The Tantura myth: it makes no sense that Palestinian villagers never mentioned a massacre

Residents of Tantura, 1948

Benny Morris writes in Haaretz on 7 October 2022:

Naively, I thought that with Mohamed Bakri’s film “Jenin, Jenin” (2002), which mendaciously describes the Israeli army’s conquest of Jenin’s refugee camp during the second intifada, we had reached the pinnacle of historical distortion: when manipulations and lies – visual and verbal – coalesce and offer the viewer a false picture of what has happened. But Alon Schwarz, in his new film “Tantura,” definitely outdoes his mentor, at least when it comes to manipulation, schticks and tricks.

He did it again in his article “How to Cover Up a Massacre.” Like the film, the article suffers from an extreme dearth of integrity. It’s basically fraudulent.

I will begin with a personal comment. Some months ago, Schwarz interviewed me on camera over a period of two to three hours. To my surprise, when he sent me a copy of the film at my request (for one-time viewing), I discovered that I do not appear in it at all. Schwarz chose to disappear me. I know that filmmakers don’t like to waste their precious time or their footage, but that’s what Schwarz did. To me it is clear that he simply didn’t like what I said, because my comments weren’t compatible with the narrative about Tantura that he wanted to sell his viewers: a sensational, earthshaking tale – “the Jews behaved like Nazis” – that would garner him extensive publicity and perhaps even prizes from so-called Israel lovers abroad.

In both the article and the film, Schwarz maintains that Israeli forces, specifically the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade, perpetrated a large massacre against the inhabitants of Tantura immediately after they captured the seaside village on May 23, 1948. The film is based on the allegations made by Teddy Katz in his master’s thesis, submitted to the University of Haifa in 1998. Katz wrote that soldiers of the battalion systematically murdered “no fewer than 200 to 250 men… in circumstances in which the villagers lacked weapons and lacked protection altogether.” Katz is the film’s hero and chief narrator.

In his article, which he wrote in response to widespread criticism of his documentary, Schwarz wrote, “[The film] includes different versions of what happened in Tantura, including the accounts of many interviewees who deny that a massacre took place.” This is a crude lie. In fact, in the film Schwarz gave the speakers who support the “big massacre” story (Teddy Katz, Adam Raz, Ilan Pappé – Katz’s anti-Zionist mentor at the University of Haifa – and so on) 10 times more screen time than he gave the interviewees who refuted the story. And Schwarz saw to it that the chief refuter who appeared in the film, Prof. Yoav Gelber, emerged as a ridiculous figure by means of tendentious editing. Schwarz demanded that Gelber speak in English, which is not his native tongue (whereas others in the film were allowed to use their own language – Hebrew or Arabic), and Gelber appears in a way that is, how shall I put it, not exactly intellectually persuasive.

In the film, Schwarz backs Katz’s thesis to the hilt (“200-250 murdered”), but in his article, he is circumspect if not downright sly. He writes that “the film doesn’t focus on the question of whether 12, 20 or 200 people were killed in Tantura.” That’s correct – Schwarz does not focus on the numbers, he simply allows the viewer to understand that Katz’s numbers – and his descriptions of a systematic, Nazi-style mass murder – are correct. The film, with its multiple appearances of Katz (in a wheelchair, underlining his status as a victim of Israeli academe – he was eventually barred from continuing to a Ph.D. at the University of Haifa), is wholly geared to confirming the “big massacre” thesis.

The remark about “12, 20 or 200” having been killed is designed to leave Schwarz with an escape hatch – namely, “I did not claim explicitly that 200 to 250 people were killed” – as he knows that there are Israeli historians who have concluded that Alexandroni soldiers did in fact perpetrate “small” war crimes at Tantura, but reject the “big massacre” narrative (see, for example, my essay, “The Tantura ‘Massacre,’” in The Jerusalem Report, Feb. 2, 2004). The argument between Katz (and his supporters, including Pappé, Michael Confino, Adam Raz and Arie Dubnov) and his opponents revolves not around the small war crimes committed by individuals, but around the question of whether or not a systematic massacre of 200-250 villagers took place. Such a massacre necessarily would have been organized by the battalion commanders (if not the brigade commander).

An abandoned, but still intact, building on the site of the former village of al-Tantura in 2015

Schwarz admits there were “a number of imprecise quotes in Katz’s thesis.” But he argues that these few imprecisions are insignificant, and were used by his critics as an excuse to disqualify Katz’s findings in toto. Again, Schwarz is misleading his readers. Katz’s distortions are very significant; they all aim at proving the thesis of the “big massacre” and the evil of the Zionist soldiers (or Zionism).

