De Britse fotograaf Rich Wiles bericht wat er achter die Apartheidsmuur gebeurt.
Behind the Wall – ‘War Crimes and Picnics’
On the table in front of me a young boy stares out from an old photograph on the back of a magazine. The strong-looking boy is around ten years old and dressed simply, behind him the classic brick work of a traditional Palestinian abode contextualizes the image. The photograph was taken in the early 1960’s outside the school in a small village north-west of Al Quds. This small village has a million stories to tell about the last 60 years or so, about colonialism and occupation, resistance, and the ongoing struggle for its rights. It is a village with a dark history that its people are still struggling against today although now exiled from their land. The village of Imwas, and the neighbouring villages of Yalo, and Beit Nuba, which make up the area known as the Latrun Enclave, bore witness to war crimes.
Abu Gaush was born in the village of Imwas, and though now exiled from his land he continues to struggle for it actively. He was born just a few years after Al Nakba during which Imwas was attacked several times by Zionist militias but never fully occupied. Around 50,000 Dunums of the village’s land was stolen but most of the houses and the center of the village were elevated from the surrounding plains and were successfully protected by some Jordanian soldiers and Palestinian resistance groups. Yishtak Rabin was the Israeli military leader in Al Quds in 1948 and Ariel Sharon fought and was injured in the Latrun during these unsuccessful Zionist attempts to occupy the villages. The villages were strategically situated being on the transport routes from Al Quds to Yafa. Abu Gaush grew up hearing these stories and the stories of neighbouring villages that had been demolished and depopulated, but at the age of 14 he says he really started to understand and feel what occupation meant:
“Two days before the war started in 1967 everybody was preparing for a war between Israel and the Arabs. Some Egyptian soldiers came to the villages and we also noticed a lot of Jordanian soldiers moving unusually in the area. The old men were very afraid because they had seen 1948 but us youth were pleased because we thought Egypt was strong and could free Palestine. On June 5th my father asked me to work with him to make a shelter in a cave to use when the bombing started. We worked until about 1am then I went to sleep, I was very tired. At 4am I woke after hearing noises. I could hear people saying that (Israeli) tanks had surrounded our village. Our house was at the eastern edge of the village and on one of the highest points so we could see what was happening. We saw tanks in semi-circles surrounding the village and advancing from the north, south, and west. Many of the men of 20 years or older went to support the Jordanian soldiers. Some of the villagers had old guns from the First World War. My brother went to defend the village but he said the Jordanian army pulled out of the village around midnight. He stayed with many other youth to defend the village but once the Jordanians had left and they saw that tanks were all over the villages his men also decided to withdraw. The Israeli’s were searching houses, my family fled to the mountains as they were frightened that 1948 was happening all over again, we remembered what had happened in Deir Yassin and other villages less than 20 years earlier. Some families went to the Latrun Ministry believing they would be safe there because it was a Christian place but they were not. My family first went to Yalo, then Beit Nuba, then onto Beit Ur before finally being forced to walk all the way to Ramallah. The soldiers emptied all the houses in the villages and forced everyone out onto the streets. The only way open was to Ramallah and they told us to go there. Other soldiers were saying ‘Go to Jedah, all land before there is ours and if you stop before Jedah we will kill you!’”
Abu Gaush was young and strong but not all villagers were so able and some simply couldn’t leave:
“There were ten elders in the village including one disabled man. They didn’t leave. We know they didn’t leave because they couldn’t, but nobody ever saw any of them again after that night. One soldier has written a testimony which said he saw another soldier telling one of these old men to leave his house, but the man refused saying ‘I cant walk and I wont leave! You can kill me here but I will not leave!’”
Maybe these ten villagers were killed and buried, or maybe they were buried alive underneath the destruction of their houses, but no evidence of them has ever been found. They never got out of the village that much is known. Those that did leave, over 10,000 from the three villages, took very little with them:
“People took keys, small things, some were forced to go with no shoes or real clothes, they were forced out in just their nightclothes, I saw people walking barefoot. We walked all the way to Ramallah, 32 kilometres with no food or water, it took us about nine or ten hours. Four people from the village died during this journey. My family was friends with the Mayor of Ramallah and we went to live with him for 2 months. Some other people also came to Ramallah but most just kept going straight to Jordan. Many of those that came to Ramallah lived inside schools or mosques when they first arrived.”
