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 United Nations has often been tested in the course of its history, and once again it is facing a major challenge directed at its capacity to serve the cause of peace, security and justice through respect for the rule of law.

The test involves the treatment given to the Goldstone Report, so named after the distinguished jurist, Richard Goldstone, former judge of the South African Constitutional Court, who headed a fact-finding mission on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. The focus of the mission was on alleged war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the 22 days of attack on Gaza last winter.

On September 15, the Goldstone Report was released. It is 575 pages in length, relying on 188 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of reports and documents, and 1,200 photos. There is nothing really new in the report as far as substance is concerned, but it has caused quite a stir. Earlier respected human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as Israeli and Palestinian groups, had confirmed the main allegations against Israel. The Goldstone Report is more comprehensive and in one sense, enjoys a greater credibility because of the eminence of the four mission members.

Ironically, Israel could not have hoped for a more sympathetic chair for such an inquiry. Goldstone, a lifelong Zionist with strong family ties and institutional affiliations in Israel, as well as an impeccable reputation as a non-partisan devotee of the rule of law, should have put the issue of balance and fairness to rest. If Goldstone can be attacked as biased, which Israel had done with great fury, then there is no one on the planet that could have proved acceptable! Any commission with a truth-telling commitment would have reached the same conclusions as the Goldstone Report if its members had even a 30 per cent open mind.

Indeed, what makes the Goldstone Report an historic document is precisely its status as a record of Israeli war crimes resulting in massive Palestinian suffering that cannot be responsibly disregarded or discredited. The report also makes recommendations for implementation that will help the world better understand whether the UN stands behind the rule of law or remains a plaything of the rule of force. What makes the report difficult to ignore is the call for an end to impunity, tasking the UN Security Council, the General Assembly and ultimately the International Criminal Court with the job of moving forward with investigating whether criminal prosecutions should be forthcoming in relation to Israeli and Hamas political and military leaders for the attacks between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009, against the essentially defenceless society of Gaza, whose population was already severely weakened by a blockade of food, fuel and medicine that had then been maintained for 18 months.

The report also recommends reliance on “universal jurisdiction”, that is on national courts with the capacity to prosecute for international crimes where sufficient evidence exists.

Several constitutional democracies in Western Europe claim this authority. Israel itself invoked universal jurisdiction back in the early 1960s when it prosecuted Adolf Eichmann for crimes committed in Nazi Germany years before the state of Israel even existed. Such a basis for attaching criminal law to foreign acts has a long history, mainly associated with the practice of apprehending pirates and their ships wherever found.

The Goldstone Report considers in detail the Israeli claims that their attacks were a defensive response to the rocket attacks, and agrees that these Hamas rockets were indiscriminate weapons aimed mainly at Israeli residential communities near the Gaza border. It considers these rocket attacks to be war crimes, and urges comparable action to be taken by the UN to impose accountability. Nevertheless, the overwhelming emphasis of the report is upon alleged Israeli practices during the Gaza war that amounted to war crimes, which cumulatively appear to constitute crimes against humanity.

Both Israel and Hamas are given up to three months to investigate these charges in a manner that meets international standards (rather than self-congratulatory investigations that have been so far conducted by the Israeli Defence Forces), and another three months to follow up with appropriate action against any perpetrators. If this does not happen, the scene for implementation is supposed to shift to the International Criminal Court, with the expectation that steps to impose accountability would follow.

From the outset, Israel refused to cooperate with the Goldstone fact-finding mission, claiming that the UN Human Rights Council was biased. It contended that nothing worthwhile could result from such a mission even if led by Richard Goldstone. Now that the report has been issued, the top Israeli officials have vented their fury: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that report was “a perversion of truth”, Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, called it “a mockery of history” and Defence Minister Ehud Barak called it a “shameful document” whose only message was that “terrorism pays”.

How can we explain such a hysterical reaction from top leaders to such a sober, fact-based, truth-telling report? It illustrates the politics of deflection, diverting attention from the message to the messenger.

Would it not have been more effective for the Israeli leaders to turn their backs and leave it to their many defenders to respond?

This is the standard Israeli response to strong criticism. Why treat the Goldstone Report so differently?

