Information compiled by Ron Saba, Editor, Montreal Planet Magazine
CBC Video: Jewish National Fund's (JNF) "Canadian cover-up to a war crime"
Toronto Star: "Park funded by Canadian Jews hide ruins of Arab villages", "Wiped off the Map", "Old Arab villages wiped off the map":
Toronto Star - Toronto, Ont.
Author: Bob Hepburn Toronto Star
Date: Oct 6, 1991
Start Page: H.1
Section: NEWS
Text Word Count: 4298
Document Text
Note
CANADA PARK, West Bank - Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish wipes tears from her eyes as she sits on a pile of rocks.
"This is my house," she says, pointing to the rubble. "Right here is the bedroom; across the street is the coffee shop and over there is the post office. When you open a window, you can see out over all of the plains.
"I see everything; I remember everything; I will never forget."
For Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish, 65, this pile of weed-choked stones in the midst of 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.
In reality, though, the pile of rocks is all that remains of her family's ancestral home. It is also a constant, brutal reminder of hatred and fear in this tension-filled region.
Canada Park is built on the ruins of three once-thriving Arab villages that Israeli soldiers bulldozed into the ground during the 1967 Mideast War. Nearly 9,000 Arab residents were driven out of their homes and forced to march for days over rocky hillsides to safety.
When the residents were gone, the soldiers pulled down the homes and plowed under the orchards. Israel wiped the villages off the map.
"I feel like I was slaughtered on the alter," Qtaish says in a quavering voice. "Those Jews from Canada who built Canada Park, they should see what they did. Why did they build it?"
Today, Canada Park is a source of pride for Canadian Jews, who funded it as a sign of Canadian-Israeli friendship. The park is an 32,000-hectare (80,000-acre) oasis of greenery within sight of the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. A glossy brochure describes it as "a creative innovation in recreation in Israel . . . matching the natural conditions of the area with the archaeological ruins to meet the need of rest and recreation in the heart of nature."
Israeli tour guides point out the park to Canadian tourists - Christian and Jewish alike. They conveniently skip over the fact that Arab towns once existed here. One of the destroyed villages was Emmaus, known to Palestinians as Amwas. It was where Qtaish was born, raised, attended school, married and gave birth to her children. The other villages were Beit Nuba and Yalu.
The story of Amwas is 24 years old but is important once again - especially for Canadians - because the proposed Middle East peace conference could result in Israel giving up some of the West Bank lands seized during the 1967 war. Places like Amwas could be up for grabs in a land-for-peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Several Christians in Switzerland have already formed the Association for the Reconstruction of Emmaus with the prime objective of rebuilding the Arab village as a sign of reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. So far, the group's activities have been limited to promoting their cause. An exhibit of photographs and a large clay model of Amwas will be on display late this month in Geneva.
Canada Park sits on a spectacular site. It lies where the Israeli coastal plain meets the hills that climb up to Jerusalem. On a clear day you can see Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea 35 kilometres (20 miles) away. Thousands of Israeli Jews flock to the park to enjoy picnics, to camp, to hike along the terraced hillsides, to dip their feet in cool spring water.
Watching over them are Israeli soldiers, who sometimes join children in buying snacks from the ice-cream trucks that cruise the park's paved roads.
Amwas dates back to biblical times. It was here, according to the Gospel of St. Luke, that Jesus Christ appeared in the first days after the crucifixion and ate with two disciples who failed to recognize Him until He performed a ritual blessing: "And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him."
Jews say the area is closely linked to the history of Israel. Joshua Ben Nun defeated the Canaanites here, and near the ancient city of Emmaus Judah Maccabbee launched a surprise attack on the Seleucid Greeks, winning his first important victory in seizing Judea. Later, the Romans built two forts to guard the road to Jerusalem. Julius Ceasar may have visited here. Many other ruins go back to the Byzantine era.
From 1948 until 1967 Amwas was in Jordanian territory. The so- called Green Line that separated Israel from Jordan ran right along the western edge of the village. Before 1967, the village of Amwas, or Emmaus, appeared on Israeli maps of the Holy Land along with its sister villages of Beit Nuba and Yalu. They no longer appear on official Israeli maps. It is as if for Israel the villages never existed.
Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish was 30 when war erupted on June 5, 1967. She was pregnant. Her youngest daughter, Naheda, was celebrating her first birthday that morning. Three other daughters were at home while her husband and two sons were in Jerusalem.
