In 1998, Israeli researcher Teddy Katz produced a Master’s thesis for the University of Haifa in which he noted that in 1948, Jewish militias - later the IDF - committed a massacre in the Palestinian fishing village of Tantura.
The thesis was based on 140 hours of audio-recorded interviews with 135 witnesses - half of whom were Jewish.
When Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv published the findings in 2000, the IDF took Katz to court for defamation, but the court threw out the case. The IDF, however, forced Katz to sign a statement in which he denied that the massacre took place. His MA was thus revoked by the university and his attempts to redeem himself against the IDF in court failed.
Katz’s redemption came last week through Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwartz in a documentary titled “Tantura.” In it, Schwartz uses Katz’s audio recordings alongside fresh testimonies by now-nonagenarian Israeli veterans who participated in the Tantura massacre.
The massacre was committed by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade, one of the Haganah’s field force brigades, on May 22nd and 23rd, 1948. It is estimated that 200-250 villagers were executed and buried in mass graves in the area. Those who survived were scattered across the country or ended up as refugees abroad.
The brutality of the massacre was only exceeded by the sheer scale of cover-up and denial. The massacre has been almost completely edited out from Israel’s 1948 war documents. Not even in the work of most of Israel’s “new historians” - a revisionist history movement that emerged in the late 1980s - was it defined as a massacre, if at all mentioned.
Israeli historian Benny Morris, for instance, the one who coined the term “new historians” and the first to bring to the Israeli public’s attention the Palestinian refugee problem, spoke of the Tantura incident but without a clear reference to a massacre.
He did not deny that there was an official Israeli decision to occupy the village, but framed the incident as a mere military operation. Expelling the villagers, he said, was mainly due to their resistance and failure to surrender to the Jewish Haganah.
Schwartz’s documentary was hailed, and rightly so, for challenging Israel’s official history. Many Palestinians saw in it confirmation for what they have been saying for decades. It has in fact created a momentum that encouraged the victims’ descendants, many currently residing in the coastal town of Furreidus near Haifa, to launch a popular initiative to pressure the Israeli state to disclose the village mass graves and redress the victims’ families.
Schwartz was forthcoming in the documentary about the need to recognise “Israel’s dark past,” and in so doing, he indirectly cast light on the larger and more disturbing reality of his country’s collective amnesia.
The fact that the massacre was the only case in Israel's history in which an event directly connected to the Nakba had been discussed in an Israeli court and yet continues to be adamantly ignored accentuates the ironies embedded in this amnesia.
But the ironies do not end there. Today, the Tantura victims are allegedly buried under the allocated car park of Israel’s popular Dor Beach. Here, the bustling noises of Israeli sunbathers and the sheer semblance of normality above the ground conceal the innocent souls of hundreds underneath it.
Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan once said that Israel’s forgetting of the past is disturbing mostly because of its “banality.” Tuqan seemingly reutilises the term “banality of evil” coined by Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt was referring to how the appalling acts of persecution - here, a specific reference to Nazi Germany’s murder and persecution of Jews - were normalised and routinised until they lost their moral meaning.
Similarly, Tuqan critiques how the normalisation of the Palestinian tragic experience as something unrelated to the establishment of the Jewish state made forgetting a guilt-free trip for the majority of the Israeli-Jewish public. This forgetting is not due to the absence of remembrance or ignorance, but rather a certain kind of “active forgetting” that is selective and misleading.
The Zionist historical narrative is premised on the notion that history can be controlled, moulded, changed by the formation of a dominant Israeli reality. Fundamental to the continuation of this reality is the removal of other realities that undermine it, namely the Palestinian ones.
As if to say that as much as “remembering“ has been critical in the formation of Israeli-Jewish identity and the justification of Israel’s establishment, it could not have been maintained and legitimised without eliminating Palestinian memory.
Israel’s founders knew from day one exactly what they wanted to be remembered and what they wanted to be forgotten. And, as such, since 1948, the Israeli state has been systematically removing, replacing, or concealing the traces of a Palestinian past from the Israeli public sphere.
Today, in a tragic irony, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum and the symbol of Jewish victimhood, sits on top of a hill overlooking the village of Deir-Yassin, the site of the famous 1948 Deir-Yassin massacre. There are no markers, placards or memorials, and no mention from tour guides in the museum regarding what their visitors see from where they stand.
In various other places, the physical traces of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians are hidden in plain sight. Travelling across what became Israel, you would notice the piles of stones, ruins, and structures overgrown with almond and fig trees, which belonged to the pre-1948 Palestinian communities. Most of these sites exist within open spaces where groves were planted, parks were created, nature reserves were established, and pathways for hiking were opened.
These “sites of silence” were also removed from their historical roots by being systematically hebrewised and rebranded to match the founding myths of Zionism as well as the Biblical claims to the land.
What is more, because memory is socially constructed and history is prone to revisions, it was also necessary to maintain the silence through strict legal instruments. These provide the Israeli state with the legislative and judicial power to shape or draw the boundaries of the public debate on the past.
Think of Israel’s 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which transferred the ownership of the internal and external refugees to the State of Israel. Then there is the notorious 1950 Law of Return, which gives Jews the right to move to Israel and obtain citizenship upon arrival, yet blocks the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.
Also think of the 2011 Nakba Law, which criminalises the commemoration of the Palestinian 1948 Nakba, and the recent 2018 Nation-State Law, which makes the right to the land exclusive to Jews, encourages settlements as a right, and downgrades Arabic — spoken by 20% of the population — to a ‘special status’ language.
With this complex web of silence, the question one must ask: how many Tanturas continue to be hidden under the banality of Israeli life? Under the glamorous beaches, green fields, or urban structures?
More critical, if more massacres are discovered or admitted, the bigger question that remains is: can this lead to Israel owning up to its past? Not only in the sense of admitting what happened in 1948, but also about its relationship with today’s status quo.
The signs are not encouraging. Scanning the reactions to the “Tantura" documentary in the comment sections on the Israeli newspapers that covered the subject, very few Israeli commentators had reservations against the need to investigate the massacre. Yet, for most, the massacre’s relationship with the Nakba and with today’s occupation was never mentioned.
For most, it seemed more of an exercise of self-cleansing and guilt-neutralisation and less of a redemption for the massacred Palestinians.
This gives the impression that, yet again, when Palestinian history is examined by Israelis, it is diminished and turned into an internal debate of Jewish history.
Dr Emad Moussa is a researcher and writer who specialises in the politics and political psychology of Palestine/Israel.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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