the fighting in 1948 and never rebuilt. The inhabitants were offered compensation but not allowed to return. The lands of the 3 villages were confiscated and declared a closed area, and only declared 'public land' to be developed for a recreational park two years later in 1969. The settlement of Mevo Horon was built on the lands of Bayt Nuba in 1970. Signage in the park indicates that it falls under the Department of Archaeology, Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria, Judea and Samaria being the Israeli terms for the West Bank. Canadian funding In 1972, Bernard Bloomfield of Montreal, then President of JNF Canada, spearheaded a campaign among the Canadian Jewish community to raise $15 million ($80m in terms of 2010 values) for the park's establishment. The road leading to the park is named for John Diefenbaker, the former Canadian prime minister, who opened it in 1975. The project was completed in 1984. Residents' request to return In 1976, Palestinian residents of Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba wrote to the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asking for what they described as their "legitimate humanitarian right to return to the villages from which we were driven and expelled" in order to rebuild their houses without requesting compensation from Israel. They did not receive a reply. In 2007, the Israeli NGO Zochrot wrote to Israel's minister of defense, Ehud Barak, on behalf of the residents to ask why they could not return to their homes. In 2008, the minister's office informed them that "The return of the village inhabitants [was] not allowed for security considerations". In 2013 the Palestinian National Authority's Negotiations Affairs Department launched a campaign to have the 50-km. contiguous to the Green Line restored to it as 'vital and integral part of the State of Palestine as defined by the 1967 border.' Criticism According to former Israel parliamentarian and radical left activist, Uri Avnery, the creation of the park was tantamount to complicity in ethnic cleansing, and Canadian involvement in its creation a "cover to a war crime". According to Meron Benvenisti the function of such re-afforestation projects like that at Canada Park was to confiscate Arab land in the Palestinian territories Israel occupied after 1967. The JNF's reafforestation programme privileges pine over indigenous species, and, according to Ilan Pappé, the choice of planting a forest based on fast-growing species was dictated by considerations of rapidly hindering a