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 state has confirmed that, acting without a court order, the army has barred Palestinian villagers from freely accessing their farmland for two years. The admission was made in the state's response to a High Court petition filed last year by Beit Furik residents.

The plots farmed by the residents of Beit Furik, which is southeast of Nablus, border several unauthorized outposts that were built near the Itamar settlement over the past decade and are known as the Gidonim outposts. In 2010, the Israel Defense Forces began preventing villagers from accessing their fields freely. As a result they must coordinate their farmwork with the army, in accordance with deployment levels.

Representing the state, attorney Shosh Shmueli wrote: "This was done without benefit of a court order, in an improper manner." GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon signed a military order in March, barring entry to Beit Furik's agricultural lands without coordination with the IDF for a period of two years.

In its response to the petition, the state ascribed the need for the order to the "complex security situation in the Gidonim area," adding that, within two years, security arrangements should be in place for Itamar that will permit the reduction of the area located within the closed-off portion of land.

The IDF Spokesman's Office issued the following response: "In the past decade, 15 Israelis have been murdered in the Israeli communities and outposts near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik, including women and children, and many more have been injured. Additional attacks were prevented by security forces.

"In order to protect the area's Israeli residents," it continued, "a decision was made according to which Palestinians seeking to approach the Israeli communities and outposts in the area must coordinate this in advance. As the state's response to the petition indicated, a similar decision was taken in the past that had the force of authority but was not backed by a formal order ... The term 'improper' referred mainly to procedural aspects of the issuing of the order."

Israel Railways has prepared a major plan for providing train service throughout the West Bank to serve both Israelis and Palestinians.

The plan, prepared at the request of Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, calls for establishing 11 new rail lines, according to a map that Haaretz has obtained. Katz has on several occasions expressed his intention to build a railway network in the West Bank.

Except for the proposed line from Rosh Ha'ayin to the West Bank settlement of Ariel, the prospects for actually carrying out the entire scheme are seen as slim. There are diplomatic, legal and budgetary hurdles involved, as well as a need for cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which administers large areas of the West Bank.

No target date has been set for implementing the plan and no cost estimate has been presented, although the sums involved would clearly be substantial.

The Transportation Ministry confirmed that it was pursuing the plan for the new rail lines "so as to permit it to be carried out in the future," and in accordance with "a legal commitment the ministry made to the High Court of Justice."

In a visit to the northern part of the West Bank in 2010, Katz promised to revive the pre-state Ottoman and British Mandate-era rail line there with establishment of service between the city of Jenin and Afula in the Jezreel Valley. Katz also allocated NIS 3 million to plan a line from the Israeli town of Rosh Ha'ayin, northeast of Tel Aviv, to Nablus in the northern West Bank. Detailed plans were drawn up for the first part of that line - from Rosh Ha'ayin to Ariel.

Last December, at an event at which Katz was honored by the Yesha Council of West Bank Jewish settlements, he said he had instructed Israel Railways management to expedite the planning of the rail lines.

According to the map that Haaretz obtained, the proposal calls for 475 kilometers of rail lines. For purposes of comparison, the combined length of existing routes in Israel proper is currently 1,100 kilometers.

The West Bank network would include one line running through Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Ma'aleh Adumim, Bethlehem and Hebron. Another would provide service along the Jordanian border from Eilat to the Dead Sea, Jericho and Beit She'an and from there toward Haifa in the west and in also in a northeasterly direction. The proposed scheme also calls for shorter routes, such as between Nablus and Tul Karm in the West Bank, and from Ramallah to the Allenby Bridge crossing into Jordan.

Israel Railways hired engineer Gidon Yerushalmi, to the tune of NIS 1 million, to develop the West Bank master plan. Yerushalmi's firm has previously worked on other such projects.

A preliminary document on the project explains that its aim is to "address the transportation needs of local residents and other passengers."

The plan also includes infrastructure that would connect the rail lines at a later stage to lines in the Gaza Strip and in Arab countries. An emphasis is being place on "continuity between the rail network within the Green Line [Israel's 1967 borders] and the planned network in Judea and Samaria."