Her father was a major landowner in the Amwas area, with many laborers working in his orchards and olive trees. The family had lived in the village for centuries.
"As long as I remember, I only remember living in Amwas," Qtaish said through an Arabic translator.
In the days immediately before the war, she could hear sporadic gunfire between Israeli and Jordanian soldiers. Some Jordanian soldiers were posted on the rooftops of houses on the highest points in the village. "The shooting was going on for a few days, but we kept working, plowing the land, fixing tiles on the veranda," she recalled.
When the war actually started on June 5, Jordanian soldiers came to every house in Amwas and told the residents not to worry, that everything would be all right. No one believed them.
"People started to leave, running in every direction," she said. "I couldn't go anywhere. My husband was in Jerusalem. I didn't know what to do."
Qtaish hid the night of June 5-6 with her children in the basement of her home. When she came out the next morning, she saw soldiers. "I thought they were Arab soldiers, but when they saw me, one of them ran toward me, yelling, 'Where are the men?' I realized he was Jewish.
"They told us to come with the children to the mukhtar's (community-leader) home. I replied that I couldn't; I had bread baking in the oven, the closets were open, the house was not tidy, the chickens were hungry.
"The Jew said it was not important, that later I could come back and fix everything. I took the children. One was holding my hand, one was on my shoulder, one was holding my dress.
"When we got the mukhtar's house, the Israelis said to keep walking, to go to Yalu. I pleaded that the house was open, that the bread was in the oven. We left everything, our clothes, our money, everything.
"When I reached Yalu, my legs gave up. Everybody from Amwas was there. We were told to keep walking. We walked for three days to Ramallah (north of Jerusalem). A lot of people died on the road. My feet were bleeding.
"For the next two months we slept under the trees. We had no tents, no blankets. We slept on dirt. My family was thirsty and hungry."
Five years passed before Qtaish returned to Amwas with her family. By then, her husband had died and she was living in a small house near the Jalazun refugee camp north of Ramallah. It is still home today.
"I couldn't believe it," Qtaish said, waving her hands in the air and placing them 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 and cried."
Qtaish showed her children where the family home had been and tried to pick olives from the family's trees. "Jewish men chased us away. I said these were my olives, but they still chased us."
Israel offered the Amwas villagers compensation for their homes but no one ever accepted. Today, the former residents of Amwas are scattered around the world - in the West Bank, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Europe, the United States and Canada.
At least once a month, Qtaish and her family travel the 50 kilometres (30 miles) to Canada Park. They stop and pray outside the barbed wire fence that blocks their access to her grandfather's tomb. Inside the fence, which also encloses the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, is a sign stating that the "Children of Montreal" helped fund the archaeological excavations at the site.
Walking through the forest, Qtaish points out pieces of iron, fragments of stones that once formed the foundations for her neighbors' houses. "I know exactly where everything is," she said. "Every family has a special place."
Her son, Adnan, said he brings his mother whenever she is feeling tired. "Look at her," he said. "Running around like a young lady, a big smile on her face."
Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish wonders to this day why Israel destroyed Amwas. "It was the Jordanian army that was fighting them, not us from the village," she said.
Walking arm-in-arm with her daughter Naheda through the ruins of the village, Qtaish paused, then in a voice barely above a whisper said: "If the Israelis gave me a tent, I would come here and live again."
Yaacov Golan was a 19-year- old private in an Israeli infantry platoon when the war broke out. His unit was stationed on Hill 364, a barren peak above the Latrun monastery. From there, Golan could see the entire Ayalon Valley, a small demilitarized zone and fields where members of nearby Kibbutz Nahshon were harvesting wheat.
Golan was a radio operator, able to listen to the military commanders in the valley below.
The area around Amwas was called the Latrun salient. It was a thumb-shaped piece of Jordanian territory that jutted into Israel. For years, it had been considered one of the most strategic zones in the region.
It was the easiest place where Arab troops could break into Israel, having been a base for Arab commandos since the 1948 Mideast war. Whoever held it controlled the vital Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor.
Thus, both Israeli and the Arab forces were poised for a major battle at Latrun, the site of a 100-year-old Trappist monastery.
"We were south of the Jordanian fortifications," Golan recalled. "When the war started on the afternoon of June 5, we were shelled by the Jordanians. At night, the Israeli attack started.
