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Map of Middle East |
CIAO DATE: 06/02
Spring 2001 (Volume XXX, Number 3, Issue 119)
The Tantura Massacre, 22-23 May 1948
On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli army's Alexandroni Brigade. The village, south of Haifa, lay within the area assigned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly's partition resolution. In its occupation, depopulation, subsequent destruction, and seizure of all its lands by Israel, the fate of Tantura was similar to that of more than 400 other Palestinian villages during the 1948 war. But it also shared with some two score of these villages the additional agony of a large-scale massacre of its inhabitants.
Word of the Tantura massacre was completely overshadowed at the time by the fighting between Israel and the regular armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, which had entered the country after the state had been proclaimed. The first written reference to it was made by Haj Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Muslim cleric who had been an active member of the Arab National Committee of Haifa (the highest local political body) before its capture by the Haganah on 23-25 April. In about 1950, Khatib published in Damascus under the title Min Athar al-Nakba (Consequences of the Catastrophe) a compendium of writings, including his own memoirs on Haifa and several eyewitness accounts by Palestinian refugees from various parts of the country. Khatib's work, along with those of two other Arab authors, was translated into Hebrew in 1954 by the Israel Defense Forces, General Staff/History Branch, and published under the title Be'einei Oyev (In Enemy Eyes). Khatib's references to the Tantura massacre comprise a short account by Iqab al-Yahya (a notable of the village) and a longer and more detailed account by his son Marwan (pp in Min Athar, etc.). Khatib also reports cases of Tantura female rape victims being treated in a Nablus hospital. Later, using Marwan's testimony, Walid Khalidi referred to "the methodical shooting and burial in a communal grave of some forty young men in Tantura village" in the famous triangular Spectator correspondence between Erskine Childers, Jon Kimche, and himself (12 May-4 August 1961; republished in 1988 in JPS 18,1). Nonetheless, the entry under Tantura in Khalidi's inadvertently omitted All That Remains (Washington, IPS, 1992), mention of the massacre.
The issue of the Tantura massacre has come into recent prominence because of the work of an Israeli researcher, Teddy Katz, who dealt with it at length in his 1998 master's thesis at Haifa University. A summary of his research, particularly his finding that more than 200 Tantura villagers, mostly unarmed young men, had been shot after the village surrendered, was published in an article in the Hebrew press in January 2000. The article unleashed a storm in Israel, culminating in a 1 million shekel libel suit brought by veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade against Katz (though his research was based on taped testimonies not only of survivors but also of members of the brigade). What happened at the December 2000 trial is dealt with in an article in this issue by Israeli historian Ilan PappÈ, who also discusses the research itself and its ramifications.
The fate of Tantura was sealed long before the night of its fall. It was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine (see JPS 28,1 for the full text). Tantura itself fell within the zone of operation of the Alexandroni Brigade, one of the erstwhile Haganah's six Khish (field force) brigades (to be distinguished from its strike force, the three Palmach brigades). The official history of the Haganah, Sefer Toldot Haganah (vol. 3, pp. 1474-75), summarizing the operational orders to the brigades under Plan Dalet, lists the assignments of the four battalions constituting the Alexandroni Brigade. These include the "occupation of al-Tantura and al-Furaydis" as well as the capture of "twenty villages in enemy territory" (i.e., land assigned to the Arab state under the UN General Assembly partition plan). Plan Dalet was put into operation in the first week of April, six weeks before the end of the Mandate and the entry of the Arab regular armies. The task of capturing Tantura was assigned to the Alexandroni Brigade's 33rd Battalion. After the fall of the village and the massacre, the women and children were taken to the nearby village of Furaydis, which had already fallen but whose inhabitants had not been expelled. The surviving men were held in prison camps and were eventually transported under prisoner exchanges out of Israel; their families followed. Today most live in refugee camps in Syria or in the al-Qabun quarter of Damascus. In June 1948, a few weeks after Tantura's fall, the kibbutz of Nachsholim was established on its lands by Holocaust survivors. The village itself was razed, except for a shrine, a fortress, and a few houses. The site of the village is now an Israeli recreational area with swimming facilities, and the fortress houses a museum.
The evidence provided by the testimonies published below supplements the evidence of the two Yahyas and the research of Katz, albeit from the inevitably fragmented and narrow perspective of individual villagers caught in the vortex of events beyond their capacity to comprehend. The testimonies were selected from tens of interviews collected during the summer of 2000 by Mustafa al-Wali, a Palestinian researcher living in Damascus. First published in the autumn 2000 issue of Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, JPS's sister quarterly, they form part of a larger oral history project on 1948 to be published later this year.
The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial by Ilan Pappé
This article examines the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a graduate thesis using oral history—the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish witnesses—to document a massacre carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura in late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a Zionist, the case sheds light on the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as "ethnic cleansing." The article also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual massacre as it can be reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts from some of the transcripts.
Reshaping Druze Particularism in Israel by Kais M. Firro
In order to suppress Arab and Palestinian national sentiments among the Druzes, Israeli policymakers have systematically tried to reshape Druze traditional particularism since 1948 into a Druze identity that is part reconstruction, part invention. In so doing, Israeli government officials, with the help of a coopted Druze elite, are practicing a policy seeking to politicize Druze communal and sectarian dimensions, while depoliticizing their noncommunal and national dimensions. This paper, based largely on Israeli archival material, documents some of the political, social, and economic factors that have led to the "success" of these policies.
Reflections on October 2000: A Landmark in Jewish-Arab Relations in Israel by Azmi Bishara
This article was written in response to the violence that took place in Israel during the first two weeks of October 2000. The first phase of these events, from 1 to 6 October, was marked by massive demonstrations in Arab localities throughout Israel in sympathy with the second intifada; in the course of these demonstrations, thirteen unarmed Arab citizens were shot dead by Israeli security forces, a thousand were wounded, and hundreds were arrested. The second phase, from 7 to 15 October, involved vigilante actions by Jewish citizens against Arab citizens, including attacks on mosques, clinics, stores, and homes (see Docs. A5, C1, and D2 in JPS 118, and Docs. C4 and C5 in this issue.)
In diagnostic rather than narrative mode, the piece analyzes Israel's conduct during the events and their repercussions. Its thrust is that Israel's measures reveal the hollowness of its democracy as far as its Arab citizens are concerned. It equally condemns the Israeli establishment (military and civilian), the Israeli Left, and the "Israelized Arabs" preoccupied with winning the approval of the Jewish majority. Among the main results of the October events, in the author's view, are the reversal of the trend toward "integration" and the confirmation of the Arab national identity of Israel's Arab citizens, an identity that is bound to be consolidated as Israel pursues its policies of separation in the occupied territories.
Rocks and Rockets: Oslo's Inevitable Conclusion by Mouin Rabbani
Though the al-Aqsa intifada took the world by surprise, Palestinians are now almost unanimous in attributing its scope to the failures of Oslo. The author analyzes these failures from two perspectives: those concerning implementation and structural flaws. In describing the unfolding of the intifada and particularly its militarization, the author analyzes the primordial role of Fatah, the single most important factor in transforming the early clashes into a sustained rebellion.
Book Review
Mattar: Encyclopedia of the Palestinians. by James Jankowski
Shepherd: Ploughing Sand. by Ann M. Lesch
Righteous Victims. by Charles D. Smith
Schulz: The Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism. by Kamal Abdel-Malek
Brynen: A Very Political Economy. by Sara Roy
Wolkinson: Arab Empowerment in Israel. by Ali Kadri
Bollens: On New Ground. by Fred H. Lawson
El Khazen: The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967-76. by Irene L. Gendzier