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.”

SOMETHING strange is happening to us Zionists in the 60th year of the state of Israel: we are repudiating our astonishing success. If in the 1880s (the start of Zionist settlement in what is now Israel) or in 1948 (the War of Independence) or even in 1967 (the Six-Day War) somebody had said that one day virtually the entire world, including all the Arab nations, would accept the existence of the State of Israel in 78 percent of the land of Israel, he would have been regarded as either idiotically optimistic or clinically insane. That, however, is where we are today. We have won, but we are refusing to accept the result.

It is as if the captain of a team winning the World Cup, a triumphant Olympic sprinter or a victor of Wimbledon were to say: “No, no. There has been a mistake. I didn’t win, I lost. My victory is an illusion.”

While it is true that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talks about wiping Israel off the map, and he might be developing the technical means to do so, he has also said that he will agree to whatever agreement the Palestinians accept. The Lebanese Islamic group Hezbollah is utterly hostile, but it is now focused on events in its own country.

The Palestinian Hamas, which rules Gaza, refuses to recognize Israel, but even that movement seeks a long-term truce, which is tantamount to de facto recognition.

Far more significantly, Fatah, the official Palestinian leadership, is negotiating peace with Israel. The member states of the Arab League, headed by Saudi Arabia, are on record as recognizing Israel within its pre-1967 borders. The world’s only superpower, the United States, is solid in its support of Israel under any conceivable president.

The other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the overwhelming majority of the members of the United Nations all recognize pre-1967 Israel.

Wake up, fellow Israelis, it’s over, we’ve won! What is more we’ve won a lot: more than 8,000 square miles out of the 10,400 square miles of the British Mandate for Palestine. And most Palestinians have accepted this territorially lopsided resolution of the 100-year-old dispute.

Problems remain, of course. We Israelis have made a shambles of our Zionist enterprise by establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories we have occupied since 1967. Either we must disentangle ourselves from the Palestinians, or else create a structure for sharing the land with them. Many of the flagship Jewish settlements are so deep in Palestinian territory that no matter how the borders were to be redrawn, the settlements would be left inside Palestine.

And the current talk of swapping “settlement blocs” in the West Bank for equivalent amounts of land in Israel near the border is unrealistic. For any “two-state solution” to work, we would need to conduct a complete withdrawal from the West Bank. Even so, the success of the Zionist enterprise would be astounding.

If we cannot summon the determination it would take for a complete pullback, might the world, led by the United States, try to force us to withdraw? It might, but it probably won’t, so we are most likely looking at some sort of single state, bi-national state or confederation. What matters is that we are acting from a position of strength, and we ought to be investing our energy and creativity in working out a long-term solution with the Palestinians that will be acceptable to both of us.

What we should not be doing is what we are doing now: besieging and blacking out Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.

The most recent suicide bombing in southern Israel has predictably prompted calls for a new barrier along our 145-mile Egyptian border. This is unreasonable. Walls, as recent events have shown, can be breached. Palestinian terrorism against civilians has decreased over the past years, even though the barrier separating Israel and the West Bank has many large gaps. It is illogical to suppose that this incomplete wall is the factor that has reduced terrorism.

The proposal to build an additional fence along the Egyptian border represents all that is wrong with our current policies. To cower behind a wall is to demonstrate again our loser mentality at a time when we have, in fact, won. The political settlement that the world is begging us to reach is the only way to ultimately stop the violence between us and the Palestinians.

This week's request from French President Nicholas Sarkozy, made at the conference of nations donating money to the Palestinian Authority, that Israel remove the roadblocks in the West Bank is hardly new. World Bank reports have been saying for years that the roadblocks are a major impediment to Palestinian economic development. Tony Blair, the Quartet's special envoy, one of whose briefs is to help develop the Palestinian economy, has also made the same point several times.

Sarkozy, Blair and the World Bank are not talking about the checkpoints between Israel and the territories. They are referring to the barriers that prevent Palestinians from traveling and transporting goods between Tulkarm and Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, and between all of those places and East Jerusalem. They are also talking about those barriers that block entry to and exit from almost every village in the Palestinian territories.

According to a report in Haaretz last month, there are 572 roadblocks in the West Bank, 97 of them manned. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the manned checkpoints do prevent terror, inasmuch as people passing through them are searched and questioned. These checkpoints may stop a potential suicide bomber from attacking targets inside Israel by halting him early on, and certainly help to protect the settlements in the territories from would-be attackers.

But what on earth is the function of the 475 unmanned obstructions? Is it seriously contended by anyone that a mound of earth, a ditch or a series of concrete blocks can stop terrorists from moving around? Do these barriers serve any function other than embittering the lives of the Palestinians? The sick and the elderly, pregnant women and people carrying shopping baskets undoubtedly find it more difficult to get in and out of their barricaded towns and villages. Indeed both B'Tselem and the organization Physicians for Human Rights have documented cases of sick people being unable to receive treatment because they couldn't reach their doctors or clinics - while anybody planning a terrorist attack can easily clamber over the mounds, traverse the ditches or circumvent the blocks.

