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Dossier on Canada Park

From the editors of the Shunpiking Magazine

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TTTTTable of Contentable of Contentable of Contentable of Contentable of Content

Canada Park: Canadian Complicity in a War Crime .............................................. 5THE ROAD TO EMMAUS ......................................................................................... 9OUTRAGE AT EMWAS: .......................................................................................... 13WIPED OFF THE MAP ............................................................................................ 17

Text of the supplication sent out by the Jewish National Fund of Canada. ....... 23

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Source:” OUTLOOK”, Published byCanadian Jewish Outlook Society -September / October 2001 issue.

“Here is our house”, says Ibrahim

Elsheikh, the 75-year-old mukhtar(village headman) of Imwas (Emmaus),pointing to the rubble of his homewhich stood there until June 1967, whenIsrael invaded and occupied Sinai, theWest Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.Thousands of villagers, from Imwas,Yalu and Beit Nuba-my own hometown-still cry remembering their homes thatstood there until Israel erased them fromthe face of The Holy Land, when theywere systematically dynamited andbulldozed. In Beit Nuba alone, 18 old ordisabled men, who were unable orunwilling to leave their homes instantly,were buried under the rubble.

No fighting took place in these villageswhen they were occupied in the earlyhours of June 6, 1967. The three villageswere once part of what was called theLatrun salient. Over 10,000 people livedthere; they had schools, mosques,agricultural land and many centuries of

history. It was in Imwas (Emmaus) whereChristians believe that Jesus Christ firstappeared after the Crucifixion.

The destruction of these villages waswitnessed and described by the Israelijournalist Amos Kenan, who was areserve soldier in the occupying forcein Beit Nuba. He gave this account tothe Israeli newspaper Ha’Olam Hazeh,which was prohibited by the censorfrom publishing it. It was sent to allmembers of the Knesset, and to thePrime Minister and Defence minister,but no response was received.

“The unit commander told us that it hadbeen decided to blow up three villagesin our sector; they were Beit Nuba,Imwas and Yalu ... We were told to blockthe entrances of the villages andprevent inhabitants [from] returning ....The order was to shoot over their headsand tell them not to enter the village.

“Beit Nuba is built of fine quarry stones;some of the houses are magnificent.Every house is surrounded by anorchard, olive trees, apricots, vines andpresses. They are well kept. Among thetrees, there are carefully tended

vegetablebeds.

“At noonthe firstbu l ldozerarrived andp u l l e ddown thefirst houseat the edgeof thev i l l a g e .Within tenminutes thehouse wasturned intorubble. The

olive trees and cypresses were alluprooted. After the destruction of threehouses, the first refugee column arrivedfrom the direction of Ramallah. We didnot fire in the air. There were old peoplewho could hardly walk, murmuring oldwomen, mothers carrying babies, smallchildren. The children wept and askedfor water. They all carried white flags.

“We told them to go to Beit Sira. Theytold us they had been driven out. Theyhad been wandering like this for fourdays, without food, some dying on theroad. They asked to return to theirvillage ... Some had a goat, a lamb, adonkey or a camel. A father groundwheat by hand to feed his four children... The children cried. Some of oursoldiers started crying too.

We went to fetch the Arabs some water.We stopped a car with a major, twocaptains and a woman ... We asked theofficers why these refugees were sentfrom one place to another and drivenout of everywhere. They told us thatthis was good for them, they shouldgo. ‘Moreover’, said the officers, ‘whatdo we care about the Arabs anyway?’ “

“We drove them out. They go onwandering like lost cattle. The weak die.Our unit was outraged. The refugeesgnashed their teeth when they saw thebulldozers pull down the trees. None ofus understood how Jews could behavelike this. No one understood why thesefellaheen [villagers] shouldn’tbeallowed to take blankets and somefood.

“The chickens and doves were buriedin the rubble. The fields were turnedinto wasteland in front of our eyes. Thechildren who went crying on the roadwill be fedayeen [freedom fighters.] innineteen years, in the next round. Thuswe have lost the victory.” (From IsraelImperial News, March 1968.)

Canada Park: Canadian Complicity in a War CrimeBy Dr. Ismail Zayid

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Uri Avneri, then a Knesset member,described the destruction of thesevillages as a definite war crime. This wascarried out on the direct orders ofYitzhak Rabin, then Chief of Staff ofIsrael’s armed forces. These acts are indirect violation of The Fourth GenevaConvention, 1949, to which Israel is asignatory. Article 53 of the conventionstates: “ Any destruction by theOccupying Power of real or personalproperty belonging individually orcollectively to private persons, or to thestate, or to other public authorities orsocial or cooperative organizations isprohibited”.

It is now difficult to spot the ruins andthe rubble. Today there stands on thespot the infamy called “Canada Park”,with picnic areas for Israelis, built withCanadian tax-deductible dollarsprovided by the Canadian JewishNational Fund (JNF).

It was in 1973 that Bernard Bloomfieldof Montreal, then President of the JNFof Canada, spearheaded a campaignamong the Canadian Jewish communityto raise $15 million to establish CanadaPark, so as to provide a picnic areaaccessible to Israelis from Jerusalem andTel Aviv.

At the entrance of Canada Park, justoff John Diefenbaker Parkway (openedby Diefenbaker himself in 1975), is a sign

that reads: “Welcome to Canada Parkin Ayalon Valley-a project of the JewishNational Fund of Canada.”

The JNF, responsible for the upkeep ofthe park, has removed all signs of thevillages and their inhabitants from thearea. It would seem that only theCanadian donors are worthy of beingremembered; their names are engravedin the bronze plaques which cover anentire wall. Interestingly, these donorsare not directly informed that the parkis built on the site of the demolishedvillages. The Director of the AmericanJNF stated that, “It is a delicate

situation, and one cannot expect aninstitution [such as the Canadian JNF]which gathers money from abroad, topublicise the issue [of the demolitionof these villages].” (“Canada Park: ACase Study,” by Ehud Meltz and MichalSelah, Kol Hair, Aug. 31, 1984.)

The glossy guidebook, published bythe JNF of Canada, has an entire pagedevoted to the history of the area,including the biblical, Roman, Crusaderand British periods, but has no mentionof these villages or their destruction.Another step in the obliteration of thevillages from memory can be seen intheir absence from Israeli maps.

As a new Canadian, my personal painwas compounded when I read on Dec.4, 1978, in our local newspaper, TheHalifax Herald, that Peter Herschorn, aprominent Halifax businessman andpast chairman of the Atlantic branch ofthe JNF, was honored by the JNF forhis humanitarian work and “choosingthe right goodness” in his participationin the building of Canada Park. TheLieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia,the Premier of N.S. and the Mayor ofHalifax were in attendance and offeredtheir greetings. I was mortified thatpolitical leaders in my new country,Canada, would consider the erection of

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recreation centres on the site of ruinsof criminally demolished peacefulvillages, illegally occupied, as ahumanitarian act.

Canada continuously brags about itsreputation for upholding the UNCharter, international law and humanrights, yet allows its taxpayers’ dollarsto sponsor such a war crime. Over manyyears, I have written repeatedly-supported by some honourablepoliticians like Senator HeathMacquarrie and Mr. R.A. Corbett, MP-to successive Revenue Canada

Ministers, expressing concern aboutthis, and receiving only vagueunhelpful answers.

Father Louis, who worked at the LatrunFranciscan Monastery for 40 years,said, “Every time I go by Canada Park, Istill get angry. Why does the Canadiangovernment allow it to be called CanadaPark? It is built on the ruins of people’shomes”.

Every Canadian should be asking: whyshould our country’s name beassociated with this infamy?

