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 new fissures in the Palestinian ranks do not threaten to setback only the quest for peace in Palestine but also the process of Palestinian reconciliation.

The leadership of Hamas, the movement which is in control of the Gaza Strip, is split between those in favour of a negotiated once-for-all peace settlement with Israel, leading to a two-state solution, and those who are not willing to accept the 1967 front lines as the basis for an agreement.

However, the real issue here is the February 6 agreement signed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Mishaal, calling for Abbas to become prime minister of an interim Palestinian government that will prepare the ground for legislative elections in May. The accord advances the agreement that was signed in Cairo in May by Fateh and Hamas.

Israel has been warning that it will have nothing to do with a Palestinian government — effectively the Palestinian Authority (PA) based in Ramallah, West Bank — that would result from a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation. It calls Hamas a “terrorist” organisation supported by Iran and dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Israeli officials say the Hamas charter states that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. Hamas believes that its argument against making peace with Israel on the basis of the two-state solution is the best answer to Israel’s rejection of the 1967 lines as the starting point for peace negotiations.

In the meantime, the internal Palestinian differences are worsening.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation, an alliance of eight groups leading the Palestinian struggle for independence, has seen splits within its component factions. Then the Islamist Hamas movement emerged in the Gaza Strip and contributed to the start of the first Intifada that began in late 1987. The relationship between Hamas and the Fateh-dominated PLO was at best uneasy because the former saw the latter as a Western lackey. The distrust came to a head-on clash in the mid-2000s and Hamas chased Fateh out of the strip and seized the territory.

Since then, the international Quartet of Middle East peace mediators — comprising the US, the European Union, Russia and the UN — has said that Hamas has to renounce armed struggle, recognise Israel’s right to exist and accept agreements signed by Palestinians and Israelis if it is to be accepted as a partner in the quest for peace.

Hamas has not accepted these conditions and it does not look likely that it will ever do so, particularly in view of its control of the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas seizure of the territory in 2007 saw what was nominally a collective Palestinian leadership being split and depriving Abbas of support for his effort for a negotiated settlement with Israel, whose leaders told him he would have to choose between “peace” and Hamas.

Inter-Palestinian differences need to be settled if they hope for an agreement with Israel.

The quest for Palestinian reconciliation was given a new start with the signing of the Cairo agreement of 2011 and the Doha agreement of 2012. Then came another blow, with the split within Hamas between the Mishaal camp and the movement’s Gaza-based leaders. That puts yet another hurdle for the efforts for peace.

Now the Hamas leaders have to reconcile with each other before Hamas-Fateh reconciliation. It seems to be a tough endeavour, given that the Hamas leaders based in Gaza see the Doha agreement as an existential threat since they would have to give up power and see the proposed interim government taking their place in the coastal enclave.

During the signing of the Doha agreement Mishaal said that it would create greater Palestinian unity “in order to be free for confronting” Israel. But the Gaza-based Hamas leaders saw Palestinian unity as a disguise word for the decline of their power. Some of them are determined not to let go of their control of the Gaza Strip, which they see as the best strategic option under the circumstances.

Therefore, questions have been raised over the chances of reconciliation between the two Hamas camps. And that means another serious blow for the sought-for broader Palestinian reconciliation.

His Majesty King Abdullah’s meeting at the White House with US President Barack Obama was one of the warmest summits between the two leaders and reaffirmed their close relationship.

The focus of the meeting was largely the quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace, which has been revived with Jordan’s initiative that brought together negotiators from the two sides for three meetings in Amman. While there was no breakthrough following the meetings, the two sides now appear to better understand each other’s position.

Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian proposal that the 1967 lines be the basis for negotiations does not make sense. Isn’t the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war the central piece of any peace talks? Does Israel believe that it can retain the parts of the West Bank it wants for itself even before beginning negotiations? Isn’t that setting a precondition that belies Israel’s claims that it is ready to launch unconditional negotiations?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to simply accept Israel’s conditions which make a mockery of the very concept of negotiations. When Abbas refuses to do so, he is accused of not wanting to negotiate with Israel.

Netanyahu’s assertion that he is willing to go to Ramallah any time for talks with Abbas “without preconditions” might fool some people in the international arena, but not those who are familiar with the realities in Palestine.

The only way to advance the elusive quest for peace in Palestine is to bring pressure to bear upon Israel to accept the inevitability that the Holy Land will remain insecure and unstable as long as the Palestinians are denied their right to set up an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

The Palestinians are willing to make territorial compromises to accommodate most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but Israel wants it all.

How to bring about that kind of pressure on Israel is the key question here.

The focus immediately shifts to the Europeans, since it is clear that the United States is in no position to apply pressure on its “strategic partner” in the Middle East.

Of late, one could note a key shift in the position of the European Union countries. A series of reports prepared by EU delegations to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel have been critical of the latter, in the context of the 1.24 million Arab Israelis or of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Israel immediately went on the offensive, rejecting the criticism and even insulting the EU countries by saying that they risk to make themselves “irrelevant” if they seek to pressure it. Israeli ministers sounded as if their country were the sole superpower and all others subservient to it.

