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  1. Before dawn on June 6, one day after Israel launched the 1967 war, “three villages in the fertile Latrun Valley [under Jordanian administration in accordance with the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel] that had defied capture in 1948…were totally razed by Israeli bulldozers, their residents scattered without concern for their future. Beit Nuba, Imwas [the latter believed by Christians to be where Jesus first appeared after his resurrection] and Yalu lay just across the frontier on the West Bank, about fifteen miles northwest of Jerusalem, and obstructed a direct route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. The [10,000 or more] residents had been ordered out…without explanation, given no chance to rescue their possessions except for what they could carry, left to wander without shelter or food or water.” They were never permitted to return. (Donald Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East in 1967, Amana Books Brattleboro, Vermont, 1988, p. 290)

    Even though the inhabitants put up no resistance, the three villages were demolished on the direct orders of Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff of the Israeli army. Several of the villages’ elders who were unable to walk without assistance were killed by falling rubble as Israel’s bulldozers demolished their homes.

    To Canada’s everlasting shame, the land on which Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu once stood is now, thanks to tax-deductible donations to the Canadian chapter of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), known as “Canada Park,” a recreational area where Israeli Jews frolic and picnic and their government plants trees in the name of Canadians who have provided Israel with financial or other support.

    By permitting Israel to convert these occupied lands into “Canada Park” and allowing contributions to the Jewish National Fund to have tax-deductible status, Canada is complicit in a war crime as defined by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.

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