Tantura massacre

Tantura massacre
Part of the 1948 Palestine war and the Nakba
Photograph of Tantura during the British Mandate
Location	Tantura, Palestine
Date	22 May 1948; 76 years ago (1948-05-22)
Target	Palestinian villagers
Deaths	Unknown. Estimates range from "dozens" to 200+
Perpetrators	Haganah, Alexandroni Brigade

The Tantura massacre took place on the night of 22/23 May 1948 during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, when Palestinian villagers were massacred by the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah. The massacre occurred after the surrender of the village of Tantura, a small village of roughly 1,500 people located near Haifa. The number of those killed is unknown, with estimates ranging from "dozens" to 200+.^{[1][2][3][a][b][c]}

Oral testimonies by surviving Palestinians were met by skepticism. A corroborative 1998 thesis by an Israeli Haifa University graduate Theodore Katz, who interviewed survivors, was also met with denial. In a 2022 Israeli documentary film called Tantura, several Israeli veterans interviewed said they had witnessed a massacre at Tantura after the village had surrendered. In 2023, Forensic Architecture published its commissioned investigation of the area and concluded that there were three potential gravesites in the area of the Tel Dor beach that were connected to a massacre.

After the massacre, most of the village was destroyed and its residents were expelled, with many of the women and children being transported to Furaydis. The Israeli kibbutz and beach resort of Nahsholim was established on the site of the depopulated village. The victims were buried in mass graves, one of them presently beneath a parking lot for the nearby Tel Dor beach.

Tantura was a Palestinian village within the territory assigned to a Jewish state in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.^[4][5] It had a population of 1,500.^[6] As part of Plan Dalet, formulated in March 1948, ahead of the 14 May 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Haganah assigned the Alexandroni Brigade for the "occupation of al-Tantura and al-Furaydis".^[4][7] Of the brigade's four battalions, the 33rd was assigned to Tantura.^[4]

On the night of 22–23 May 1948, Tantura was attacked by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade.^[4]

Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi writes that Nimr al-Khatib provided "much detailed evidence" of "the methodical shooting and burial in a communal grave of some forty young men in Tantura village."^[4][8] Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote that in addition to executions, a number of villagers were killed in "a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets."^[9]

Muhammad Abu Hana, who was a child at the time of the events in Tantura recounted:

"By morning, the shooting had stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up [...] the women and children on one side, the men on the other. [...] the soldiers led groups of men away, and you could hear gunfire after each departure. [...] I saw bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura who emptied their cargo in a big pit. [...] On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about."^[4]

Yaacov Esptein, the mukhtar of the nearby Jewish village of Zichron Yaacov, was a friend of Tantura's mukhtar and attempted to intercede on behalf of the villagers.^[4][10] In 2002, The News & Observer interviewed Jawdat Hindi, a daughter of Tantura's mukhtar, who said that Epstein arrived and shouted at the Jewish soldiers, and that at a later point, "he was crying, saying that we did not expect such a day and such a happening to our neighbors".^[10] Ilan Pappé writes that Yaacov had "managed to call a halt to the orgy of killing in Tantura, but ‘he came too late’, as one survivor commented bitterly."^[11]

After the massacre, the women and children were expelled to Furaydis, a neighboring village. The surviving men were placed into prison camps and later left Israel through prisoner exchanges, with their families following.^[6] Many of the survivors ended up living in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria.^[12]

Historian Saleh Abdel Jawad writes that executions of prisoners from Tantura also took place in detention centres after the massacre.^[13]

Historian Saleh Abdel Jawad writes that Nimr al-Khatib was the first to write about the massacre, having done so in 1951.^[14]

Research on the event was expanded upon by further testimonies gathered by Mustafa al-Wali from tens of interviews that were published in the Summer 2000 issue that year of Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, a quarterly of the Journal of Palestinian Studies.^[4][15]

In January 2000 Israeli journalist Amir Gilat published an article about the events at Tantura in Ma'ariv,^[16][d] that drew heavily on the 1998 thesis of Katz. Following the publicity, Alexandroni Brigade veterans protested, and Gilat wrote a follow-up piece including their denial that a massacre had occurred.^[18] The veterans sued Katz for libel (asking for 1 million shekels, or $321,000, in damages).^[19]

In the resulting court case, after two days' cross-examination, Katz agreed to an out-of-court settlement that involved him signing a statement nullifying the conclusions of his research, namely that extrajudicial killings were committed after the surrender of the village.^[20] The next day at court, Judge Drora Pilpel announced the case closed. Katz, however, then attempted to rescind his statement, explaining that he had signed it in a "moment of weakness that he already deeply regretted", and that it "did not represent what he really felt about his work".^[20] After several further hours of deliberation, Judge Pilpel upheld the decision to close "based on her conviction that a contract between parties must be respected,^[20] though "she emphasized that her decision did not relate in any way to the content, accuracy or veracity of the libel suit".^[20] Katz subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the decision of the lower court for the same reasons.^[20]