About a week after being forced out of the Latrun villages in June 1967 an announcement was made over Israeli radio that all villagers could return to their homes peacefully. Those still in the West Bank tried but when they reached the villages they found checkpoints and tanks surrounding the villages and forcing everyone away. Abu Gaush’s brother made this journey back to Imwas, his parents decided he should make the journey alone to see if it was safe before taking all the family. Their hesitancy proved wise. Despite the Israeli announcement that villagers could return home nobody was allowed into the villages. A ruling had been made to allow the villagers back but it was over-ruled militarily. Instead villagers could watch the spectacle as one by one their homes were being systematically blown up. Bulldozers ploughed over ancient olive trees and houses were crushed under these huge mechanical monsters or blown up by Israeli Explosive Units. There was no resistance in the village and its people had been forced out days earlier. Nobody knows if the ten elders were still alive inside their houses or not when this happened. The villagers were forced to return to Ramallah again.
As Abu Gaush explains the story of Imwas though his experiences I look through a series of postcards documenting the destruction. An Israeli photographer was in the village as the Explosive Units carefully laid their wires before bringing each home its knees. But to me the images seem to show men at work, there isn’t the urgency and panic of war photographs. The members of the Explosives Unit seem relaxed as though they could be instead workmen constructing a family home. There was no panic as the men ‘worked’. All villagers excluding the ten who were never found, were already away from the village. There had been no resistance in the event when the IOF came, and the days the houses were demolished were many days later, the village had already been depopulated. These ‘relaxed workmen’ were carrying out the orders from above. These orders were to commit war crimes.
Two months later villagers were told that they could return to the villages with trucks but only to collect their harvest which had been stored away before they were forced out:
“My brother drove our truck. We saw everything destroyed, just the mosque was still standing. People were crying and weeping, some were just standing, looking, speechless... Some had lost all their land in 1948 but had tried to rebuild there lives and now it had all happened again. People needed anything so took whatever they could find and put it into trucks. Some people found a sheep or a goat but the houses were totally destroyed. We found our ‘cawasheen’ (a big box containing important documents such as deeds to property and land) but couldn’t get any clothes or anything else. We knew there was nothing left but we wanted to see what had happened to our village…”
The villagers collected what few things they could salvage and their harvest before leaving once more, nobody was allowed to stay. The villagers who stayed in the West Bank formed a committee to oversee negotiations with Israel about returning to their land:
“My father was on the committee that negotiated with Israel. They were offering money as compensation for our land and homes. My father told them 'we will not accept all the money in the world for one dunum of Imwas, and we will not accept one dunum in heaven for one dunum in Imwas!’. The Israeli’s told him that he had three choices ‘…one, u can go the same way as Abdul Hameed; two – prison; three – put something sweet in your mouth and keep quiet!’
Abdul Hameed Al Sayeh was a Palestinian Sheik who vociferously spoke up for unalienable Palestinian rights including the Right of Return and was exiled by Israel for speaking out. With these three options they were basically being told to accept some compensation and give up the right to ever return to their villages and keep their mouths shut, otherwise they would end up in prison or being exiled. The committee members said that they were not the leaders of the village, most of them had gone to Amman, and that Israel must allow the leaders to come back from Amman to negotiate, but Moshe Dayan refused. Those who had gone straight to Jordan were not issued West Bank ID cards in 1967 and Israel would not allow them to return. In fact Dayan had struck a deal with the Ministry Of Defense and the Israeli cabinet in which he agreed that the Palestinians who had been forced out of six other villages including Qalqilya, Habla, and Zeta, could return to their villages on the understanding that the Latrun villagers could never return.
Dayan, Rabin, and Sharon had all been involved in and around the Latrun enclave during the Nakba years. Sharon was injured in the villages in 1948 and all three had been involved in various Zionist attempts to occupy the villages without success. By 1967 all were prominent figures in the military leadership and were seemingly all intent on settling what seemed like personal grievances because of the successful Palestinian resistance of the villages years earlier and the subsequent embarrassment it no doubt caused the three leaders. Dayan wrote soon after the war about the ethnic cleansing of the Latrun villages:
"[houses were destroyed] not in battle, but as punishment . . . and in order to chase away the inhabitants . . .”