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Dr. Ismail Zayid was born and grew upin Beit Nuba, Palestine. He is the authorof two books: Palestine: A StolenHeritage, and Zionism: The Myth andthe Reality, and several articles. He isalso the President of theCanadaPalestine Association. He lives inHalifax, Nova Scotia Canada. He can bereached via e-mail at:<izayid@hfx.eastlink.ca>

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THERE WAS no reason for me tosuspect, as we drove down through thehills northwest of Jerusalem on a crispJanuary morning in 1968, that my lifewould never be quite the same again.

My companion was a Palestinianwoman, middle-aged and taciturn, whohad lived all her life in Jerusalem. Shehad offered to drive me to the airport atthe end of two crowded weeks I hadspent investigating conditions in theWest Bank and Gaza, which the Israelishad occupied six months earlier. Wemust make an early start, she had said;there was something she wanted toshow me, something...exceptional. Shewould say no more; and since much thatI had seen and heard in those two weekswas already, by any reasonablestandard, exceptional, there wassomething ominous about the silencethat fell between us.

She didn’t take the main road to theairport, but a little country road whichwound its way out to the hills, rejoiningthe main highway close by the Trappistmonastery of Latrun. As we came downinto the plain, she asked me what I couldsee ahead. Nothing in particular, I said,puzzled. All about us was emptyfarmland; the soil looked rich, incontrast to the bare hills behind us. Butwhereas in the hills there had been smallvillages, here in the fertile plain therewas no sign of human habitation.

Presently we overtook three women inthe richly embroidered dresses ofPalestinian villagers, carrying basketson their heads. We stopped to askwhere they were going. “To Beit Nuba,”one of them said, “to gather sticks.”And then, disconcertingly, they beganin unison to cry.

For a few moments, while mycompanion spoke gently with them inArabic, I stood uncomfortably aside.When we drove on, she explained thatthey were from Beit Nuba, one of threevillages that had stood where, justbelow us, the hills ran out into the plain.The villages had been there for longerthan anyone could remember and theirinhabitants had lived comfortably onthe produce of the rich soil. But since1948 they had been right up against theborder with the new state of Israel; andin the wake of their lightning victory inJune 1967, the Israelis had brought inbulldozers and destroyed all threevillages. They had made no provisionfor the inhabitants, about 9,000Palestinians, but simply drove them off,young and old alike, to wander over thestony hillsides in the June heat. Andwhen some of them returned, exhausted,saying they had been told by anotherdetachment of Israelis that they couldgo back to their homes, the soldiersdrove them away again, while thebulldozers pulled down their houses anduprooted their orchards.

Some of these details I learnt later, froman account written by one of the Israelisoldiers who took part in thedestruction of Beit Nuba. He happenedto be a journalist who was doing hismilitary service as a reservist and wasposted to the Latrun area. He didn’twrite his account for publication, butto bring to the attention of the civilauthorities in Israel what he saw as atragedy which would have fatefulconsequences. He sent a copy of it toevery member of the Knesset. Therewas no response, and there the mattermight have ended but for a Palestinianpoet, Fawzy al-Asmar, who had got holdof a copy which he translated andarranged for it to be published abroad.

The soldier’s name was Amos Keinanand his account was vivid and verymoving, animated as it was by a livelyindignation at what he called ”thisidiotic concept of collectivepunishment”. He told of theconsternation of the Israeli soldiers asthe villagers, “old people who couldhardly walk, mothers carrying babies,small children who wept and asked forwater”, pleaded to be allowed to returnto their homes. But, he went on, “theorder was to shoot over their heads andtell them not to enter the village”.

The Israeli soldiers, Keinan wrote, were“outraged”, so much so that theirofficer went off to headquarters to seeif there was some mistake. When hecame back, he said: “There were noorders in writing, simply, that they wereto be driven out.” The soldiers didn’tlike it, but they did as they were told -so thoroughly, in fact, that, as Keinanrecorded: “Chickens and doves wereburied in the rubble. The fields wereturned into wasteland before our eyes.The children who went crying on theroad will be fedayin in the next round.Thus we have lost the victory.”

When my companion and I came to BeitNuba six months after Keinan, much hadchanged. Most significantly, the rubblehad disappeared. It had taken theIsraelis six months to clear it, in greatsecrecy; while relays of volunteers wereengaged in this macabre task, theauthorities closed the approach road toLatrun. When we came there on thatJanuary morning in 1968, the road hadjust been reopened.

Without a guide, I should probablyhave driven straight through withoutrealising that there had been villageshere at all. The demolition squads hadbeen thorough. But when we stopped

THE ROAD TO EMMAUS BY MICHAEL ADAMS

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the car and gut out to look, there wereplenty of tell-tale signs; it isn’t easy,even in six months, to wipe out athousand years of history withoutleaving a trace. There were a few piecesof masonry, a broken tile, a twisted rodof steel from some concrete extensionand - a sure sign that people had oncelived here – the cactus hedges, whichthe Palestinians use to protect theirgardens and orchards againstmarauders, were starting to grow back.They are very hard to eradicate.

After Beit Nuba, on the other side ofthe road, was its sister village of Yalu,which had suffered the same fate andwhere a group of prefabricated huts ona ridge above the site of the village gavean indication that the Israelis wereplanning to establish a settlement here.Beyond Yalu the road swung off to theright towards the monastery of Latrunand beside it the third of these villagesin what strategists called the “Latrunsalient”, because it jutted out like afinger poked irritatingly into Israel’sside. This was the village which thePalestinians called Amwas and whichappears in the Gospel of St. Luke asEmmaus, the place where Jesusappeared to two of his followers shortlyafter the crucifixion.

Amwas presented a quite differentpicture from Beit Nuba and Yalu.Whereas they had stood in the midstof open farmland so that once theIsraelis had blown up the villagers’houses and carted away the stones thesite remained open and exposed. Amwashad been situated on sloping groundon both sides of the road steep inplaces and much of it covered with fruitand olive trees. The Israelis had notuprooted the trees as they had done atBeit Nuba, and they had plantedoleanders in the open spaces betweenthem so that when I came to Amwasthere was a tangle of old and newvegetation. All this must have made itmore difficult to dispose of the evidenceof human habitation, and you could stilltrace in the undergrowth the pavingstones of a terrace or the mouth of adisused well - and even find here andthere a more personal and poignant

reminder, in the shape of a page from achild’s exercise book or a scrap of tornclothing, of the life that, after so manycenturies of continuity in this corner ofPalestine, had now been stilled,abruptly and forever.

THERE WAS a lot for me to think aboutas I flew back to London, exchangingthe clear sunshine and the cruelty andthe stifled protests of the Palestiniansfor the drizzle and the humdrum, good-natured, self-absorbed preoccupationsof the England of Harold Wilson andThe Archers.

At the beginning of 1968, when theoccupation was only six months old, itwas generally assumed - such wasIsrael’s reputation in those days – thatthe conduct of the army of occupationwas scrupulously correct, and even(the word was actually employed by theBBC correspondent and echoed by afew gullible leader-writers) benevolent.The reason for this belief was a simpleone: in 1968 no British newspaperretained a correspondent of its own inIsrael, depending instead on theservices of an Israeli “stringer”, a localjournalist who earned a little extramoney in his spare time. None of themknew anything about the occupiedterritories or their Palestinianinhabitants. Nor had they any meansof finding out about them had theywanted to. They did not speak Arabicand it they tried to communicate withPalestinians they came up against a wallof resentful silence.