The map obtained by Haaretz was presented in December to the top planning council of the Israel Defense Forces' Civil Administration. (Because the West Bank has not been formerly annexed to Israel, the IDF has general administrative authority there.)

At the time, the members of the Civil Administration's council appeared to give serious consideration to the plan. There was discussion, for example, of a tunnel under Nablus as part of the proposal.

For his part, the council chairman, Shlomo Moshkovitz, noted that the plan calls for rail lines through areas under partial or total control of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians can be expected to object, Moshkovitz said, and the plan is "without value without their approval."

More than 150 American actors, writers, directors and other artists signed a letter of support for the Israeli actors who declared they would not perform in the West Bank.

The American signatories include Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda on "Sex and the City"; Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride"; and character actor and writer Wallace Shawn, who played the principal in "Clueless."

Ten days ago, the Israeli actors caused a storm when they released a petition stating they would not perform in the West Bank. Their move was prompted by reports that the theater companies were planning performances at the new cultural center in Ariel.

The American letter calls the Israelis' refusal brave, notes that Ariel is one of the largest settlements in the West Bank and calls it illegal by any standard.

The signatories said that most of them faced daily compromises with things they found unacceptable, and that when a group of people decided they would make no more compromises and found the strength to refuse, this inspired them and filled them with hope.

The American artists were moved to know the Israelis had refused to allow their work to become part of what they called making the cruel occupation normal and accepted, they said in the letter. The occupation is an obstacle to hope and a just and sustainable peace for Israelis and Palestinians, they added.

The signatories said the Israeli artists' decision should be appreciated by those who seek justice around the world.

The letter made waves in the artistic community in the United States. On Friday, several actors called the Israeli Consulate to ask what they should do, and were advised by the cultural attache not to interfere in internal Israeli affairs, Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

Wallace Shawn told Haaretz on Sunday that the Israeli artists' refusal had touched him. They did something that could get them fired, and he found that inspiring, he said. Theater is the art of truth, and the Israeli artists are following their own truth, he said.

If they were to appear in Ariel they would be legitimizing something they do not agree with, said Shawn. If they do lose their jobs as a result of their stand, the world is watching and people will support them, he said.

Security sources have found and made public 28 incidents of settlements violating the ten-month building freeze in the West Bank declared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz learned on Monday.

Responding to an appeal made by Meretz MK Haim Oron to clarify alleged settlement freeze infringements, deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, responded by that saying "The court order to halt construction has been given out. The implementation of the building freeze will be examined."

On Monday, Vilani released a list of settlements violating the building freeze, which included Tekoa, Etz Efraim, Revava, Alfe Menashe, Ma'ale Shomron, Psagot, Beit Arye, Emanuel, Kedumim, Barkan, Beitar Illit, Ma'ale Addumim and Kfar Etzion.

The left wing group Shalom Achshav claims there are building violations also in the settlements of Kokhav HaShahar, Nili, Kiryat Arba, Elazar.

These violations are in addition to outpost building, which has continued at a steady pace.

On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation discussed a privately sponsored bill on compensating settlers hurt by the recent construction freeze. The bill, initiated by MK Danny Danon (Likud), is supported by 16 MKs from different parties and suggests setting up a compensation system modeled on the one used for the evacuees of the disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

"This bill requests a claims committee be set up, in order to assist and transfer compensations to the settlers of Judea and Samaria," the introduction to the bill read.

"The committee would have four members: A representative from the Prime Minister's Office, a representative of the Interior Ministry, a representative of public interest to be appointed by the justice minister in consultation with chairmen of local councils the area, and a magistrate judge - appointed by the justice minister in consultation with the director of the courts - who will chair the committee."

"The committee would be responsible for determining a claimant's eligibility for compensation, the scope of his eligibility and the sum of his compensation," the document continues. "It will be set up no later than 60 days after the date marking the beginning of the construction freeze, and it will operate a Web site that provides access to contact the committee and see its details, schedule and decisions."

The bill sets the deadline for claims at five years after the beginning of the freeze, and says the committee will be obliged to pay out the compensation no later than 60 days after its decision. Compensation claims would be filed either in writing or through the committee site, the proposition said.