Rabin, as the Chief of Staff and IOF leader in 1967, ordered the destruction of the villages which was an act in direct violation of article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which concerns property protection under Occupation. Furthermore, ‘Forced displacement’ as perpetrated against the villagers is prohibited under article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and also under International Humanitarian Law.
The Imwasees and refugees from the neighbouring villages continued to try to negotiate and struggle for their return whilst also living in forced exile.
“I started to hate them because they forced me out. I ‘felt’ this from the first day they came in 1967. A feeling began to build in my chest and in my mind. First I had heard stories about Al Nakba but from 1967 I saw myself what they did. After years of this we all search for a way to fight... for a way to struggle against it. In 1973 I went to Beirut to study and I became active with Palestinians groups there. What you see in your childhood gives you the feelings which you struggle with…”
After completing his studies Abu Gaush returned to Palestine and started working with a small secret resistance cell. He was arrested in 1977 and sentenced to eleven years. Not long after release he was arrested again in 1991, and sentenced to a further 18 months for taking part in the resistance. Between these two spells in prison Abu Gaush was able to return to Imwas to visit several times:
“We would walk in the village. We collected fruits like romman (pomegranate) and grapes, and zatar (Thyme), but it made me angry to go back. The reason I fought the Occupation was because of Imwas.”
Abu Gaush says he is ‘old’ now so he must struggle in different ways. Since his release from prison he has put all his time into struggling through campaigning for the rights of the Latrun villagers and also political prisoners.
“Now we see what they do and from generation to generation this grows and we want again and always to struggle. Now I must continue my struggle in other ways, I am still with the struggle and I always will be. I stand with our interests; we have the right to our land!”
So now Abu Gaush devotes his time to the Imwas Human Society (http://www.imwas.org/) which canvasses for publicity and awareness to the war crimes committed in the Latrun Enclave, and campaigns for the villager’s rights. They work to produce literature based on testimony’s both from villagers themselves and also from members of the IOF who took part and bore witness to the events of 1967 in the area. They also organize annual demonstrations and other activities to raise the profile of Imwas and tell its tortured story. Imwas was a village Occupied in 1967 so the villagers are not looking to return to a village now located inside ‘Israel’, but a village that is inside the West Bank. Abu Gaush is quite clear what the villagers want:
“This is land Occupied in 1967 and we have the full right to return to our land and rebuild our homes even under Occupation. We refuse any compensation if it is not included with full return. We refuse any resettlement or any border modification. We have also held demonstrations against the PA for not actively attempting to help us get our rights. We are happy to talk to the PA but I think they will give up our rights and give our villages away. They are not strong enough to stand up to Israel, and I think they will agree to a land swap…”
If you go to find the village of Imwas today you will not see a traditional Palestinian village. Instead you will see Canada Park. In 1973 the Jewish National Fund of Canada raised $15million in order to establish a pleasant picnic area for Israeli’s on the road from Tel Aviv to Al Quds. The Canadian JNF still maintain the facility today and are clearly proud of Canada Park. In their literature they describe the park as ‘one of the largest parks in Israel covering an area of 7,500 acres in the biblical Ayalon Valley. At peak season, some 30,000 individuals visit the Park each day, enjoying its many play and recreational facilities and installations.’ The project to establish Canada Park began less than 5 years after war crimes were committed in the village. The website of the JNF of Canada goes on to proudly proclaim ‘We are proud of our role in the transformation of the land of Israel in partnership with our brethren in Israel. We remain committed to "reclaiming our homeland"’. The hundreds of thousands of visitors who relax and enjoy the fresh air of Canada Park every year now are doing so on the site of unrecognized war crimes for whom no-one has ever been held accountable. Underneath the park there still remains the cemetery of Imwas, and maybe somewhere down there lay the ten village elders who were never accounted for. And for sure, down there past the buried layers of this ‘park’, past the footprints and amongst the dust of former homes, are the spirits and souls of the displaced, the Imwassees. Abu Gaush knows his soul, or rather his ‘childhood’, is still in Imwas:
“I can draw every neighbourhood (in Imwas) from memory, I can still see the faces of my house. Every stone, every tree means something to me. We lived in peace but they forced us out. I left my childhood in Imwas – money or property is nothing to me but I left my childhood there… and now it is a park for Israel.”
The Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901 to help establish a Jewish State in Palestine. It has branches worldwide and buys up state land in ‘Israel’ (including occupied Palestinian land); it currently owns around 13% of all state land including the land of many destroyed Palestinian villages. Its funds have supported practices of ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Palestinian villages, and the appropriation of Palestinian land, much as in Imwas. In July 2007 the Israeli Knesset approved a bill reaffirming that all JNF land can only be allocated to Jews. Luisa Morgantini (Vice President of the European Parliament) described this move as Israel striking ‘another blow against democracy, fueling discrimination and Apartheid’. However, such nuances didn’t concern Israel’s staunch supporters either side of the Atlantic. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accepted an invitation to become the new patron for the UK branch of the JNF only weeks later, and in the U.S. such supposed advocates of ‘democracy and human rights’ as Hilary Clinton are similarly willing to support practices of Apartheid with her work as a JNF lobbyist.
Whilst Israel attempts to bury and erase history with the full backing and support of much of the outside world the people of Imwas, Yalo, and Beit Nuba, continue to struggle for their rights. Through their campaigning they are trying to raise awareness to their case, something Abu Gaush does passionately:
“We want to send a message to European people that they must stand with us because their governments stood against us and with Zionists and caused this suffering. We want British people to correct what the British Government did, and still do, and stop this suffering. We believe that Zionism cannot accomplish its ends without the support of Europe and the British Government…What happened in Imwas is against all standards of law, and if people talk about democracy and freedom than they must support those who struggle for them. You must stand with the Palestinian right to return back to our land. Israel is an occupying state and it must respect international humanitarian law. It was a war crime and people must be held accountable and sent to court for that. The soldier’s testimonies say they met no resistance – they forced us out and demolished our homes for no reason.”
Abu Gaush is an articulate and dedicated man. His features are strong but his face is warm, its lines hint at the struggles of life. He bares little resemblance now to the fresh faced young boy in the photograph on the back of the magazine. But that confident and strong looking young boy in the image still had his village, and he still had his home. The photograph of Abu Gaush had been taken nearly half a century earlier in his village of Imwas, but that was before he had been exiled, before his village had been destroyed, before he had walked 32 kilometres to Ramallah without food or water, before he had spent 12 years in prison. The photograph was taken before it had all happened…'
On the table in front of me a young boy stares out from an old photograph on the back of a magazine. The strong-looking boy is around ten years old and dressed simply, behind him the classic brick work of a traditional Palestinian abode contextualizes the image. The photograph was taken in the early 1960’s outside the school in a small village north-west of Al Quds. This small village has a million stories to tell about the last 60 years or so, about colonialism and occupation, resistance, and the ongoing struggle for its rights. It is a village with a dark history that its people are still struggling against today although now exiled from their land. The village of Imwas, and the neighbouring villages of Yalo, and Beit Nuba, which make up the area known as the Latrun Enclave, bore witness to war crimes.
Abu Gaush was born in the village of Imwas, and though now exiled from his land he continues to struggle for it actively. He was born just a few years after Al Nakba during which Imwas was attacked several times by Zionist militias but never fully occupied. Around 50,000 Dunums of the village’s land was stolen but most of the houses and the center of the village were elevated from the surrounding plains and were successfully protected by some Jordanian soldiers and Palestinian resistance groups. Yishtak Rabin was the Israeli military leader in Al Quds in 1948 and Ariel Sharon fought and was injured in the Latrun during these unsuccessful Zionist attempts to occupy the villages. The villages were strategically situated being on the transport routes from Al Quds to Yafa. Abu Gaush grew up hearing these stories and the stories of neighbouring villages that had been demolished and depopulated, but at the age of 14 he says he really started to understand and feel what occupation meant:
“Two days before the war started in 1967 everybody was preparing for a war between Israel and the Arabs. Some Egyptian soldiers came to the villages and we also noticed a lot of Jordanian soldiers moving unusually in the area. The old men were very afraid because they had seen 1948 but us youth were pleased because we thought Egypt was strong and could free Palestine. On June 5th my father asked me to work with him to make a shelter in a cave to use when the bombing started. We worked until about 1am then I went to sleep, I was very tired. At 4am I woke after hearing noises. I could hear people saying that (Israeli) tanks had surrounded our village. Our house was at the eastern edge of the village and on one of the highest points so we could see what was happening. We saw tanks in semi-circles surrounding the village and advancing from the north, south, and west. Many of the men of 20 years or older went to support the Jordanian soldiers. Some of the villagers had old guns from the First World War. My brother went to defend the village but he said the Jordanian army pulled out of the village around midnight. He stayed with many other youth to defend the village but once the Jordanians had left and they saw that tanks were all over the villages his men also decided to withdraw. The Israeli’s were searching houses, my family fled to the mountains as they were frightened that 1948 was happening all over again, we remembered what had happened in Deir Yassin and other villages less than 20 years earlier. Some families went to the Latrun Ministry believing they would be safe there because it was a Christian place but they were not. My family first went to Yalo, then Beit Nuba, then onto Beit Ur before finally being forced to walk all the way to Ramallah. The soldiers emptied all the houses in the villages and forced everyone out onto the streets. The only way open was to Ramallah and they told us to go there. Other soldiers were saying ‘Go to Jedah, all land before there is ours and if you stop before Jedah we will kill you!’”