The Israel Defense Forces spokesperson refuses to answer questions on the subject, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, is prepared to explain the government's policy in general terms. "Israel must continue to be vigilant," he told me. "The only reason that terror attacks have been sharply reduced is that our forces are preventing them. If there were to be an attack at this point, it would not only cause the deaths of innocent people, but severely damage the current diplomatic process. The prime minister intends to move the roadblocks further from the Palestinian towns and closer to the security fence to ease the lives of the Palestinians, but we must still be very cautious."

Regev's reasonable-sounding statement, however, is only logical with regard to the manned checkpoints. Nobody I've spoken with has a convincing military explanation for the unmanned roadblocks. In fact, people familiar with Israeli military thinking have convinced me that the main object of these barriers is to fragment the territory, effectively preempting the "contiguous Palestinian state" recently touted by U.S. President George Bush. Nothing I have heard has convinced me that the unmanned roadblocks increase the security of Israelis in Israel, or even of the Jewish settlers in the territories.

What I have heard, and what the media have reported, is that the main problem in removing these roadblocks is the refusal of the army to obey orders. When ordered to take them down, the local IDF commander either ignores the order, or replaces the demolished roadblock with another one a few hundred meters away. It seems incredible, but the disobedience of many IDF officers at the start of the second intifada has been well documented.

Long before the recently screened TV documentary "A Million Bullets in October," the facts were reported in Haaretz by Reuven Pedatzur. Former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, former deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh, and senior negotiator Gilad Sher, are only three who maintained in the film that the government was frequently incapable of ensuring that the IDF obey its orders.

Is this still happening? I honestly don't know, but I have a comparatively modest suggestion for our government: Make a start with the 475 unmanned roadblocks. Leave the 97 manned checkpoints in place, but level the earth mounds, fill in the ditches and remove the concrete blocks. Send in the bulldozers and tractors tomorrow morning. It would improve the lives of the Palestinians enormously, and thereby reinforce the popularity of the Mahmoud Abbas-Salam Fayyad regime. It would do wonders for Israel's image in the world, thus enhancing our diplomatic position. It would not harm our security in any way.

Above all, it would be a test case of whether our government is capable or not of making the IDF obey its orders.

Daniel Gavron's latest book, "Holy Land Mosaic," is being published this month by Rowman and Littlefield in the U.S.

It is not often that I totally disagree with Haaretz's editorial, but today's plea for the swift completion of the security fence strikes me as uniquely ill-judged. There's not a scrap of evidence proving that the 42 percent of the barrier that has been built has prevented even one suicide bombing. The statistics quoted in the editorial are meaningless. If we are looking for a correlation between acts of terror and Israeli policy, it is no less logical to accept the claim of Benjamin Netanyahu that his tough, no-nonsense stance as prime minister sharply reduced terrorist actions. It's certainly true that during his term of office, there was a far lower rate of attrition.

In fact it has to be said that the highest rate of terrorist bombings was during the super-tough period of retaliation implemented by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. It can be argued that the IDF campaign at that time encouraged motivation on the Palestinian side, but the sad fact is that the number of attacks depends on them, not us. If there are less attacks today than in the past, it's because the various forces in the Palestinian Authority territories are planning and executing less. It's a moot point whether this is a result of Israel's policy of incursions, arrests and targeted assassinations, but it's certainly not because of the separation fence.

It may be logical to argue that a completed fence will stop - or at least sharply reduce - terror attacks, but it is unconvincing, to say the least, to contend that making a terrorist travel a few kilometers to find a section of unprotected border can have any effect. Whether the route of the barrier is along the old Green Line or snakes surrealistically around the so-called "settlement blocs" is irrelevant. The concept is basically wrong.

The original sin of the fence is the unilateral approach: the concept that there is nobody to talk to. In the period immediately after the Six Day War, the idea of unilateral withdrawal was suggested by, among others, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon and Pinhas Lavon. After the Arab summit at Khartoum had decided on no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel, it made sense even though it was laughed out of court at the time. Now, 39 years later, it makes no sense at all.

Not only is there somebody to talk to now, but also that somebody has been desperately trying to talk to us for the past six years. It's true that after the Camp David meeting in the summer of 2000 there was an outburst of violence by the Palestinians. It's also true that Israel over-reacted to this, but also it's a fact that there were further negotiations, which moved toward an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Both sides have been playing the blame game over the failure to reach an accord, but neither side has ever put forward a convincing reason for stopping the talks. If half the ingenuity and energy invested in the separation fence had been directed toward negotiations, we might be in a different place today.

The barrier was conceived as a response to despair over suicide bombings. Since then, various pressure groups - the right, the left, the settlers, the IDF, the demographic lobby, the civil rights movements, and the Supreme Court - have argued about its proposed route. Is it any wonder that its route is an illogical improvisation that endeavors to placate the various above-mentioned bodies?