"As the radio man, I could listen to what was happening. About 2 a.m., I heard one of the commanders in the valley describing the mass evacuation of Jordanian soldiers and civilians from the area.
'When we came down to hill we saw the village was gone, levelled'
"The next day, about noon, we got orders to move into the occupied area. We took up a position on a fortified hill abandoned by the Jordanians right above Amwas, just several hundred metres away.
"To get there, we drove a jeep through the narrow alleys of the village. I remember it was completely abandoned.
"About a week later, we were told to move again, this time to East Jerusalem. When we came down the hill we saw the village was already gone, levelled. It was rubble. There were a few old people, donkeys and goats.
"It came as a big surprise."
Amos Kenan was a 40-year-old Israeli army reservist assigned to the Latrun area during the war. He was also a professional journalist in civilian life. Today he lives in Tel Aviv, an often surly man who dislikes reporters prying into Amwas.
Yet Kenan witnessed first-hand the horror at Amwas. His job was to stop the villagers from re-entering the area. It so horrified him he wrote a private journal about the scene and sent copies to every member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
His journal, later translated into English, provides a gripping account of the actual destruction:
"There were old men hardly able to walk, old women mumbling to themselves, babies in their mother's arms, small children weeping, begging for water. . . . They said some had perished on the way. . . . The children wept and some of our soldiers wept too.
"Our platoon commander decided to go to headquarters to find out whether there were any written orders as to what should be done with them. . . . He came back and said there was no written order, we were to drive them away. Like lost sheep they went on wandering along the roads. The exhausted were beyond rescuing.
"The battalion grumbled and the villagers gritted their teeth as they watched the bulldozers flattening trees. That night we stayed on to guard the bulldozers, but the entire battalion was incensed, and most of the men didn't want to carry out the orders. In the morning we were transferred out.
"Not one of us could understand how Jews could do such a thing. Even those who defended the action conceded that (the authorities) could have put up temporary accommodations for the villagers until a final decision was reached on where they were to go, and then they could have taken their belongings along. It was impossible to fathom why those fellahin (peasants) should not have been allowed to take their kerosene stoves, blankets, and provisions with them.
"Chickens and pigeons were buried under the rubble. The fields were laid waste before our very eyes. And the children straggling along the roads wailing and crying bitter tears will be the fedayeen (warriors) of the next round in another 19 years. That's how we bungled the victory that day."
Kenan also sent his report to then prime minister Levi Eshkol and defence minister Moshe Dayan. They never replied.
Eventually, Israel gave several explanations for why it ordered the bulldozing and dynamiting of Arab villages in the West Bank. Dayan said the operation was for strategic reasons.
"The inhabitants of the West Bank were not an objective, neutral population in this war, but part of the Kingdom of Jordan and of the deployment of those forces that began warfare against Israel," he told the Knesset 10 days after the ceasefire was announced.
"The civilians in the various villages and their families were partners to his war, the cannons which fired on Lod airport and Tel Aviv were stationed in these villages. They were not fired from Transjordan. . . . I would be much happier if I could come here and say that the Jordanian Legion forces carried on this war, and the West Bank inhabitants did whatever they did under coercion or remained neutral but it was not so."
A year later, in response to an article on Amwas in the Times, the press attache in the Israeli embassy in London wrote a letter to the editor in which he argued the Jordanians would have destroyed Israeli towns if they'd had the chance.
"These villages suffered heavy damage during the June war and its immediate aftermath when our troops engaged two Egyptian commando units, which had established themselves there and continued fighting after the ceasefire," M.H. Sharon wrote.
"There is no need to speculate as to what would have happened to our villages, and towns had the tide turned the other way, the intentions of our neighbor are shown by Jordanian battle orders that fell into our hands, instructing units 'to kill all inhabitants' of the places they were supposed to take."
As in any post-war reconstruction of events, of who gave the orders, who carried them out, there are still conflicting Israeli accounts of exactly who decided to bulldoze Amwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu.
Was it a definite order by Dayan? Or was it soldiers acting on their own?
Rafik Halaby, a former Israeli journalist who wrote a detailed book called The West Bank Story, said that regardless of who gave the exact order, it was clear the villages "were deliberately razed for reasons of strategic necessity.
"When Latrun fell in 1967, the military authorities decided to settle the problem of the salient once and for all and literally wiped the three settlements off the face of the Earth," he wrote. "Even the carefully hewn stones of demolished buildings were carted off by private building contractors."