Abu Gaush was young and strong but not all villagers were so able and some simply couldn’t leave:
“There were ten elders in the village including one disabled man. They didn’t leave. We know they didn’t leave because they couldn’t, but nobody ever saw any of them again after that night. One soldier has written a testimony which said he saw another soldier telling one of these old men to leave his house, but the man refused saying ‘I cant walk and I wont leave! You can kill me here but I will not leave!’”
Maybe these ten villagers were killed and buried, or maybe they were buried alive underneath the destruction of their houses, but no evidence of them has ever been found. They never got out of the village that much is known. Those that did leave, over 10,000 from the three villages, took very little with them:
“People took keys, small things, some were forced to go with no shoes or real clothes, they were forced out in just their nightclothes, I saw people walking barefoot. We walked all the way to Ramallah, 32 kilometres with no food or water, it took us about nine or ten hours. Four people from the village died during this journey. My family was friends with the Mayor of Ramallah and we went to live with him for 2 months. Some other people also came to Ramallah but most just kept going straight to Jordan. Many of those that came to Ramallah lived inside schools or mosques when they first arrived.”
About a week after being forced out of the Latrun villages in June 1967 an announcement was made over Israeli radio that all villagers could return to their homes peacefully. Those still in the West Bank tried but when they reached the villages they found checkpoints and tanks surrounding the villages and forcing everyone away. Abu Gaush’s brother made this journey back to Imwas, his parents decided he should make the journey alone to see if it was safe before taking all the family. Their hesitancy proved wise. Despite the Israeli announcement that villagers could return home nobody was allowed into the villages. A ruling had been made to allow the villagers back but it was over-ruled militarily. Instead villagers could watch the spectacle as one by one their homes were being systematically blown up. Bulldozers ploughed over ancient olive trees and houses were crushed under these huge mechanical monsters or blown up by Israeli Explosive Units. There was no resistance in the village and its people had been forced out days earlier. Nobody knows if the ten elders were still alive inside their houses or not when this happened. The villagers were forced to return to Ramallah again.
As Abu Gaush explains the story of Imwas though his experiences I look through a series of postcards documenting the destruction. An Israeli photographer was in the village as the Explosive Units carefully laid their wires before bringing each home its knees. But to me the images seem to show men at work, there isn’t the urgency and panic of war photographs. The members of the Explosives Unit seem relaxed as though they could be instead workmen constructing a family home. There was no panic as the men ‘worked’. All villagers excluding the ten who were never found, were already away from the village. There had been no resistance in the event when the IOF came, and the days the houses were demolished were many days later, the village had already been depopulated. These ‘relaxed workmen’ were carrying out the orders from above. These orders were to commit war crimes.
Two months later villagers were told that they could return to the villages with trucks but only to collect their harvest which had been stored away before they were forced out:
“My brother drove our truck. We saw everything destroyed, just the mosque was still standing. People were crying and weeping, some were just standing, looking, speechless... Some had lost all their land in 1948 but had tried to rebuild there lives and now it had all happened again. People needed anything so took whatever they could find and put it into trucks. Some people found a sheep or a goat but the houses were totally destroyed. We found our ‘cawasheen’ (a big box containing important documents such as deeds to property and land) but couldn’t get any clothes or anything else. We knew there was nothing left but we wanted to see what had happened to our village…”
The villagers collected what few things they could salvage and their harvest before leaving once more, nobody was allowed to stay. The villagers who stayed in the West Bank formed a committee to oversee negotiations with Israel about returning to their land:
“My father was on the committee that negotiated with Israel. They were offering money as compensation for our land and homes. My father told them 'we will not accept all the money in the world for one dunum of Imwas, and we will not accept one dunum in heaven for one dunum in Imwas!’. The Israeli’s told him that he had three choices ‘…one, u can go the same way as Abdul Hameed; two – prison; three – put something sweet in your mouth and keep quiet!’
