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.”

We stood still in front of the cemetery fence. Karam stared at the well-worn asphalt road. This is where his cousin, Salah, fell right in front of his eyes two weeks ago. This is where Karam asked, "What is this - a joke, Salah?" before he saw his cousin's body convulse. Then he tried to pick him up, but Salah slipped from his arms. Israel Defense Forces soldiers fired a live bullet into Salah's head in circumstances that posed no threat to their lives. The soldiers were stationed in a protected watchtower that looks out onto the road.

Salah and Karam Amarin, two 15-year-old cousins and ninth-grade students in the same secondary school, had been standing alone on this desolate road. A few minutes earlier, the two youths had roamed around the graves in the cemetery, trying to find a place to hide from the gas grenades being fired by the soldiers in the tower; the soldiers aimed at a group of young people who threw rocks at the cement wall of the separation barrier near the cemetery, and then retreated.

Salah is now buried in that same cemetery. Only a few dozen meters separate his burial plot from the site where he was shot. Six days passed before Salah died of his injuries. Ten days passed before the IDF military advocate general's office ordered the Military Police to investigate the incident.

The army prosecutors had moved more quickly with regard to the killing of the student Lubna Hanash: That investigation was launched immediately. Lt. Col. Shachar Sapeda, deputy commander of the Judea Brigade, or his driver, shot her in the head after some youths hurled stones and perhaps also Molotov cocktails at their car. Lubna died on the spot; she died the same day that Salah did. Both were from the same city, Bethlehem. Salah lived at the Azza refugee camp (officially known as Beit Jibrin camp ); Lubna was from the Jabal Malawach neighborhood.

Salah's slightly built father, Ahmed, who has for years worked as a maintenance man at settlements in the Betar Ilit area, merely asks: "What would have happened had my boy been an Israeli?" Salah was Ahmed's only son; he has four daughters.

The Azza refugee camp is one of the smallest and most crowded on the West Bank. Some 1,800 residents are packed into 20 dunams (five acres ), imprisoned between the main roads and a wall; the camp is hidden away behind two luxury hotels: Bethlehem's established, veteran Intercontinental Hotel, and the new Saint-Michel.

Salah was Azza's youth soccer star. He trained in what is referred to as Bethlehem's soccer academy, and dreamed of playing in Italy. Two weeks ago, on Friday afternoon, the two cousins, Salah and Karam thought about heading to the school's soccer field. Salah was sitting on a bench near the metal workshop of his uncle Majad, Karam's father; his cousin was putting on his soccer cleats. Salah disappeared before Karam finished lacing up: It turned out that he had walked off to the neighboring Aida refugee camp to copy some papers for a school assignment. There is a print shop at the foot of the watchtower, alongside the separation fence that cuts off the Aida camp.

This week, together with Karam, we retraced his cousin's last steps along the winding lanes of the camps. Here is the bench where he sat before he died; there is the road, next to the cemetery, where he was shot and killed. On the day of the incident, after someone told him his cousin had gone to Aida, Karam set out for that camp as well. He is a good-looking teenager, as was his dead cousin. His words were faint, and at times he covered his face with a black scarf.

Karam disappeared after the shooting. His family found him after nightfall, sitting silently by the cemetery fence, at the spot where Salah was shot.

In recent weeks there had been an increase in stone-throwing incidents near the wall which runs from Rachel's Tomb, but soldiers never used live bullet fire in response. That Friday afternoon a group of youths gathered and hurled rocks. Soldiers responded by shooting tear gas. When Karam reached Aida, below the wall, he met Salah. The cemetery area nearby was covered by smoke. A group of 20 youths beat a retreat back to the "key gate": This is a huge sculpture of a key that was erected in memory of the homes lost in the 1948 war by residents of the camp, which is located a few hundred meters away. Despite the smoke and confusion, Salah and Karam decided to continue on to the printers.

It was about 4 P.M. Karam relates that the two were alone on the road. Similarly, testimony taken by B'Tselem investigator Soha Zeyad indicates that they were indeed alone by the wall, across from the watchtower, at the moment when the rock-throwers fled from the gas.

Salah and Karam stood at a distance of 100 meters from the wall, whose iron gate was barred shut; soldiers could be seen behind the tower's fortified glass window. Karam didn't hear the bullet's whistle, and so he thought that Salah was playing a game when he fell suddenly to the road. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the IDF claimed that Salah was holding a slingshot.

After his cousin's body fell from Karam's arms, a group of youths came to the scene and they brought the wounded teenager to the key fence. A private car sped up and transported him to the small hospital in Beit Jala.

I saw a film taken by security cameras at a nearby culture center; the alarmed youths can be seen frantically carrying the wounded Salah. In the car, he managed to ask Karam whether the wound in his head was large, but didn't say anything else. Later he was taken to Bethlehem's rehabilitation center.

Thanks to the intervention of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who happened to be visiting Bethlehem the same day, Salah was then taken to Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, where he died six days later. Physicians there asked the father to consent to organ donation, but Ahmed refused, just as he did not approve of an autopsy.