In his thesis, Katz wrote, among other things, that a refugee from Tantura named Abu Fahmi (his full name is Ali Abed al-Rahman al-Arja) said, “While this was happening, soldiers with Bren machine guns walked on both sides of the people and from time to time shot and killed and wounded people.” He was also quoted as saying, “They rounded up all the village residents in the square, stood all those who were left with their faces to the walls and murdered them in cold blood. I was a witness to that. About 95 people were murdered.”

But in the recording of the interview with Abu Fahmi, Katz is heard egging him on, “But it’s clear that they shot people after the surrender?” And Abu Fahmi replies: “We didn’t see that they killed after we raised our hands… No, they didn’t kill [after the Arabs surrendered].” Of course, this exchange does not appear in the thesis.

Elsewhere, Katz supposedly quotes an Israeli officer named Shlomo Ambar, who says: “Here, in Tantura, Arabs were murdered.” But these words are absent from Katz’s recording of the interview with Ambar. (Katz later claimed that Ambar did in fact say this, but only after his tape recorder batteries had run out – to which I can only say, give me a break.)

Schwarz maintains in the article that his film is based on Katz’s paper and on “documents, military aerial photographs and other archival materials.” This is just another crude lie, which points precisely at the central historiographic problem with Katz’s thesis and Schwarz’s film: There is no written evidence from 1948 – not in Israeli archives, not in United Nations’ archives and not in the archives of the Red Cross or the Western powers – that describes or even mentions a big massacre at Tantura. Katz and Schwarz base the “big massacre” thesis entirely on interviews with Arabs and Jews who “remembered” or claimed that they remembered it 40 years after the event.

If there was a massacre of 200 to 250 people at Tantura, it was the largest of the 1948 massacres. But there is no available document from 1948 that mentions a massacre at Tantura, apart from one document, which I’ll come back to below, that deals with the execution of a handful of Arab prisoners of war on the fringes of the village. Strange, very strange, because all the massacres perpetrated by Jews in 1948 are at least mentioned, if not described, in documents from 1948. These include documents of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia until the end of May 1948, the Israel Defense Forces, the UN (which had observers on the ground from May 1948), the Red Cross (whose officials operated in the country from April 1948), as well as records by the British and the Americans, whose representatives reported from Israel to London and Washington about the wartime events.

Deir Yassin, Burayr, Ein Zeitun, Lod, Hunin, Dawayima, Eilabun, Arab al-Mawasi, Majd al-Kurum, Saliha, Jish, Safsaf, Bi’na-Deir al Asad – the massacres perpetrated by Jews in these places and others are all mentioned in contemporary 1948 documentation, and in some cases are described in detail. Just not Tantura, not one mention.

Not that Haganah/IDF officers ignored Tantura in 1948. Accounts of the battle, the expulsion, the demolition of buildings afterward, all appear in the documents. Just not a massacre. On June 18, during the war’s First Truce, under the supervision of the International Red Cross and the United Nations, more than a thousand refugees from Tantura were transferred in an army convoy to Tulkarm, then under Iraqi army control.

A document in the Haganah Archives sums up Arab radio broadcasts of that period (Haganah Information Service, “E.I. [Eretz Israel, Mandatory Palestine], June 21-22, 1948”): “An Arab woman from Tantura… relates that the Jews are raping Arab women and demolishing the place.” But according to the report, the woman did not mention by so much as a word that the Jews also massacred hundreds of her fellow villagers. (A slightly different version of this report states that the woman related that the Jews “raped women in addition to the acts of robbery, theft and arson.” Again, no mention of a massacre). These items were broadcast on Radio Ramallah.

In addition, as far as I was able to discover, the archives of the UN and the Red Cross – whose officials organized and escorted the move of the Tantura refugees to Tulkarm and reported frequently to their headquarters – contain no mention of a massacre at Tantura. Does it stand to reason that among the thousand deportees, who were no longer under Jewish control, not one bothered to tell the Iraqi officers or the UN and Red Cross officials that, by the way, they had endured a horrific massacre of their fathers, brothers, sons, as described by Katz and Schwarz and their supporters? It is simply inconceivable, if a large-scale massacre that they had eyewitnessed or at least heard about had indeed occurred.

In his article, Schwarz quotes and interprets – again, misleadingly – two reports of Haganah/IDF officers about Tantura from the days after the battle, in which 14 Israeli soldiers and dozens of villagers had died. One report mentions “many acts of sabotage,” the second contains the phrase “Tantura plan.” Schwarz interprets these phrases as cover words or hints of a massacre. I don’t think so. A more logical explanation would be that the officers were referring, literally, to the condition of the homes in the village, taking into account the intention (“plan”), even before the conquest of the village, to establish a Jewish settlement at the site.

