Tantura Documentary Sparks Crucial Debate about Israel and the Palestinian Nakba – New Study of 1948 Israeli Massacre supports Eyewitness Survivors' Reports
“You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people,” – Ilan Pappé
Palestinians leaving a village near Haifa 1948 – Tantura TV
Please note that this post is too long for email. Click on the title to watch the Tantura documentary and read the additional material in full.
Whether it be with an individual or in this case, the 75 year long brutal conflict between Palestine and the purposefully created state of Israel, we cannot begin to properly understand the present unless we look back to learn about what actually occurred in the past.
The film Tantura, officially released at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, provides a perfect example of this. For myself and many others, including the learned Professor Ilan Pappé, the truth of what has really happened from the time leading up to Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration to the 1948 Nakba, including the Tantura massacre, carrying on through to Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of Palestine, defines the State of Israel’s illegitimacy.
The following is a reposting of a review of the film Tantura by Carolos Aguilar as published by the Los Angeles Times.
“You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people,” says Ilan Pappé, a professor at the University of Haifa, about the post-World War II founding of the state of Israel in the blistering and defiant documentary “Tantura.”
To investigate the validity of that strong proclamation, director Alon Schwarz (“Aida’s Secrets”) concentrates on the seaside town of Tantura. Once a prosperous fishing village, it became the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Alexandroni Brigade early in the 1948 campaign to take over Palestine — known by Israelis as the War of Independence.
For Palestinians, the onset of their tragic displacement is known as the nakba.
Details of what took place in Tantura more than 70 years ago had remained secret, a taboo subject that contradicts the idealized self-image of the Israeli state. But in the late 1990s, scholar Teddy Katz interviewed many of the soldiers involved as part of his master’s thesis.
In those in-depth conversations they begrudgingly corroborated the brutal slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians, mostly men, and the disposal of their bodies in mass graves. Notable too is the dehumanizing language they use to refer to their “enemies.”
After the media learned of Katz‘s findings, the Alexandroni men retracted their statements and sued him, effectively ending his career and silencing the truth. Now Katz has shared the tapes with Schwarz, who uses excerpts, as well as new interviews with those soldiers still alive, to construct a damning exposé of a nation unwilling to admit its primordial sins.
Some of those who agree to speak with Schwarz, now in their 90s, admit to having witnessed the crimes, but deny taking part in them. Others, emboldened perhaps by their advanced age, and more so by the impunity their status as heroes grants them, confess to the killings. An eerie score by Ophir Leibovitch accompanies their chilling accounts.
Yet, they all distance themselves from any direct blame, justifying the events as the inevitable cost of war. Every time Schwarz offers them an opportunity to examine their own behavior, to show remorse, to consider the effect of their actions, or of their inaction, they default to the language instilled in them about the righteousness of their cause.
Therein lies the earth-shattering power of “Tantura,” because as long as the perpetrators refuse to acknowledge responsibility for what happened, healing cannot commence. But neither the veteran soldiers, nor the Israeli government, will own up to this history, because admitting to the massacre would challenge the legitimacy of the state as a whole. And if the recognition of any wrongdoing seems unfeasible, then so are any talks of reparations.
Late in the documentary, Schwarz speaks with elderly Israeli civilians who arrived in Tantura as children. Their opinions range from those who believe Palestinians should surrender all claims to the land, while others, in a show of limited empathy, would agree to a monument to the memory of those buried there as long as it’s not taken as a sign of ownership.
Only a couple of Palestinians with memories from the time offer their testimony. Their presence serves as a reminder of the devastation that families endured. While the Alexandroni soldiers have enjoyed longevity and veneration, their victims’ remains never received a proper burial, and, as Schwarz’s research implies, they may now be lost forever.
Still, for all the institutionalized pushback to avoid confronting this instance of “ethnic cleansing,” as one expert describes it, it’s also the bravery of the Israeli academics who share their perspectives on screen that can have the most impact. They dare to publicly question the official story in a society that demands absolute loyalty to its origin myth.
Though Schwarz’s finished film provides unmissable and infuriating insight, it’s also disappointing that he never mentions the ongoing violence that the Israeli state commits against residents in the current Palestinian territories, including numerous documented human rights violations.
Watching “Tantura,” one could assume that the nakba was the extent of the military conflict, rather than the cornerstone of decades of oppression with no end in sight.
During the film, Ilan Pappé the Haifa, Israel born Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies atthe University of Exeter, comments in part as follows.
