PLO

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee called for a "full review" of the U.S. relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization, including shutting its Washington office, in the wake of its obtaining non-member state status at the United Nations.

Republican U.S. senators introduced the first efforts to penalize the Palestinians and the United Nations should the body affirm enhanced Palestinian status.

Israel’s military censor authorized for publication the testimony of an army officer who said he killed PLO cofounder Abu Jihad in 1988.

Nahum Lev, the commander of the operation which ended in Abu Jihad’s death in Tunis, told a reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth in an interview before his own death in 2000 that he had killed Abu Jihad, who cofounded the Palestine Liberation Organization. 

Lev died in a car accident. The censor only recently lifted a ban on publication, and the interview appeared in Friday's paper.

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The PLO representative to Washington called for a new approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying the two sides are far from resolution.

“We are not close to ending this conflict,” the representative, Maen Rashid Areikat, said Wednesday at a kosher luncheon organized by New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies and the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The PLO office in Washington raised a flag for the first time.

"It's about time that this flag that symbolizes the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination and statehood is raised in the United States," said Palestine Liberation Organization envoy Maen Areikat in a brief ceremony Tuesday outside its Dupont Circle offices. "We hope that this will help in the international efforts to provide recognition for the Palestinian state."

NEW YORK (JTA) -- In the long-running Palestinian-Israeli conflict, score some recent victories for the Palestinians.

It’s not that Israel has given an inch in the territorial dispute over the West Bank, or that the Palestinians in Gaza have achieved new military victories against the Israelis, despite increased rocket and mortar fire from the coastal strip in recent weeks.

Rather, the Palestinians have scored a series of diplomatic and public-relations successes against a Jewish state weakened by fraying relationships and a declining reputation internationally.