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.

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.”

Secretary of State John Kerry is making an all-out effort to restart peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Many well-intentioned, highly intelligent people from around the world have engaged in some way, shape, or form in the Palestinian-Israeli issue and many of these people have had hands-on experience in resolving other longstanding, global issues, like those of Ireland, South Africa, and U.S. civil rights. While there is always a great deal to learn from other global experiences, the case of Palestine is different and unless Secretary Kerry recognizes this, all the efforts and millions of dollars being thrown at this conflict will be in vain, as will the latest U.S. negotiations blitz.

Three issues related to this conflict that are crucial to understand are: historic guilt, colonial responsibility, and the U.S. “special relationship” with Israel.

Today’s global powers bear a tremendous amount of historic guilt, not only, as is popularly believed, for the anti-Semitism their ancestors practiced against Jews. This was very real throughout the 19th and 20th centuries – and earlier – and it was rampant in mainly white, Christian European places like Germany, Poland, France, Austria, and, yes, even in the U.S.

But these countries should also understand their historic responsibility for making the Palestinians pay for European and American crimes. Their guilt vis-à-vis Jews has hobbled their objectivity and skewed their capacity to see the acts of Israel for what they have been, and continue to be: crimes against humanity.

Long before the Holocaust, the political ideology of Zionism charted a path towards ethnically cleansing Palestine from its native Muslim and Christian Palestinian population, aiming to create what was dubbed a “Jewish State.” This colossal, historic injustice of dispossessing Palestinians is no longer a point of contention: even Israeli historians have meticulously documented this fact.

Furthermore, many of those same global powers, led by the U.S., were born out of a colonial history that displaced indigenous populations. As such, these powers see the Israeli enterprise as very similar to their own and find it difficult to hold Israel accountable for fear that this will then boomerang on them.

Thus, instead of seeing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for what it really is – ongoing colonialism – these powers prefer to frame the conflict as one in which the parties have equally valid, competing narratives that require a partition of the land. And meanwhile, as they remain transfixed on this outdated partition paradigm, they can offer no explanation as to why their respective governments allowed the reality on the ground to gradually render this solution unfeasible.

Ever since the New York Times headline of May 14, 1948 - “ZIONISTS PROCLAIM NEW STATE OF ISRAEL” – the U.S. has taken sides in this conflict, arming, funding, diplomatically covering for, and politically and militarily planning with Israel in its determination (always camouflaged in euphemisms) to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

Israel worked hard to cast the U.S. support in cement. Israeli leaders understood very well the inherent weaknesses of an open political system and wasted no time in creating a pro-Israel lobby that transformed what is supposed to be a foreign affairs issue into a U.S. domestic issue. Israel’s domestication of the U.S. political scene – courtesy of American proxies – is alive and well today; just ask newly appointed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

U.S. president Barack Obama epitomizes this reality. During his recent trip to Israel, he visited the Yad Vashem (Holocaust Museum) to declare that Israel’s future existence and security as a “strong Jewish state” would ensure that there will never be another holocaust.

What did he mean? Was the idea to imply that if Israel, as a “Jewish state,” ceased to exist (like other states with a racially-based raison d’etre, such as the U.S. prior to the Civil War or South Africa during its Apartheid era), then Jews in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, would be slaughtered?!

Adding insult to injury, Obama then did a huge favor to Israel’s right wing by going outside official protocol to lay a wreath on the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the political ideology of Zionism.

Through his actions, intentionally or otherwise, Obama gave credence to the ‘right’ of a Jewish state in Palestine, while ignoring the indigenous people of Palestine – including Christians, Muslims and even some Jews – upon whose ruins the Israeli state was built. Palestinians are still struggling for survival in the face of an ethnic cleansing campaign that began more than 65 years ago and is still going on.

