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 other day I was reading the Israeli press on the website of the leading Israeli paper Haaretz when the juxtaposition of two stories struck me as highly ironic and I almost burst out laughing. The headings on the big stories of the day were arranged vertically and next to them also arranged vertically, but in a smaller characters, there were links to other stories.

A heading on the main column caught my attention. It read that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes that peace is necessary. At about the same level in the adjacent smaller column, another story’s heading read: ‘Israel bombs Syria’.

After I overcame the temptation and the urge to laugh out loud, I marvelled at the irony. I thought to myself, how remarkable that a random juxtaposition of two headlines expressed cogently myriad dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Its Orwellian dimension was so striking, its concision so sharp, and its propagandistic value so high. But perhaps its most astounding feature was its ability to penetrate the psyche of the reader or the listener without encountering any resistance.

Long years of manufacturing consent, as the leading American intellectual Noam Chomsky would say, has dulled the senses and neutralised critical thinking skills. Propaganda is truth; the oppressor is the victim and the victim is the oppressor. Under these circumstances, the conflict is redefined; its cause is re-imagined; and the prescription to end it is reinvented; divorced from the principles of justice and law.

Driven by an impulse to blame the victim, it seeks domination, and perpetuates oppression. Blaming the victim, as the title of a book by the late Arab-American intellectual Edward Said suggests, makes it possible to rationalise oppression.

Contradiction

Some of these aspects came to the fore last week. For example, on the occasion of the visit by his Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Netanyahu gave a novel definition of the cause of the Palestine conflict. Despite public statements by American and Israel officials praising a more flexible Arab peace plan, which a delegation from the Arab League had presented to Kerry, Netanyahu gave it a cool reception and went on to redefine the cause of the conflict.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, was never about territories. It was, he said, about the refusal of the Palestinian people to recognise Israel as a Jewish state and the home of the Jewish people.

If indeed the roots of the conflict were not territorial, as he claims, why is he refusing to accept the 1967 line as the basis for negotiating a peaceful end to the conflict? And why is he bent on dispossessing Palestinians of their land? And why is he defying his most important benefactor and protector and refusing to halt colony construction in the Occupied Territories, including occupied east Jerusalem?

Inarguably, there is a territorial dimension to the Palestine conflict, but Netanyahu is also pursuing the yet-to-be realised dream of a Greater Israeli, which will require more land to accommodate the Jews of the world who are expected to gather in Israel.

Another dimension

There is also another dimension to the strategy, which Netanyahu is pursuing. Getting Palestinian recognition for the Jewish character of Israel means conceding to Israel the right to refuse the return of Palestinian refugees to the homes and land the Palestinians left behind when they were expelled or fled Zionist terror. If Israel were to accept the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and these refugees were to exercise that right, Israel would eventually become a bi-national state.

In effect, what Netanyahu wants to accomplish in negotiations is what the Zionist armies failed to achieve in the 1947-49 war: The total exclusion of the Palestinians as contenders for the same land in order to establish in Palestine a country as “Jewish as England is English”.

But the dream of ethnic purity and complete homogeneity is anachronistic — just like 19th century European nationalism, which partly stimulated political Zionism, or 20th century Pan-Arabism or Arab nationalism.

Nationalistic sentiments, other than those expressed by groups still fighting for independence and self-determination, are likely to collide with the multicultural individual and the global citizen. These are increasingly defined, no longer by their national loyalty to their country of residence, but by their appurtenance to various social groups mediated by the sociology of the communication revolution.

Humanism will eventually replace nationalism; and when we look back we will wonder why so much blood had to be shed, before we could understand a simple truism: All people yearn for life in freedom and human dignity.

Despite three trips to the region and intensive attempts at restarting stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, US Secretary of State John Kerry returned home disappointed. It must have been a sobering experience as could be deduced from his statement that he had a lot to learn.

