Abbas welcomed home as hero while Qatar denounced

[oberliner]

RAMALLAH — President Mahmoud Abbas got a hero's welcome on Tuesday from thousands of Palestinians who denounced the Qatari regime and its Al Jazeera television channel for accusing their leader of selling out to Israel.

Supporters burned posters of the Emir of Qatar, who an Abbas aide said had approved Al Jazeera's broadcast of leaked Middle East negotiation documents, as well as Israeli flags with Al Jazeera's name sprayed inside the blue Star of David.

"We will go to Jerusalem, a million martyrs strong," the crowd of over 3,000 chanted, in a rousing endorsement for Abbas using a famous slogan not heard since the days of his more charismatic predecessor, Yasser Arafat.

"The Palestinian principles ... have not and will not change and the first of them is that East Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Palestine," Abbas said to cheers from supporters from all over the occupied West Bank.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41252208/

[brooklynite]

1. The Al-Jazeera details...

PA selling short the refugees

...snip...

Some six million Palestinian refugees are scattered around the world, including more than 400,000 in Lebanon. Here, they are deprived of basic rights, not permitted to buy or sell property, and are banned from more than 70 job categories. Mired in abject poverty, they are dependent on an increasingly incapable United Nations agency for aid.
A "symbolic number" of returnees

The Palestine Papers show that Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiators were prepared to make major concessions on the refugees’ right of return: on the numbers potentially allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel; on whether refugees would be able to vote on any peace agreement; and on how many would be able to settle in a future Palestinian state.

...snip...

The papers also reveal that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed that 1,000 Palestinian refugees be allowed to return annually to Israel over a period of five years - totalling just 5,000, a tiny fraction of those displaced after Israel’s creation.

...snip...

According to the documents, not only did Palestinian officials offer a low figure of returnees, the chief negotiator of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, said that refugees would not have voting rights on a possible peace deal with Israel.

http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/2011124123324887267.html

[oberliner]

2. How many Palestinians who were displaced after Israel's creation are alive today?

Do you know what the total is?