jews have beach parties on mass grave of 1948 Tantura massacre

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Aerial view of Dor beach and its parking lot in Israel, built over the mass grave of the Palestinian massacre victims of Tantura, 1948.

There's a Mass Palestinian Grave at a Popular Israeli Beach, Veterans Confess
https://israelpalestinenews.org/mass-palestinian-grave-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-tantura-massacre/

"I was a murderer. I didn't take prisoners," admitted an Israeli combat soldier present for the June 1948 massacre in the Palestinian town of Tantura. "I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can't say how many [I killed]."

by Adam Raz, reposted from Ha'aretz, January 20, 2022  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1D7MDBp6XWmOi8euCcyxU8Hej2dazwehz8T38rFfxGNuFlvBberv-HHVE

"They silenced it," the former combat soldier Moshe Diamant says, trying to be spare with his words. "It mustn't be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don't want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It happened."

Twenty-two years have passed since the furor erupted over the account of what occurred during the conquest by Israeli troops of the village of Tantura, north of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, in the War of Independence. The controversy sprang up in the wake of a master's thesis written by an Israeli graduate student named Theodore Katz, that contained testimony about atrocities perpetrated by the Alexandroni Brigade against Arab prisoners of war.

The thesis led to the publication of an article in the newspaper Maariv headlined "The Massacre at Tantura." Ultimately, a libel suit filed against Katz by veterans of the brigade induced him to retract his account of a massacre.

For years, Katz's findings were archived, and discussion of the episode took the form of a professional debate between historians. Until now. Now, at the age of 90 and up, a number of combat soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces' brigade have admitted that a massacre did indeed take place in 1948 at Tantura – today's popular Dor Beach, adjacent to Kibbutz Nahsholim.

The former soldiers describe different scenes in different ways, and the number of villagers who were shot to death can't be established. The numbers arising from the testimonies range from a handful who were killed, to many dozens. According to one testimony, provided by a resident of Zichron Yaakov who helped bury the victims, the number of dead exceeded 200, though this high figure does not have corroboration.

Tantura massacre confessions
According to Diamant, speaking now, villagers were shot to death by a "savage" using a submachine gun, at the conclusion of the battle. He adds that in connection with the libel suit in 2000, the former soldiers tacitly understood that they would pretend that nothing unusual had occurred after the village's conquest. "We didn't know, we didn't hear. Of course everyone knew. They all knew."

Another combat soldier, Haim Levin, now relates that a member of the unit went over to a group of 15 or 20 POWs "and killed them all." Levin says he was appalled, and he spoke to his buddies to try to find out what was going on. "You have no idea how many [of us] those guys have killed," he was told.

Another combat soldier in the brigade, Micha Vitkon, talked about an officer "who in later years was a big man in the Defense Ministry. With his pistol he killed one Arab after another. He was a bit disturbed, and that was a symptom of his disturbance." According to Vitkon, the soldier did what he did because the prisoners refused to divulge where they had hidden the remaining weapons in the village.

Another combat soldier described a different incident that occurred there: "It's not nice to say this. They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel." One of the soldiers summed up by saying that the his comrades-in-arms simply didn't behave like human beings in the village – and then resumed his silence.

Coerced apology for truth-telling about Tantura massacre
These and other testimonies appear in an impressive documentation project of the director Alon Schwarz. His documentary film "Tantura," which will be screened twice this weekend online as part of the Sundance Film festival in Utah, would seem to undo the version that took root following the libel suit and Katz's apology.

Even though the testimonies of the soldiers in the film (some of them recorded by Katz, some by Schwarz) were given in broken sentences, in fragments of confessions, the overall picture is clear: Soldiers in the Alexandroni Brigade massacred unarmed men after the battle had concluded.

In fact, the testimony Katz collected was not presented to the court during the libel trial, which was settled midway through the proceedings. Listening to those recordings suggests that if the court had probed them at the time, Katz would not have been impelled to apologize. Often what the soldiers told him was only hinted at and partial, but together it added up to an unequivocal truth.

"What do you want?" asked Shlomo Ambar, who would rise to the rank of brigadier general and head of Civil Defense, the forerunner of today's Home Front Command. "For me to be a delicate soul and speak in poetry? I moved aside. That's all. Enough." Ambar, speaking in the film, made it clear that the events in the village had not been to his liking, "but because I didn't speak out then, there is no reason for me to talk about it today."