Will the politics of deflection work? Time will tell. It is disappointing, yet not surprising, that the Obama presidency, despite its broad promises to uphold the rule of law in foreign policy, has seconded the Israeli effort to bury the report. It has officially called the report one sided and pleads with all parts of the UN to reject its recommendations.

For most of the world, the Palestinian struggle has become the successor to the anti-apartheid campaign, as the primary moral battleground in the world today. To stand in support of Israeli tactics in Gaza is seen outside of the United States as little different from what support for the racist regime in South Africa would have seemed in the 1980s. It is the wrong side of history as far as human rights and global justice are concerned.

Even if the United States cannot manage it, let’s us hope that the UN, at this symbolic moment, seizes the opportunity to convey two messages: there is no longer impunity for war crimes, regardless of the identity of the perpetrator, and the UN refuses to remain a footstool of geopolitics.

The writer is professor emeritus of international law, Princeton University, and special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council for Occupied Palestine. His most recent book is “Achieving Human Rights” (2009). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Although a practicing lawyer in Saudi Arabia by profession, a long-term resident of Paris by choice, and an American by nationality and education, John Whitbeck is above all a citizen of the world who has been actively dedicated to the pursuit of global justice for years, if not decades. His particular emphasis is on getting the United States to do right and sensible things in the Middle East, especially with regard to the long-festering struggle between Israel and Palestine. In this vein, Whitbeck, despite his early Sullivan & Cromwell credentials, has reinvented himself as a free-lance journalist, adept at placing his columns in a multitude of newspapers, including some in the mainstream, and making himself available, especially to the Palestinians, as a legal/diplomatic adviser. He also has established a valuable “listserv” to distribute online his writing on the themes of his book to a group of influential persons generally sympathetic with his critical outlook. In the end, despite his genuine commitment to universal values, Whitbeck comes across as very much of an American in the best sense, traveling the world to do good, a moral entrepreneur or practical utopian who acts from conscience and conviction, with intelligence and imagination, constantly challenging conventional wisdom in the pursuit of a better world.

Against such a background, it is a pleasure to welcome the publication of The World According to Whitbeck, a collection of his short journalistic pieces mainly written and published since 2001, but with a couple of earlier essays that disclose the continuity of his thought about how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. On one level, Whitbeck’s thinking fits rather easily into a left/liberal approach, favoring a two-state solution, compromising on Jerusalem, and renouncing the use of political violence against civilians by either side. But his originality arises from the specific slant given to these views. For instance, Whitbeck favors an “imposed peace,” by the United Nations. He is convinced that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians would be politically able to offer the necessary compromises, politicians and negotiators on both sides being captives of their constituencies. Of course, Whitbeck recognizes that such a prospect is so remote as to be hardly worth considering. He says, however, what every reasonable person knows: only a peace that allows the Palestinians to have their own state, even if limited to 22 percent of the original Palestine Mandate, will bring peace and security to both peoples, as well as serving the short- and longer-term interests of the United States in the region and the world. Whitbeck attributes this incapacity of the U.S. government to pursue its own national interests in the Middle East to “domestic politics.” He identifies this with Zionist lobbies, pro-Israeli influence in policy-making circles, and fanatical support for Israel from the American religious right for apocalyptic reasons.

Whitbeck also explores the relatively ignored issue of leverage in the Arab world and dismisses the hypothesis of Arab impotence. Whitbeck suggests that if the Arab oil-producing countries were to cut oil exports incrementally by 5 percent a month until Israel totally withdrew to its 1967 borders, the impact would be so great on the world economy, including stock markets and oil pricing, that the United States and Israel would cave in as soon as they appreciated that this economic diplomacy would be sustained until it achieved its objectives. He deplores the myopic unwillingness of Arab governments to flex their oil muscles in this manner and even recalls the 1973 OPEC embargo with nostalgia. In his enthusiastic effort to rouse this sleeping giant, there is no discussion of risks. After all, it should be remembered that with the lesser OPEC moves of the 1970s, there was much talk around Washington of an American intervention in the Gulf. Kissinger argued that such a reaction to attempts at “economic strangulation” justified war. The Atlantic published a much-discussed cover story by Robert W. Tucker that seriously proposed dropping American paratroopers onto the Saudi oil fields. Would not the Whitbeck proposal in the present setting generate an even stronger impulse to meet Arab oil coercion with military intervention?

