* AP has an interesting feature about the relationship between Palestinian refugees and their Arab hosts. The refugees, it seems, face a lot of discrimination in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere.
* The Arab League has decided that Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ are not terrorists. For the irrational basis of this, see Q and A in Arab News.
* Haaretz reports on Islamic Jihad funding via Syria.
* Jerusalem Post goes into some detail on PA finance minister Salam Fayyad’s threats to resign due to Arafat’s cronies stalling Fayyad’s reform efforts.
* Shlomo Avineri has an op-ed in the LA Times on Geneva Accord:
The biggest problem for Israelis is that what the document’s authors claim it says and what it actually says are very different. Many Israelis – including those ready to make considerable concessions – feel that with the Geneva initiative, they have been taken for a ride by the Palestinian propaganda machine and some willful – or naive – Israeli accomplices.
* Former National Security Council member Kenneth M. Pollack on ‘America and the Middle East After Saddam’:
The Arab states are broken. They are absolutely stagnant, politically, economically, and socially. And their people know it. The vast majority of Arab schools don’t teach anything useful to their students and don’t produce students who have useful job skills. Most of the students specialize in humanities, many of them aspire to be lawyers and Islamic scholars: two-thirds of all of the Ph.D.s issued in Saudi Arabia every year are in Islamic studies.