Just occasionally, during those earlymonths of the occupation a word or apicture suggested that all was not as itshould be. Malcolm Muggeridge wroteof his surprise at seeing, in Jerusalem,an Israeli patrol suddenly grabbing ayoung Palestinian in the street andhustling him off with a black bag overhis head; and David Holden, in adispatch to The Sunday Times, referredto dark rumours of ill-treatment by theIsraelis, but without giving any details.It was this article that had made medecide to take advantage of aninvitation to make a series ofprogrammes for the BBC about the state

of mind of the Arab world after the JuneWar, and to see for myself.

From a base in Jerusalem, I travelled fortwo weeks through the occupied areasof the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,meeting at first with blank suspicion onthe part of the subject Palestinians, whohad learned to keep their mouths shutin the presence of unidentifiedstrangers. But I had sought the adviceof a Palestinian friend in Beirut, one ofthe many exiles from Jerusalem, a manwhose family had played adistinguished part in the life of the cityfor centuries before the creation of aJewish state, and who had armed mewith a list of names and a scrap of paperbearing a few words in Arabic. Withthese I found myself passed from handto hand all through the occupiedterritories, among people who feltthemselves imprisoned and who hadalmost despaired of re-establishingcontact with the outside world. Fromthem I learned the truth about theoccupation.

The worst aspect of all was theuniversal sense that a screen ofprejudice had been erected betweenthem and the rest of the world, againstwhich the truth seemed powerless toprevail. I was to discover for myself howeffective that screen could be - andwhat the penalties were for trying tobreak through it. A series of articles Iwrote for The Guardian, whichdescribed for the first time in the BritishPress the methods the Israelis wereusing to impose their rule (exactly thesame methods they are using today totry to suppress the Palestinian intifada),caused a storm of protest from Israel’ssupporters, with the editor as well asmyself coming under violent attack. Atfirst he stood by me, but as the pressureon him intensified, I could feel hissupport melting away.

There was a warning after he hadpublished four of my articles, of whichthe first was about Gaza, where thesituation was especially bad, and thelast about Jerusalem, where the Israelis,defying a vote of 99 to nil at the UnitedNations, had just expropriated 800 acres

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of Arab-owned land on which to buildsettlements for exclusively Jewish use.The facts were not in doubt and theIsraelis did not try to pretendotherwise; but their friends in Englandset up a great hullabaloo about TheGuardian’s coverage of the issue andactually went so far as to accuse theeditor of anti-Semitism.

On my return to England I had sent TheGuardian a long list of people inJerusalem, other than Palestinians, whocould vouch for what I had written. Thelist included the Anglican Archbishop,senior UN officials, doctors at hospitalsin the West Bank and Gaza,representatives of aid agencies anddiplomats. The editor never referred tothis list and it soon became clear thatthere was a quite different set of peoplewho were closer at hand and who foundit easier to catch his attention.

I could feel the ground slipping awayfront under me, but it still came as ashock when the editor refused, pointblank, to publish my final article, whichtold of the destruction of Amwas andother villages along the old armisticeline between Jordan and Israel. At firstI was angry, but not alarmed. I stillassumed that whatever the obstaclesput in its way, the truth must in the endprevail; that there was a limit to theextent to which unwelcome facts couldbe kept out of sight, and even erasedfrom the historical record altogether. Inthe long run this provided to be true,as it always does (and as we are seeingin Eastern Europe today). But in theshort run, the Israelis were allowed toachieve their objective. They must haveweighed it up and decided it was wortha try.

The Israeli government and whoever inthe army command gave the order (notin writing, of course) to destroy the

villages must have thought that it waspossible to rearrange both history andgeography in this way; that if theycarted away the rubble and raked overthe ground and planted seedlings wherethe homes of 9,000 people had been, allof which they did, they would be ableto get away with it. Why? Because ofthe Holocaust, and because Westernnewspaper editors don’t like to becalled anti-Semitic, and because ofthose Israeli stringers in Jerusalem in1967 who either didn’t notice or didn’tthink it worth reporting to Britishnewspaper readers what was going on15 or 20 miles away.

And the Israelis might well have gotaway with it, at least for long enoughto put the matter beyond dispute, butfor the Israeli soldier who happened tobe a journalist with a conscience, andbut for the middle-aged Palestinianwoman who took it upon herself to driveme to the airport that morning by aroundabout route. As it was, the factsdid eventually become known. But it alltook time. The article which the editorof The Guardian refused to publishwent to and fro in Fleet Street, and Ihad almost given up hope when TheSunday Times decided to publish it - afull year after the events it described.At about the same time Amos Keinan’saccount was published in English inIsraeli Imperial News, a samizdat-stylesatirical magazine put out by dissidentIsraelis. And the editor of The Guardiansent a home reporter, Harold Jackson,to Jerusalem to took into the storyabout Amwas. Jackson was a goodreporter and an honest man; he wrote amoving article and The Guardian ran itin full.

WHAT DIFFERENCE did it make? Notmuch, on (lie face of it; the villages hadgone and not many people would knowthat they had ever been there. But the

story is not quite ended. A short timeago, out of the blue, there droppedthrough my letterbox an envelope witha Geneva postmark. Inside there was aleaflet, four pages of it and well printed,with the heading “Association for theReconstruction of Emmaus” and on theback page were three photographs,taken at 10-yearly intervals from thesame spot just outside the village ofAmwas.

The first showed Amwas as it was in1958, with the village houses scatteredacross the hillsides on either side of theroad. The second showed the samehillsides as I had seen them in 1968, withthe same road running between them,but bare of houses. And the thirdpicture showed the site in 1978, thicklywooded on both sides of the samecurving road and now transformed,thanks to the generosity of the Jewishcommunity in Canada (can they haveknown what they were paying for?), intoa recreation area called Canada Park.

The leaflet explained that a group ofChristians in Switzerland had setthemselves the objective of rebuildingthe village as a symbol of reconciliationbetween Palestinians and Israelis. Theyhad an ally in Jerusalem, in the personof Father Tournay, a distinguishedFrench theologian and former directorof the Ecole Biblique, and through himthey were in touch with a few of theformer inhabitants of Amwas who werestill in the area and who longed for theopportunity to rebuild their homes ontheir ancestral land.

A pious hope, against the backdrop ofconflict and repression in the Holy Landin 1991? Maybe - but sooner or latersomeone has to give reconciliation achance, and Emmaus seems as good a

place as any to make a start.

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“HERE is the house of Yusef MustafahSaadeh,” my guide was saying, yet Isaw no house at all, just two picnictables in the middle of a sandy clearing,and a garbage barrel to one side. “Andthese are his grapes,” he said,descending the crest of the hill to abarren, neglected vine. The whole tourwas going this way. Where I saw pinetrees and picnic sites, he saw stonehouses two storeys high, water cisterns,vegetable gardens, and fruit stalls. Wewere walking in Canada Park, arecreation ground just off the mainhighway between Jerusalem and TelAviv.

My guide was Haidar Mustafah Ahmad,a seventy-five-year-old Palestinian. Ihad shown him a brochure thatdescribed the park as “a proud tributeto Canada and to the Canadian JewishCommunity whose vision and foresighthelped transform a barren stretch ofland into a major national recreationalarea for the people of Israel.” Ahmadwas bent on showing me that the parkis, in the Palestinian view, a disgrace toCanada because part of it is built noton barren land, but on the ruins of thevillage of Emwas, where he was born.

The site of the developed area of thepark is splendid. On a slope overlookingthe fertile Ayalon Valley are severalpicnic areas, a playground with slidesand monkey-bars, and a network ofstone footpaths leading to the ruins ofa Roman bathhouse and the remains ofancient Emmaus, where Jesus firstappeared after the crucifixion. Part (Infact all .. publishers)} of the park is informer Jordanian territory, occupied byIsrael since 1967. The rest is spread over

6,500 acres of hills, mostly in Israelproper (That is incorrect .. publishers), covered in pine forests and bisectedby a winding hiking trail - the John G.Diefenbaker Parkway, officially openedby Diefenbaker himself in 1975.