Indeed, Palestine is different, really different. A more basic and more relevant issue than artificial partition is still waiting to be seriously addressed: Is Israel to be a state of all its citizens—Jewish and non-Jewish—or not? The answer to this question goes to the heart of Zionism’s racially-based enterprise and opens the way to a historic reconciliation and a homecoming of Palestinian refugees to what is today called Israel.

The scheme has been criticised by Palestinian human rights groups, who point out that Hamas has previously banned sport from the school curriculum on the grounds that there is not enough time for it.

Hamas authorities introduced the 'Futuwwa', or youth programme into the state curriculum last September for 37,000 Palestinian boys aged between 15 and 17, conceiving it as a scheme intended to initiate a new generation of Palestinian men in the struggle against Israel.

Izzadine Mohamed, 17, was among the students who attended the weekly school classes, which covered first aid, basic fire fighting skills and how to fire a Kalashnikov rifle. He was also one of 5,000 boys across Gaza who also signed up for an optional two-week camp held at a Hamas military base.

"I was excited to learn the right way to use a weapon," said Mr Mohamed. "It's important because of the occupation. I feel stronger and more confident with the knowledge, which I could use against the occupier."

At the two-week camp, the boys spent their time dressed in a military-style uniform of black t-shirts and black jeans, and were trained by officers with the Hamas National Guard and militants with Hamas' armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.

Mr Mohamed said that as well karate and other street-fighting techniques, they were taught how to throw hand grenades, and how also how to protect themselves if one exploded nearby – "drop flat on the ground next to the grenade, it explodes outwards".

Hamas has denied that live weaponry is used in the course or that militants are involved in the training.

But Samar Zakout, of the Gaza-based human rights organisation Al Mezan, described it as "unbelievable" and likely to encourage Israel to see schools as targets during conflicts.

"They are trying to create a resistance culture, make our boys stronger to face Israel, but they shouldn't be doing it in schools. Maybe Israel will use this as a reason to bomb Gaza's schools in future," Mr Sakout said.

Mohamed Syam heads the education ministry in charge of the Futuwwa programme, which may be extended to girls' schools next year.

"We are not conducting military training in our schools, we are providing information," he said. "The youth can join military wings of factions, they don't need military training at school."

Yet an article written in Arabic on the Hamas ministry of education website credits the al-Qassam Brigades for its contribution to the course and notes their attendance at a graduation ceremony, also attended by Mr Syam. A YouTube clip showing a military demonstration in a Gaza school also appears to contradict the Hamas official line.

Posted on April 5, the video shows a mock Israeli military post erected in a school playground, where Palestinian militants enact a mock battle during which a faux Israeli soldier is killed and another captured. A shoulder-held rocket launcher is then fired at the military post, the force of the blast leaving only a smoking metal frame and a billowing Israeli flag.

Mr Syam said the video, which he claimed not to have seen, was not representative of the new initiative, and that the training course was designed mainly to school Gaza's youth in discipline and respect. "The military aspect takes up only one per cent of the course," he said.

"On the other side, in the occupied territory, [Israelis] are teaching the youth to hate and to kill Arabs and are training their teenagers in the military."

Israeli teenagers are drafted into an obligatory three-year military service after graduating from secondary school. There is no official Palestinian army. A number of armed militant groups, listed as terrorist organisations in Israel and Britain, operate in the Gaza Strip and are responsible for firing rockets into Israel.

A hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner whose detention without charge in Israel has sparked violent protests across the West Bank has called on the British government to force Israel to abandon its practice of administrative detention.

Writing for Comment is free, Samer Issawi – who was hospitalised last Wednesday evening having refused food for more than 210 days in protest at his imprisonment – argues that Britain should take responsibility for its role in the genesis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the subsequent suffering of Palestinians.

Pointing to the UK's "historic responsibility for the tragedy of my people", he says the British government should impose sanctions on Israel "until it ends the occupation, recognises Palestinian rights and frees all Palestinian political prisoners".

"Israel would not dare continue its oppression of the Palestinians without the support of western governments," Issawi writes.