At the entrance to Canada Park, just off John Diefenbaker Parkway (opened by Diefenbaker himself in 1975), is a sign that reads: "Welcome to Canada Park in Ayalon Valley - A project of the Jewish National Fund of Canada."
Other signs mark contributions from other Canadians, such Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum of Toronto who funded the Valley of Springs.
Bernard Bloomfield, the late president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada, was the driving force behind the idea for Canada Park. His widow, Neri, is now JNF president.
In 1973, he spearheaded a campaign among the Canadian Jewish community to raise $15 million to establish the park. One of its early brochures boasted how the site of Canada Park was "liberated by the Israeli Defence Forces" in 1967.
Under the terms of the agreement between the JNF and Israel, none of the Canadian money was to be spent on parts of the park in the occupied West Bank, even though that's were virtually all of park is located.
Individual Canadian Jews, however, made donations that were spent in parts of the park clearly on occupied territory. The Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Recreation Area, for example, is on occupied land.
Avi Binder of the United Jewish Appeal in Israel said the Jewish National Fund of Canada cannot violate its charter that stipulates no money from Canada can be spent outside the Green Line. "The money raised in Canada was never used in the occupied territories," Binder insisted. "Israeli funds are used now to maintain the park."
The Canadian fund drive for Canada Park ended in 1984.
Since 1973, more than 5 million trees have been planted in Canada Park. In 1986 former Ontario Premier David Peterson ran into a storm of protest from Arabs living in Canada when he offered to plant a tree in Canada Park as a gift of friendship to Israel.
The names of thousands of Canadians who contributed to Canada Park are on a commemorative wall in the park. The site, which is just a few metres outside the Green Line, also includes the names of individual Canadians and Canadian companies that have donated money over the years to various Israeli projects.
"It was easy for us to bring all the names to one spot where Canadians could see them," Binder said.
The Toronto Star Newspaper Ltd. has a nameplate attached to a wall at the commemorative centre.
The Star made a contribution in 1989 to the Bassett Foundation for Environmental Action in Israel. "We were told that the money would go toward the promotion of environmental care in Israel, not toward building a park on the West Bank," says Burnett Thall, vice- president of The Star.
The commemorative centre is barely 50 metres from the ruins of Zahda Shaker Abu Qtaish's home.
It is also less than a kilometre from the Latrun monastery, where Catholic monks reported tales of old Palestinians being buried alive while the Israeli bulldozers smashed into the Amwas houses.
For nearly a century, dozens of Amwas laborers worked for the Latrun monks in their winery and in the surrounding fields.
Father Tournay, a Catholic priest who has lived in east Jerusalem since 1945 and was head of the Ecole Biblique there, said the Latrun monks "smelled bodies" rotting inside the demolished homes.
In an interview from his bed at St. Joseph's Hospital in east Jerusalem, Tournay told of how the Latrun monks visited Amwas in the days immediately after the Israelis captured the village.
"They demanded answers from the soldiers, from the Israelis," he said. "They got no reply."
The Latrun monks insist there were no serious battles between the Jordanian and Israeli troops on June 5, 1967, near Amwas. The Jordanian soldiers simply fled without much of a fight.
To this day, the Trappist monks at Latrun are reluctant to discuss Amwas in any detail. They worry about upsetting Israeli authorities.
Father Louis, a monk who has lived at Latrun for 40 years, shrugged his shoulders when asked about reports of bodies. "I hear things," he said in a meeting at the monastery.
Israeli authorities have consistently denied any Palestinians were buried in Amwas, Beit Nuba or Yula.
Father Louis remembers his first visit to Amwas after the war. "I cried," he said. "I knew these people. They worked for us. They were gone. Their homes were gone.
"Every time I go by Canada Park, I still get angry," he said in the monastery's guest house. "Why does the Canadian government allow it to be called Canada Park? It is built on the ruins of people's homes."
Residents of the nearby Kibbutz Hahshon, the closest Israeli community to Amwas, also are convinced the residents of the Arab village had little to do with the fighting.
"I am sure no one from Amwas" was involved, said Shadmi, a glassmaker from Kibbutz Hahshon. "We were shocked there was hardly any fighting there during the war."
Shadmi (the only name he gave) said there was little contact between residents of the kibbutz and the Arab villages before the 1967 war. They lived in separate countries, he noted. He didn't set foot in the village until several days after the war.