I think the self image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. How important it is to be exceptional. We are The Chosen People. This is part of the Israeli self-identification as a superior moral people, and I grew up on this…
“The most moral army in the world.”
And I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes because, basically the project of Zionism has a problem.
It’s a tragedy in a sense. Jews had to escape from Europe to find a safe haven, but you cannot create a safe haven by creating a Catastrophe for other people.
Hundreds of Palestinians and villages were destroyed in 1948. At least 750,000 became refugees.
To this day The Nakba is taboo in Israeli Society.
I highly recommend watching the film. It should be noted that when I first looked for this film two months ago it was available on YouTube but has since been removed, not surprisingly.
Please click on the image below to watch an HD version of the film on Odysee.
Debates surrounding Tantura also raise questions around the role of non-historians in shaping historical narratives and memories of the past. These include journalists and state officials, as well as documentarians. Their interventions have a great effect on public opinion and how collective memory is formed.
The participation of historians and other cultural agents in this public debate transgresses the Israeli taboo surrounding the Palestinian Nakba. A taboo that is in fact embedded in Israeli law. Legislation like the Nakba Law reduces state funds from institutions that commemorate the Nakba. This same taboo is also responsible for Israel’s refusal to release archival material that might describe atrocities committed by Israel during the 1948 war. This is done by using a legislative loophole that bypasses the state’s legal obligation to release these materials.
Ultimately, the Israeli Nakba taboo exists because of the moral implications this history would have for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict; particularly Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
For Israel and Israelis, dealing with the Nakba means acknowledging the country’s violent regime and policy toward the Palestinians. It means recognizing the devastating results of trying to control a people using military rule. As difficult as it is, Israel will eventually have to reconcile with its dark past.
A new documentary demolishes the official denial of the Tantura massacre, when more than 200 Palestinians were gunned down by a Zionist militia days after the establishment of Israel in 1948
By Jonathan Ofir • 21 January 2022 • Published by Mondoweiss
35 x 4 meters. That’s 115 x 13 feet. These are the dimensions of the mass grave in which over 200 Palestinians of the village Tantura were buried, following their massacre on the May 22nd-23rd by the Alexandroni brigade of the Haganah, the Jewish Zionist militia, in the very first days of the official establishment of Israel.
These dimensions are now documented in a new documentary film by Alon Schwarz titled “Tantura”, which is featuring this weekend at the Sundance festival in Utah. The site of the massacre is now a popular beach in Israel.
In Israel, this is stirring some controversy, once again. The veterans of the Alexandroni brigade tried to hush it up once again in 2000, after they testified to historian Theodore (Teddy) Katz for his Masters thesis with the massacre as its central theme, completed in 1998. Their testimonies (as well as those of Palestinian survivors) would perhaps have remained rather obscure in the Haifa University library had it not been for the Israeli paper Ma’ariv widely exposing the massacre in 2000. The veterans sued Katz for libel (1 million Shekels, $321 thousand current value), and in a moment of weakness, without his lawyer and under both economic pressure, family pressure and dire health (a recent stroke), Katz signed a prepared letter of recantation to get out of it all. He regretted it hours later, but it was too late – the judge, who hadn’t actually immersed herself in the testimonies of Katz’s work, said that it was a done deal.
Haaretz today has a report on the documentary, by Adam Raz titled “There’s a Mass Palestinian Grave at a Popular Israeli Beach, Veterans Confess”. Raz highlights the fact that the judge, Drora Pilpel, hears some of the original testimonies obtained by Katz for the first time during the making of the documentary, and she says:
If it’s true, it’s a pity… If he had things like this, he should have gone [taken the case] all the way to the end.
It’s not a maybe: Katz did have “things like this,” 60 hours of them. Wasn’t it relevant for the judge to glance at those things before closing the case?
Even the Jewish witnesses cited by Katz were emphatic.
Yosef Graf, a guide from neighboring Zichron Ya’akov who accompanied the Alexandroni forces, said:
I am telling you these [Alexandroni] people, they massacred.
Mordechai Sokler, also a guide from Zichron Ya’akov, said:
After eight days, I came back to the place where we buried them, near the railway. There was a big mound for the bodies had inflated.
In May 2023, The Guardian reported on the extremely important analysis of artographic data and aerial photos by Forensic Architecture research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London which Israel would much prefer be kept buried. This analysis supports some of the information, eye witness testimony about mass graves, included in Alon Swartz’s Tantura film linked above.
