For a long time, the revelation, in 2000, of the killing of more than two hundred Palestinian civilians by the Israeli forces in the village of Tantura remained a disputed subject. The person who made the revelation was subjected to defamation, ostracism, and marginalization. Twenty years later, a film has come to confirm his work: the Tantura massacre did indeed take place.

It was in 2000, and Israel was aware of the case, as it does with such cases that emerge from time to time: “the Katz case” to some, and “the Tantura case” to others. The case attracted the attention of a small number of specialists and did not make newspaper headlines. But it soon sparked public debate. A University of Haifa student, Theodore (Teddy) Katz, who was not particularly young, wrote a master’s thesis about what happened on May 23, 1948, in Tantura, a Palestinian fishing village 20 kilometers from Haifa—exactly eight days after the establishment of the State of Israel, at a time when the first Arab-Israeli war had barely begun.

“I Couldn’t Bear It”

Two years of research led Katz to conclude that after a short battle won by Israeli forces, a crime was committed in this village was committed by Battalion 33 of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Palmach, the elite armed militia of the labor movement, which dominated the Zionist camp at the time. (The Israeli army would not be officially established until a week later.)

The Palestinian survivors, who became refugees and whom Katz interviewed, all spoke of a massacre that took place outside the context of combat. Most of them referred to a brother, father, son, or husband who had “been taken and never returned.” Shlomo Anbar, who was a non-commissioned officer at the time and later became a general, arrived at the scene after the massacre and told Katz: “When I saw what the soldiers had done, I couldn’t bear it. I left.” He later refused to testify on Katz’s behalf.

The Palestinian survivors, who became refugees, all spoke of a massacre that took place outside the context of combat.

Katz was then a member of one of the more left-wing kibbutzim in Israel. He was also active in Meretz, the Zionist left-wing party. The graduate student interviewed 135 people, including 65 former residents of the village, many of them refugees in the West Bank, and 20 members of the Israeli brigade, as well as senior officers and people from the area around Tantura, both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. The village whose fate he was investigating had a population of 1,500.

According to Katz, in order to accelerate the process of expelling them, Israeli soldiers first separated women, children, and the elderly from men between the ages of 14 and 50. After several rounds of verification, he concluded that 90 of them had been killed on the beach, while many others were killed in the streets or even inside their homes. The student submitted his thesis in March 1998 and received a high grade of 97 out of 100 from the university’s examining committee.

A Legendary Brigade of the “War of Independence”

In January 2000, the newspaper Maariv reported on Katz’s work and gave surviving Israeli brigade officers an opportunity to speak. They condemned the work as “fabricated.” They all presented the same account: there had been a battle—a real battle—but no massacre had been committed. They sued Katz for defamation.

We will not pause to recount the details of this unequal battle between a trained historian and the power represented by veterans of a legendary brigade from Israel’s “War of Independence.” Katz was alone. Attacks against him soon came from all sides. Because of a poorly worded sentence that had no direct connection to the facts in question, the graduate student was accused by the plaintiffs’ lawyer of fabricating evidence.

The Israeli brigade officers denied that a massacre had taken place, speaking instead of a battle.

His wife was repeatedly harassed by telephone: “You whore, you will see what we will do to you and your traitor husband.” His wife broke down. His opponents managed to persuade Teddy Katz to speak with them in the absence of his lawyer. They offered him a “settlement”: he would withdraw his thesis and they would withdraw their complaint. His wife supported the idea. The opposing side pointed out that Katz did not use the word “massacre” in his thesis, but rather referred to “mass killing.” Therefore, they told him, he had no reason not to retract it. The process lasted for hours. Finally, Katz, facing the opposing lawyers alone, signed a statement acknowledging that he had “systematically fabricated the testimonies.” He added that “no massacre was committed by soldiers of the Alexandroni Battalion.” He did not even tell his own lawyer.

Katz then returned home. He did not sleep all night. The following day, he appeared before the court and told the judge that he had experienced a “moment of weakness” and rejected the statement he had signed. It was too late. After suspending the hearing for two hours, the judge returned to declare the statement signed by Katz valid.