Abdul Hameed Al Sayeh was a Palestinian Sheik who vociferously spoke up for unalienable Palestinian rights including the Right of Return and was exiled by Israel for speaking out. With these three options they were basically being told to accept some compensation and give up the right to ever return to their villages and keep their mouths shut, otherwise they would end up in prison or being exiled. The committee members said that they were not the leaders of the village, most of them had gone to Amman, and that Israel must allow the leaders to come back from Amman to negotiate, but Moshe Dayan refused. Those who had gone straight to Jordan were not issued West Bank ID cards in 1967 and Israel would not allow them to return. In fact Dayan had struck a deal with the Ministry Of Defense and the Israeli cabinet in which he agreed that the Palestinians who had been forced out of six other villages including Qalqilya, Habla, and Zeta, could return to their villages on the understanding that the Latrun villagers could never return.
Dayan, Rabin, and Sharon had all been involved in and around the Latrun enclave during the Nakba years. Sharon was injured in the villages in 1948 and all three had been involved in various Zionist attempts to occupy the villages without success. By 1967 all were prominent figures in the military leadership and were seemingly all intent on settling what seemed like personal grievances because of the successful Palestinian resistance of the villages years earlier and the subsequent embarrassment it no doubt caused the three leaders. Dayan wrote soon after the war about the ethnic cleansing of the Latrun villages:
"[houses were destroyed] not in battle, but as punishment . . . and in order to chase away the inhabitants . . .”
Rabin, as the Chief of Staff and IOF leader in 1967, ordered the destruction of the villages which was an act in direct violation of article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which concerns property protection under Occupation. Furthermore, ‘Forced displacement’ as perpetrated against the villagers is prohibited under article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and also under International Humanitarian Law.
The Imwasees and refugees from the neighbouring villages continued to try to negotiate and struggle for their return whilst also living in forced exile.
“I started to hate them because they forced me out. I ‘felt’ this from the first day they came in 1967. A feeling began to build in my chest and in my mind. First I had heard stories about Al Nakba but from 1967 I saw myself what they did. After years of this we all search for a way to fight... for a way to struggle against it. In 1973 I went to Beirut to study and I became active with Palestinians groups there. What you see in your childhood gives you the feelings which you struggle with…”
After completing his studies Abu Gaush returned to Palestine and started working with a small secret resistance cell. He was arrested in 1977 and sentenced to eleven years. Not long after release he was arrested again in 1991, and sentenced to a further 18 months for taking part in the resistance. Between these two spells in prison Abu Gaush was able to return to Imwas to visit several times:
“We would walk in the village. We collected fruits like romman (pomegranate) and grapes, and zatar (Thyme), but it made me angry to go back. The reason I fought the Occupation was because of Imwas.”
Abu Gaush says he is ‘old’ now so he must struggle in different ways. Since his release from prison he has put all his time into struggling through campaigning for the rights of the Latrun villagers and also political prisoners.
“Now we see what they do and from generation to generation this grows and we want again and always to struggle. Now I must continue my struggle in other ways, I am still with the struggle and I always will be. I stand with our interests; we have the right to our land!”