One of the grimmest testimonies in Schwarz's film is that of Amitzur Cohen, who talked about his first months as a combat soldier in the war: "I was a murderer. I didn't take prisoners." Cohen relates that if a squad of Arab soldiers was standing with their hands raised, he would shoot them all. How many Arabs did he kill outside the framework of the battles? "I didn't count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can't say how many."

The Alexandroni Brigade soldiers' testimonies join past written testimony provided by Yosef Ben-Eliezer. "I was one of the soldiers involved in the conquest of Tantura," Ben-Eliezer wrote, some two decades ago. "I was aware of the murder in the village. Some of the soldiers did the killing at their own independent initiative."

Mass grave: "They took care to hide it"
The testimonies and documents that Schwarz collected for his film indicate that after the massacre the victims were buried in a mass grave, which is now under the Dor Beach parking lot. The grave was dug especially for this purpose, and the burial went on for more than a week.

At the end of May 1948, a week after the village was conquered, and two weeks after the declaration of statehood, one of the commanders who was posted at the site was reprimanded for not having dealt properly with the burial of the Arabs' bodies.

On June 9, the commander of the adjacent base reported: "Yesterday I checked the mass grave in Tantura cemetery. Found everything in order."

In addition to the testimonies and documents, the film presents the conclusion of experts who compared aerial photographs of the village from before and after its conquest. A comparison of the photographs, and the use of three-dimensional imaging done with new tools, makes it possible not only to determine the exact location of the grave but also to estimate its dimensions: 35 meters long, 4 meters wide.

"They took care to hide it," Katz says in the film, "in such a way that the coming generations would walk there without knowing what they were stepping on."

"Disqualified"
The confession of the Alexandroni Brigade troops casts a new light on the dismal attempt to silence Teddy Katz.

In March 1998, while a graduate student at the University of Haifa, Katz submitted a master's thesis to the department of Middle Eastern history. Its title: "The Exodus of the Arabs from the Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948."

Katz, then in his fifties, received a grade of 97. According to custom, the paper was deposited in the university's library, and the author intended to proceed to doctoral studies. But his plan went awry.

In January 2000, journalist Amir Gilat borrowed the study from the library and published an article about the massacre in Maariv. It touched off a firestorm.

Besides the libel suit initiated by the Alexandroni veterans association, the university also went into a tizzy, and decided to set up a committee to reexamine the M.A. thesis.

Even though the original reviewers found that Katz had completed the thesis with excellence, and even though the paper was based on dozens of documented testimonies – of Jewish soldiers and Arab refugees from Tantura – the new committee decided to disqualify the thesis.

Katz's paper is not fault-free, but probably the primary target of criticism is the University of Haifa, which accompanied the research and the writing in a deficient manner, and after approving it then reversed course and disowned its student. That made possible the years-long silencing and repression of the bloody events in Tantura.

For Katz, one court hearing was all it took for him to sign a letter of apology in which he declared that there had not been a massacre in the village and that his thesis was flawed. The fact that just hours later he retracted this, and that his lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, was not present at the nighttime meeting in which Katz came under pressure to recant, was forgotten. The apology buried the findings the thesis had uncovered, and the details of the massacre were thereafter not subjected to comprehensive scrutiny.

Was Tantura a massacre? Historians' opinions
The historians who addressed the episode – from Yoav Gelber to Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé – reached different and contradictory conclusions. Gelber, who played a key role in the struggle to discredit Katz's paper, asserted that a few dozen Arabs had been killed in the battle itself, but that a massacre had not occurred.

Morris, for his part, thought that it was impossible to determine unequivocally what happened, but wrote that after reading several of the testimonies and interviewing some of the Alexandroni veterans, he "came away with a deep sense of unease."

Pappé, who engaged in a highly publicized debate with Gelber over Katz's thesis, determined that a massacre had been perpetrated in Tantura in the straightforward sense of the word. Now, with the appearance of the testimony in Schwarz's film, the debate would seem to be decided.

Dor beach and its parking lot in Israel, built over the mass grave of the Tantura massacre victims.

In one of the more dramatic scenes in the documentary, Drora Pilpel, who was the judge in the libel suit against Katz, listens to a recording of one of Katz's interviews. It was the first time she had encountered the testimony collected by Katz, whose speedy apology brought the trial to a quick end. "If it's true, it's a pity," the retired judge tells the director after removing her headphones. "If he had things like this, he should have gone all the way to the end."