In the wake of this case, the University of Haifa suspended Katz's degree, which had originally received a grade of 97%, inviting him to revise his thesis.^[19][18] The paper was sent out to five external examiners, a majority (3:2)^[18] of whom failed it.^[21] Katz was subsequently awarded a "non-research" MA.^[18][22]

The historian Ilan Pappé supported Katz and his thesis, and has challenged the Israeli veterans to take him to court, saying he has evidence that the massacre occurred.^[17][16] In a 2001 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Pappé defended the use of oral history with reference to the USA. He pointed out that that history was obtained by Katz, not only from Palestinian villagers, but also from Israeli soldiers. Pappé provided new evidence that had come to light after Katz had presented his thesis, in one case quoting (with reference to the IDF source file) "from a document from the Alexandroni Brigade to IDF headquarters in June notes: 'We have tended to the mass grave, and everything is in order'”, and in another, published testimonies by eyewitnesses who had been located in Syria. He also related the background to Katz's original signed repudiation of his thesis.^[17]

In 2004, Israeli historian Benny Morris extensively reviewed the Tantura controversy and recounted himself coming away "with a deep sense of unease". He suggested that, while it is unclear whether or not a massacre occurred, there was no doubt that war crimes were committed by the Jewish forces (Haganah) and that the village was forcibly cleansed of its Arab inhabitants. Morris believes that one village woman was raped, Alexandroni troops may have executed POWs and there may have been some looting, based on an army report that uses the Hebrew word khabala (sabotage).^[23][24]

Morris underlined the fact that in interviews conducted by himself and by the Ma'ariv reporter Amir Gilat, all refugees confirmed that a massacre had taken place, while all IDF veterans denied it. Regarding the latter, Morris describes what he calls “troubling hints”, such as a diary by an Alexandroni soldier, Tulik Makovsky, in which he wrote “… that our boys know the craft of murder quite well, especially boys whose relatives the Arabs had murdered... or those harmed by Hitler [they are the same fascists]. They took their private revenge, and avenged our comrades who had died at their hands, against the snipers”. Morris also noted that, given the political sensitivities at the time, the word khabala may have been used as a euphemism for a massacre.^[18]

Morris further pointed out issues with the scoring of the second version of Katz's thesis in that the two referees who gave anomalously low scores had been co-authors of an IDF book in which it was argued that ”… the Israeli Army had carried out only a ‘partial expulsion’ of the populations of the Arab towns of Lydda and Ramlah and dismissed the charge that the troops had massacred Lydda townspeople, some of them inside a mosque, on July 12, 1948”, whereas IDF records from the IDF archive show that a full-scale expulsion had been carried out and that Yiftah Brigade troops killed some 250 townspeople.^[18]

There were plans in 2004 to exhume bodies from a site between Nahsholim and Dor believed to be a mass grave, but this has not happened.^[18] In 2006, Katz's presentation of the facts was disputed again by the Israeli historian Yoav Gelber who was to play a key role in the efforts to discredit Katz's research.^[25][26]

In January 2022, a documentary film on the subject by Alon Schwarz called Tantura was screened at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.^[26] Several Israeli veterans interviewed said they had witnessed a massacre at Tantura after the village had surrendered. Many of the interviewees gave descriptions, with the numbers of victims who were shot dead from "a few" to "several dozen" or "more than 200". The latter estimate was provided by a resident of Zikhron Ya'akov who stated he had helped bury the victims. They affirmed that soldiers in the Alexandroni Brigade had murdered unarmed men after the battle had ended, and the victims were indeed buried in a mass grave, now located under the Dor Beach parking lot near Nahsholim kibbutz.^[26] Other interviewees explicitly denied a massacre had taken place.^[27] The screening also prompted entities including the Palestinian Authority and the editorial board of Haaretz to call for a commission to investigate another alleged mass grave site near Mount Carmel.^[28]

University of Haifa history professor Yoav Gelber told Schwarz in Tantura that Katz's thesis was flawed due to its heavy reliance on oral testimony,^[29][30] and later criticized the film after it was screened due to what The New York Times paraphrased as "a paucity of other documentation [besides oral sources]."^[31] This criticism and others about the film were also made by Benny Morris.^[32] The family of one of the veterans interviewed accused Schwarz of misrepresenting the veteran's account,^[31] and another veteran said a massacre had happened^[33] but told The New York Times that the Israeli soldiers had acted without orders.^[31]

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In 2023, after being commissioned to do so by the Palestinian NGO Adalah, the Forensic Architecture research unit at Goldsmiths undertook a comprehensive investigation of the historical sources, cartographic and aerial photographic data together with oral testimonies, and produced a 3-D model indicating the existence of three grave sites beneath the beach resort.^{[34][35][36][37]}

• Pappé, Ilan (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld. ISBN 978-1-85168-555-4.

• Israeli Myths & Propaganda. Part 3 (Interview with Ilan Pappé)
• Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura, Youtube-Chanel from Forensic Architecture, 30 May 2023; 17 minutes