Imwas - a/k/a Canada Park

On our last day, we, among other things, visited the former “Canada Park.” Canada Park is a park funded by the Jewish National Fund - Canada. The JNF and the Israeli horrors are intricately connected. Rather than the nice charitable fund we all thought, the JNF is the custodian for the 93% of the land in Israel that is state owned and that only Jews can lease or build. Remember all those $2.00 trees we purchased to make the desert bloom? Well, to hide the destruction of the hundred of Palestinian villages in 1948 and 1967, the JNF planted those trees over the sites of the destroyed villages. If you know what you are looking for, when you go to these parks, you can see the ruins of the villages. I have posted pictures below from the remains of one of the villages, Imwas, on which Canada Park was built. The wheel is an olive press. The cacti are what the Palestinians typically used in their villages to denote property lines. The headstone is a Palestinian grave stone, with Arabic writing on it. The stones are the stones left after the Israelis demolished the village.

When Canadians discovered this outrage, there was an outcry. Zochrot has also taken action. Zochrot is an Israeli organization working to raise awareness to the Nakba as well as to the refugee issue and the refugees’ right of return. Their main work is educating Israelis about Nakba. They are now coming across stories from Israelis who were there in 1948, and even participated. Israelis don’t study the Nakba, don’t visit places destroyed or hear testimonies. Destroyed villages are not on maps, and there are no signs. Zochrot is trying to expose knowledge, history and geography. They believe that Israel needs to acknowledge the Palestinians’ loss and take responsibility, which is essential to reconciliation in future. We met with Zochrot earlier in the trip.

One of Zochrot’s projects was Canada Park. They filed a lawsuit to put up signs commemorating Imwas. They succeeded and the Israeli government, surprisingly, put up the Imwas signs. Subsequently, the signs were blacked out with paint. Zochrot went back to court but the Israeli government’s position was that the original court order was to put up signs, which they did, not maintain them. Eventually, between the outcry and the Zochrot action, the name of the park was changed, officially, to “Ayalon Park.” There is a movement to revoke the JNF Canada’s non-profit status. If you want to read a short summary of this issue, go to http://www.countercurrents.org/cook220609.htm I am going to try to get some more sleep now. More about our meeting with Omar Barghouti and some closing thoughts later.