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.”

It's doubtful if there was such foolishness in global politics since World War II as the settlement enterprise. The fact that the Israeli political leadership has engaged in it since 1967 makes the pill all the more bitter.

The sparse population in the West Bank, relative to the crowdedness of central Israel, created for Israel interests to suppress from the beginning any Palestinian efforts to organize. Moshe Dayan was considered an enlightened occupier thanks to the permission he gave Palestinians to work in Israel, for dirt cheap, and to import money from Jordan through the open bridges policy. As a colonialist, he was a cruel and short-tempered ruler. Only Ariel Sharon competed with him in historical blindness.

The army rushed to refer to the territories by their biblical names Judea, Samaria and Gaza. They called residents of the territories "locals," as if to say they lacked any other connection to land, people, and history. They were quickly treated as a danger during the process of parceling out their privately held land, a process in which an entire people was humiliated for decades. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, masses of them methodically tortured, tried in kangaroo courts, put under curfew in honor of our holidays, and had their land expropriated. An entire nation was subjected to hunger, siege, humiliation of parents in front of their children, killing without distinction, as well as - how could it be otherwise? - being preached to about the injustice of resistance. Israel created with its own hands the security threat and through that threat the right controls us.

Fairly late in the game, when Sharon became convinced that the Gaza Strip was no longer worthwhile, he abandoned it and closed its residents within an enormous ghetto, poor and starved. Gaza is far from the center of the country, and just as most Israelis have no interest in the Negev, Gaza as well, from enlightened Israel's perspective, can expire between one so-called war on terror and the one following it.

However, through the West Bank it's easy to unmask the occupation. It was under Jordanian control until 1967, and it bothered us less than did Egypt or Syria. Nor did the detachment from Beit El or other illusions interfere with the development of our spiritual lives. But Israel understands only force, and the Palestinian population was militarily weak. Here, ever since the 1978 Camp David Accords, Sharon expanded the settlement enterprise.

The drugged-up nation wasn't told about water and real estate. They injected it with terms like "land of the forefathers" and "security." The settler lords were awarded luxuries, lived on the business of the forefathers and now they are the so-called far right that the world, including the Palestinians, is being asked to keep in mind when we plead helplessness. The army, always moderate in the Israeli psyche, will represent the security interest because the army is us and we are moderates. However, the settlers need the army to deepen control and the army needs the settlers to control the territories. That's the tango.

The tendency to blame the Palestinians for failing to compromise is part of the colonialist hauteur. We imprison Palestinians, torture, steal, spread out on their land and ask them to compromise with us? In the name of what? In the name of fear of the extreme right?

Now Avigdor Lieberman comes along and declares that a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians is impossible and everyone is silent. The Palestinians are actually offering a peace deal. The big obstacle and the one that grows from year to year is the settlement enterprise, which promises that no solution will be achieved until it sinks us all.

In order to put pressure on the government, it is worthwhile learning from Beitar Jerusalem and its fans' racist war: The fear of international sanctions work. The time has come to encourage the international community to fight Israeli intransigence and pressure Israel to give up on the occupied territories and its residents, who lack a voice from the perspective of our democracy. The "La Familia" government will surrender.

The 1967 borders are the goal, and for that we need to boycott not just Ariel College. All this will have to start from within us. After his speech in the Knesset, Obama will return to dine in the White House. We will stay to eat our spoiled fruit, fertilized like Naftali Bennett or Yair Lapid. Fertilizer is fertilizer.

Every once in a while there's an outbreak in the centrist and left-wing camps known as "the United States won't allow it." For years we have been told that the United States opposes settlements, and so for years Israel's settlement policy was not described domestically as bad in and of itself but as a stumbling block in our ties with our big ally. Even when hawks would provoke acts of war, the non-right would warn that the United States would not allow it. But then, astonishingly, even if we did hear some condemnation from the U.S. State Department, Washington's veto on Israeli issues would still be waiting for us at the UN Security Council and so would its military assistance - assuring us that the United States actually does allow it, and how.

During those years when there was still disagreement within Israel, its scope reflected much of the disagreement between the State Department and the Pentagon in the United States. Over time our leaders learned how to maneuver between the different positions in Washington, usually through two rules that Yitzhak Rabin expressed after the first Lebanon war. The first rule is that a superpower does not tell its vassal state what to do; the vassal state must assess the superpower's interests and target them, fashioning a war that will serve those interests. For the moment at least, this appears to be the approach of Israeli leaders who support a military attack on Iran.

