Nakba denial in Israel is long and deep, new documentary shows

35 x 4 meters. That’s 115 x 13 feet. These are the dimensions of the mass grave in which over 200 Palestinians of the village Tantura were buried, following their massacre on the May 22nd-23rd by the Alexandroni brigade of the Haganah, the Jewish Zionist militia, in the very first days of the official establishment of Israel.

These dimensions are now documented in a new documentary film by Alon Schwarz titled “Tantura”, which is featuring this weekend at the Sundance festival in Utah. The site of the massacre is now a popular beach in Israel.

In Israel, this is stirring some controversy, once again. The veterans of the Alexandroni brigade tried to hush it up once again in 2000, after they testified to historian Theodore (Teddy) Katz for his Masters thesis with the massacre as its central theme, completed in 1998. Their testimonies (as well as those of Palestinian survivors) would perhaps have remained rather obscure in the Haifa University library had it not been for the Israeli paper Ma’ariv widely exposing the massacre in 2000. The veterans sued Katz for libel (1 million Shekels, $321 thousand current value), and in a moment of weakness, without his lawyer and under both economic pressure, family pressure and dire health (a recent stroke), Katz signed a prepared letter of recantation to get out of it all. He regretted it hours later, but it was too late – the judge, who hadn’t actually immersed herself in the testimonies of Katz’s work, said that it was a done deal.

Haaretz today has a report on the documentary, by Adam Raz titled “There’s a Mass Palestinian Grave at a Popular Israeli Beach, Veterans Confess”. Raz highlights the fact that the judge, Drora Pilpel, hears some of the original testimonies obtained by Katz for the first time during the making of the documentary, and she says:  

If it’s true, it’s a pity… If he had things like this, he should have gone [taken the case] all the way to the end.

It’s not a maybe: Katz did have “things like this,” 60 hours of them. Wasn’t it relevant for the judge to glance at those things before closing the case?

Even the Jewish witnesses cited by Katz were emphatic.

Yosef Graf, a guide from neighboring Zichron Ya’akov who accompanied the Alexandroni forces, said:

I am telling you these [Alexandroni] people, they massacred.

Mordechai Sokler, also a guide from Zichron Ya’akov, said:

After eight days, I came back to the place where we buried them, near the railway. There was a big mound for the bodies had inflated.

Sokler told Katz that he counted 230 bodies.

When the Alexandroni veterans got Katz to recant in 2000, they were elated. On their official site they posted (Hebrew):

The story of Tantura – the end of the blood-libel

In January 2000 an investigative report was published in the paper “Maariv”, initiated by one Teddy Katz, who purports to be a historian, on a massacre which was supposedly enacted by the combatants of Division 33 [Alexandroni] upon defenseless people after the battle in Tantura. The combatants of the brigade went out to a legal and public battle to cleanse their name and to remove the unjust stain that was attributed to them by the mentioned “historian”. Following is the summary of the episode, at the end of which the truth came to light. 

It was exactly the opposite – the veterans were trying to bury the truth once again. The degree of denial among the Alexandroni veterans was outrageous – it went as far as a main witness, IDF veteran General Shlomo Ambar signing an affidavit stating that he and his mates recall nothing of what they told Katz.

Ambar’s original testimony is particularly heavy. He actually reflects upon his and his comrade’s actions in comparison to Nazis, and deems Nazi policy towards prisoners of war more favorably than theirs:

I associate [what had happened in Tantura] only with this: I went to fight against the Germans who were our worst enemy. But when we fought we obeyed the laws of the war dictated to us by international norms. They [the Germans] did not kill prisoners of war. They killed Slavs, but not British POWs, not even Jewish POWs— all those from the British army who were in German captivity survived.

And now, in the recent documentary, Ambar appears again, this time with expressions of puzzling denial (as cited by Raz in Haaretz):

“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.”

However, there are even more candid witnesses in the documentary:

“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 his comrades-in-arms simply didn’t behave like human beings in the village – and then resumed his silence.

Or this:

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.”

Or this:

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.”

In essence, all of these harrowing details aren’t new. We have dozens of testimonies from Palestinians starting shortly after the massacre. Like this one, that was conveyed to Teddy Katz by Salih ‘Abd al-Rahman (Abu Mashayiff) from Tantura.

[Shimshon Mashvitz] agreed [to stop] after he had killed eighty-five people [alone]…He killed them [with a Sten gun]. They stood next to the wall, facing the wall, he came from the back and killed them all, shooting them in the head…Every group twenty or thirty people. Twice or three times he changed magazines.

Ali ‘Abd al-Rahman Dekansh (Abu Fihmi) told Katz:

“The person who was with me knew Hebrew. He overheard them saying that after they [the diggers] finish the first mass grave, let them dig another one and kill them and put them in it… Their military announcement said they had killed two hundred and fifty. It is a war military announcement, it was broadcast.” 

It’s not important if we get each word precisely right. But that was the nature of the pedantic and obsessive witch-hunt that the Alexandroni conducted of Teddy Katz. They found some six examples where the text was not precise enough, like if he wrote “Nazis” instead of “Germans” (relating to the testimony of Ambar). And the judge accepted that level of alleged error, she didn’t challenge it.

After the court case and Alexandroni’s ridiculous, self-righteous proclamation of victory against the “blood libel”, Haifa University also joined the witch-hunt. Despite Katz having gotten one of the highest grades imaginable (97), they suggested that there were inaccuracies and that the thesis should be fixed. Katz fixed it, and actually extended it with more testimony. Two of the examiners recruited to the panel, Dr. Avraham Sela (Hebrew University) and Dr. Arnon Golan (Haifa University), gave Katz a 50 and a 40. Despite having gotten 85, 83 and 74 from the three other examiners, all of which would be passing scores, Katz was stripped of his Masters at Haifa University. Sela and Golan are outright distorters of the Nakba, as even Israeli historian Benny Morris has shown concerning their distortion and minimizing of the Lydda and Ramleh expulsions.

That is all part of the shame of Israeli Nakba denial. Professor Ilan Pappé, who has been a strong supporter of Katz, wrote yesterday on Facebook:

In 2007, with the insistence of the ministry of education I had to resign my position at Haifa University (despite the fact that I had tenure); one of my “crimes” was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz. I did my own research and categorically stated that this was one of the worst crimes committed by the Israeli army in 1948 – even after Katz under immense pressure and intimidation retracted his findings. 

I am not sorry for a moment and am grateful that I was able to continue the struggle against the Nakba denial at the university of Exeter in the last 15 years and I still hope to establish in London a center against Nakba denial.

Kibbutz Nachsholim was built atop Tantura merely three weeks after it was ethnically cleansed, and the mass grave became a parking lot. Tantura is now called Nachsholim, or Dor Beach.    

If you look at travel guides, the area of Dor Beach today looks like heaven. Sun and blue waters. But under that heaven is a real hell.

We now know precisely where the mass grave is located (due to a comparison of aerial photographs before and after the massacre, featured in the recent documentary). We know long and how wide it is: 35 x 4 meters. How deep it is we don’t exactly know. And how deep is the Israeli Nakba denial? Very deep. There are still millions of pages of Israeli reports on Nakba events of 1948 which are censored and unavailable to the public eye. I am thinking, if Palestinian survivors and descendants find this acceptable and respectful, that this mass grave should be unearthed and that some closure would be provided that way.

Not that this will eradicate Israeli Nakba denial. That’s something that seems to be buried under much thicker layers than the beach sands of Tantura.