Yet Whitbeck is not entirely negative with respect to Arab diplomatic efforts. He refers admiringly to the so-called Beirut Declaration of 2002, which proposes a full normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between Arab countries and Israel if Israel withdraws from Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 and agrees to accept a two-state solution. Whitbeck praises the Beirut Declaration for making Israel a “generous” offer and calls then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia “courageous” for taking such a bold step. I find some incongruity between calling courageous such a verbal effort to resolve the conflict in a mutually beneficial manner and Whitbeck’s chiding of Arab governments for their failure to use coercively their oil weapon on behalf of Palestinian self-determination. It is only such a bold move that deserves to be lauded as courageous – or possibly branded as reckless!

Although alive to the colossal political obstacles that block progress toward peace for these two suffering peoples, Whitbeck welcomes any positive initiative that he believes will achieve the essential outcome of ending the violence and finally producing a sustainable form of self-determination for the Palestinians. In this spirit, he gave his unreserved blessings to the so-called Geneva Accord, a comprehensive agreement worked out by prominent peace-oriented Israelis and Palestinians and endorsed in a December 1, 2003, public ceremony by international personalities, including Jimmy Carter. According to Whitbeck’s assessment, widely published at the time in several Arab newspapers as well as in the Financial Times, the Geneva Accord “deserves the active and wholehearted support of everyone who genuinely cares about Israelis, Palestinians or peace” (p. 65). In his view, this civil-society document “addressed and settled sensibly all the most difficult issues — Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and borders” (p. 67). Whitbeck also quotes approvingly former President Carter’s assertion that “[t]he only alternative to this initiative is sustained and permanent violence” (p. 68). Such enthusiasm for the Geneva Accord exhibits both Whitbeck’s constructive approach, reaching out in every possible way to make the impossible happen, but also a somewhat dispiriting tendency to grasp at straws.

I share the view that the Geneva Accord deserved serious attention when issued, but it never seemed to me to offer much hope. To begin with, there was an asymmetry in participation by the two sides. The Palestinian participants, led by Yasser Abed Rabbo, were acting with the approval of Arafat and were virtually representatives of the Palestinian Authority. In contrast, the Israeli participants were strong opponents of the Sharon government and were not even considered to represent the mainstream Labor outlook. As might be anticipated, Israeli officialdom mocked the Geneva Accord, while their Palestinian counterparts embraced it.

Beyond this, I am not at all sure that the Geneva Accord dealt adequately with the final-status issues, or produced an outcome that would have provided the Palestinians with a sustainable sort of sovereign state that would enjoy real political independence. The proposed agreement committed Palestine to being a “non-militarized state,” while leaving Israel free to remain fully militarized. Such a lack of mutuality on this fundamental issue, especially given the history of the relations between the two peoples, imposes on the Palestinians an enormous burden of trust and gives to the Israelis an enduring military option to intimidate and devastate Palestine at their discretion. Also, important issues such as water rights and economic relations were to be addressed later. There were conscientious and generally desirable approaches taken to some difficult issues including Jerusalem and refugees, but the question of land swaps and the retention of the Israeli settlement blocks required careful scrutiny. I agree with Whitbeck that the Geneva Accord is the best profile yet available of what peace entails, but its appraisal needed to include its political handicaps and problematic aspects. In part, Whitbeck as a spontaneous commentator of unfolding realities was using his journalistic talents to tout the agreement, almost in the spirit of activism, and thus could not be expected to offer a more considered assessment of pros and cons.

This concise volume deserves a wide reading. Its arguments and perspectives are clear. It takes on some crucial issues that are related to, yet distinct from, the Israel-Palestine conflict such as the oppressive realities of the Saudi state as a breeding ground for martyrs and extremism and the dangerous propagandistic manipulations of the word “terrorism,” especially in the aftermath of 9/11. Whitbeck also offers a rationale and plan for a quick and responsible exit from Iraq and critically depicts the dubious geopolitical goals of the United States in the Middle East concealed beneath the banner of anti-terrorism. Whitbeck’s clear-eyed rejection of Israel’s demand for an end to resistance as the precondition for discussing an end to its prolonged illegal occupation is welcome. So is his call for America to assume the role of “honest bystander” because of its confirmed inability to be a credible “honest broker.” All in all, these essays, written in the heat of the moment, stand well the test of time.