Ahmad led me through the picnicgrounds, pointing out clusters of cactusplants yielding sweet prickly pears,plants traditionally used as fences inArab villages. We inspected the park’swalkways and retaining walls, findingsome new stones but others old andpoorly cut for the purpose. “The stonesof the houses of Emwas,” Ahmad saidthrough our interpreter. On one wallwere hundreds of strips of metalarranged like miniature ladders againstthe stone, each engraved with aperson’s name and the name of a city inCanada. A map given to me by theJewish National Fund in Jerusalemidentified the wall as theCommemorations Centre, dedicated tothe Canadians who had contributed $15million toward the building of the park

But what of the village of Emwas? Howhad it disappeared? To find out, I spenta few weeks talking to Arabs and Jewsinvolved in the events that led to thecreation of Canada Park

IN THE early morning of June 6, 1967,the second day of the Six Day War, thevillagers of Emwas. Yalu, and Beit Nubaheard the shooting. “There was aJordanian army outpost nearby but thesoldiers told us, ‘We’re leaving, defendyourselves,’” recalls Ibrahim IsaZayyad a former Yalu merchant, now ajanitor at Kalandia refugee camp nearJerusalem and self-appointed archivist

of Yalu. “About 3 a.m. we saw lightsfrom Israeli tanks. They fired on thevillage and we raised white flags. At 5or 6 a.m. the Israelis entered the villageand called us together. Then they firedtheir guns into the air, telling us to fleefor our lives to Amman.”

A Swedish UN envoy, NilsGoranGussing, filed a similar report a weeklater: “According to accounts fromdisplaced persons, the Israel forcesentered the three villages...at 4:30 a.m.on 6 June and called the inhabitants toassemble, after which they were orderedunder threat to leave in the [easterly]direction of Ramallah.”

Some villagers left their houses in night-clothes, some without shoes - andcertainly without food or water - forwhat turned out to be a two-day walk.Zayyad says one Yalu woman left herhouse with six children but was unableto take her seventh, an infant. “Shewasn’t allowed back to get it”

Most of the people were obliged to gocross-country rather than by road, overstony hills terraced with vineyards anddotted with olive trees, a landscapecharming to the eye but hard on thefoot. The 10,000 villagers pressed on,and after two days arrived at Ramallah,the largest Arab population centre inthe area, aside from Jerusalem to thesouth. The war ended three days later,and villagers heard on the radio andfrom loudspeakers mounted on Israelijeeps that everyone was to return home.They went back, again on foot But atthe approach to the villages, they werestopped. Amos Kenan, an Israelijournalist, was then a forty-year-oldreserve soldier assigned to keep

OUTRAGE AT EMWAS:What was once an Arab village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv isnow part of a recreation area called Canada Park.BY JOHN GODDARD

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villagers out of Beit Nuba. The taskupset him. and he tried to have theorders reversed

by writing a quick report to the Knesset.His 1,200-word testimony tells not onlyof the suffering of the Arabs but alsoof the anguish felt by the Israelisoldiers:

“There were old men hardly able towalk, old women mumbling tothemselves, babies in their mother’sarms, small children weeping, beggingfor water .... They said some hadperished on the way.... The childrenwept and some of our soldiers wepttoo....

“Our platoon commander decided to goto headquarters to find out whetherthere were any written orders as to whatshould be done with them .... He cameback and said there was no writtenorder, we were to drive them away. Likelost sheep they went on wanderingalong the roads. The exhausted werebeyond rescuing....

“The soldiers grumbled ... At night westayed on to guard the bulldozers, butthe entire battalion was seething withanger; most of them did not want to dothe job. In the morning we weretransferred to another spot.” By thetime Kenan’s testimony was read in theKnesset, the villages were gone.

DURING one of my visits to Canada jPark I met a man sitting on top of a picnictable, fingering a string of yellow worrybeads as he stared out at the valley,farmed now by a West Bank Jewishsettlement. “I’m sitting here meditatingon how it all happened,” he said, after Iopened the conversation. He was bornin Emwas but he left in 1956, at age ten,when his family moved to Jordan. Thiswas his first trip back to his boyhoodhome. “I know this isn’t a realcemetery,” he said. “But it feels likeone.”

Ahmad had told me seventeen oldwomen and one old man who were toofeeble to flee the village had gatheredin the house of Hagar Khalil, and were

bulldozed with the village. Everyvillager I talked to told me similarly grislystories of people who had either beenshot by the soldiers or bulldozed in therubble. I walked to the site whereAhmad said Hagar Khalil’s house oncestood, near the entrance of the parkwhere a large sign announces: “CanadaPark A Project of the Jewish NationalFund of Canada.” From the sinking ofthe ground and the broken stones lyingaround, it was evident that a house hadonce stood there. I spoke to Ahmadagain.

“How do you know eighteen peoplewent to one house and were buriedalive?”

“Did you see it happen?` “No. 1 wasstill in Ramallah.” “How did you firsthear of it”

“One of the women who died was thewife of the brother of my wife. She toldus when we left the village, ‘I’m goingto stay with Hagar; because others weredoing the same. We haven’t found atrace of any of those we knew to beinside this house.”

“Can you name the eighteen?” I asked.He named eleven right off.

I called on Amos Kenan in Tel Aviv. Hereceived me in a room at the top of anarrow spiral staircase that wound likea fire-escape from the kitchen. “Blah,blah,” he said when I told him the storyof the eighteen. “When there is warthere is blah, blah. Enough damage isdone in war without the liesafterwards.” He said he had seensoldiers from his unit check the houses,bringing out a wounded Egyptian andseveral old people. He also said hespent most of his time on the outskirts,keeping the villagers back.

I continued to meet villagers withatrocity stories.

“How do you know these thingshappened?” I asked Dr. Moussa AbuGhosh, a native of Emwas who nowpractises in Ramallah.

“In spite of all the difficulties, some ofthe younger people managed toinfiltrate back to their homes to pick upsome belongings, and when they duginto the rubble, some found bodies;”he said. “A relative of mine was foundthis way - Hasan Shukri, the son of mycousin. He was nineteen, an invalid,paralyzed from polio. They found hiswheelchair outside and found his bodyunderneath his house.”

A French monk from the Latrunmonastery next to Canada Park MichelKhoury, said he went to Emwas twoweeks after the war to sift through therubble for bodies. The monks had closerelations with the village because thevillagers worked the monastery’svineyards and wine-cellars.

“I was in charge of the poor people ofEmwas,” the monk said. “Two old blindwomen, sisters named Hadieh andFatmeh Hamden, used to eat lunch hereevery day. After the war their nephewcame to me and said he thought theywere buried under a house. It was aSaturday, and we went to where thehouse was. Israeli soldiers came andtold us to leave, but I smelled theodour.”

“What odour?”

“I smelled the bodies under the ruins.”

1 began asking people to write downnames of those who died. They usuallyremembered two or three, almost alwaysrelatives. The lists sometimes hadnames in common. In all, I collectedthirty-nine names of people said to havebeen killed in the villages, seventeenfrom Emwas, eleven from Beit Nuba, andeleven from Yalu.

How could as many as three dozenvillagers, most of them old or invalid.be killed without anyone hearing aboutit for fourteen years?