Issawi, who was affiliated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested in April 2002 and sentenced to 26 years in prison for membership of an illegal organisation, attempted murder and possession of explosives. During the second intifada he manufactured and distributed pipe bombs and in several incidents opened fire indiscriminately on Israeli civilian vehicles.

Hundreds of Palestinian protesters met Israeli soldiers in clashes across the West Bank following midday prayers last Friday. Demonstrations were organised in support of the hunger strikers at flashpoints including Ofer prison, Qalandiya checkpoint and Bili'in, a village whose struggle against encroaching Israeli settlements was captured in the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras.

Tariq Qaadan and Jafar Azzedine abandoned their hunger strike last week after a deal was struck securing their release at the end of May. Negotiations are now under way to resolve the cases of Issawi and Ayman Sharawna.

Sharawna, who has been on intermittent hunger strike since July, is also under observation in hospital. Both men were freed by Israel as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011 but subsequently rearrested for allegedly violating the terms of their release – charges they deny.

"The Israeli side has begun dialogue today to find a solution to this issue, but so far they have not presented an acceptable offer," Issa Qaraqe, the Palestinian Authority's minister for prisons told reporters on Friday, adding that Issawi and Sharawna had refused an offer to be freed and deported.

Sivan Weizman, a spokesperson for the Israeli prison service, said on Thursday that Issawi's condition was stable but "it's better that he be in hospital".

Two Palestinian teenagers shot and critically injured by Israeli soldiers have become the latest totems in a wave of violent protest across the Palestinian territories.

The Israeli army has confirmed that live ammunition was used in Monday's clashes with Palestinian protesters and that two were shot with 0.22 calibre bullets – ammunition known to cause fatalities.

Udi Sirkhan, 16, was shot in the head outside an Israeli military outpost near Bethlehem amid clashes after the burial of Arafat Jaradat, whose death in Israeli custody on Saturday sparked the protests.

As surgeons at Israel's Hadassah hospital worked to remove a bullet from his brain, Sirkhan's grandfather Fathi Ramadan told journalists that the teenager had been walking home from work when he was hit. The Israeli military said Sirkhan was attempting to torch an army post.

The moments leading up to the shooting of 13-year-old Mohammed Khaled Qurd were captured on film. Footage obtained by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem shows Qurd standing more than 50 metres from a heavily fortified Israeli outpost. At least one Molotov cocktail is seen flying towards the Israeli line but Qurd, standing with a small group of rock-throwers, was some distance from where the firebomb was thrown.

He was rushed to a local Palestinian hospital for emergency surgery to remove two bullets from his torso. His condition has stabilised.

Thousands of mourners had poured on to the streets of the West Bank town of Saeer under hails of celebratory gunfire on Monday to bury Jaradat. The petrol station attendant is widely reported to have been active in the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade – Fatah's military wing – and was buried with military honours.

On Tuesday morning, two M75 Grad rockets were launched into Israel – the first rockets to be fired since November. Al-Aqsa militants in Gaza claimed responsibility for the attack. Israel has closed the Kerem Shalom goods crossing into Gaza in response.

The United Nations has been quick to condemn both the Palestinian casualties and rocket fire.

With less than a month before President Barack Obama's visit to the region, the United States has called for "maximum restraint" on both sides.

While local media has speculated over the inevitability of a third intifada, few Israeli analysts believe there will be a sustained uprising.

Hillel Frisch, an expert on Palestinian politics at Bar-Ilan University, said that while the motivation may be there, Palestinians lacked the capability to stage another armed revolt.

"The people being wounded in these clashes are 13 and 16-year-old kids, not the 17 to 32-year-olds who would form the crucial middle command providing the organisation needed for a mass uprising. These men have been either decimated or incarcerated since the second intifada.

"The Palestinian Authority will try to keep up the heat until Obama comes; that will put pressure on Israel. We will see slightly higher levels of violence until then but I do not see the situation escalating significantly in the short term," Frisch said.