Already on April 12, Israel Galili, the head of the Haganah National Command, referred to the desire of the settlement institutions to establish a Jewish settlement in Tantura (apparently based on the assumption that the villagers would flee or be expelled). Indeed, on June 14, three weeks after the battle, Kibbutz Nahsholim was established there. Another IDF document from the days after the battle mentions “bodies” that remain scattered at the site – but that does not constitute evidence of a large-scale, methodical massacre. Perhaps the opposite, because according to Katz and Schwarz’s story, most of those who were massacred were shot in concentrated fashion and buried collectively in one or two graves.

There is one contemporary document confirming that Alexandroni Brigade soldiers murdered a number of captives in Tantura: the diary of Tulik Makovsky, a soldier from the 33rd Battalion, who was killed on June 1, 1948. It includes the following entry about events on the edge of Tantura: “The guys are quite well acquainted with the work of murder. In particular, these were guys whose families the Arabs had murdered, slaughtered or done other ‘nice’ things to, or who were victims of Hitler (after all, it’s the same fascism). They took their own private revenge and the revenge of our fallen comrades on the snipers…”  This account is afforded a measure of support in the book “The Alexandroni Brigade in the War of Independence” (1964, in Hebrew), edited by Gershon Rivlin and Zvi Sinai, which states: “After B Company combed this ridge, 8-10 snipers who were hiding in crannies were wiped out.”

(It’s noteworthy that a memorandum of the Arab Higher Committee, titled “The Atrocities of the Jews,” which was sent to the UN in early July 1948, makes no mention of Tantura – another puzzling omission if a large-scale massacre had recently taken place there.)

Refugees from Tantura in a scene from ‘Tantura’

It’s worth noting that Palestinian historiography in the decades after 1948 also did not mention a massacre at Tantura. The book deemed the Nakba bible, the six-volume “Al-Nakba” published between 1956 and 1960 by the chronicler Aref al-Aref, does not mention a massacre at Tantura. Nor does Walid Khalidi, the most important and most serious of the Palestinian historians, mention a massacre there despite devoting two-and-a-half pages to Tantura in his encyclopedic 1992 book about the lost villages, “All That Remains.”

Similarly, Mahmoud al-Yihiya Yihiya, who went into exile in Syria and in 1998 published a book called “Al Tantura” about his native village, did not mention a massacre, but rather listed the names of 52 villagers who were killed, presumably those killed in the battle and the handful of prisoners and others murdered afterward. (The only person from the 1948 generation who described a massacre at the site was an exile from Haifa, Haj Muhammed Nimr al-Khatib, in his book “Consequences of the Catastrophe,” published in Damascus in 1951. But neither Aref al-Aref nor Khalidi cited or quoted him about Tantura; they apparently thought he lacked credibility.)

Notably, Alexandroni Brigade veterans sued Katz for libel in April 2000. According to Schwarz’s article, the trial ended in a “hasty compromise.” Again, a barefaced lie. The plaintiffs emerged victorious. Katz capitulated, admitted that he was mistaken and signed a document in which he affirmed that the soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade had not perpetrated a massacre at Tantura. Afterward, he retracted his admission and appealed to the Supreme Court – which backed the District Court’s judgment against Katz.

And one final, personal matter: Schwarz distorts in his article what I said in the interview with him, with the clear intent of besmirching me. He claims I told him that the country was not photographed from the air during those years. But in fact every layperson who deals with the 1948 war knows the country was indeed photographed from the air – after all, aerial photos of Palestine were taken as early as World War I. Schwarz also claims I said that “dead bodies can’t bloat.” Another wicked distortion. Of course cadavers can bloat – the question was whether this can result in the creation of a small mound, as Katz claimed. At the time I consulted an expert on this matter, and she explained that it cannot.

Fortunately, Schwarz didn’t allege that I said the Earth is square. But he did write that I turned pale when he showed me the aerial photographs of Tantura as proof that a large massacre had occurred. What can I say? There are no limits to the man’s inventiveness and mendacity.

Clearly, Schwarz inserted me into his article to try to make me look ridiculous and in order to associate me with the group who “conceal” or “silence” or “deny” the Nakba. The underlying “argument” was simple: Whoever rejects his/Katz’s version of events at Tantura is a Nakba concealer/silencer/denier. That is arrant nonsense. It is possible to maintain that there was no “large-scale massacre” at Tantura and still affirm that Jews massacred Arabs elsewhere and that the Palestinians endured a “Nakba” (catastrophe).

To learn about the Nakba, Schwarz should read my books “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Revisited” (2004) and “1948” (2008), as well as Gelber’s book “Independence Versus Nakba: The Arab-Israeli War of 1948” (2004, in Hebrew). But I’m not optimistic on this score. Schwarz seems to be one of those people immune to evidence and facts.

This article is reproduced in its entirety