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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Arab League boycott members meet in Damascus

From Al-Quds:
On Tuesday in a hotel in Damascus, Syria, the eighty-second conference of liaison officers to the regional offices of the Arab boycott of Israel opened with the participation of 14 Arab countries.

Eight countries were absent from the meeting, namely Jordan, Egypt, Mauritania, Oman, Bahrain, Comoros, Somalia and Djibouti.

The three-day conference will discuss a number of topics relating to the amendment of some items of the general principles of the boycott and the addition of companies in breach of these principles through their support for the Israeli economy and put it on the blacklist. The conference will discuss "the lifting of the ban on companies that have committed themselves to the terms of the boycott that were named on the black list," according to organizers.

The conference meets twice a year to draw up a "black list" of names of Israeli companies, or companies that do work in Israel, to be boycotted. Since the normalization of relations between a number of Arab countries and Israel over the past twenty years, the effectiveness of the Office of the boycott has been reduced.
The article doesn't list the names of the countries that attended, so it is unclear if, for example, Saudi Arabia or the UAE was there. Both countries had agreed to drop the boycott under US pressure for their entry into the World Trade Organization, and both apparently reneged.

It looks like the PA also attended. They had attended recent conferences.