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 Gaza Strip is the most densely populated piece of land in the world but it has had little or no investment in infrastructure for years, and the situation has worsened since sanctions were imposed last year.

With no sewage plant, Gaza's waste is dumped into the sea, making it unsafe for fishing or swimming according to a recent report. It was envisioned to be Gaza's open-ended source of possibilities. But the Gaza shore is now too polluted to use safely.

It is estimated that 20 million cubic metres of raw sewage are pumped into the sea every year through 14 discharge outlets spanning the 42km-long shore. The stench is unbearable but it was the skin rashes children developed after swimming that drove Ramadan Abu Seif, a resident of the Al-Shate refugee camp, which is next to one of the sewage-discharge outlets, to act.

He says that he has to tell children playing by the sea to stay away. "They are kids, they don't know", he says.

It would take over $200 million to construct the needed sewage treatment plants in Gaza, but given the current political climate, donors are not expected to put up this amount any time soon.

In some areas the sewage is collected in open pools, which are fast reaching full capacity, threatening nearby neighbourhoods with disaster.

Samir al-Afifi, the director of the Palestinian Environmental Friends Association, has been studying pollution on Gaza's shores for the past 10 years.

He recently published a study on the Rafah shores, concluding that they are simply not safe for swimming or fishing.

He says: "Eye, skin infection, ear infection and headache - there is a close relation between the level of contamination of sea water and the people who are visiting these sites."

Sewage is collected in open pools

Al-Afifi says the pollution sometimes reaches two to five kilometres into the sea and that even the shore sand is polluted.

The quality of fish is already suffering.

He says that "a suitable site to be used for recreation" cannot be found anywhere in the Gaza Strip.

Without treatment plants, creating a sewage network like the one in central Gaza has caused more damage than good. Here, out of sight has not been out of mind.

With international sanctions still choking the struggling Palestinian economy and no political horizon in sight, addressing this menacing problem will have to wait while the cost of politics and occupation continues to mount.

So the day has finally arrived when you pack your belongings and leave our land, fulfilling what we always believed is the inevitable; Palestinian land returning to its rightful owners… We have to tell you that you will not be missed and that your departure and that of your occupation army is a weight lifted off our shoulders and a requirement for peace in the region, if it is what you seek…

We don’t know you; at least we only know your settler persona. We pray, for your sake and that of your country, that as you shed your settler status at the gates of your dismantled settlements in Gaza and Jenin, you shed that persona as well and with it, the illusions and delusions that made occupying others’ property and living on their misery and deprivation an acceptable state of being…

You may not realize it but this should be a cleansing process for you and Israel because the mentality you carry is one that could only lead to more bloodshed and woes for both sides… With your departure, our lives will now stand a chance of being normal, laden with the pleasures and joys that are everyday occurrences for the rest of the world. As you leave, know that peace shall replace your presence and that serenity shall now return to our hearts and replace fear. The children in Al-Mawasi, who have been isolated from the rest of Gaza for years and subject to your repeated orgies of pillage and destruction will finally know how it feels to play in their backyards without fearing your attacks. The farmers in Jenin will now rejoice as they tend their land without fearing death or mutilation…

You see, for too long, your army of occupation has forcibly confiscated the land we have owned and lived from for centuries for the purpose of creating these artificial settlements in our midst. The aim was to strengthen the foothold of occupation in a foolish and futile attempt to make it irreversible… But we knew all along that this brutal occupation and all its high fortresses will crumble just as all other occupations did before them…

The optimists amongst us believe that some of you are victims of the occupation regime like us. Some of you have been lead to believe that living in these illegal settlements is not only moral but a national duty. You were given economic incentives by successive governments that thrived on enshrining the occupation of Palestine and oppressing its People.

But you should have known better; at least we were always confused by your seeming insensibility to our suffering and loss because of your imposed presence. Did you not see our miserable state of poverty and need after being stripped of our land? Did you not hear our cries and pleas as we saw our homes demolished and trees uprooted to make way for you? Did you not know that we went thirsty while you swam in your swimming pools, watered your lawns and washed your cars with water that was once ours? Were you blind as you drove through our land in your exclusive roads to the state of utter misery and density that we were forced to live in after your took our land to build and enjoy spacious homes? How could you not have noticed? Or was it a conscious choice every day as you drove past our towns and refugee camps not to see or hear our misery so as to not upset your costly comfort?

The zealots amongst you leave with a heavy heart, overburdened with hate and violence… We know they will save no opportunity to retaliate at us but we are certain that the danger they pose far outstretches us and extends to your streets… It is difficult to say how we feel about them… We will not forget how they treated us. We shall not forget the children they beat – some to death and others to permanent disability. We will not forget the countless victims they attacked and terrorized nor will we forget the property they ransacked and burned… Forgiveness might come with time but it must be preceded by a lot of healing and it necessarily requires your salvation from this mentality of abuse and aggression. Perhaps we will reach forgiveness one day but for now, parting with these zealots is as sweet as the honey promised in heaven… It is sweet, luscious, and so very gratifying… In fact, some of us who have made peace with the fact that these zealots are now Israel’s problem have nothing but pity for them and those who must endure their extreme views and attitudes. They are an obstacle to peace and a hindrance to progress for they optimize the raw ugliness of the occupation, which is built on the premise that Israeli prosperity must be built on the ruins of Palestinian lives, rights, property, and land…

We shall not waste our energy on hate or bitterness. Instead, on the day of your departure, we shall expend it on rejoicing, gloating, and celebrating. Every square inch of land you leave is sacred grounds for us and it shall be honored and welcomed back. We will dance and sing; we will laugh and cry sweet tears of joy for once. We will mark that day as the beginning of our journey to the dawn of freedom… Your departure marks the beginning of our emancipation from occupation and repression and it will be sweet and comforting… But that is not all. We shall waste no time in putting our land back to use for our benefit so that we may once again enjoy its offerings and celebrate its abundance and beauty… Now, we will build with our blood and sweat a brighter future for our children for we will no longer have to slave labor for your benefit on our land…

And amidst all this happiness and reflection, we will not lose sight of the fact that your exit is not meant to be a signal for our coming freedom; farcical as that may be. You see, Ariel Sharon, who pioneered the idea of settlements and drove many of you into this wretched status, intends for this departure to be a salvation for his occupation regime of the remaining Palestinian Territory. But victory and freedom are ours and shame is his…

Be sure that just as you left Gaza and Jenin, you will leave the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory because your settlements are unsustainable if peace is to rein over this battered Holy Land. Peace is made by acknowledging the truth and embracing the way to make peace. The support that the general Israeli public has shown to this departure is hopefully an indication that they have reached the right conclusion: settlements contradict peace and to build peace, you must dismantle settlements. We pray that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when the Israeli public forecloses this status of thievery and aggression that has ruined our lives and shattered our dreams for three decades now. We pray they opt for peaceful coexistence instead …