Time to stop pretending
The Tantura [massacre] affair exemplifies the difficulty that soldiers in the 1948 war had in acknowledging the bad behavior that was on display in that war: acts of murder, violence against Arab residents, expulsion and looting. To listen to the soldiers' testimony today, while considering the uniform stand they demonstrated when they sued Katz, is to grasp the potency of the conspiracy of silence and the consensus that there are things one doesn't talk about.

It's to be hoped that from the perspective of years, such subjects will be more readily addressed. A possibly encouraging sign in this direction is the fact that the film about Tantura received funding from such mainstream bodies as the Hot cable network and the New Fund for Cinema and Television.

A possibly encouraging sign in this direction is the fact that the film about Tantura received funding from such mainstream bodies as the Hot cable network and the New Fund for Cinema and Television.

The grim events at Tantura will never be completely investigated, the full truth will not be known. However, there is one thing that can be asserted with a great deal of certainty: Under the parking lot of one of the most familiar and beloved Israeli resort sites on the Mediterranean, lie the remains of the victims of one of the glaring massacres of the War of Independence.

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Explosive new Israeli documentary 'Tantura' is prompting calls to excavate a possible Palestinian mass grave
https://www.jta.org/2022/01/25/culture/tantura-an-explosive-new-israeli-documentary-is-prompting-calls-to-excavate-a-possible-palestinian-mass-grave

What really happened near a beach in Israel in 1948?

The question, once debated in a 20-year-old libel suit that served as a microcosm for the battle over Israel's historical record, reentered the public consciousness this week. Entities including the Palestinian Authority and the editorial board of Haaretz have begun calling for a commission to excavate land near Mount Carmel in search of an alleged mass grave site in which perhaps 300 Palestinians may be buried.

The renewed attention is due to an explosive new documentary, "Tantura," directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, which premiered virtually Jan. 20 at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Schwarz interviews several Israeli veterans who, in the country's 1948 war for independence, served in the Alexandroni Brigade, a regiment that forcibly displaced Arab residents of the village of Tantura following the formal conclusion of the war in order to build Dor Beach and the neighboring Kibbutz Nahsholim.

On camera, many of these former soldiers tell a disturbing story: They had participated in a massacre, one the Israeli government subsequently covered up.

"We killed them. No qualms at all," one of the interviewees says. Another says he "didn't count" how many unarmed Palestinians he killed, except to note, "I had a machine gun with 250 bullets."  (Various accounts in the film estimate the death toll at between 200 and 300.) A third recounts witnessing a rape.

These elderly Israelis, many of them nonagenarians and four of whom have lived on Kibbutz Nahsholim since 1948, had told their stories at least once before: to the film's protagonist, onetime historian Theodore Katz. In 1998, for his graduate thesis at Haifa University, Katz amassed more than 140 hours of tape interviewing witnesses and survivors of Tantura (half of them Israeli, the other half Arab) to compile an oral history of the events, for which no paper documentation exists or has yet been made public by the Israeli Defense Forces archives.

Two years after Katz submitted his thesis, its claim of a massacre was picked up by Israeli media and ignited a firestorm of controversy. Soon after, many of his interview subjects recanted their testimony and sued Katz for libel. Katz signed an apology recanting his research, only to immediately claim the apology was coerced. The university pulled his thesis from its shelves, and to this day his findings are questioned by the government and some Israeli academics (one of whom, IDF historian Yoav Gelber, criticizes Katz's sole reliance on oral testimony by remarking in the film, "I don't believe witnesses").

"If you want to make a movie of them," Katz warns Schwarz, referring to the taped testimonies, "be careful, because you'll be hunted down as I was."

In the film, Katz's defense attorney says his libel case was the first Israeli trial to deal directly with claims of Israeli war crimes during the 1948 war, known by Palestinians as the "Nakba," or "catastrophe."

Tantura joined a small but potent group of allegations of Israeli violence against Palestinians in 1948 that have been hotly debated in Israeli society ever since, including incidents at Deir Yassin and Lydda/Lod. A similar documentary on Deir Yassin, in which Israeli director Neta Shoshani collected eyewitness and archival accounts from soldiers, premiered in 2017.

Prominent Israeli "New Historian" Ilan Pappé, whose work questions large parts of the Zionist historical narrative on 1948 and who had been a major supporter of Katz's thesis, also becomes a character in the film. A vocal supporter of the "one-state solution" that would combine Israel and the Palestinian Territories into a single unified government, Pappé invokes the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe what took place not only in Tantura but also across the Zionist project as a whole, from 1948 to today.

