Palestinian Authority

It's a small world with the internet.
In one of the several groups I've joined in the online community, I was easily able to contact someone from Palestine. We exchanged a couple mint sheets of stamps easily available to ourselves, but difficult to get apart from each other.
I had simply wanted used stamps from Palestine in exchange for mint US.
My friend informed me that it was difficult for him to obtain used stamps and that it was easier for him to get mint.
That kind of surprised me. When I went to my Scott catalogue, I found that the values for used were the same as the values for mint. I wonder if the used values were underpriced then in the catalogue? After all, aren't the values based on availability? Perhaps the demand for Palestinian stamps isn't great enough at the moment to justify a higher value. I would suggest to anyone recieving mail from Palestine to hold onto those covers, or at least soak off those stamps and put them away for safe keeping. We may know something those catalogue editors don't. If Scott's people aren't trying to get there hands on Palestinian Authority stamps, they may not be seeing how difficult it is to get them.

I'm not referring to the older Palestine stamps but rather the latest ones issued by the new Palestinian authority.

I'd like to add, that it took a good month and a half to recieve this letter. Closer to 2 months. Perhaps it was carried on camelback across the Sahara, and placed on a raft that needed to drift by ocean currents all the way to the US. I'm sure all of us that have corresponded internationally have wondered what was taking so long for a reply. Another guess of mine, is that big brother is going thru and reading all the mail for security purposes. No doubt our correspondance is so innocent, that they have cryptographers working overtime to try to find the hidden message buried within our communication.