By the editors
Sarajevo- Amidst a gathering of international filmmakers and the Bosnian audience, the documentary film “Tantura” by Israeli director Alon Schwartz was screened, which documents – using cinematic tools – the testimonies of soldiers from the “Alexandroni” Brigade who confess to committing the massacre of the Palestinian village of Tantura and burying its martyrs in a mass grave.
The documentary follows the story of Israeli graduate student Teddy Katz, who documented the killing of Palestinian civilians through oral testimony from soldiers involved in the massacre during the era known in Israel as the “Israeli War of Independence” and in Palestine as the “Nakba.” The Israeli researcher was initially celebrated for his meticulous scholarly work, but was soon stripped of his degree and publicly targeted as a traitor and fraud.
Decades later, new evidence has emerged to confirm Teddy Katz’s findings, not only exonerating him, but raising profound questions about how Israelis deal with one of the darkest chapters in modern history, and telling the untold story of Israel’s founding. It is forbidden to talk about the “Nakba”.
Bosnians in Sarajevo expressed their pain at the film’s story, which they saw as a reflection of the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s. Palestinian journalist Ashira Darwish, who attended the film’s screening, said she was deeply affected by the documentary about Tantura. She added, in an interview with Al Jazeera Net, that she was deeply pained because she learned that the place where the cars were parked when she visited the area was located directly above the mass grave where the Palestinians were buried.
Tantura village
The massacre was committed in the village of Tantura on the Mediterranean coast, most of whose inhabitants, estimated at more than 1,200, were displaced during the Nakba to the nearby village of Al-Furaidis, and some of them settled there, while the majority of the inhabitants of Tantura were forced to leave by the settlers, so they dispersed until some of them settled in the Yarmouk camp in Syria or in the Irbid region in Jordan and some Arab villages inside Palestine.
The film is based on 140 hours of accounts and testimonies from survivors of the massacre and those who participated in its commission. It also relied on the discovery of documents in the Israeli archives that include confessions by some officers during correspondence between them about committing the massacre – on May 23, 1948 – and killing the residents without indicating the number of victims and placing the bodies in a mass grave.
What was revealed in the Tantura film did not stop at the confessions of 4 soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade who participated in the massacre, but rather a 3D aerial photograph of the area showed that a hole was dug in 1948, after the massacre was committed, with a length of 35 meters, a width of 4 meters, and a depth of one meter.
Based on recorded testimonies and oral history, Katz interviewed dozens of soldiers who took part in the operation, as well as Palestinian survivors who are now over 90 years old. Based on his findings, Katz concluded that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes in the capture of Tantura, such as killing unarmed individuals, raping, and looting property. The thesis was published, and was largely ignored at the time, but two years later, an Israeli newspaper picked it up and published it.
After its publication, veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade sued Katz for defamation, and the University of Haifa formed a special committee to review the academic thesis, which found “methodological errors that raised questions about the thesis.” Katz was forced to apologize and retract his thesis, in exchange for dropping the legal charges, and his work was removed from the shelves of Israeli libraries.
Where is the mass grave?
A year ago, a committee of residents of the displaced Palestinian village of Tantura prepared a report identifying the locations of the mass graves of the massacre that took place in the village 76 years ago, some of which were previously unknown.
These results came after an investigation conducted by the committee in cooperation with Adalah Legal Center And the institution Forensic Architecture Over the course of a year and a half, it included an analysis of maps and a study of aerial photographs before and after the village was occupied, as well as listening to many testimonies.
The committee identified four mass grave sites, and said that its findings would establish a legal path to obtain Israel's recognition of the massacre and impose the sanctity of these mass graves, allowing the victims' families to bury them in a proper manner.