Appearing before a congressional committee, Kerry said that despite the challenges, he is committed to pursue a peace settlement. US President Barack Obama said last week that there was a “window of opportunity” to revive the Middle East peace process. And probably for the first time publicly, Kerry warned that time was running out and that there may only be a year or two left to reach a peace agreement.

Public warnings that time is running out may be said to be one of the two most abiding features of the Middle East peace process. The other one is the fact that these warnings go unheeded. Even when the dire consequences implied in them came to pass, the various participants never sufficiently internalise the lessons from the unheeded warnings, and change their behaviour.

Take the example of the terms of reference for the peace process. Officially, they are founded on relevant UN Security Council resolutions, especially resolution 242, which reiterates the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territories by force (something which had already taken place during the establishment of the state of Israel in the 1948 war) and establishes the principle of land for peace. This requires Israel to return the land it acquired by force in the 1967 war — that is the West Bank, Gaza, occupied east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — for recognition by, and peace with the Arab countries.

In reality, Israel is acting as if the terms of reference were exactly the opposite; dispossessing the Palestinians of their land, and actively expanding the colonial enterprise despite widespread international condemnation. In doing so, Israel not only violates international law, but also undermines the prospects of a peaceful settlement to which it claims to be earnestly committed.

This is belied not only by the Israeli strategy of creating facts on the ground, but also by candid admissions made by Israeli leaders. Consider the following statement made by Ariel Sharon. “Everybody has to move,” he once reportedly urged his compatriots, “run and grab as many hilltops as you can to enlarge the settlements [colonies], because everything we take now will stay ours.”

The Palestinian position also suffers from myriad contradictions. The Palestinian National Authority has privately made sweeping concessions and obtained nothing in return. In what has been described as “the biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict”, hundreds of confidential documents were obtained and published in January 2011 by Al-Jazeera network, and the Guardian. They show that Palestinian negotiators secretly accepted Israel’s annexation of practically all the colonies in occupied east Jerusalem, built in violation of international law.

The Palestine Papers also reveal that the Palestinian leaders were privately informed about Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza. The papers also show that the leaders suggested swapping part of occupied east Jerusalem’s Arab neighbourhood of Shaikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.

The leaders went so far as to propose a joint Israeli-Palestinian committee to be in charge of holy sites in occupied Jerusalem’s Old City — a concession which Yasser Arafat adamantly refused at the cost of dooming the 2000 Camp David talks to failure. The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, privately boasted that the Palestinians had thus offered Israel the biggest Jerusalem in history. Israeli leaders turned downed the offer.

Clearly, the Palestinian leadership is shown in the Palestine Papers to have had little regard for the official frame of reference based on international law and justice. Instead, they accepted the principles of balance of power in which the relationship of power between the parties determines the outcome of the negotiations. Since the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is one of gross inequality (one is occupier, the other is occupied), the powerful should be expected to exploit, as Israeli leaders do; but the weaker party does not have to behave submissively, as the Palestinian leaders do.

Crucially, this begs the question: Why should Israeli leaders abide by the official terms of reference of international law and justice when their Palestinian interlocutors observe the implications of the balance of power-imminently more favourable to the Israelis? Washington’s uncritical support for the Israeli position and approach helps perpetuate the impasse in which the peace process is inextricably lodged.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly told Kerry that the resumption of peace talks depended on Israel’s freezing of colony-building in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem. He also told Kerry that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should present a map of the borders between Israel and Palestine.

Given the real terms of reference obtaining between the parties, an official of the Israeli government dismissively rejected the request out of hand.

The Netanyahu government went even further in an unusual demonstration of power over and control of the moribund peace process. After Kerry left, an anonymous official of the Israeli government rejected Kerry himself, and questioned his approach and knowledge. The senior Israeli official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the American secretary’s strategy was unacceptable. “Kerry believes that he can bring about the solution, the treaty and the salvation,” the Israeli official said. “He thinks that the conflict is primarily over territory [...] and that is wrong.”

