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 Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu, who has died aged 102, was an uncompromising Zionist best known for the profound influence he had over his son Binyamin, the country's prime minister. Benzion insisted on the need for eternal vigilance in defence of Jewish rights, as he saw them, and critics blamed him for dissuading Binyamin from making peace with Palestinians. Many saw in the son's approach to Iran a reflection of his father's bleak world view.

Yet their mutual admiration was evident. During Binyamin's successful 2009 election campaign, a television ad of the two playing chess had him saying to camera after a move by his father: "You need the steadfastness to act, to do the unpopular thing that may ultimately save the country."

Benzion's involvement in controversy started when he broke off a promising academic career in mandate-era Palestine to become chief aide and secretary to Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, the leader of the rightwing Revisionist strain of Zionism, precursor to the now-ruling Likud party. Jabotinsky withdrew from the mainstream Zionist organisation in 1931, angry at Britain's perceived reneging on its promise to Jews as framed in the 1917 Balfour declaration. Jabotinsky and his protege, Netanyahu, also resented the socialist outlook of the Labour Zionists, led by Israel's future first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who increasingly came to dominate Jewish politics in pre-independence Palestine.

Netanyahu believed in Jewish rights to settle both banks of the River Jordan, in maintaining an "iron wall" until Arabs recognised the permanence of a Jewish presence, in a free economy, and in Jabotinsky's wake-up call to Jews to leave eastern Europe before the onset of genocide.

Jabotinsky died in New York in August 1940. Netanyahu had gone with him, and acted as the guardian of his legacy: he lobbied passionately for a Jewish state with Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and President Dwight Eisenhower. And while he opposed the UN general assembly partition solution of November 1947, he probably deserves some credit for getting Washington to back the creation of Israel the following year.

After his return to Israel in 1948, Benzion had to accept that the former Irgun underground militant, Menachem Begin, was now the political leader of Revisionism. If anything, Benzion's views hardened: Begin called him an extremist and others a racist.

From 1949 onwards, Benzion concentrated on his research, while earning a good living as editor of the popular Encyclopedia Hebraica. Citing discrimination by a hostile leftist academic establishment in Israel, Benzion took his wife, Tzila, and young family to the US in 1956. Thus Binyamin was raised in an environment where he saw himself and his family, despite his privileges, as double outsiders – both from a socialistic Israel whose Labour party had wrested the Zionist narrative from the Revisionists and from a Begin-led Likud.

None of the five "founding fathers of Zionism" whom Benzion profiled in his book (in 2004 in Hebrew and this year in English) came from the Labour tradition. For Benzion, Binyamin's victory in 1996, when he was narrowly elected as Israel's youngest-ever prime minister, and his regaining of power in 2009 were moments of almost personal vindication. In 1976 he had suffered the great loss of his eldest son, Yonatan, killed while leading the Israeli raid on a hijacked French airliner at Entebbe, Uganda.

Born in Warsaw, while Poland was part of the Russian empire, Benzion Mileikowsky was 10 when his family left for British-ruled Palestine. Benzion's Lithuanian-born father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, soon changed the family name to the Hebrew Netanyahu, meaning "God has given". He toured Europe and America exhorting Jews to "return to Zion". Benzion ("son of Zion"), by contrast with his Orthodox father, lived a secular life; yet, in the words of David Remnick in the New Yorker: "His judgment of Israel and history are often so dark, so unforgiving, that he sounds like the harshest of Old Testament prophets … his range of disapproval is breathtaking."

Benzion studied medieval history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, graduating in 1933. Soon he was co-editing Revisionist publications. From 1940 to 1948 he was in New York, and in 1944 married Tzila Segal, a native of Petach Tivka, Palestine, who had studied law at Gray's Inn, London. From the 1950s to the 70s, the Netanyahus alternated between Israel and the US, with Benzion teaching at Dropsie College, Philadelphia, the University of Denver and Cornell University.

Over time, he worked on a novel thesis regarding the Jews of late medieval Spain. Prevailing opinion held that the "conversos" were secretly still Jews, and were persecuted for that by the Inquisition. In The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995), Benzion argued that this was a romantic delusion: most genuinely accepted Catholicism and wished to assimilate, yet were persecuted because they had Jewish blood and aroused Christian envy by their success. Critics said he was swayed by his perception of the Holocaust "through a rear-view mirror": his conclusion, that only an Israel could save diaspora Jews, smacked of polemical bias and persecution mania. Nonetheless that work and others on Jewish Spaniards have won praise for their fluency and thoroughness in recent years.

Benzion could seem forbidding. In 1998 he publicly chided his son for part-relinquishing Israeli control over Hebron. He showed wariness even towards Israel's "dedicated benefactor", the US, said Remnick. Yet his leftist publisher, Jason Epstein, spoke of a mutual friendship based on "admiration akin to love". Tzila died in 2000, and he is survived by Binyamin and his other son Iddo, a novelist and radiologist.