Karam has kept the blood-stained trousers that his cousin wore that day. The two were very close, though he says they never discussed what they wanted to do when they grew up. But later on during our visit, at a mourner's meal to which we were invited, the father, Ahmed, related that Salah often said to him: "What difference does what I study make - I'll be a laborer no matter what."

The cemetery gates have recently been locked shut, so that youths do not enter it while soldiers observe them from the watchtower. We reached those gates exactly when a funeral was being held for one of the city's residents. The camp's guard relates that a short time before our arrival, soldiers fired gas canisters at participants in the funeral. The guard, Mohammed Sami Imrazik, shows us a blood stain on his pants, and says that it is Salah's blood, left after he helped carry him from the site.

The deceased are buried above ground at this cemetery, owing to a shortage of land. Next to Salah's fresh grave, upon which a tombstone has already been erected, there is a bag from which the guard takes dozens of gas canisters that soldiers have shot at his cemetery.

"We've turned into goats," he says in Hebrew, fixing a baseball cap to his head.

As Salah was being laid to rest here, Lubna Hanash, a student, was leaving her sister's house, at the Arroub refugee camp, north of Hebron. This was last Wednesday, following a two-day visit paid by Lubna to her sister. She was headed now to her own home in Bethlehem. Her friend Sawad proposed that she cross the main road, to come see him at the agricultural college where he studies, across from Arroub camp. When the visit was over, the two returned to the main road, Route No. 60, and waited for a cab that would take Lubna home.

Monir, Lubna's bereaved father, now sits in his home, perched on a hill in the Jabal Malawach neighborhood, grieving. Residents of this neighborhood came originally from Jerusalem's Malcha neighborhood; the family's original house was close to today's Holyland project.

One of the mourners present, an old man wearing a keffiyeh, exclaims: "Palestinian blood is cheap. Soldiers and settlers go out to drink champagne with their girlfriends and boast about how they killed a Palestinian. As their culture sees it, a dead Arab is a good Arab. They kill Palestinians as though they are clearing mosquitoes from the air."

Witness reports that have reached the family indicate that on that Wednesday, a white automobile that passed by on the road was attacked by stones; the deputy brigade commander and his driver got out of the vehicle, and started to chase the rock-throwers into a vineyard on the side of the road. Suddenly they opened fire. One bullet hit Sawad's hand; another, or perhaps the same, bullet struck Lubna's head. The two started to run, in panic, but Lubna fell and collapsed after a few meters. She apparently died right away, says the father, trying to find a way to console himself. A 21-year-old student, she was in her final year of bachelor's degree studies in political science at Al-Quds University, in Abu Dis.

"Why was she killed?" the father asks. "Why was she murdered - that ought to be the headline of your report."

There are many differences between preelection gatherings conducted by Jews and Arabs. For one thing, the burekas are tastier and more crispy in Arab locales. Fruit and vegetables abound, as do other pastries and drinks. The fare in these living-room meetings just happens to be better. But how much burekas can you eat in one day if you are a candidate running from one of 10 such consecutive meetings to another?

At these Arab caucuses, the women peek in from kitchens, because politics is for men only. In some houses, the plastic chairs the guests are seated on are covered by fine cloth. The salons are infused with cigarette smoke, cell phones ring constantly, and praise is heaped upon the candidate - who is treated with deference and respect. The bitter griping, complaints and criticism characteristic of Jews is nowhere to be found.

The questions asked are a mirror of the woes that Arab citizens face in their daily lives: difficulties getting connected to the electricity grid or becoming tenured employees with the Israel Electric Corporation; issues related to housing, sewerage, industrial zones, public transportation, family unification, university study and the lack of hospitals in the Arab sector.

Like local election

Yet, just as it is with the Jews these days, not a word is spoken about the occupation, Iran or the budget deficit. Nor is anything said about concepts of the "Jewish state" - as opposed to a "state of all its citizens."

Sometimes it seems as though the seats up for election are not for the next Knesset, but rather the local municipality . And the Palestinian Authority, which once involved itself up in balloting in the Israeli Arab sector, is staying away this time.

We are accompanying the electioneering rounds of MK Ahmed Tibi, or "the Doctor" as his supporters admiringly call him (Tibi had a career as a gynecologist before entering politics ) - and he had many such supporters during the day we spent together. The head of the United Arab List-Ta'al party, he is a television celebrity in Jewish households. In the morning he was seen on Channel 10's morning news program; the night before he appeared on the "Fly Away with a Million" game show; the day before that, he debated Channel 2's military correspondent Roni Daniel. Tibi has also previously been seen ripping up a picture of Meir Kahane while standing at the Knesset rostrum; in a standoff with a woman spitting at him at Bar-Ilan University; speaking eye-to-eye with Jews who despise him. Throughout it all, he "fights back" defiantly, and thereby stirs some pride in the Arab sector. Here, children quote his speeches and adolescents follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

In touch with modern trends, Tibi goes nowhere without his driver-photographer, a cap-wearing Palestinian from the Wadi Joz section of Jerusalem who documents every moment in the life of his boss during election season, for online posts. At 2:00 P.M., we sat in the dingy VIP section of Taibeh's soccer stadium, during the big derby match between Shimshon Taibeh and Taibeh Youth, for first place in Israel's fifth division.