"Nobody was there, but there were a lot of cows, small houses, shops," Shadmi said. "The next week they (the Israelis) bombed all the small houses."
Shadmi is sorry the Arab villagers lost their homes but isn't sorry the threat of Arab violence in the region was erased.
"Until 1967 I always worried about my children," he said. "I shall never forget all those years. I told my children to stay away from the hills, that Arab terrorists are sitting around and from time to time shooting at Israelis. We were always afraid of Arab shooting because we were very near the border."
"Latrun and Amwas were the key point in wars. They controlled the high road to Jerusalem. We had to close it forever. It was an order and the poor people of Amwas were caught by it."
Michael Adams, a British reporter who has researched Amwas extensively since 1968 when he first visited there, wrote recently he had a great deal of trouble convincing editors to carry articles about Israeli-destroyed villages.
"The Israeli government and whoever in the army command gave the order to destroy the villages," he wrote, "must have thought that it was possible to rearrange both history and geography in this way: that if they carted away the rubble and raked over the ground and planted seedlings where the homes of 9,000 people had been, all of which they did, they would be able to get away with it.
"Why? Because of the Holocaust, and because Western newspaper editors don't like to be called anti-Semitic."
The mere mention of the name Canada Park is a very sensitive issue for Canadian diplomats in Tel Aviv.
Canada's official position is that it has no opinion on Canada Park because it was "a private initiative" by Canadian citizens, according to Michel de Salaberry, senior counsellor at the Tel Aviv embassy. He declined to discuss the issue any further.
In an obvious private protest, however, few if any of the Canadian diplomats assigned to Israel have ever set foot in the park, even in the part on the Israeli side of the Green Line.
Morris Zilka, executive vice president of 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 the news again with the peace process and the issue of returning land for peace," he said in a telephone interview from Canada.
Zilka admitted openly that "some" Arab villages had been destroyed on the site of Canada Park. But he quickly added that the money raised by Canadian Jews was only a small fraction of the funds needed to develop the park.
"We finished with the project in 1984 and haven't raised any money for it since," he said. "We are not selling anything now, we are not even publishing any pamphlets" about the park.
"Some" Canadian Jews who donated to Canada Park probably never realized it was built on the site of three demolished Arab villages, he said. Others, though, knew exactly where the park was located, he added, noting that some Jews are quite forceful in demanding their funds be spent on projects in the West Bank.
Over the years, many Israelis, Palestinians and Canadians have protested to the Israeli government about Canada Park and what happened at Amwas.
But Shadmi of Kibbutz Nahshon, where many residents violently opposed the demolitions, says the complaints are useless.
"Everyone can talk, but in war who will listen? So what if we protest? Soldiers also protested. If we still protest, then what? Who will listen?"
Israeli television recently broadcast a beautiful 10-minute travelogue on Canada Park.
It was filled with inspiring music and scenes of green trees, grass, toddlers happily playing on swings, picnics, fresh springs and streams. It described the area's archeological importance and its heritage from the biblical days of Joshua and the Romans to the 1948 War of Independence.
The film made no mention of the Arab village of Amwas.
Boycott Israeli Apartheid
It wasn't long before the perps were spotted, brazenly on their way to the scene of their earlier crime, "trespassing" on the campus of the University of Ottawa.
Soon the pair was surrounded by a sizeable escort as the crowd turned around and retraced its steps, back to MacDonald Hall.
On the way, we passed the University Security Services headquarters. Sorry, University Protection Services. Can you make out the sign? (Click on the photo to enlarge it.) It says "Protection". So I guess what that means is that there is no longer such a thing as security on campus, but they do aim to protect students from certain kinds of knowledge, mostly an awareness that education involves a great deal more than regurgitating often outdated facts in return for a piece of paper that says you were there even if you were only half there.
Here is the motley crew of aiders and abetters entering MacDonald Hall Auditorium, unhampered by either "Protection" or police, in spite of the well-advertised presence of telephones which anyone could have used at any time.
More people were waiting inside and soon the auditorium was nearly full - like in the old days when there really was a film and discussion. But as Denis Rancourt says, that's "reel" life and this is "real" life.
Below, Rancourt is seen with Prof. Claude Lamontagne who has taken over the facilitation of the Friday evening sessions since Rancourt is no longer allowed to book rooms and organize events on campus.