“Who was listening?” said Ismail Zayid,a refugee from Beit Nuba, when Iphoned him on my return to Canada.He now teaches at Dalhousie MedicalSchool in Halifax. “Whom were we

15

supposed to tell? Even today when Itell how my village was destroyed andhow people were killed there, nobodybelieves me.”

The Palestinians had no voice in 1967,a predicament that led some to hijackairplanes and commit other acts ofterrorism. Besides, a war had just beenfought. Canada and other Westerncountries were elated by Israel’svictory. If there was concern afterwards,it was over East Jerusalem and otherissues of greater internationalconsequence than Emwas, Yalu, andBeit Nuba.

THE ISRAELI government gives twoexplanations for the destruction of thevillages. One is that the villagers werepart of an enemy population anddeserved to be treated as belligerents.The other is that the events took placein heavy fighting during the war.

The first explanation comes fromMoshe Dayan, then Israel’s defenceminister, who said in a speech to theKnesset on June 21, 1967, while the lastfew houses were being destroyed: “Theinhabitants of the West Bank were notan objective, neutral population in thiswar, but part of the Kingdom of Jordanand of the deployment of those forcesthat began warfare against Israel .... Thecivilians in the various villages and theirfamilies were partners to this war; thecannons which fired on Lod airport andTel Aviv were stationed in thesevillages. They were not fired fromTransjordan.... I would be much happierif I could come here and say that theJordanian Legion forces carried on thiswar and the West Bank inhabitants didwhatever they did under coercion orremained neutral; but it was not so.”

The second explanation has become thestandard one, summed up by M. H.Sharon, then Israeli press counsellor inLondon, in a letter to the LondonSunday Times in June, 1968 “Thesevillages suffered heavy damage duringthe June war and its immediateaftermath, when our troops engagedtwo Egyptian commando units whichhad established themselves there and

continued fighting after the ceasefire.”Yet eyewitness accounts from bothsides seem to agree that the Israelis metno resistance, and that the houses weredestroyed one by one after the war.

There is a good reason why Israeligenerals wanted the villages wiped out: their location. The villages were partof what is called the Latrun salient, apocket-shaped piece of land jutting intoIsrael and commanding the hills at theentrance to the main corridor toJerusalem. Jewish forces tried to takethe heights in the 1948 war, the war inwhich Israel was created, but lost thecampaign at enormous cost. “Latrunwas Israel’s nightmare,” said Mira Meir,the general secretary of KibbutzNachshon opposite Canada Park “It wascalled the Latrun monster, the site ofvery bad battles in 1948 and a synonymfor something unconquered.”

When the war broke out in 1967, theIsraeli army was determined not only toneutralize Latrun but to make it part ofIsrael, said Uri Avnery, a long-timeIsraeli member of parliament known forhis criticism of Israel’s treatment of theArabs. “The Israeli mentality is that youchange boundaries by changingpopulations,” Avnery told me. “Theidea was, let’s get rid of the Arabsbefore we get to the negotiation table.”(Nobody at the time predicted Israelwould hold on indefinitely to the Arabterritories overrun in the war.) “Ofcourse, what happened at Latrun ismanifestly illegal. This was a war crime,very simply.”

KIBBUTZ Nachshon is within walkingdistance of Canada Park It was here thatI spoke to Mira Meir. Besides beinggeneral secretary of the kibbutz, she isan accomplished writer of children’sbooks and recently helped adaptSesame Street for Israeli television.

“We never had any trouble with ourneighbours,” she said. “Quite theopposite. We were separated by a stripof no-man’s land, and each side beganto cultivate it - a little more each year,because the border was in no particularplace and it was very good soil. In 1965,

something marvellous happened. Ourfields were so close that we begantaking coffee breaks with the Arabsfrom Emwas, sitting with them. Weexchanged small souvenirs, key-holders and things, which we still havetoday. We stopped when soldiers fromthe Arab Legion outpost opened fireand badly wounded one of ourmembers.”

After the 1967 war, when most of themen from the kibbutz were stillmobilized in the army, she heard theIsraeli soldiers blowing up the housesat Emwas. “I and other members of thekibbutz tried to have it stopped. Eachtried in his own way. I went to Jerusalemto lobby members of the Knesset. Therewas no reason to take quiet citizens andsend them away. Everyone was sayinghow benevolent the Israelis were - andhere, through our windows, we sawsomething different.

“Later we heard a park was going to beestablished there, and people would begoing for picnics. Nobody from thiskibbutz has ever gone to sit there. It ispainful to have it next to our door.”

Shaul Sharon, another long-timemember of the kibbutz, joined in: “I’m afarmer. There are many things I don’tunderstand, but when I pass the parkthere is something - I can’t explain it -that I feel right here.” He put his handto his stomach. “I don’t feel very good.What I’m sorry about is that we neverhad a chance to live with them as realneighbours. I don’t feel very proudabout it”

Amos Kenan concluded his report tothe Knesset: “The children whodragged themselves along the road thatday, weeping bitterly, will be thefedayeen of nineteen years hence. Thisis how, that day, we lost the victory.”

Uri Avnery drew the same conclusionin a speech to the Knesset on June 21,1967, in a reply to Moshe Dayan’sspeech equating the Arab villagers witha belligerent army: “I blame MinisterDayan from this podium for us havinglost a most important campaign after the

16

war. We achieved a brilliant victory inthe days of the war. Almost the wholeworld was on our side. How did we losethis fantastic moral advantage within afew days? What for? What is the useof it? ... It will cause weeping forgenerations, a residue of hate amongthose with whom we shall wish to livetogether tomorrow.”

I

N 1973, Bernard Bloomfeld of Montreal,then president of the Jewish NationalFund of Canada, acted on a suggestionfrom JNF headquarters in Jerusalem thathe raise money for a park easilyaccessible from both Jerusalem and TelAviv. Funds were raised, and work onthe park soon began.

Rubble from the Arab houses wascarted away. Pine trees were plantedamong the fruit trees of Emwas. Namesof Canadian donors were placed on thestone wall of the CommemorationsCentre. Even now, workers can be seencarting off the remaining signs of Yalufor another picnic ground.

“I don’t know anything about any Arabvillages,” Bloomfield told me angrily by

telephone. I began telling him the story,but he hung up.

Akiva Einis, a JNF official in Jerusalemwho oversees Canadian projects, saidhe was instrumental in persuading theJNF of Canada to sponsor the park. Hesaid he told the Canadians the parkwould cover the ruins of at least oneArab village, and that the park wouldhe partly in Israeli-occupied Jordan.The Canadians liked the site, he said,because of its easy access from bothJerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The name Canada Park came from Einis,following the tradition of naming JNFprojects after the country of thesponsors. “I actually chose the namebecause they [the JNF of Canada]suggested the Great Canadian Forestor something,” Einis said. “But the ideathat the name include Canada came fromthem.” Elsewhere in Israel there werealready parks called Canada Forest, theCanadian Centennial Forest, and theCanadian Friendship Forest.

The Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv isuncomfortable about having a site withsuch a history bearing Canada’s name.

As Don Sinclair, Canada’s firstsecretary in Tel Aviv, put it: “We findourselves in the position of having toexplain the name - of having to explainthat this is a private venture involvingprivate Canadian money, that theCanadian government is not involvedin planning it or funding it.”

Canadian government representativesavoid stepping into the part of the parkin occupied Jordanian territory becauseCanada considers development ofoccupied territory, other than formilitary security, illegal underinternational law. Michael Yarosky,vice-president of the JNF of Canada forthe past two years, said he wasn’t awareof the Canadian governments attitudetoward the park, or that a portion of thepark is in occupied territory. Yaroskycontinues to solicit donations towardthe park’s upkeep and development Inwhat better way, he argues, could aCanadian contribute to the well-beingof Israel’s Jews and Arabs than bycreating a place of recreation andrelaxation for them?