But Rabin also came up with another rule, which he learned during the decisive years of America's defeat in Vietnam: The United States tends to operate relatively rationally, and when its interests are harmed, it cuts its losses all at once. No Israeli leaders seem to be taking this into account - neither the right nor the non-right, which is simultaneously warning against war but effectively supporting it as long as the United States is leading the way.

It's convenient for centrists and left-wingers to repress the truth about this dependence. They even repress the fact of U.S. intervention in our moment of greatest spiritual decline, the 1967 war. The non-right prefers not to remember, for instance, how Israel's foreign minister at the time, Abba Eban, flew to Washington to ascertain whether it would prevent the war - or how Mossad director Meir Amit traveled after him, and without his knowledge, to make certain that U.S. leaders wouldn't listen to our foreign minister if he sought to make peace. Not only was the green light given, but U.S. President Lyndon Johnson banged on the table and shouted, behind Eban's back: "Smash Nasser!"

The Americans, of course, won better standing with the Arab countries in this war, while Israel essentially committed suicide. Although it now looks like the tables have turned, the non-right camp is still having difficulty internalizing this kind of historical critique in relation to the United States and to its fundamental alienation from our interests. This matter is connected to the denied realization: Without American interests - in short, America's control of Middle Eastern oil - it's doubtful that we would still exist. Hence the frequent complaint that "the West isn't defending itself." What underlies this grievance is nothing but the complaint: "Why aren't the Americans fulfilling our fantasies?"

What exactly do opponents of a war really mean? Would a war led by the United States be good for us? This is a neurosis after all, so the real questions get bypassed in favor of the whining underscored by the question: "Where are you, Obama?" As though Barack Obama were Moses rather than the president of the United States. Now imagine the United States attacking to our applause and retreating, as with Iraq, after getting futilely entangled, because its losses in the Persian Gulf are too large. We will be left with the self-pity of soccer fans who believe their team must have lost because everyone else is a bastard.

Historians will one day describe Kadima as a symptom of the opposition in a society without resistance. Those who voted in the past for Meretz and Labor will not "return home" now. The drift that brought them to Kadima is the same drift turning the Likud into a widening alliance of the far-right Hotovely-Danon party and satellites such as Ehud Barak, or Otniel Schneller, or Yair Lapid in the future. They can all make the most of what democracy has to offer - a political class playing at government and opposition.

This political class, which consists of 120 Knesset members and everyone else who feeds well off it, can move to the coalition, return to the opposition, split, extract, unite, invent issues to squabble over and most importantly get to continue in office. In other words, it can play at opposition, enabling the bourgeoisie to vote for "its own" party. It began with Dash (the Democratic Movement for Change) and continued with Shinui and the Center Party. They all appealed to the bourgeoisie in the name of a "clean," "moderate," "white," "effective," "secular," "decent" alternative. They all excelled at "pragmatism," another name for opportunism.

In those years the political controversy in the Knesset became drained of content, the MKs' wages rose, their economic influence grew and the lobbies were formed. In brief, the political class became an active partner in the capitalism that melts everything. It does not represent the people. It receives power from them in the name of the democratic game. Indeed, the argument between the political blocs disappeared, as did the blocs themselves.

The argument over colonizing the occupied territories ceased to be an internal Israeli argument. The colonization attorneys in the Knesset represent divisions of settlers who are eligible to vote in ballots posted in the occupied territories, in islands of "Israeli democracy" surrounded by an army and regions of subjects who do not have the right to vote. The only ones bearing the burden of fighting the colonization are the Palestinians, the international community and too-few leftist activists.

There is nothing like the argument over the colonial university in Ariel to demonstrate the cohesiveness of the political community, apart from a few leftist exceptions, surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu, who squanders every solution and sentences masses of natives to the "lesser evil" of the bantustan.

But the opposition was not swallowed up by colonialism alone. Nor was it merely the Zionist left's pathetic need to stand at attention every time an Israeli prime minister gets into a bombing frenzy, like Ehud Olmert in Lebanon and Gaza.

Instead, the greatest contribution to this process was the welfare state's dissolution. No Western state has undergone such a process without vociferous resistance. However, just as the return of territories here has been assigned to the right wing, so the Labor Party took it upon itself to dismantle the welfare state and its only support, the Histadrut. Those who took the Histadrut apart knew it was the only interested party that could defend the welfare state.

