Lede: The Israeli veterans of the 1948 battle at Tantura village finally come
clean about the mass killing of Arabs that took place after the village's
surrender

Adam Raz, 20 January 2022

(quote)
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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

The Tantura 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.

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.

Adam Raz is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict Research. The Akevot Institute assisted the filmmaker (without
remuneration).
(/quote)
-- https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968