Researchers analysed cartographic data and aerial photos to identify three possible locations in former fishing village Tantura
By Bethan McKernan Jerusalem correspondent • Thu 25 May 2023 06.00 CEST
An investigation into a massacre in a destroyed Palestinian village carried out by Israeli forces in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation has identified three possible mass graves beneath a present-day beach resort.
Palestinian survivors and historians have long claimed that men living in Tantura, a fishing village of approximately 1,500 people near Haifa, were executed after surrendering to the Alexandroni Brigade and their bodies dumped in a mass grave believed to be located under an area that is now a car park for Dor Beach. Estimates have ranged from 40 to 200 people.
In recent years, a growing body of evidence for the Tantura massacre has generated significant controversy in Israel, where atrocities committed by Jewish forces in 1948 remain a highly sensitive subject: an Israeli-made documentary about what happened in the village faced widespread backlash on its release last year.
The extensive new investigation by the research agency identifies what it says is a second mass grave site in the former village of Tantura, as well as two more possible locations, in the most comprehensive research yet.
The likely sites of executions and mass graves as well as the boundaries of previously existing cemeteries.
Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, analysed cartographic data and aerial photos from the British mandate era, cross referenced with archival and newly collected eyewitness testimonies from survivors and perpetrators and Israeli army records. The data was used to create 3D modelling determining the likely sites of executions and mass graves as well as the boundaries of previously existing cemeteries, and whether any graves may have been exhumed or removed.
The Tantura report was commissioned by Adalah, a Palestinian-run human rights group focusing on legal issues. Based on the findings, Adalah filed on Wednesday a first-of-its-kind legal petition in Israel on behalf of several Tantura families still in the country to demarcate the sites.
“It is hard to argue that there are no mass graves in Tantura. The families’ rights to visit these sites and the right to dignified burial have obviously been violated under both Israeli and international law,” said Suhad Bishara, Adalah’s legal director.
“What we hope with the filing is that it’s not a matter for the Israeli courts to decide ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on, but just how to facilitate access,” said Bishara.
Tantura’s previously identified mass grave was described as being located in an open field, near prickly pear bushes and three trees, and is now thought to be below the car park, although the site has not been exhumed or excavated.
The second grave site, in an orchard near to where the village square used to be, bears similarities to the first, and is also believed to now be under the concrete of a car park. In aerial photographs both appear to have been long, thin earth features about 3 metres by 30 metres long, oriented along an east-west axis, and at the northern boundary of an open field.
One possible execution site is believed to have been a courtyard behind the house of the Haj Yahya family. Human bones were reportedly found on the site years later, leading researchers to assess there may also be a mass grave there.
Forensic Architecture analysed aerial photos from the British mandate era.
Adnan Al Yahya, now 92, was 17 when Tantura fell to Israeli forces. He has testified in several academic and journalistic publications over the years that he and a friend were forced by soldiers to dig a grave at the site and throw dozens of bodies in.
“I will never forget that day, it’s still very clear to me. I lost my belief in God that day,” Haj Yahya said on the phone from his home in Germany. “The world should know what happened to us in Tantura.”
The Tantura families’ committee and Adalah hope that the Forensic Architecture investigation will lead to more inquiries into the events of 1948, which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Approximately 700,000 people – about half the population – were expelled or fled from their homes in the war surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, and about 500 villages destroyed.
Forensic Architecture said the Tantura project is the first of a series of visual investigations the organisation is conducting into reported massacres related to the Nakba.
A thorough investigation must be undertaken of all of the archived records held in the UK, Israel and elsewhere relating to Tantura along with the rest of the Palestinian villages which were subjected to similar heinous fates.
There will be no peace for Palestine nor peace in our world until support on all levels for the Zionist state of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – aided and abetted by the U.S. and UK along with other entities – ends.
I had downloaded this a year ago. Forgot about (and my son hijacked my YouTube account lol - I really need to get him his own). Woke in the middle of the night and watched the first hour. Heartbreaking. It really is. The lies are falling apart. It is said the Israeli gov has all the evidence under lock and key. I wouldn’t be surprised if they destroy it. Being that these solders are in their 90s, witnesses will soon be gone too.
I had downloaded this a year ago. Forgot about (and my son hijacked my YouTube account lol - I really need to get him his own). Woke in the middle of the night and watched the first hour. Heartbreaking. It really is. The lies are falling apart. It is said the Israeli gov has all the evidence under lock and key. I wouldn’t be surprised if they destroy it. Being that these solders are in their 90s, witnesses will soon be gone too.