17

17

CANADA PARK, West Bank - ZahdaShaker Abu Qtaish wipes tears from hereyes as she sits on a pile of rocks.

“This is my house,” she says, pointingto the rubble. “Right here is thebedroom; across the street is the coffeeshop and over there is the post office.When you open a window, you can seeout over all of the plains.

“I see everything; I remembereverything; I will never forget.”

For Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish, 65, thispile of weed-choked stones in the midstof leafy trees will always be special.From it, in her mind, she still sees a store,a schoolhouse, a medical clinic, a cafe,children laughing, goats, donkeys,orchards.

park is an 32,000-hectare (80,000-acre)oasis of greenery within sight of themain Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Aglossy brochure describes it as “acreative innovation in recreation inIsrael . . . matching the naturalconditions of the area with thearchaeological ruins to meet the needof rest and recreation in the heart ofnature.”

Israeli tour guides point out the park toCanadian tourists - Christian andJewish alike. They conveniently skipover the fact that Arab towns onceexisted here. One of the destroyedvillages was Emmaus, known toPalestinians as Amwas. It was whereQtaish was born, raised, attendedschool, married and gave birth to her

Jerusalem. On a clear day you can seeTel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea 35kilometers (20 miles) away. Thousandsof Israeli Jews flock to the park to enjoypicnics, to camp, to hike along theterraced hillsides, to dip their feet in coolspring water.

Watching over them are Israeli soldiers,who sometimes join children in buyingsnacks from the ice-cream trucks thatcruise the park’s paved roads.

Amwas dates back to biblical times. Itwas here. accordingly to the Gospel ofSt. Luke. that Jesus Christ appeared inthe first days after the crucifixion andate with two disciples who failed torecognize Him until He performed a

In reality, though, the pile of rocks is allthat remains of her family’s ancestralhome. It is also a constant, brutalreminder of hatred and fear in thistension-filled region.

Canada Park is built on the ruins ofthree once-thriving Arab villages thatIsraeli soldiers bulldozed into theground during the 1967 Mideast War.Nearly 9,000 Arab residents were drivenout of their homes and forced to marchfor days over rocky hillsides to safety.

When the residents were gone, thesoldiers pulled down the homes andplowed under the orchards. Israel wipedthe villages off the map.

“I feel like I was slaughtered on thealter,” Qtaish says in a quavering voice.“Those Jews from Canada who builtCanada Park, they should see what theydid. Why did they build it?”

Today, Canada Park is a source of pridefor Canadian Jews, who funded it as asign of Canadian-Israeli friendship. The

children. The other villages were BeitNuba and Yalu.

The story of Amwas is 24 years old butis important once again - especially forCanadians - because the proposedMiddle East peace conference couldresult in Israel giving up some of theWest Bank lands seized during the 1967war. Places like Amwas could be up forgrabs in a land-for-peace settlementbetween Israel and the Palestinians.

Several Christians in Switzerland havealready formed the Association for theReconstruction of Emmaus with theprime objective of rebuilding the Arabvillage as a sign of reconciliationbetween Arabs and Jews. So far, thegroup’s activities have been limited topromoting their cause. An exhibit ofphotographs and a large clay model ofAmwas will be on display late thismonth in Geneva.

Canada Park sits on a spectacular site.It lies where the Israeli coastal plainmeets the hills that climb up to

ritual blessing: “And their eyes wereopened, and they knew Him.”

Jews say the area is closely linked tothe history of Israel. Joshua Ben Nundefeated the Canaanites here, and nearthe ancient city of Emmaus JudahMaccabbee launched a surprise attackon the Seleucid Greeks, winning his firstimportant victory in seizing Judea.Later, the Romans built two forts toguard the road to Jerusalem. JuliusCeasar may have visited here. Manyother ruins go back to the Byzantineera.

From 1948 until 1967 Amwas was inJordanian territory. The so-called GreenLine that separated Israel from Jordanran right along the western edge of thevillage. Before 1967, the village ofAmwas, or Emmaus, appeared on Israelimaps of the Holy Land along with itssister villages of Beit Nuba and Yalu.They no longer appear on official Israelimaps. It is as if for Israel the villagesnever existed.

WIPED OFF THE MAPPark funded by Canadian Jews hides ruins of Arab villages.

By Bob Hepburn TORONTO STAR

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Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish was 30 whenwar erupted on June 5, 1967. She waspregnant. Her youngest daughter,Naheda, was celebrating her firstbirthday that morning. Three otherdaughters were at home while herhusband and two sons were inJerusalem.

Her father was a major landowner in theAmwas area, with many laborersworking m his orchards and olive trees.The family had lived in the village forcenturies.

“As long as I remember, I only rememberliving in Amwas,” Qtaish said throughan Arabic translator.

In the days immediately before the war,she could hear sporadic gunfirebetween Israeli and Jordanian soldiers.Some Jordanian soldiers were postedon the rooftops of houses on thehighest points in the village. “Theshooting was going on for a few days,but we kept working, plowing the land,fixing tiles on the veranda,” sherecalled.

When the war actually started on June5, Jordanian soldiers came to everyhouse in Amwas and told the residentsnot to worry, that everything would beall right. No one believed them.

“People started to leave, running inevery direction,” she said. “I couldn’tgo anywhere. My husband was inJerusalem. I didn’t know what to do.”

Qtaish hid the night of June 5-6 withher children in the basement of herhome. When she came out the nextmorning, she saw soldiers. “I thoughtthey were Arab soldiers, but when they,saw me, one of them ran toward me,yelling, ‘Where are the men?’ I realizedhe was Jewish.

“They told us to come with the childrento the mukhtar’s (community-leader)home. I replied that 1 couldn’t; I hadbread baking in the oven, the closetswere open, the house was not tidy, thechickens were hungry.

“The Jew said it was not important, thatlater I could come back and fixeverything. I took the children. One washolding my hand, one was on myshoulder, one was holding my dress.

“When we got to the mukhtar’s house,the Israelis said to keep walking, to goto Yalu. I pled that the house was open,that the bread was in the oven. We lefteverything, our clothes, our money,everything.

“When I reached Yalu, my legs gaveup. Everybody from Amwas was there.We were told to keep walking. Wewalked for three days to Ramallah (northof Jerusalem). A lot of people died onthe road. My feet were bleeding.

“For the next two months we slept underthe trees. We had no tents, no blankets.We slept on dirt. My family was thirstyand hungry.„

Five years passed before Qtaishreturned to Amwas with her family. Bythen, her husband had died and she wasliving in a small house near the Jalazunrefugee camp north of Ramallah. It isstill home today.

I couldn’t believe it,” Qtaish said,waving her hands in the air and placingthem on the side of her head in anguish,“My home was down to the ground.They had turned the village into a park.They called it Canada Park. I cried andcried.”

Qtaish showed her children where thefamily home had been and tried to pickolives from the family’s trees. “Jewishmen chased us away. I said these weremy olives, but they still chased us.”

Israel offered the Amwas villagerscompensation for their homes but noone ever accepted. Today, the formerresidents of Amwas are scatteredaround the world - in the West Bank,Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Europe,the United States and Canada.

At least once a month, Qtaish and herfamily travel the 50 kilometers (30 miles)to Canada Park. They stop and pray

outside the barbed wire fence thatblocks their access to her grandfather’stomb. Inside the fence, which alsoencloses the ruins of a Romanbathhouse, is a sign stating that the“Children of Montreal helped fund thearchaeological excavations at the site.

