International academics and activists have gathered at the Australian National University in Canberra for a wide-ranging conference on the state of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
Direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians resumed late in July, after a three-year stalemate in the negotiations.
No-one is expecting any quick breakthrough.
Israel-based Nobel Peace Prize nominee Professor Jeff Halper says life remains uncertain for the four-million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
He says Israeli occupation of the territories restricts all manner of rights - civil, political, economic, social and cultural.
Professor Halper says his work to defend Palestinians' rights to housing is ongoing.
"I've talked to many Palestinian women who say to me 'the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is I look out the window to see if there's bulldozers and soldiers and if the coast is clear I get dressed and wake up the kids and start making breakfast.' And in fact the family lived in their home for five years and one day in the middle of the day they're having lunch and there's a knock on the door. Saleem answers the door, Rami says to him 'is this your house?', Saleem says 'yes it's my house', he says 'no it isn't, it's our house now. You got ten minutes to get all your belongings our we're going to demolish it'. Here's where the soldiers literally kick in. Saleem was beaten and kicked out of his home. In the commotion Arabia managed to slam the door shut and she called us. So the soldiers broke the windows of the home, threw in tear gas to flush out the family, she was carried out unconscious, the kids screaming and yelling in all directions."
Harvard University senior research scholar Doctor Sara Roy says the absence of violence with the Israelis does not mean the absence of difficulties for Palestinians.
She believes the new peace talks will become just the latest in a series of failed discussions which have seen Palestinian rights gradually eroded since 1993.
"They've faced growing constraints. In fact what many people don't understand about this so-called peace process is that it diminished, and weakened and contracted Palestinian life rather than the opposite."
Dr Roy and her colleagues argue the Israeli occupation compromises Palestinians' access to adequate medical services, water, education, food, housing and work.
She says tasks like collecting groceries or going to school are exponentially complicated by more than 600 fixed and flying checkpoints dotted across the territories.
And she says sometimes it's what people living elsewhere would regard as simple things that highlight how restrictive life is for Palestinians.
"I have friends who live in Ramallah in the West Bank. The wife is from Gaza. Now Gazans are restricted from entering the West Bank and have been for a very long time. My friend has had two children they're now 12 or 13 years old. Their grandparents who live in Gaza have never seen their grandchildren and you're talking about distances that you can measure in the tens of miles. It is easier for Palestinians to go to the United States than it is to travel between West Bank and Gaza."
PhD Candidate at Queens University Belfast, Lucy Royal-Dawson has conducted interviews with Palestinian students about their lives.
She says Israeli occupation has become so normalised that Palestinians don't realise the barriers they face.
"The last question I asked in a lot of the interviews was 'and so how does the occupation affect your education?' and people would say 'no, no it doesn't. It used to but not any more.' And you think 'wow, that's how deep the normalisation has become that people can no longer see it, it's only represented by acts of violence.'"
Despite the ongoing difficulties, academics like Sara Roy do see glimmers of hope.
Like earlier this year, when a three-year-old Jewish boy fell from the fourth floor window of his home in Israel and was later declared brain-dead.
His parents decided to donate his organs to a Palestinian boy.
Dr Roy says she's heard other similar stories - not many, but some.
"In the final analysis people are human beings and I truly believe, and I've seen many examples of this in my many years over there, that when you bring people together and you allow them to see each other as human beings, as monthers, as fathers - that often, not always, but often - people can sometimes break down these terrible political barriers that have been erected for them and this is one powerful example of that."
Professor Jeff Halper, an American Israeli, has been arrested numerous times defending the rights of Palestinians.
He's a co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, which helps Palestinians to replace homes destroyed by Israeli authorities in the occupied territories.
Professor Halper says the committee's work shows Israelis and Palestinians can work together.
"We've built 187 homes in the last 12 or 13 years which isn't much in a humanitarian way. But if you think of it as 187 joint acts of resistance of Israelis and Palestinians then it really means much more than that."
The conference at the ANU has been criticised by Jewish community leaders who say speakers lacked academic credibility, and that it amounted to blatant anti-Israel advocacy.