So now Abu Gaush devotes his time to the Imwas Human Society (http://www.imwas.org/) which canvasses for publicity and awareness to the war crimes committed in the Latrun Enclave, and campaigns for the villager’s rights. They work to produce literature based on testimony’s both from villagers themselves and also from members of the IOF who took part and bore witness to the events of 1967 in the area. They also organize annual demonstrations and other activities to raise the profile of Imwas and tell its tortured story. Imwas was a village Occupied in 1967 so the villagers are not looking to return to a village now located inside ‘Israel’, but a village that is inside the West Bank. Abu Gaush is quite clear what the villagers want:
“This is land Occupied in 1967 and we have the full right to return to our land and rebuild our homes even under Occupation. We refuse any compensation if it is not included with full return. We refuse any resettlement or any border modification. We have also held demonstrations against the PA for not actively attempting to help us get our rights. We are happy to talk to the PA but I think they will give up our rights and give our villages away. They are not strong enough to stand up to Israel, and I think they will agree to a land swap…”
If you go to find the village of Imwas today you will not see a traditional Palestinian village. Instead you will see Canada Park. In 1973 the Jewish National Fund of Canada raised $15million in order to establish a pleasant picnic area for Israeli’s on the road from Tel Aviv to Al Quds. The Canadian JNF still maintain the facility today and are clearly proud of Canada Park. In their literature they describe the park as ‘one of the largest parks in Israel covering an area of 7,500 acres in the biblical Ayalon Valley. At peak season, some 30,000 individuals visit the Park each day, enjoying its many play and recreational facilities and installations.’ The project to establish Canada Park began less than 5 years after war crimes were committed in the village. The website of the JNF of Canada goes on to proudly proclaim ‘We are proud of our role in the transformation of the land of Israel in partnership with our brethren in Israel. We remain committed to "reclaiming our homeland"’. The hundreds of thousands of visitors who relax and enjoy the fresh air of Canada Park every year now are doing so on the site of unrecognized war crimes for whom no-one has ever been held accountable. Underneath the park there still remains the cemetery of Imwas, and maybe somewhere down there lay the ten village elders who were never accounted for. And for sure, down there past the buried layers of this ‘park’, past the footprints and amongst the dust of former homes, are the spirits and souls of the displaced, the Imwassees. Abu Gaush knows his soul, or rather his ‘childhood’, is still in Imwas:
“I can draw every neighbourhood (in Imwas) from memory, I can still see the faces of my house. Every stone, every tree means something to me. We lived in peace but they forced us out. I left my childhood in Imwas – money or property is nothing to me but I left my childhood there… and now it is a park for Israel.”
The Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901 to help establish a Jewish State in Palestine. It has branches worldwide and buys up state land in ‘Israel’ (including occupied Palestinian land); it currently owns around 13% of all state land including the land of many destroyed Palestinian villages. Its funds have supported practices of ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Palestinian villages, and the appropriation of Palestinian land, much as in Imwas. In July 2007 the Israeli Knesset approved a bill reaffirming that all JNF land can only be allocated to Jews. Luisa Morgantini (Vice President of the European Parliament) described this move as Israel striking ‘another blow against democracy, fueling discrimination and Apartheid’. However, such nuances didn’t concern Israel’s staunch supporters either side of the Atlantic. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accepted an invitation to become the new patron for the UK branch of the JNF only weeks later, and in the U.S. such supposed advocates of ‘democracy and human rights’ as Hilary Clinton are similarly willing to support practices of Apartheid with her work as a JNF lobbyist.
Whilst Israel attempts to bury and erase history with the full backing and support of much of the outside world the people of Imwas, Yalo, and Beit Nuba, continue to struggle for their rights. Through their campaigning they are trying to raise awareness to their case, something Abu Gaush does passionately:
“We want to send a message to European people that they must stand with us because their governments stood against us and with Zionists and caused this suffering. We want British people to correct what the British Government did, and still do, and stop this suffering. We believe that Zionism cannot accomplish its ends without the support of Europe and the British Government…What happened in Imwas is against all standards of law, and if people talk about democracy and freedom than they must support those who struggle for them. You must stand with the Palestinian right to return back to our land. Israel is an occupying state and it must respect international humanitarian law. It was a war crime and people must be held accountable and sent to court for that. The soldier’s testimonies say they met no resistance – they forced us out and demolished our homes for no reason.”
Abu Gaush is an articulate and dedicated man. His features are strong but his face is warm, its lines hint at the struggles of life. He bares little resemblance now to the fresh faced young boy in the photograph on the back of the magazine. But that confident and strong looking young boy in the image still had his village, and he still had his home. The photograph of Abu Gaush had been taken nearly half a century earlier in his village of Imwas, but that was before he had been exiled, before his village had been destroyed, before he had walked 32 kilometres to Ramallah without food or water, before he had spent 12 years in prison. The photograph was taken before it had all happened…'
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