The Palestinian Authority has launched a new campaign to bring Arabs from the “Diaspora” to visit their “homeland,” which it says includes Haifa and the "historic city of Yafo (Jaffa)."
The campaign targets Arab youth living in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and Britain, according to the Bethlehem-based Ma'an news agency.
A group of 41 from Haifa, Jerusalem, Gaza and Arab cities in Judea and Samaria is touring Israel now in a two-week “Explore & Live Palestine" trip organized by the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HLCEF) as part of the year-old 'Know Your Heritage' program.
"This mosaic of young faces represents the diversity of the Palestinian nation spread across the globe,” the organization's president Rateb Rabie told Maan.
The Palestinian Authority for several years has conducted a dual-track strategy of referring to all of Israel as Palestine while convincing the international community it wants to sit down with Israel for “negotiations” to establish the PA as a new country based on the 1949 Temporary Armistice Lines. The Six-Day War in 1967 ended those borders and the Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria and large areas of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority also has tried to keep alive its copycat version of Israel’s Right of Return that grants citizenship to every Jew in the world who lives in Israel.
The Arab world’s “right of return” demand refers to millions of Arab descendants from approximately 700,000 people who fled Israel in previous wars. The United Nations designation of "refugee" does not extend to descendants in any place in the world except for Arabs who fled Israel during previous wars.
Their numbers have been estimated at approximately 5 million, but Ma'an quoted a resource center as saying there are 10 million Arab refugees “with significant population centers in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Chile, Egypt, Europe and the United States.
The Palestinian Authority has adopted the Saudi Arabian "Peace Initiative" of 2002, which conditions normalization of relations with Israel on the Jewish State's allowing the immigration of all of the descendants of Arab refugees.