The film never explores exactly why Katz's subjects are now suddenly willing to come forward again and verify that their testimonies are true. In his director's statement, Schwarz theorizes they opened up "as if they wanted to share a truth deep inside their soul." Whichever the reason, Schwarz's relitigation of the case, which includes playing Katz's original audiotapes, produces shocking results. Subjects offer a steady drip-drip of half-remembered firsthand details: soldiers chasing villagers with flamethrowers; a mule-drawn cart carrying corpses to a mass grave.

Schwarz builds his interviews to a finale in which he uses historical mapping software to pinpoint a specific parking lot near the beach. Excavate the lot, the film's participants essentially dare, and you may find the truth.

That's exactly what the P.A. and various members of the Israeli left are now calling on Israel to do. Immediately following the film's Sundance premiere, the groups began to demand that the government investigate the veterans' claims, dig up the alleged gravesite and erect a memorial to the lost Tantura. The P.A. says an international commission should be formed to further probe the claims in the film.

Whether or not these efforts to resurface claims dating back to Israel's very founding will prove successful, Schwarz's film has already generated heated conversation around how the Jewish State commits itself to its own memory. If "Tantura" finds a distributor willing to back its post-Sundance release, that conversation is sure to grow even more intense. As one of the subjects notes, "A state is seized by the sword."

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Israeli Historian Dismisses Confessions By IDF Soldiers Of 1948 Slaughter At Tantura — 'I don't believe witnesses'
https://christiansfortruth.com/israeli-historian-dismisses-confessions-by-idf-soldiers-of-1948-slaughter-at-tantura-i-dont-believe-witnesses/

When it comes to "Holocaust" survivors, we are all expected to believe their "eyewitness" accounts as if they were directly given to us by God, but when it comes to the genocide of Palestinians, many of whom were burned alive by Jewish terrorists with flamethrowers at Tantura, Jewish historians are far less sympathetic to the witnesses — even Jewish eyewitnesses:

https://www.jta.org/2022/01/25/culture/tantura-an-explosive-new-israeli-documentary-is-prompting-calls-to-excavate-a-possible-palestinian-mass-grave

What really happened near a beach in Israel in 1948? The question, once debated in a 20-year-old libel suit that served as a microcosm for the battle over Israel's historical record, reentered the public consciousness this week. Entities including the Palestinian Authority and the editorial board of Haaretz have begun calling for a commission to excavate land near Mount Carmel in search of an alleged mass grave site in which perhaps 300 Palestinians may be buried.

The renewed attention is due to an explosive new documentary, "Tantura," directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, which premiered virtually Jan. 20 at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Schwarz interviews several Israeli veterans who, in the country's 1948 war for independence, served in the Alexandroni Brigade, a regiment that forcibly displaced Arab residents of the village of Tantura following the formal conclusion of the war in order to build Dor Beach and the neighboring Kibbutz Nahsholim.

On camera, many of these former soldiers tell a disturbing story: They had participated in a massacre, one the Israeli government subsequently covered up. "We killed them. No qualms at all," one of the interviewees says. Another says he "didn't count" how many unarmed Palestinians he killed, except to note, "I had a machine gun with 250 bullets." (Various accounts in the film estimate the death toll at between 200 and 300.) A third recounts witnessing a rape.

These elderly Israelis, many of them nonagenarians and four of whom have lived on Kibbutz Nahsholim since 1948, had told their stories at least once before: to the film's protagonist, onetime historian Theodore Katz. In 1998, for his graduate thesis at Haifa University, Katz amassed more than 140 hours of tape interviewing witnesses and survivors of Tantura (half of them Israeli, the other half Arab) to compile an oral history of the events, for which no paper documentation exists or has yet been made public by the Israeli Defense Forces archives.

Two years after Katz submitted his thesis, its claim of a massacre was picked up by Israeli media and ignited a firestorm of controversy. Soon after, many of his interview subjects recanted their testimony and sued Katz for libel. Katz signed an apology recanting his research, only to immediately claim the apology was coerced. The university pulled his thesis from its shelves, and to this day his findings are questioned by the government and some Israeli academics (one of whom, IDF historian Yoav Gelber, criticizes Katz's sole reliance on oral testimony by remarking in the film, "I don't believe witnesses").