That is a bad omen. If Kerry is serious about a peaceful settlement of the Palestine conflict, which is clearly in the interest of the US, he should work on changing attitudes and misconceptions in Washington before heading to the Middle East again.

The word ‘land’ may be the shortest summary of the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When the early Zionist leaders were looking for a country to colonise and make a Jewish homeland, they considered Argentina, Uganda and Cyprus. But these countries were already colonised and the imperial powers from whom the Zionists solicited support for their colonisation project, refused to provide it.

Some visionary Zionists insisted that for their colonisation project to succeed, the Jews of the world — who would be called upon to populate the new homeland — must be able to visualise the journey in dramatic and emotional terms. Only the colonisation of Palestine could offer such emotional resonance with the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land.

As the Zionists set out to marshal support for their daring project, they faced hostility from Jewish leaders afraid of jeopardising their political rights in their country of birth, and indifference from the majority of the Jewish people.

To overcome hostility and indifference, and concisely explain their project to their European audiences, the Zionists came up with a master stroke of propaganda that emphasised the Jewish people’s need for a homeland, while at the same time eliminating the inhabitants of the same land from any consideration as if the Palestinians had never existed.

The brilliantly constructed slogan claimed that the Zionist project for a homeland in Palestine was nothing more than ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’.

When the Zionist Commission arrived in Palestine in 1918, they found a sophisticated society, with a highly active professional and merchant classes, and a developed political consciousness. It was nothing like what the manipulative propaganda claimed. The Zionists in Palestine set out to strengthen Jewish institutions and foster the production and the use of Hebrew street signs.

The question of Jewish immigrants arriving in Palestine regularly, and notwithstanding regular Arab protest and demonstrations, the British civilian administration proved unable to stop the waves of Jewish immigrants that were transforming the balance of demographic power in Palestine.

Nonetheless, the ‘redemption’ of the land remained a basic tenet of Zionist ideology. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) established at the fifth Zionist Congress in Basle in 1901, was in charge of land purchase on behalf of the Jewish people, usually at the expense of the Arab farmer, who was banned from working on Jewish land.

The British Hope Simpson report confirmed the discriminatory practice and in 1930 said that Arabs were gradually being driven off the soil by Jewish land purchases and by the JNF not allowing Arab employment on Jewish land.

The process of dispossession continued unabated. During the 1947-49 war, the Zionists used expulsion, and ethnic cleansing to accelerate the dispossession and achieve the goal of transforming Palestine into a country “as Jewish as England is English”. It is ironic that the absence of a serious interest in the two-state solution on the part of today’s Zionist leaders of Israel may end up achieving the unintended goal of a bi-national state. Homogeneous ethnic purity in the developed world is a thing of the past. The dispossession continued after Israel conquered the Arab land in the 1967 war and especially after the right wing Likud led by Menahim Begin, came to power in Israel in 1977.

A Supreme Court ruling stated that a farmer, who cultivated miri (all land that lies within a radius of 2.5 kilometres from the built-up area of a village) land for 10 years and then ceased cultivating it did not lose the ownership rights. In its declarations policy, Israel decided to apply the opposite interpretation: whereby unregistered miri land which had been cultivated for at least 10 years, then cultivation stopped, becomes government property. In this way, “Israel declared large swaths of land in the West Bank as state land” when under local law they were “private Palestinian property”.

The report published by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem describes how the Israeli state founded the colonisation enterprise on what was declared state land, and on privet Palestinian land. However, a 1979 judgment of the High Court of Justice (the Elon Moreh case) prohibited the requisition of private Palestinian land to build civilian colonies.

The B’Tselem report included an analysis of the Ottoman land code as well as the Mandatory British land law and the Jordanian land code. The report found that “Israel’s application of its declarations policy was unlawful” because it classified private Palestinian property as public land.