The latest EU report is very refreshing since it not only reflects a clear understanding of the realities but also outlines a series of measures aimed at pressuring Israel.

EU member states signalled a shift in approach in December, when European members of the UN Security Council — Britain, Germany, France and Portugal — issued a strong condemnation of Israel’s construction activities in the West Bank and the attacks by the 720,000 settlers on Palestinians.

Again Israel went on the offensive, with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggesting that Israel had a better democracy than some of the EU member countries, including the United Kingdom.

The recent EU report includes recommendations meant to strengthen the PA’s control over Arab East Jerusalem and press Israel to change its policy in the West Bank. It calls for increased Palestine Liberation Organisation representation and activities in Arab East Jerusalem.

Growing Israeli construction of settlements in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, the report says, preempts the two-state solution since, without dividing Jerusalem, which shall serve as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, it would be impossible to secure a durable peace.

It suggests the preparation of a “blacklist” of settlers considered violent, with a view to banning them from entering the EU, and advises senior EU figures visiting Arab East Jerusalem to refrain from being accompanied by Israeli government representatives or security personnel.

The report encourages European tourism companies to refrain from dealing with Israeli businesses located in Arab East Jerusalem and to raise EU public awareness of Israeli products originating from the settlements or from Arab East Jerusalem.

No doubt the Europeans are well aware of the implications of the suggestions. The document should encourage the EU to follow it up, seeking an end to Israel’s settlement construction in the occupied territories.

Parallel to such reports, senior EU officials have also been increasingly vocal in criticising Israel. British Cabinet member Nick Clegg was the latest to slam Israel’s settlements by calling them “deliberate vandalism” of efforts to establish a Palestinian state.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon had the audacity to call Clegg irresponsible and ill-informed.

Surely, the EU countries have come to understand that Israel is now showing its real colours and policies which dictate that it pay only lip service to its international relations and pounce at the slightest sign of anyone criticising it, let alone challenging it.

The rest is up to the Europeans themselves, but they should not allow themselves to be taken for one more Israeli ride.

These are the facts that made King Abdullah exert maximum pressure on Palestinians to restart the process of direct negotiations, which has been stalemated for a long time to Israel’s advantage.

Israel, it is known, has an apartheid policy against the Palestinians living under its occupation, as well as against Israelis of Arab origin. It practises an openly violent form of apartheid against the people living under its occupation.

Israeli soldiers and settlers continuously humiliate Palestinians at every given opportunity, whether in their towns and villages or at the hundreds of roadblocks. Every town and every village in the West Bank can be described as a detention centre since all entry and exit points are tightly sealed off, with Israeli soldiers guarding and enforcing their rules on whoever passes through the points they control.

The Israeli military and police turn a blind eye to the heavily armed Jewish settlers’ physical attacks against the Palestinians while they are roaming through the West Bank. The Israeli military authorities continue to create “Jews-only” roads in the occupied territories and punish any non-Jew who dares to use them. Vehicles are given distinctly separate licence plates for Jews and non-Jews so that they can be easily identified.

The punishment for entering the “Jews-only” roads could be confiscation of the vehicle or heavy fines. But there are no signs saying that these roads are “only for Jews” because, as Israelis themselves say, Israel does not want someone to take a photograph of such signs and circulate it around the world, thus establishing that there is indeed apartheid in Israel.

The Israeli authorities impose blanket curfews and seal off entire West Bank areas when Jewish settlers hold any celebration. Israelis are not permitted to transport Palestinians in a vehicle registered in the name of a Jew without a permit from the occupation authorities. But the Palestinians who have no choice but to work for the settlers are exempted from the ban.

Those who cross the bridges across the River Jordan are subjected to such a treatment that many wish they had an alternative other than returning to experience the humiliation and abuse. Well, that is the whole idea. Israel wants to drive out as many Palestinians as possible from their homeland through whatever means it has at its disposal.

Former US president Jimmy Carter observed that Israeli policy in the West Bank represented instances of apartheid worse even than those that were once applied in South Africa.

“When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa,” he had said.

Carter was commenting in his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, which he said was meant to spark US discussion of Israeli policies. He came under strong criticism, not only from Israelis but also from leaders of the Jewish community in the US, for the book and his subsequent comments in which he said he stood by his position as stated in the book.

Israel applies another form of apartheid while dealing with its Arab citizens, who represent some 24 per cent of its 7.7 million population. Israel, which likes to describe itself as the “sole democracy” in the region and says all its citizens are equals, discriminates against its Arab citizens through many means.

Arab Israelis do not have proportionate representation in the Israeli parliament and their needs

for services in the health and education sectors as well as social and community development are more often than not treated as low-priority issues. They are also treated with suspicion and humiliated by Israeli officials and soldiers alike.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is an ardent advocate of stripping a large number of Arab Israelis of their citizenship and placing them under Palestinian sovereignty as part of a land-swap arrangement within the context of a final peace agreement.