"If you want to make a movie of them," Katz warns Schwarz, referring to the taped testimonies, "be careful, because you'll be hunted down as I was." In the film, Katz's defense attorney says his libel case was the first Israeli trial to deal directly with claims of Israeli war crimes during the 1948 war, known by Palestinians as the "Nakba," or "catastrophe."

Tantura joined a small but potent group of allegations of Israeli violence against Palestinians in 1948 that have been hotly debated in Israeli society ever since, including incidents at Deir Yassin and Lydda/Lod. A similar documentary on Deir Yassin, in which Israeli director Neta Shoshani collected eyewitness and archival accounts from soldiers, premiered in 2017.

Prominent Israeli "New Historian" Ilan Pappé, whose work questions large parts of the Zionist historical narrative on 1948 and who had been a major supporter of Katz's thesis, also becomes a character in the film. A vocal supporter of the "one-state solution" that would combine Israel and the Palestinian Territories into a single unified government, Pappé invokes the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe what took place not only in Tantura but also across the Zionist project as a whole, from 1948 to today.

The film never explores exactly why Katz's subjects are now suddenly willing to come forward again and verify that their testimonies are true. In his director's statement, Schwarz theorizes they opened up "as if they wanted to share a truth deep inside their soul." Whichever the reason, Schwarz's relitigation of the case, which includes playing Katz's original audiotapes, produces shocking results. Subjects offer a steady drip-drip of half-remembered firsthand details: soldiers chasing villagers with flamethrowers; a mule-drawn cart carrying corpses to a mass grave.

Schwarz builds his interviews to a finale in which he uses historical mapping software to pinpoint a specific parking lot near the beach. Excavate the lot, the film's participants essentially dare, and you may find the truth.

That's exactly what the P.A. and various members of the Israeli left are now calling on Israel to do. Immediately following the film's Sundance premiere, the groups began to demand that the government investigate the veterans' claims, dig up the alleged gravesite and erect a memorial to the lost Tantura. The P.A. says an international commission should be formed to further probe the claims in the film.

Whether or not these efforts to resurface claims dating back to Israel's very founding will prove successful, Schwarz's film has already generated heated conversation around how the Jewish State commits itself to its own memory. If "Tantura" finds a distributor willing to back its post-Sundance release, that conversation is sure to grow even more intense. As one of the subjects notes, "A state is seized by the sword."

Most Israelis — and Zionist Jews in the Diaspora — are completely ignorant of the extent of Jewish "crimes against humanity" — a term Jews created to accuse and prosecute their German captors after the end of World War II.

Nahum Goldmann — the former head of the World Jewish Congress — once cynically observed,

"After Aushwitz, the non-Jews had a guilty conscience and tended to treat us as privileged. This is the reason why they voted in favor of the establishment of [the Jewish state] in 1947." (as quoted in the 1978 book, The Jewish Paradox)

And there's a simple reason why Jews are so removed from reality — the Israeli Defense Forces have a secret unit whose job it is to continually purge their archives of any evidence of genocide against the Palestinians.

This secret IDF unit is literally modeled after the fictional character of Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984 whose job it is to relegate inconvenient facts down the memory hole.

From cradle to the grave, Jews are fed a completely distorted and narcissistic narrative of suffering and victimhood that is completely divorced from reality.

The Capstone Jews — those at the top of the cabal — know exactly the lies they tell their underling Jews — their self-righteous "social justice" foot soldiers — their "willing executioners" who blindly do their bidding and experience the greatest brunt of the inevitable blowback from the "gentiles".

Common Jews often live in fear — not only of "gentiles" who want to "throw them in gas ovens" — but even more so of their fellow Jews at the top of their kosher Mafia — "brutal killers" who are "not nice people" in the words of Donald Trump.

Jews worldwide are gaslighted on a daily basis — as the Israelis literally wipe the Palestinians off the map, the Israelis cry out in pain, accusing the Palestinians of wanting to wipe them off the map.

This Jewish filmmaker of "Tantura" has already been mercilessly attacked and cancelled for attempting to break out of this Jewish cult of lies — just as another Jewish filmmaker — David Cole — literally had his life threatened when he made a documentary film exposing the lies of mass murder in gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Truly, they are a people whose entire identity is based on trinity of monstrous lies — their rejection of ultimate reality embodied in Jesus Christ, their preposterous insistence that they are Israelites, and the "Holocaust"– it's no wonder that Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of them, "For a Jew nothing is more insulting than the truth."