In addition, Israeli governments applied stringent standards to Palestinian claims of rights in rocky land. If less than 50 per cent of the land is cultivated the Arab farmer loses his land and the Israeli state declares it state land.

US President Barack Obama has just concluded a historic visit to Israel — his first to that country as president. Given his administration’s efforts to downplay any expectations of a breakthrough, the visit did not disappoint: No breakthrough was achieved.

The task of trying to restart stalled peace negotiations — and the risk of failure that goes with it — now falls to US Secretary of State John Kerry.

But the visit, described by the New York Times as full of symbolism, was not without substantive interest. Obama spent most of his time in Israel and devoted most of his speeches there to repeated reassurances that the US will always be Israel’s most important ally, that these bonds are unbreakable, and that America will always stand by Israel and defend it against all enemies and against all threats — be it Hamas rockets, Iran’s nuclear weapons, Hezbollah, or Syria’s chemical weapons.

Obama also reassured his Israeli audiences that he understood their reluctance to take risks for peace. He appropriated the Israeli argument that Israel took a risk when it withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza only to be rewarded with violence by Hezbollah and Hamas. But he rejected the use of this argument as an excuse for not engaging in peace negotiations.

Indirectly rejecting the Israeli argument that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace, Obama emphatically asserted: “You do have a true partner” in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and in Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Obama said that peace was necessary, just and possible and that peace was “the only way to truly protect the Israeli people” because “no wall is high enough, and no Iron Dome is strong enough, to stop every enemy from inflicting harm”.

Obama called on the Palestinians to recognise that the Israelis have the right to insist on security guarantees while telling Israeli leaders to recognise that colony construction is “counterproductive to the cause of peace” and that “an independent Palestine must be viable …”

Had Obama confined himself to these remarks, there would have been nothing remarkable about the visit other than polite generalities repeated indefatigably and proven ineffective. But Obama went beyond generalities in his speech to a group of Israeli university students at the international convention centre in occupied Jerusalem. There, he mounted the most impassioned public defence of the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and self-determination.

Appealing directly to the young Israelis, Obama said they could be the generation that secured the Zionist dream or the one that faced growing challenges to it. He asserted that a viable independent Palestinian state is the only guarantee of an enduring Jewish and democratic state. He urged his young audience to make their voices louder than those who reject peace, and work towards creating the future they want their children to have.

In the most unprecedented public condemnation of the Israeli occupation ever made by an American president before an Israeli audience, Obama said, “The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognised ...

“It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own ... It is not just when settler [colonist] violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to … displace Palestinian families from their homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer … Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”

Remarkably, the Israeli audience erupted in applause, suggesting that a gulf separates Israeli leaders — generally supportive of the status quo — and the Israeli public, largely opposed to occupation, and anxious to see an end to the conflict and justice for the Palestinians.

Equally remarkable is the degree to which the Palestinian leadership is anxious to resume the stalled negotiations lest they continue to lose credibility with their own people.

The New York Times obtained a secret Palestinian document containing talking points prepared for Abbas for his meeting with Obama. The document reportedly shows Abbas offering Obama concessions to help him persuade Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze colony construction and resume peace talks.

Abbas reportedly offered to accept a secret freeze on colony construction. This, in addition to a promise not to use the recent recognition by the United Nations of Palestinian status as a non-member state to bring Israel to the Permanent Criminal Court for Human Rights violations.

It is not clear what Obama did with these offers assuming Abbas did make them.

What is clear, however, is that Obama did give up on trying to directly pressure Netanyahu into making peace with the Palestinians. He has decided to appeal to the Israeli people directly, especially the young, suggesting that change will be long in coming.

To succeed, Obama relied on the power of impassioned appeals, beautiful rhetoric, elegant arguments, and the basic justice of the Palestinian cause. In so doing, Obama made entrenched ideologues like Netanyahu look like a political dinosaur — for a brief moment at least. But will that be enough to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians?