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 government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has exploited the capture of Army Corporal Gilad Shalit to restore the country's diminished deterrence against militant Palestinian factions, to break the elected Hamas government and to impose its unilateral territorial solution on the West Bank. But when the dust finally settles, Israel's offensive against the besieged territories--and now Lebanon--will have left the region with more destruction and death and the Israeli government with the same strategic deadlock. That's why instead of lashing out against their neighbors, Israelis must end the vicious cycle of provocations and retaliations, and pursue meaningful negotiations to end the occupation.

The Olmert government bases its campaign against Palestinian civilian infrastructure on three fallacies: that Israel does not initiate violence but retaliates to protect its citizens--in this case a captured soldier; that its response is measured and not meant to harm the broader population; and that it does not negotiate with those it deems terrorists.

But Israel's offensive did not start last week. The three-month-old Israeli government is responsible for the killing eighty or more Palestinians, some of whom were children, in attacks aimed at carrying out illegal extrajudicial assassinations and other punishments. Hamas has maintained a one-sided cease-fire for the past sixteen months, but continued Israeli attacks made Palestinian retaliation only a question of time. (Palestinian factions not under Hamas's control had been firing home-made rockets across the border off and on during this period--almost always with little or no damage or casualties--but these factions maintained that the attacks were in response to Israeli provocations.)

Since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000, repeated Israeli bombardments and targeted assassinations against Palestinians have aggravated the violence and led to Israeli deaths. In fact, according to the US academic Steve Niva, who has been documenting the intifada, many major Palestinian suicide bombings since 2001 have come in retaliation for Israeli assassinations, many of which occurred when the Palestinians were mulling over or abiding by self-imposed restraint.

To give three examples: On July 31, 2001, Israel's assassination of the two leading Hamas militants in Nablus ended a nearly two-month Hamas cease-fire, leading to the terrible August 9 Hamas suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizzeria. On July 22, 2002, an Israeli air attack on a crowded apartment block in Gaza City killed a senior Hamas leader, Salah Shehada, and fourteen civilians, nine of them children, hours before a widely reported unilateral cease-fire declaration. A suicide bombing followed on August 4. On June 10, 2003, Israel's attempted assassination of the senior Hamas political leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, which wounded him and killed four Palestinian civilians, led to a bus bombing in Jerusalem on June 11 that killed sixteen Israelis.

Although Israel's provocations don't justify suicide bombings, they demonstrate how its deterrence has lost its effectiveness and why the source of terrorism lies first and foremost in its aggression and occupation. In this context, affected Palestinian civilians see themselves not as "collateral damage" but as victims of state terrorism.

As for the nature of its "retaliation," one could hardly refer to Israel's destruction of the civic infrastructure of 1.3 million Palestinians as "measured." The Israeli army began last week's offensive on the Gaza Strip by bombing bridges, roads and electric supplies, and by arresting nearly one-third of Hamas's West Bank-based parliamentarians and ministers (according to the Israeli press, the security services are holding the elected Palestinian officials as bargaining chips with Hamas).

The nature of the Israeli offensive is to punish, overwhelm and deter with disproportionate force, regardless of the suffering of the general public. Cutting off basic services of the Palestinians is not only unjustified, it is collective punishment of a civilian population--illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The asymmetry between Israeli and Palestinian firepower mustn't be translated into asymmetry between the value of Israeli and Palestinian life. The Palestinians have captured one Israeli soldier, but Israel holds more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, about 900 of whom are under "administrative detention," i.e., without trial. It has held some of these prisoners for longer than three years. Those in the international community calling for the IDF soldier's release need to address, at minimum, the ordeal of Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails.

The Israeli government, like any other, has the right and indeed the duty to protect its people, but not at the high expense of the Palestinians, whose government's credibility also rests on defending its people. The use of military force to scare and overawe a civilian population for political ends--in this case, to pressure the Palestinian Authority or undermine the Hamas government--is the very definition of state terrorism.

In its thirty-nine years of occupation, Israel's attempts to tame or intimidate the Palestinians have instead led to their incitement and radicalization. Isn't it time for Israel to change course? After all, in a minuscule territory where the longest distance separating an Israeli and Palestinian area is no more than nine kilometers, Israelis will never be secure if the Palestinians are utterly insecure.

That's why Israel's harsh responses to Palestinian militancy have generally increased, not reduced, the threat to Israelis. While from 1978 to 1987 eighty-two Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, that figure jumped to more than 400 the following decade. And in less than two years of the second intifada (September 29, 2000, to May 29, 2002), more than 450 Israelis and 1,250 Palestinians were slain, mostly civilians on both sides.

Lastly, regarding its refusal to bargain with "terrorists," Israel's previous dealings with Lebanon's Hezbollah paint a different picture. Israel's bombardment of Beirut's electric generators and its Operation "Grapes of Wrath" in 1996, which led to the Qana massacre, failed, like many other operations, to deter the Lebanese resistance, which eventually forced Israel to negotiate through a third party with those it deemed "Islamist terrorists" and release hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners from its jails in exchange for the remains of dead Israeli soldiers.

The ongoing saga has once again demonstrated the absurdity of unilateralism as a viable and secure solution. And yet, the Olmert government is using the kidnapping of the soldier to undermine the historic agreement Hamas has reached with PA President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party over a unity government and de facto recognition of and negotiations with Israel, its sworn enemy.

Whether we like it or not, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is mostly a byproduct of an oppressive occupation, not the other way around. That's why refraining from excessive use of force and concentrating all efforts on a negotiated end to the occupation is paramount. Otherwise, Israel will only increase Hamas's popularity and push it back to clandestinity and war.

Paris - When the dust finally settles, Israel's offensive against the besieged Palestinian territories will have caused more destruction and death and left the Israeli government with the same strategic deadlock. Instead of lashing out against their neighbors, Israelis must end the vicious cycle of provocations and retaliations through meaningful negotiations.

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bases its campaign against Palestinian civilian infrastructure on three fallacies: that Israel does not initiate but retaliates to protect its citizens, in this case a kidnapped soldier; that its response is measured and not meant to harm the broader population; and that it does not negotiate with those its deems terrorists.

For one, Israel's offensive did not just start this week. The two-month-old Israeli government is responsible for the killing of 85 Palestinians, including many children, in attacks aimed at carrying out illegal extrajudicial assassinations. The Hamas government maintained a one-sided cease-fire for 15 months, but continued Israeli attacks made Palestinian retaliation only a question of time.

Since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000, repeated Israeli bombardments and targeted assassinations against Palestinians have aggravated the violence and resulted in harm to more, not fewer, Israelis. In fact, most major Palestinian suicide bombings since 2001 have come in retaliation to Israeli assassinations, many of which occurred when the Palestinians were mulling over or abiding by self-imposed restraint.

To give only three examples: On July 31, 2001, Israel's assassination of the two leading Hamas militants in Nablus ended a nearly two-month Hamas cease- fire, leading to the terrible Aug. 9 Hamas suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizzeria. On July 23, 2002, an Israeli air attack on a crowded apartment block in Gaza City killed a senior Hamas leader, Salah Shehada, and 15 civilians, 11 of them children, hours before a widely reported unilateral cease-fire declaration. A suicide bombing followed on Aug. 4. On June 10, 2003, Israel's attempted assassination of the senior Hamas political leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, which wounded him and killed four Palestinian civilians, lead to the bus bombing in Jerusalem on June 11 that killed 16 Israelis.

Although Israel's provocations don't justify suicide bombings, they demonstrate why the source of terrorism lies first and foremost in its military aggression and occupation. In this context, affected Palestinian civilians see themselves not as "collateral damage" but as victims of state terrorism.

As for the nature of Israel's "retaliation," one could hardly refer to Israel's destruction of the civic infrastructure of 1.3 million Palestinians as "measured." The Israeli Army began this week's Gaza offensive by bombing bridges, roads, electric and water supplies.

By its very nature the Israeli offensive is meant to punish, overwhelm and deter with disproportionate force regardless of the suffering of the general public. Cutting off basic services of a people is not only unjustified, it is collective punishment, which is illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

The asymmetry between Israeli and Palestinian fire-power mustn't be translated into asymmetry between the value of Israeli and Palestinian life. The Palestinians have captured one Israeli soldier, but Israel holds 9,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Regarding Israel's purported refusal to bargain with "terrorists," its dealings with Hezbollah paint a different picture. Among others, its bombardment of Beirut's electric generators and its all out offensive in 1996 leading to the Qana massacre, failed to deter the Lebanese resistance and eventually forced Israel to negotiate through a third party with those its deemed Islamist terrorists, and release hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners from its jails in exchange for the remains of dead Israeli soldiers.

Given that 39 years of attempts by Israel to tame or intimidate the Palestinians have instead lead to their radicalization, isn't it time for Israel to change course? In such a minuscule territory, Israelis will never be secure if the Palestinians are utterly insecure.

The ongoing saga has once again demonstrated the absurdity of unilateralism as a viable and secure solution. And yet the Olmert government is using the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier to undermine the historical agreement Hamas has just reached with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party over a unity government, de facto recognition of Israel and negotiations with Israel.

Whether you like it or not, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is mostly a byproduct of an oppressive occupation, and not the other way round. That's why refraining from excessive use of force and concentrating all efforts on a negotiated end to the occupation is paramount for security and moderation. Otherwise, Israel will only succeed in increasing Hamas's popularity and pushing it back to clandestinity and war.

When US President George W. Bush hosts Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House today, he is expected to reiterate Israeli concerns and disappointments over his "inaction" in the face of "terror".

Or he could underline America's support for Palestinian reforms and free elections in January.

For his part, Abbas would do well to take along a copy of Bush's speech of June 24, 2002, outlining his vision of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state, and a map of the West Bank to show him how Israel has been systematically tearing down that vision by creating new harmful facts on the ground and in the process radicalising the Palestinian society.

Abbas would do well to use a yellow marker to highlight for Bush his pledge that if the Palestinians chose new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbours, then a new provisional Palestinian state would see the light in three years which fall in this week.

However, to this day, Israel continues to occupy the autonomous Palestinian areas and hold thousands of prisoners in contravention to the American position.

To justify its actions, the Israeli government blames the Palestinian authority whom it accuses of failing to take the necessary security and political measures that qualify it as a peace partner.

Worse, Israel is pressuring Washington not to yield to Abbas's requests until, in Sharon's words, they dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism.

But a three-year balance sheet shows that incessant Palestinian efforts to satisfy the American-Israeli demands have been met by more of the same Israeli violations of its agreements and of Bush's vision.

The Palestinians have reformed their financial and bureaucratic systems in accordance with American and World Bank directives and are preparing for new legislative elections in the summer under severe Israeli conditions.

They have also reformed and regrouped their security services under new heads and agreed to new security cooperation with Israel that has so far succeeded in halting most attacks.

According to its own report, the Palestinian authority has prevented 17 attacks, found 75 explosives, confiscated 15 Qassam rockets and halted seven attempts to smuggle goods across the Egyptian border during its first month of self-rule in the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian authority has also proved far more effective than Israel had in the past to maintain security and order and to achieve it without violence.

Instead of confronting and imprisoning tens of thousands of Palestinian militants or rounding up their weapons that would lead to a civil war, the Palestinian authority has succeeded in reaching a ceasefire understanding with the militant groups and has brought them into the political and electoral process.

If Washington gives Abbas a hand by supporting his homegrown and so far successful approach, he will prove far more credible and effective in attaining long-term security and stability than an immediate crackdown by Israel or under its pressure, which has failed utterly.

That's why, to the dismay of many of his compatriots, Abbas, like the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat who believed America held 99 per cent of the solution, is gambling his political career on the Bush presidency.

If Bush lets him down in these crucial times and leaves him at the mercy of Sharon, his administration will bear the responsibility for the authority's failure and for any future escalation in Palestine.

For its part, the government of Ariel Sharon has made a mockery of the international roadmap to peace.

It expanded and increased Jewish colonies and their by-pass roads after he made it clear it "must stop" all activity.

Israel built a massive illegal wall that segregates the Palestinians after he challenged it to support the "emergence of a credible Palestinian state".

And it consistently blocked the movement of peoples and goods after he urged it "to allow the Palestinian economy to develop".

Today, Bush is obliged to provide the necessary mechanisms and equal treatment missing from his 2002 speech in order to realise the two-state vision.

That includes reciprocity that forbids Israel from erecting barriers or expanding the colonies.

America needs to assure the Palestinian leadership that Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is part of the international roadmap for peace and that Washington will soon call for an international conference in coordination with the international quartet members, the European Union, UN, Russia in order to finally propose ways to resolve final status issues such as Jerusalem and refugees in accordance with the president's articulated roadmap.

Before he leaves, Abbas could well remind Bush that like the four million Americans who struggled bitterly to gain their independence from Britain, eight million Palestinians will not rest until they have attained their freedom and independence.

It's in America's as much as the Palestinian and the Israeli's best interest to restrain Sharon's drive in the West Bank in order to allow for a viable Palestinian state to emerge.

Sunday's suicide attack in the Naqab (Negev) in retaliation to Israeli attack against Palestinians in Tulkarem underlines the determination of militant Palestinian factions to maintain a "balance of terror" with the 38-year-old occupation until Israel dismantles the infrastructure of colonialism in the West Bank and Gaza.

As usual, Western countries, especially the United States, condemned the suicide bombing. On the other hand, America has been turning a blind eye to Israel's use of force against the Palestinians which is used in the form of the oppressive occupation. That's wholesale terrorism.

In the not so distant past, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon affirmed the importance of the Jewish colonies as "obstacles to war" and rejected a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza on the grounds it would "only encourage terrorism and increase the pressure upon us".

But like previous withdrawals from Sinai and South Lebanon, Sharon's evacuation of colonists and soldiers demonstrates that, unfortunately, Israel cedes only under fire.

The Israeli government claims that its retreat is a sign of strength not weakness. And Sharon, the architect of the colonies, justifies the demolition of the colonies primarily on demographic grounds.

However, unless Israel was planning to annex Gaza, the number of its inhabitants is by and large irrelevant to Israel's "Jewish democracy".

In reality, the colonies have become too costly in terms of surging security needs, growing instability, and eroding army morale. In the words of one leading Israeli analyst, the Palestinians have "won by points".

After it completes the disengagement, Israel will remain under legal and international pressure to continue its withdrawals beyond the four isolated colonies it evacuated in the West Bank and replaced with army bases.

But Sharon is expected to exploit the Palestinians' preoccupation in the impoverished Gaza to freeze the peace process and to expand Israel's control over the ten-fold larger West Bank.

Israel's government has already approved the separation/segregation wall around the colony of Ma'ali Adumim on Palestinian land only two days after its evacuation from Gaza.

If the Bush administration goes along, the Palestinians would be forced to do something.

The Palestinian leadership understands that an authority that is unable to defend its people loses all legitimacy in their eyes and opens the way for other sources of legitimacy, notably resistance.

And although they have made clear that they could honour the ceasefire agreement reached with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian armed factions are tending to transfer their operation into the West Bank.

According to Israel's leading paper, Haaretz, a third Intifada "could speed up" Israel's evacuation from 90 per cent of the West Bank.

Unprecedented

Sharon has warned of unprecedented retaliation if the Palestinians resort to violence. But Israel's 38 years use of force has failed to deter the Palestinians.

Furthermore, Sharon has been warned by his attorney general Menachem Mazuz that if the military retaliates against Palestinian population centres, Israel would be guilty of "war crimes".

Israel's dilemma is complicated by the close proximity between Israelis and Palestinians that renders its advanced conventional and nuclear capability practically obsolete.

Instead, the balance of power in the miniscule territories is determined by mounting number of Palestinians ready to die for their homeland and declining number of Israelis ready to defend the occupation project. Gaza is a living example of that reality.

Colonial powers stronger and more determined than Israel have all lost to weaker but highly motivated resistance movements costing millions of lives. The trouncing of the Israeli occupation is only a matter of time.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Palestinian resistance I mean the basic right to fight back constant injustice is motivated not be despair, but by the hope of freedom.

Suicide bombings as the one on Sunday, might be effective in the short term, but they are morally wrong and counterproductive in the long term.

Having said that, the moral burden remains heavily placed on the shoulders of those who practice state terrorism in the form of military occupation.

A couple of years ago, four former Israeli security service heads warned that Israel was "on the verge of a catastrophe" as a result of the Intifada.

Their assessment was not a military one per se, rather a general one that encompasses the economic, moral and security spheres.

You can be sure another uprising on the West Bank will do greater harm to Israel and the Palestinians than the previous too. Those who cannot stand the heat will leave first. My guess is it will be Israel.

But with one important condition; any Palestinian resistance must be limited to the West Bank both in terms of scope and endgame and balanced with an open hand for peaceful coexistence.

Unlike Gaza, South Lebanon and Sinai, the West Bank is Israel's last and narrowest defence line. Withdrawing from there could only be the culmination of international intervention and torturous internal power struggle.

Palestinian resistance and international pressures are widening the rift in the Israeli society between the secular business-driven costal communities that flourish on stability, peace and open frontiers and the religious and extremists segments that thrives conflict, tensions and the idea of a Greater Land of Israel.

Israelis who seek normality and prosperity for their country have already won the battle of Gaza.

Now, they must act quickly to ensure that its evacuation is only a prelude to West Bank withdrawal in order to prevent the outbreak of another more deadly Intifada.