.Walking through the forest, Qtaishpoints out pieces of iron, fragments ofstones that once formed thefoundations for her neighbors’ houses.“I know exactly where everything is,”she said. “Every family has a specialplace.”

Her son, Adnan, said he brings hismother whenever she is feeling tired.“Look at her,” he said “Running aroundlike a young lady, a big smile on herface.”

Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish wonders tothis day why Israel destroyed Amwas.“It was the Jordanian army that wasfighting them, not us from the village, ‘she said.

Walking arm-in-arm with her daughterNaheda through the ruins of the village,Qtaish paused, then in a voice barelyabove a whisper said: “If the Israelisgave me a tent, I would come here andlive again.”

Yaacov Golan was a 19-year old privatein an Israeli infantry platoon when thewar broke out. His unit was stationedon Hill 364, a barren peak above the 100year-old Latrun monastery. From there,Golan could see the entire AyalonValley, a small demilitarized zone wheremembers of nearby Kibbutz Nahshonwere harvesting wheat.

Golan was a radio operator, able to listento the military commanders in the valleybelow.

The area around Amwas was called theLatrun salient. It was thumb-shapedpiece of Jordanian territory that juttedinto Israel. For years, it had beenconsidered one of the most strategiczones in the region.

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It was the easiest place where Arabtroops could break into Israel, havingbeen a base for Arab commandos sincethe 1948 Mideast war. Whoever held itcontrolled the vital Tel Aviv-Jerusalemcorridor. Thus, both Israeli and theArab forces were poised for a majorbattle at Latrun.

“We were south of the Jordanianfortifications,” Golan recalled “Whenthe war started on the afternoon of June5, we were shelled by the Jordanians.At night, the Israeli attack started. Asthe radio man, I could listen to whatwas happening. About 2 a.m., I heardone of the commanders in the valleydescribing the mass evacuation ofJordanian soldiers and civilians fromthe area.

The next day, about noon, we got ordersto move into the occupied area. We tookup a position on a fortified hillabandoned by the Jordanians rightabove Amwas, just several hundredmetres away.

To get there, we drove a jeep throughthe narrow alleys of the village. Iremember it was completely abandoned.

“About a week later, we were told tomove again, this time to east Jerusalem.When we came down the hill we sawthe village was already gone, levelled.It was rubble. There were a few oldpeople, donkeys and goats.

It came as a big surprise.”

Amos Kenan was a 40-year-old Israeliarmy reservist assigned to the Latrunarea during the war. He was also aprofessional journalist in civilian life.Today he lives in Tel Aviv, an often surlyman who dislikes reporters prying intoAmwas.

Yet Kenan witnessed first-hand thehorror at Amwas. His job was to stopthe villagers from re-entering the area.It so horrified him he wrote a privatejournal about the scene and sent copiesto every member of the Israeli Knesset(parliament).

His journal, later translated in-, toEnglish, provides a gripping accountof e actual destruction: “There were oldmen hardly able to walk, old womenmumbling to themselves, babies in theirmother’s arms small children weeping,begging for water. ... They said somehad perished on the way.. . . Thechildren wept and some of our soldierswept too.

“Our platoon commander decided to goto headquarters to find out whetherthere were any written orders as to whatshould be done with them. . . . He cameback and said there was no writtenorder, we were to drive them away. Likelost sheep they went on wanderingalong the roads. The exhausted werebeyond rescuing.

“The battalion grumbled and thevillagers gritted their teeth as theywatched the bulldozers flattening trees.That night we stayed on to guard thebulldozers, but the entire battalion wasincensed, and most of the men didn’twant to carry out the orders. In themorning we were transferred out.

“Not one of us could understand howJews could do such a thing. Even thosewho defended the action conceded that(the authorities) could have put uptemporary accommodations for thevillagers until a final decision wasreached on where they were to go, andthen they could have taken theirbelongings along. It was impossible tofathom why those fellahin (peasants)should not have been allowed to taketheir kerosene stoves, blankets, andprovisions with them.

“Chickens and pigeons were buriedunder the rubble. The fields were laidwaste before our very eyes. And thechildren straggling along the roadswailing and crying bitter tears will bethe fedayeen (warriors) of the nextround in another 19 years. That’s howwe bungled the victory that day

Kenan also sent his report to then primeminister Levi Eshkol and defenceminister Moshe Dayan. They neverreplied.

Eventually, Israel gave severalexplanations for why it ordered thebulldozing and dynamiting of Arabvillages m the West Bank. Dayan saidthe operation was for strategic reasons.

“The inhabitants of the West Bank werenot an objective, neutral population inthis war, but part of the Kingdom ofJordan and of the deployment of thoseforces that began warfare againstIsrael,” he told the Knesset 10 daysafter the ceasefire was announced.

“The civilians in the various villagesand their families were partners to thiswar, the cannons which fired on Lodairport and Tel Aviv were stationed inthese villages. They were not fired fromTransjordan. . . . I would be muchhappier if I could come here and saythat the Jordanian Legion forces carriedon this war, and the West Bankinhabitants did whatever they did undercoercion or remained neutral, but it wasnot so.”

A year later, in response to an article onAmwas in the Times, the press attachéin the Israeli embassy In London wrotea letter to the editor in which he arguedthe Jordanians would have destroyedIsraeli towns if they’d’ had the chance.

“These villages suffered heavy damageduring the June war and its immediateaftermath when our troops engaged twoEgyptian commando units, which hadestablished themselves there andcontinued fighting after the ceasefire,”M.H. Sharon wrote.

“There is no need to speculate as towhat would have happened to ourvillages and towns had the tide turnedthe other way. The intentions of ourneighbor are shown by Jordanian battleorders that fell into our hands,instructing units ‘to kill all inhabitants’of the places they were supposed totake.”

As in many post-war reconstructionsof events, of who gave the orders andwho carried them out, there are stillconflicting Israeli accounts of exactly

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who decided to bulldoze Amwas, BeitNuba and Yalu.

Was it a definite order by Dayan? Orwas it soldiers acting on their own?

Rafik Halaby, a former Israeli Journalistwho wrote a detailed book called TheWest Bank Story, said that regardlessof who gave the exact order,it was clearthe villages “were deliberately razed forreasons of strategic necessity.

“When Latrun fell in 1967, the militaryauthorities decided to settle theproblem of the salient once and for alland literally wiped the threesettlements off the face of the Earth,”he wrote. “Even the carefully hewnstones of demolished buildings werecarted off by private buildingcontractors.”

At the entrance to Canada Park, justoff John Diefenbaker Parkway (openedby Diefenbaker himself in 1975), is a signthat reads: “Welcome to Canada Parkin Ayalon Valley - A project of theJewish National Fund of Canada.”

Other signs mark contributions fromindividual Canadians, such as Josephand Faye Tanenbaum of Toronto, whofunded the Valley of Springs.

Bernard Bloomfield, the late presidentof the Jewish National Fund (JNF) ofCanada, was the driving force behindthe idea for Canada Park. His widow,Neri, is now JNF president.

In 1973, he spearheaded a campaignamong the Canadian Jewish communityto raise $15 million to establish the park.One of its early brochures boasted howthe site of Canada Park was “liberatedby the Israeli Defence Forces” in 1967.

Under the terms of the agreementbetween the JNF and Israel, noCanadian money was to be spent onthose parts of the park located onoccupied land - in other words, on mostof it. Individual Canadian Jews,however, made donations that wereclearly spent in occupied territory. TheJoseph and Faye Tanenbaum

Recreation Area, for example, is onformer Arab land.