The trial ended, and members of the Alexandroni Brigade raised champagne glasses. There was no longer any need for the Palestinian survivors who had been scheduled to come and testify in support of his original thesis. No court ever heard them. Newspapers published Katz’s statement with great relish. The student turned to the Supreme Court seeking an appeal of the trial. His request was rejected. His university ostracized him and annulled his thesis—imagine that, a forger! The university later expelled Ilan Pappé, the only professor who had publicly supported him.

In 2005, I had begun editing my book The Buried: Israeli Society at a Dead End (La Découverte, 2006) by recounting this case, which seemed to me emblematic of the official Israeli relationship with the country’s past—a relationship governed from the outset by the denial of facts and reality. I met with Katz and Pappé at length. Katz, who had always regarded himself as a committed Zionist but one committed to historical truth, was a broken man. Pappé, meanwhile, was deeply disappointed, as Israeli society seemed to him incapable of moving beyond denial and lies. He left Israel shortly afterward to continue his career as a historian at a British university.

More than twenty years have passed since then. And now, in [2022], a documentary simply titled Tantura is being screened in Israel, directed by Alon Schwarz with the assistance of historian Adam Raz. The film presents testimonies from several soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade. All of them are over 90 years old, and they openly say that Katz was right: their brigade did indeed commit a massacre in Tantura on May 23, 1948.

“I Was a Killer”

Diamant, a resident of the nearby town of Zikhron Ya’akov who was present at the scene, estimates the number of dead at more than 200. Why did he say nothing before? He replies: “I neither saw nor heard anything.” He adds: “Of course, we all knew,” referring to the other soldiers who remained silent or denied it in 2000, suggesting that a culture of silence and denial was one of the components of the crimes of that period.

The soldier Amitzur Cohen recalls his conduct at the time and says in the film: “I was a killer; I did not take any prisoners.” How many men did you kill? “I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 rounds in the magazine. I cannot say how many [died].”

The soldier Misha Vitkon explains that he saw one of the officers, Nachman Karmi, “who was a little crazy (…) shooting one Arab after another with his Parabellum pistol.” Karmi later had a successful career in the Ministry of Defense.

The soldier Haim Levin recounts how a colleague approached a group of 15 to 20 Palestinians, carrying a machine gun in his hand, and “killed them all.” Another speaks of Israeli soldiers who “piled people into a barrel and then shot them. I remember the blood flowing from the barrel.”

In short, insofar as it was a massacre, it was also a brutal act. The documentary is devastating. This includes Judge Drora Pilpel, who ended the trial and prevented the Palestinian witnesses from being heard and who, 22 years later and too late, acknowledged that she may have acted improperly.

Tantura was destroyed very quickly by Israel, as were hundreds of other Palestinian villages.

As one might imagine, Tantura was destroyed very quickly by Israel, as were several hundred other Palestinian villages. Kibbutz Nahsholim and a beach that is extremely popular with Israeli swimmers, Dor Beach, were established on its lands. How many of them know that beneath these soft sands lie an unknown number of Palestinians, among those killed in a massacre committed in cold blood by Israeli elite forces? In his thesis, Teddy Katz asks a Jewish witness named Motil Sokoler, a civilian summoned to bury the bodies of the victims who had been taken to the beach, how many there were. The man replied that he had “stopped counting” after 230 bodies.

A Country Born of Sin

This documentary, which was screened in the United States at the end of January at the Sundance Film Festival founded by actor Robert Redford, where it was well received, brings a definitive end to the debate and the pathetic denial by official Israeli historians. It is, of course, a victory for Teddy Katz, the man who exposed the crime. But this victory came at a very high price. It remains worth noting the tendency among some Israeli Jewish participants or witnesses of the 1948 war who, more than 70 years later, as they approach the end of their lives, appear to want to cleanse their consciences somewhat before disappearing.

Yaakov Sharett, the son of Moshe Sharett, who served as prime minister of Israel after David Ben-Gurion, spent most of his professional career in the Shin Bet, the agency primarily responsible for suppressing Palestinians. Four months ago, he told Haaretz: “Israel was born of sin. I worked for a criminal country.” He was 95 years old at the time and said he had definitively become “anti-Zionist.”

Published simultaneously with https://orientxxi.info/ar

The report was first published in French in February 2022.

Source: Al-Araby Al-Jadeed