A Palestinian prisoner whose death in Israeli custody fanned violent clashes across the West Bank over the weekend was tortured before he died, the Palestinian Authority has said.

The results of an autopsy conducted in Tel Aviv were revealed at a press conference in Ramallah on Sunday evening after a day of angry protests across the West Bank and Gaza in which dozens were injured.

The findings contradict the Israeli prison service's claim that Arafat Jaradat died on Saturday from a cardiac arrest.

A Palestinian doctor's investigations found that while Jaradat's arteries were clear, the state of his body suggested he had been beaten in the days before his death.

That contrasts with an Israeli health ministry statement that said that the autopsy found "no signs of external trauma … apart from those pertaining to resuscitation [attempts] and a small graze on the right side of his chest".

It said: "No evidence of disease was found during the autopsy. Two internal hemorrhages were detected, one on the shoulder and one on the right side of the chest. Two ribs were broken, which may indicate resuscitation attempts. The initial findings cannot determine the cause of death. At this stage, until microscopic and toxicology reports are in, the cause of death cannot be tied to the autopsy findings."

The 30-year-old, a petrol station worker and father of two, was arrested on 18 February in relation to a stone-throwing incident in November during which an Israeli was slightly injured.

Aside from an old back injury inflicted by a teargas canister, his relatives insist he was healthy when he was arrested. A few days later, he died in Megiddo prison.

Kameel Sabbagh, a lawyer who attended Jaradat's last hearing on Thursday, said he had advised the Israeli judge his client had been tortured and should be examined by the prison doctor. According to Sabbagh, this did not happen.

"He had serious pains in his back and other parts of his body because he was being beaten up and hanged for many long hours while he was being investigated," Sabbagh told Ma'an news agency. His notes from the court hearing describe his client as "extremely afraid" of returning to his cell.

A rumour that he had been beaten to death during an interrogation spread quickly on Sunday through Hebron, where hundreds of protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers for the second day running in the streets kilometres from Jaradat's home.

"When the soldiers came to arrest him last week, they told him say goodbye to your wife and your babies, you won't be seeing them again," said Mohamed Hashlamon, 58, as he watched masked Palestinian youths hurl concrete blocks from the roof above his home in downtown Hebron to arm themselves with the rubble.

A phalanx of Israeli soldiers lining the border between the Israeli and Palestinian quarters answered rocks with rubber bullets and teargas. Three Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were injured in the clashes.

"People here are angry. They will fight until nightfall and they will protest again from 10am tomorrow just as they did yesterday," Hashlamon said.

Jaradat's body was taken for the autopsy in Tel Aviv on Saturday and will be returned to his pregnant wife for burial in his village of Saeer after midday prayers on Monday.

His death has inflamed already heightened tensions across the occupied Palestinian territory.

On Friday, hundreds clashed with Israeli soldiers in a continuation of months-long demonstrations supporting four hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners held without charge in Israeli jails. On Saturday, nine Palestinians were injured, one critically, when settlers used live rounds of fire in clashes near Nablus. The Hebrew-language media have noted with alarm that the Palestinian Authority is doing little to dissuade protests but is lending its voice to the popular outrage. Issa Qaraqea, the PA's minister for prisoners' affairs, expressed his suspicion of foul play in Jaradat's death.

"Our information was that Jaradat was being interrogated and then he died. Therefore we call for an international investigation into his death that may have resulted from torture," he told Reuters.

As night fell on Sunday, the West Bank showed no sign of calming. In Beitunia, near Ramallah, two teenagers were reportedly hit with live rounds fired by Israeli soldiers. One, the 15 year-old son of the Palestinian secret services chief, was undergoing surgery having been shot in the stomach.

"Statements from the international community calling upon Israel to 'respect Palestinian prisoner rights' are insufficient when Israel can arrest, incarcerate and even kill Palestinians without … consequences for its appalling actions," a statement from the Palestinian leadership read. "Without justice, there will be no peace."