Associating Palestine with the European Union: the Present Framework and the Way Ahead.

The paper aims at putting forward recommendations with respect of the new association agreement between the European Union (EU) and the Palestinian Territories which will be negotiated soon. In the process, the earlier association agreement is reviewed within the context of the EU's Mediterranean Initiative as well as within the implications of the Israeli -Palestinian economic accord. A number of closely related "technical" issues are also highlighted, such as the WTO's constraints on bilateral trade concessions, the EU's elaborate systems of rules of origin and the cumulation principle, and the EU's current external trade regime for fresh fruits and vegetables. The paper's central recommendation is that Palestinian negotiators should seek to integrate the EU's financial aid with trade concessions, to get more concessions from the EU on agricultural exports rather than on manufactured imports and to use the EU- Israeli agreement as a benchmark.