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.
