Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told Arabs living in Syria and Lebanon that they have the right to return to Israel.
Abbas told the visiting “refugees” and their descendants at a meeting in Ramallah to mark “Nakba Day” that every PA Arab should see Palestine. "The return is a practice, not a slogan," he said. "Whoever comes from the north, the center or the south and lives anywhere in it is in fact in the homeland. When I return to Ramallah or Nablus (Shechem -ed.) I have my foot in the homeland," Abbas said.
Nakba Day marks the “nakba” – Arabic for catastrophe – of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948.
The PA continues to insist that Arabs who fled across the border more than 60 years ago when Syria and other Arab nations attacked the fledgling reborn State of Israel have the right to return to the homes they left, along with some five million foreign-born descendants.
The PA has not budged on this condition in negotiations with Israel for a final status agreement on a two-state “solution.” Nor has it backed down on its demands that Israel hand over the areas of Jerusalem that were restored during the 1967 Six-Day War to Israel's capital, Judaism's holiest city, for creation of a capital for a new PA country.
“Palestine is ours,” Abbas told the visiting Arabs. “The Palestinian leadership will never give up the right of return. It will take practical steps to return to the homeland end life in the diaspora, because our final destination is the homeland.”