In the blink of an eye, Tibi was posting photographs from the game on his Facebook page. Not a minute had passed before responses started to flow in, which he read diligently while the SOB Jewish referee was calling another offside against the Shimshon squad. Tibi helped raise a lot of money for this stadium, whose green field sparkles. Nonetheless, the Jewish policeman does not allow him to approach the players at halftime, so we take our leave, galloping forth toward the Arab village of Zemer.

On Tuesday this week we wandered between Taibeh, Zemer, Jatt, Baka al-Garbiyeh - the Arab towns and village of the Little Triangle region, in the country's center - until late at night. We moved from house to house, most of the large marble structures replete with thick curtains, silk sofas, crystal lamps and elegant living rooms. Tibi's constituency is comprised mainly of the Arab petit-bourgeoisie, the middle class of graying hair and bulging bellies. They are second-generation citizens of Israel, no longer stricken by the Nakba trauma as their parents were, but not yet the nationalist subversives that some of their children have become.

Of course, many young people were on hand, but perpetually suspicious Jewish Israelis can relax: These were not meetings for renegade Palestinian nationalists. Here the Arabic conversation is interspersed with Hebrew terms. And one word is uttered again and again, in Hebrew, and its echo can be found everywhere in this election campaign: "a-d-i-s-h-u-t" (apathy).

This is the lurking, all-dangerous, enemy, in the face of which this election campaign is being conducted. Tibi will not emit a single negative word about the other Arab parties vying with his own United Arab List-Ta'al list; his words are directed at the fear that, this year, more Arabs than ever before will simply choose not to cast ballots at all.

Repeatedly, he explains to his listeners that whoever does not vote is nonetheless casting a ballot - for the political right: for Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett. Should the percentage of Jewish voters rise and that of Arab voters decline, only two Arab parties (out of three ) are likely to cross the threshold that will even allow them to gain Knesset representation.

Tibi talks about how Nelson Mandela led his people in a fight for the principle of "one man one vote," a principle he says is the one equal right enjoyed by Israeli Arabs, but one of which they have now despaired.

The experts are now talking about an estimated turnout level of just 45 percent among Arab voters on Tuesday. Tibi estimates that only a tenth of the boycotters will be motivated by ideology; the remainder will act out of apathy and lack of faith in the utility of voting, and of the influence it can exert on the life of Arabs in this country.

Among Arab citizens as well, this is the drowsiest election campaign in memory. Towns may be draped in election banners, and the trees might sag with election signs; but Arab communities are always rife with signs and billboards - much more so than elsewhere - as though they are there to cover the neglect and abandonment.

Shoulder to shoulder

Election activists are already waiting at the gas station in Zemer, a relatively affluent village. They are drinking espresso. Pictures of Tibi are plastered everywhere, on windows and billboards. Other activists pass around Balad party newspapers at traffic junctions, and things in the village seem to be buzzing. "We will stand shoulder to shoulder with Tibi," the meeting's host declares, as people gather in a stone house belonging to the son of the former local council head.

At the next stop, Jatt, activists wait at what was once a fresh produce stand, and has now been converted into the United Arab List-Ta'al party's local headquarters. A gas heater spreads warmth into the space on the street, as though it were another Arab tire repair establishment. Activists here wear black and yellow shirts, the colors of both Islamic Jihad and Beitar Jerusalem, with the words "the Arab Movement for Renewal" (for which Ta'al is an acronym ) written on them in both Arabic and English, as though there is a proliferation of English-speaking movement supporters in Jatt.

Some of the supporters want to see less pro-Palestinian activity on the part of Tibi and his colleagues, and more activity on behalf of Israel's Arab sector. Tibi explains that data collected by the Knesset's research department reveals that 80 percent of activity undertaken by Arab MKs in fact relates to domestic issues, but that this work receives no media coverage. For example, there is the village resident who excelled in his work at the electric company, and received tenure status there thanks to Tibi's effort on his behalf. And then, of course, there are scholarships - about 100 a year - which Tibi raises for students who are enrolled in higher education programs in Jordan.

"We don't have rights in this land, we have rights to this land," he declares, letting out a rare nationalistic campaign statement. "We are not 'minorities,' we are one national minority. Does Anastassia Michaeli [outgoing MK from Yisrael Beiteinu] know what za'atar is? Look at her color, and our color. She is white, and we are the color of the earth of this country. Whether it's Bar-Ilan or [anywhere else] - I'll state my opinion everywhere."

A Hebrew teacher praises Tibi's Hebrew; his former biology teacher proudly pulls out a business card belonging to his son - an aeronautic engineer who now works for Airbus in Germany. The latter gesture is particularly touching. Tibi, the elderly teacher relates in his home, was an outstanding student in the Tira high school where he was enrolled.

"We wish him success," says the head of the investment department at a Netanya branch of Bank Hapoalim. And at dinner at the Awani restaurant, in Baka al-Garbiyeh, salads and skewered meats are devoured rapidly at a large table where election activists sit, a little before midnight.