The Canadian fund drive for CanadaPark ended in 1984

Since 1973, more than 5 million treeshave been planted in Canada Park. In1986 former Ontario Premier DavidPeterson ran into a storm of protest fromArab-Canadians when he offered toplant a tree in Canada Park as a gift offriendship to Israel.

The names of thousands of Canadianswho contributed to Canada Park are ona commemorative wall in the park. Thesite, which is just a few metres outsidethe Green line, also includes the namesof individual Canadians and Canadiancompanies that have donated moneyover the years to various Israeliprojects.

The Toronto Star Newspaper Ltd. has anameplate attached to a wall at thecommemorative centre. The Star madea contribution in 1989 to the BassettFoundation for Environmental Actionin Israel.

“We were told that the money wouldgo toward the promotion ofenvironmental care-in Israel, not towardbuilding a park on the West Bank,” saysBurnett Thall, vice-president of TheStar.

The commemorative centre is barely 50metres from the ruins of Zahda ShakerAbu Qtaish’s home.

It is also less than a kilometre from theLatrun monastery, where Catholicmonks have reported tales ofPalestinians being buried alive whenthe Israeli bulldozers smashed intoAmwas.

For nearly a century, dozens of Amwaslaborers had worked for the Latrunmonks in their winery and thesurrounding fields.

Father Tournay, a Catholic priest whohas lived in east Jerusalem since 1945and was head of the Ecole Biblique

there, said the Latrun monks “smelledbodies” rotting inside the demolishedhomes.

In an interview from his bed at St.Joseph’s Hospital in east Jerusalem,Tournay told of how the Latrun monksvisited Amwas in the days immediately,after the Israelis captured the village.

“They demanded answers from thesoldiers, from the Israelis,” he said.“They got no reply.”

The Latrun monks insist there were noserious battles between Jordanian andIsraeli troops on June 5, 1967, nearAmwas. The Jordanian soldiers simplyfled without much of a fight.

To this day, the Trappist monks atLatrun are reluctant to discuss Amwasin any detail. They worry aboutupsetting Israeli authorities.

Father Louis, a monk who has lived atLatrun for 40 years, shrugged hisshoulders when asked about reports ofbodies. “I hear things,” he said in ameeting at the monastery.

Israeli authorities have consistentlydenied any Palestinians were buried inAmwas, Beit Nuba or Yula.

Father Louis remembers his first visitto Amwas after the war. “I cried,” hesaid. “I knew these people. Theyworked for us. They were gone. Theirhomes were gone.

“Every time I go by Canada Park, I stillget angry,” he said in the monastery’sguest house. “Why does the Canadiangovernment allow it to be called CanadaPark? It is built on the ruins of people’shomes.”

Residents of the nearby KibbutzNahshon, the closest Israeli communityto Amwas, also are convinced theresidents of the Arab village had littleto do with the fighting.

“I am sure no one from Amwas” wasinvolved, said Shadmi, a glassmakerfrom the kibbutz. “We were shocked,

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there was hardly any fighting thereduring the war.”

Shadmi (the only name he gave) saidthere was little contact betweenresidents of the kibbutz and the Arabvillages before the 1967 war. They livedin separate countries, he noted. Hedidn’t set foot in the village until severaldays after the ceasefire.

“Nobody was there, but there were alot of cows, small houses, shops,”Shadmi said. “The next week they (theIsraelis) bombed all the small houses.”

Shadmi is sorry the Arab villagers losttheir homes but isn’t sorry the threat ofArab violence in the region was erased.

“Until 1967 I always worried about mychildren,” he said. “I shall never forgetall those years. I told my children tostay away from the hills, that Arabterrorists are sitting around and fromtime to time shooting at Israelis. We werealways afraid of Arab shooting becausewe were very near the border.”

“Latrun and Amwas were the key pointin wars. They controlled the high roadto Jerusalem. We had to close it forever.It was an order and the poor people ofAmwas were caught by it.

“ Michael Adams, a British reporter whohas researched Amwas extensivelysince 1968, wrote recently he had a greatdeal of trouble convincing editors tocarry articles about villages destroyedby the Israelis.

“The Israeli government and whoeverin the army command gave the order todestroy the villages,” he wrote, “musthave thought that it was possible torearrange both history and geographyin this way: that if they carted away the

rubble and raked over the ground andplanted seedlings where the homes of9.000 people had been, all of which theydid, they would be able to get away withit.

“Why? Because of the Holocaust, andbecause Western newspaper editorsdon’t like to be called anti-Semitic.”

The mere mention of Canada Park is asensitive issue for Canadian diplomatsin Tel Aviv.

Canada’s official position is that it hasno opinion on Canada Park because itwas “a private initiative” by Canadiancitizens, according to Michel deSalaberry, senior counsellor at theembassy. He declined to discuss theissue any further.

In an obvious private protest, however,few if any of the Canadian diplomatsassigned to Israel have ever set foot inthe park

Morris Zilka, executive vice-presidentof the Jewish National Fund of Canada,conceded that . Canada Park is a“sensitive” issue for the Montreal-based group.

“I guess Canada Park is back in thenews again with the peace process andthe issue of returning land for peace,”he said in a telephone interview fromCanada.

Zilka admitted openly that “some” Arabvillages had been destroyed on the siteof Canada Park But he quickly addedthat ‘ the money raised by CanadianJews was only a small fraction of thefunds needed to develop the park

“We finished with the project in 1984and haven’t raised any money for itsince,” he said. “We are not sellinganything now, we are not evenpublishing any pamphlets” about thepark

“Some” Canadian Jews who donatedto Canada Park probably never realizedit was built on the site of threedemolished Arab villages, he said.Others, though, knew exactly where thepark was located, he added, noting that,some Jews are quite forceful indemanding their funds be spent’ onprojects in the West Bank.

Over the years, many Israelis,Palestinians and Canadians haveprotested to the Israeli governmentabout Canada Park and what happenedat Amwas.

But Shadmi of Kibbutz Nahshon, wheremany residents violently opposed thedemolitions, says the complaints areuseless:

“Everyone can talk but in war who willlisten? So what if we protest? Soldiersalso protested. If we still protest, thenwhat? Who will listen?”

Israeli television recently broadcast abeautiful 10-minute travelogue onCanada Park

It was filled with inspiring music andscenes of green trees, grass, toddlershappily playing on swings, picnics,fresh springs and streams. It describedthe area’s archaeological importanceand its heritage from the biblical daysof Joshua and the Romans to the 1948War of Independence.

The film made no mention of the Arabvillage of Amwas.

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Yom Tov 5745September 1984

Dear Member:In a few days, Jews will gather in synagogues to observe Yom Kippur. As we recite the Yiskor Prayer, we willrecall our parents, relatives and friends who are no longer with us.

But Yiskor is more than just a reminder of the past. It is a summons to serve our people. It is a prayer whosekey component is “tzedakah”, as we act not only with prayers, but with deeds.

Your donation to the ‘Yiskor Appeal’ of the Jewish National Fund will enable the vital work of land reclamation,road-building, infrastructure preparation and tree-planting to continue. It will give meaningful expression toyour prayers by linking the names of your dear ones with constructive efforts to strengthen the land andensure a secure future for our people.

Please respond on the attached form. Income Tax receipts will be issued for all contributionsand your donation will help complete the Grove in Canada Park-, in Israel, undertaken bythe members of the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol-Tifereth Israel synagogue.

May you and your family be blessed with a New Year of Health, Happiness and Peace.

Sincerely yours,

Ben C. Hilner Nat S. BernsteinPresident Chairman, Synagogue LiaisonBeth Hamedrash Hagadol- JNF of Montreal Tifereth Israel synagogue

Text of the supplication sent out by theJewish National Fund of Canada.