Since 1985, during the days of the national unity government, and even more so since the formation of the "New Histadrut" during the second Rabin government, destruction has befallen the only political power capable of preventing what the people born in those years are now trying to understand. So we have MKs zig-zagging between air-conditioned offices and cafeterias and luxury cars, while in the blazing, muggy streets, throngs of youngsters search for a lost welfare state without knowing where to begin digging.

Anyone spurring Daphni Leef to gather those masses and go into the Knesset as well is doing the right thing. Maybe this will be a beginning of a different kind.

In this postmodern culture that uses scandals, gossip, drama, breaking news, commentators and other means of concealing reality, even Ehud Olmert is a good commodity. First the media convicted him, now they're talking up his chances of becoming prime minister again and at the same time they are beating themselves up over their rush to judgment. And even this remorse is being expressed with the help of a choice journalistic commodity: self-righteousness.

Readers and viewers like the media because they enjoy feeling they are in the right - at least compared with whichever bad guy is in the news - and enjoy feeling good when the bad guy gets condemned. First the bad guy was Olmert; now it's Moshe Lador. MK Hanin Zuabi of Balad is, of course, perpetually in the hot seat.

At the same time, the media are also hawking the commodity of victimhood. Olmert has a role to play here too, at least for the moment.

In a market in which self-righteousness, condemnation and criminal conviction are commodities, the justice system remains curled up in a corner, leaving the presumption of innocence to be trampled first. All the same, there are countries, like the United States, in which the presumption of innocence is scrupulously protected - even though the media there are even better than they are here at stage-managing reality. So it makes sense to presume that the Israeli contempt for the presumption of innocence comes from some other place in our lives, and not necessarily from the media.

It would be easy to attribute it to the occupation. For 45 years, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been sentenced to jail by military tribunals that are as strongly correlated with such concepts as law, evidence and the presumption of innocence as the police orchestra's woodwind section is correlated with music.

We could also point to the extent to which the occupation is integrated into our lives: i.e., the number of generals serving as legislators, including leaders of the Shin Bet security service with expertise in "extracting confessions." In short, that which shocks Americans about Guantanamo - its extralegal nature - is prevalent here, and masses of Israelis, of all ranks, are involved in it, from the soldiers at the roadblocks to the members of Knesset.

That said, we would do better to start earlier, to return to the time when Israel was on the path to statehood. For instance, for more than a generation, our leaders enthusiastically condemned the three Revisionists accused of assassinating Labor Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff in 1933, even though two were acquitted and the third was released on appeal. At the bottom of that insistence on their guilt lies something impassioned that is tied in with the path to statehood - a time when the adoration surrounding illegal activities played an important role. This concept of tales that must not be told but should nonetheless be admired is something the State of Israel has inherited in all its glory.

The extended transition to a state of law (that still doesn't have a constitution ) was governed by the same people who led pre-state Israel, with all its military organizations, parties and collectives that stood devotedly behind their leaders, as though they themselves were the law, and with the notable absence of institutions of justice.

Israel (Rudolf ) Kastner, a Jewish Mapai candidate accused of collaborating with the Nazis in Hungary during World War II, was assassinated in 1957 by people who saw themselves as the heirs to the pre-state militias. Even though the assassination was hardly the norm, we must not forget how enthusiastic the Israeli public also was in 1986, when the state, acting as a terrorist entity, abducted nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in Rome and brought him back to Israel for a treason trial.

In short, the State of Israel is teaching its citizens that the law and the presumption of innocence are always conditional; the individual exists only as part of the collective. And the collective excitedly homes in on selected targets: external enemies and internal enemies, always the bad guys at the center of orchestrated moral panic, as though the latest scandal has suddenly revealed the state of the world. The Internet has made the atmosphere of illegality even worse (libel laws seem to have vanished altogether ) and made it possible to defame people covertly.

One of the advantages of a democratic justice system is that it frees most people from having to take on the role of civil servants, from having to act as police officers, as tax assessors, as prosecutors, as judges, as prison wardens. Israeli democracy, though, keeps duplicating the roles its citizens, whether left-wing or right-wing, must play. It turns them into police officers, prosecutors and judges, as well as informers and military recruitment officers, rather than letting them act as human beings who can simply elect or not elect someone like Olmert - in spite of, or because of, his hedonism, if not in spite of, or because of, the pile of corpses he left behind in the two wars he waged during his shortened term of office.

Israelis, therefore, are not really political beings, whether they are left wing or right wing. They are instead people who gossip, or announce, or denounce, or shout out loud "We want some blood," and they do it in front of the television and the tabloids, or in online reader comments and Facebook.