However, if the separation fence is wrong and ill-advised as a general concept, it becomes a grotesque farce when applied to Jerusalem. I invite Haaretz readers to tour the route of the barrier in Jerusalem and study the maps. The Jerusalem fence has no logic whatsoever - political, demographic or security. It is simply an ugly, unwieldy monstrosity that will create only more frustration and anger on the Palestinian side.

Hasn't the time come for us to realize that both Israelis and Palestinians live in this tiny strip of land between the Mediterranean and Jordan River, and there is absolutely no alternative to living here side-by-side? There is no way to separate us from the Palestinians, particularly since all versions of the separation fence fence off only some of the Palestinians.

Haaretz is wrong. The separation fence should not be completed. It should be abandoned, and those sections already built should be torn down. Israel can re-occupy the territories and send the IDF into every alley and building there to bring terrorism to a stop, or, alternatively, it can sit down and talk to the Palestinians - to Abu Mazen, to Hamas, to everybody. This latter approach, which I favor, will require huge patience and nerves of steel, but at least it can be tried. The separation fence is merely an ad-hoc improvisation. It doesn't solve anything.

"A demonstration of some sensitivity toward the Palestinians at this fragile state of the relationship is far more important than adding any new territories," concluded a recent editorial in Haaretz. Yes indeed, but it isn't only a matter of building and territory. The fact that numerous roadblocks obstructing Palestinian freedom of movement remain in place is not generating a good atmosphere, and neither is the continuing arrest of Palestinians.

Four weeks ago, Mohammed Tanji of Tul Karm was arrested and questioned by the Shin Bet security forces on suspicion of carrying out hostile operations against Israel on behalf of the Islamic Jihad. In a sworn statement, he said that he had been informed by his interrogators that, if he denied the accusation, witnesses would testify that he participated in the murder of an Israel Defense Forces soldier. In the statement Tanji also complained of ill treatment including beatings, threats and insults, deprivation of sleep, and being handcuffed and manacled to a chair, which caused bleeding. An attorney for the Committee Against Torture petitioned the High Court of Justice to prevent further mistreatment.

The news of Tanji's arrest has astonished his many Israeli friends because he is well known as a dedicated worker for peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. From 2000 to 2003, Tanji, a graduate student of social sciences, was the Tul Karm coordinator of Windows - Channels for Communication, an Israeli-Palestinian nonprofit association for promoting dialogue and conciliation in its many activities, notably via Windows, its Hebrew- Arabic journal for young teenagers, which consistently stresses the importance of dialogue and understanding.

Israelis and Palestinians, members of the organization, have together organized educational projects, discussions, youth activities, art, sports, Hebrew and English lessons, and drama groups in Tul Karm, the two local refugee camps and a number of nearby villages - all aimed at fostering friendship between Israelis and Palestinians. As a board member of Windows, Tanji was in the forefront of these activities and, because of this, sometimes received threats from militant Palestinians, who objected to his declared opposition to violence and his tireless work for coexistence. More recently he has become the local representative of Kufiya, an Italian-Palestinian welfare organization that extends assistance to needy families in Tul Karm and the surrounding area.

At this point one has to ask the question: Is this the appropriate time to arrest known Palestinian peace activists? Tanji says he was told by his interrogators that he had been on the official list of "wanted terrorists" for a year. This is puzzling, bearing in mind that, during the past year, he has traveled abroad and has had his ID examined on the hundreds of occasions he passed through IDF checkpoints. The fact that he was not arrested earlier would seem to be a clear indication that Tanji is not in the category of a "ticking bomb," or a "clear and present danger" to Israel's security. Doubtless there are numerous Palestinians walking around who are suspected by the security services of planning, or even carrying out, hostile operations against Israeli targets, but is now the time to arrest them?

There are already thousands of Palestinians in Israel's jails. Surely today, when the main Palestinian towns (including Tul Karm where Tanji lives) are being handed over to the Palestinian Authority, and when new relations are being forged with the authority and its new leaders, it is not the right time to go around arresting yet more Palestinians - particularly those who have a record of campaigning for nonviolence and understanding.

On the eve of handing over more towns to Palestinian control, and only three months before the scheduled disengagement from Gaza, isn't it in the interest of the government to create an improved atmosphere between Israelis and Palestinians? Under fire even from the Americans for the E-1 building project in Ma'aleh Adumim, surely the last thing Israel needs is to open yet another front with the Palestinians by making arrests that are manifestly not urgent or even essential.

As this article was being completed, a Military Court Judge ordered that Tanji be released on bail on the grounds that the classified evidence offered by the Shin Bet to support the accusations against him was not conclusive. This is good news, but even if the security services think they do have enough evidence to put Mohammed Tanji on trial, they should hesitate to continue with a prosecution at this time. They should also review other doubtful cases - and certainly confine any further arrests to manifestly "ticking bombs."