It has also been confirmed that many in the Israeli society — the whites of Israel, to be more precise — are practising apartheid against black African Jews. A demonstration held last week in Kiryat Malachi, near the port of Ashdod, brought focus on the African Jews’ suffering discrimination in Israel. Attended by more than 2,000 black Jews, mainly of Ethiopian origin, the event highlighted the fact that Kiryat Malachi’s established residents are unwilling to rent out or sell them apartments. Some residents even signed agreements committing themselves not to sell or rent out apartments to members of the Ethiopian community.

A report presented last year showed that students of African Jews are confined to certain schools, with others are denied admission.

The discrimination is underlined by the approach of many white Israelis whose attitude is: “We don’t think you match our lifestyle and we’re not sure about your Jewishness either.”

In response to charges of racial discrimination, Israeli Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver told the black African Jewish community: “Say thank you for what you got.”

It rings a bell. Wasn’t that what we used to hear in apartheid South Africa?

It is an understatement to say that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is hopping mad at some of his European counterparts because of their objective observations about Israel’s practices and policies against not only the Palestinians living under its occupation but also its own Arab citizens.

Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer from Ukraine, never hit it right with European governments (or with the US for that matter) because of his aggressive, non-diplomatic way of dealing with others. He also believes in “either you are with me or against me” and leaves no room for common ground.

Now it seems that he would punch his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Portugal at the first given opportunity. Well, that is an issue for the Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deal with, although one often gets the feeling that the prime minister enjoys unleashing Lieberman against critics of Israel.

The latest European Union (EU) action that has enraged Lieberman, and of course the Israeli government itself, is the preparation of a confidential 27-page brief outlining indicators suggesting that Arab Israelis “suffer from economic disparities, unequal access to land and housing, discriminatory draft legislation and a political climate in which discriminatory rhetoric and practice go unsanctioned.”

The report does criticise some Arab Israeli leaders for what it describes as their “disloyalty to Israel,” but the thrust of criticism is levelled at Israel.

Israeli foreign ministry officials have been quoted as expressing outrage at the report’s circulation in secrecy (it is no longer a secret anyway) and criticising those who drafted it for doing so “behind our backs.”

“We were not informed, consulted or approached about this document, which was allegedly written by EU diplomats,” a ministry spokesman said.

Well, the Israeli reaction to the report takes a second place when we review the contents of the documents.

Britain’s Independent newspaper, which revealed the existence of the report, notes that the EU often criticises Israeli policies, especially regarding Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. However, according to the Independent, the European bloc is “unusual in tackling such a highly sensitive issue” as Israel’s treatment of its own Arab citizens.

The report indicates “that the erosion of Israel’s founding ethos — as a Jewish homeland but one committed to treating all citizens equally — will reinforce those who seek to ‘delegitimise’ Israel and damage its international standing,” the British newspaper reported.

The EU report calls on the international community to look at Israel’s treatment of its minorities “as a core issue, not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Ashkenazi European Jews dominate the Israeli establishment at the expense of those from other parts of the world, such as the Sephardim, which originally referred to the descendants of the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula before their expulsion in 1594 by the Spanish Inquisition, but later came to describe Jewish Israelis of Oriental origin. We are closely familiar with the discrimination that the Israeli establishment practices against Arab Israelis in terms of their political rights and proportional representation in the Knesset and addressing their health and educational needs and social services.

Lieberman, known for what could be described as a born hatred for Arabs, is angry not because of the obvious shortcomings and discrimination in the Israeli government’s treatment of Arab Israelis, but because the Europeans helped expose them.

Lieberman was already enraged that Britain, France, Germany and Portugal, as representatives of the European bloc, joined a strong UN Security Council denunciation of Israel’s policy of expanding settlements in the occupied territories. They also condemned the rising violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

That was enough to trigger off Lieberman. He told a recent meeting of some 100 top Israeli diplomats that Israel did not need to apologise to European nations that condemned its West Bank construction policy and rightist violence.

He claimed that “Israeli democracy has nothing to be ashamed of — even in comparison with the glorious British democracy...”

According to Lieberman, “the countries which issued the condemnation should understand that (settlement) construction... is not an obstacle to peace; it is the Palestinians who are hurting the chances for peace by refusing to negotiate.”

In any event, the European Union is showing in public an increased awareness of the realities on the ground in Palestine. The bloc does have a substantial clout in the form of commercial relations with Israel.

With Israeli leaders like Lieberman publicly berating, ridiculing and even insulting EU member countries, the atmosphere is conducive for an intensified Arab effort to build a European consensus for pressure on Israel to accept the inevitability of recognising the rights of the Palestinians as the basis for a peace agreement to settle the Palestinian problem.

Surely, it cannot be done overnight, but any kind of pressure on Israel is always welcome.

This was the keynote theme of recent Jordanian contacts with Israeli decision makers.