During the mid-'80s, Mughniyeh led an Iranian-sponsored group in Lebanon known as Islamic Jihad, a gang that kidnapped dozens of American and other Western hostages. It was to ransom some of those hostages that Ronald Reagan sold missiles to Iran in the so-called Iran-Contra scandal.

Mughniyeh was indicted in Argentina for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that took 85 lives. And an arrest warrant was issued for him in connection with the 1992 bombing in Buenos Aires of the Israeli embassy.

Illustrating the inverted value system of the terrorist netherworld, Hezbollah's TV station al-Manar issued a statement yesterday saying, "With pride and honor, we announce the martyrdom of a great resistance leader who joined the procession of martyrs in the Islamic resistance."

The official American reaction was the antithesis of Hezbollah's, reflecting Mughniyeh's past standing atop this country most-wanted terrorist list, with a bounty of $25 million on his head. Today he is second only to Osama bin Laden. "The world is a better place without this man in it," said a State Department spokesman yesterday. "One way or another, he was brought to justice."

Israel, for its part, denied killing Mughniyeh. Whether it did or not, Israel is already being blamed by Hezbollah and its allies in Iran and Syria. There is almost certain to be a retaliatory strike against Israel that Hezbollah will call revenge for the execution of Mughniyeh.

Hezbollah and its Iranian backers can be expected to target Israel whether or not they obtain proof the Damascus bombing was an Israeli operation. They know that the secret services of several Western and Arab capitals also had scores to settle with Mughniyeh. But in the shadow world of terrorists and counterterrorists there are no rules of evidence, no presumption of innocence, and no legal justice. This is why the fight against terrorism must include a foreign policy that fosters the rule of law around the world.