Tantura, The Story of an Arab Village from 1948

Tantura, directed by Alon Schwarz, is a new meticulously-researched documentary film which tells a disturbing story from the 1948 war, including a shocking and senseless killing, and a massive cover-up in its wake.  The film includes interviews with perpetrators, victims and witnesses (many now more than 90 years old), recreations, and never-before-seen archival material from the 1948 war.

The Arab village of Tantura was located on the coast, a bit south of Haifa, near Zichron Ya’akov, where Kibbutz Nachsholim and Dor Beach are located today. The soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade conquered the village in 1948, and the surviving villagers were expelled – some of them across the border.  There had always been rumors of a massacre there, and in the 1990s, Teddy Katz, a graduate student at Haifa University, interviewed more than 130 people – both Jews and Arabs – as primary research material for the writing of a Master’s thesis.  He stated in his thesis that not only were the Palestinians of Tantura expelled from their village, but there was also a massacre of perhaps as many as 200 unarmed men which took place after the conquest of the village was concluded. 

A conspiracy of silence had been created by the veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade.  At the time that Katz’s thesis became public through a report in an Israeli newspaper, members of the brigade’s veterans’ association sued Katz in civil court for libel, forcing him to deny his academic findings and to apologize saying that no massacre had taken place. 

Now, more than twenty years later, filmmaker Alon Schwarz provides the viewer with an enormous body of testimony – using the original audio recordings from Teddy Katz’s research, original documents and also contemporary interviews -- in order to build a story of what happened in that village so many years ago.

This film is part of the ongoing story of the Nakbah, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, which refers to the terrible tragedy that befell the Palestinian people during the 1948 war, in which hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed.  In some cases, the villagers fled, but in many other cases Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee by intimidation.  Later on, tractors were sent in to demolish the villages. As if this was not enough, there were also terrible atrocities that occurred – senseless killing of unarmed villagers, looting, and cases of rape. 

But Israelis like to think of themselves as the under-dog in this war. Also, atrocities were committed not only by Jews but also by Palestinians in that very difficult war. Nevertheless, an entire myth of denial of the Nakbah has been built up in Israeli society which includes the refusal to teach about it in Israeli schools and the claim that the Israeli army is the most moral army in the world.  During wartime, however, armies by definition do many immoral things.  Apparently, the Israeli army in the 1948 war was not immune to such acts.

Many questions remained in my mind after viewing this difficult film: can Israeli society acknowledge the destruction of the village of Tantura, the massacre, the expulsion and the ensuing years of denial? Will grappling with the terrible atrocities committed during the 1948 war help us to move on?  Will it help the descendants of Tantura come to terms with what happened there?  As journalist Gideon Levy wrote last week in Ha’aretz, won’t this help to lay the ghosts of the past to rest?  Perhaps this film could be the first step along the path of mutual recognition of past sins, similar to the Truth and Reconciliation commission of South Africa.

The film Tantura (documentary, 90 minutes) was produced with funding from two Israeli mainstream bodies: HOT cable TV and the New Fund for Cinema and TV.  The film is available from Reel Peak Films.