Ilan Pappe: Tantura and Beyond by Dr. Ilan Pappe, Department of Political Scien 8:17pm Fri Nov 23 '01 Dr. Ilan Pappe on the Tantura case. print article On 21 January 2000, the Israeli daily Ma'ariv published a long article on the massacre of Tantura. Written by the journalist Amir Gilat, the article was based mainly on a masters thesis by Teddy Katz, a student in the department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University. The thesis, entitled "The Exodus of the Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel," had been awarded the highest possible grade for a master's thesis several months earlier (it had been submitted in March 1998, but for complications having nothing to do with the case itself, was only examined in the end of 1999). The thesis is a micro-historical research on the 1948 war focusing on five Palestinian coastal villages between Hadera and Haifa, and particularly on the villages of Um Zeinat and Tantura. The testimonies reproduced by Katz in his fourth chapter tell a chilling tale of brutal massacre, the gist of which is that on 22-23 May 1948, some two hundred unarmed Tantura villagers, mostly young men, were shot dead after the village had surrendered following the onslaught of Haganah troops. KATZ'S RESEARCH AND THE ROLE OF ORAL HISTORY The basic idea behind the thesis is that even works focused exclusively on the 1948 war, such as Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, have not dealt in detail with the fate of individual villages. At the heart of Katz's thesis are the oral testimonies he obtained, for a micro-research of this kind could not have been carried out by relying solely on archival material, which for individual villages is exceedingly scant. Certainly, Katz was aware of the pitfalls of oral history. But his supervisor guided him, rightly in my opinion, to treat oral history as a significant and vital component in the historical reconstruction of the Nakbah [the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948]. Especially with the advent of electronic recording, oral history has gained increasing recognition in the past decades in the academic community worldwide: there are over a thousand oral history programs under university auspices in the United States alone. Nor is written documentation still seen as necessarily more authentic or reliable than oral history. This is particularly true with regard to IDF documents concerning the 1948 war, which are mainly reports or correspondence by military men whose aim is at times less to report than to conceal. This means that historians must often use as much guesswork and imagination in reconstructing what happened from the documents as they would in working with oral testimonies. (If one thinks ahead fifty years and imagines the contrast between official IDF reports concerning the latest intifada and the occular testimony of witnesses, one has some idea of the problem.) Oral history is not a substitute for written evidence, but it is particularly important in validating and filling in the gaps in the documentary evidence, which give us the "bare bones." Thus, what is, in the official Israeli record (the History of the Haganah, for example), a brief reference to the act of occupying a village--or "cleansing" it, to use the actual term of the Jewish texts --becomes in Palestinian history a detailed account of assault, expulsions, in some cases massacres. Indeed, in the case of Tantura, the massacre might not have come to light at all had it not been for oral testimony on the Palestinian side--later corroborated by Jewish testimony--for the piecemeal evidence currently available in the Israeli archives is too fragmentary (as we shall see) to more than hint at what happened. In this case, then, it is the documents that fill out the oral history, rather than the reverse. Recently, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote very movingly about the value of oral history. He was writing about its use in the reconstruction of the Holocaust, and though no comparison between the Holocaust the Nakbah is intended, the passage serves to remind us of the value of oral history as a legitimate tool in reconstructing past traumas: The memory of trauma is often murky, unstable, contradictory, untrustworthy....What we learn from [memoirs of camp survivors in this case] are not the fine details of camp administration, train schedules, ideological purpose and genocidal organization. These are matters far better left for historians. What we learn is the infinity of pain and suffering that makes the memory of those years into a burden whose weight stretches far beyond the ephemeral human existence, a presence that clings to the mind and inhabits the deep recesses of consciousness long after is should have cleansed and washed away. In writing his thesis, Katz was well aware of the "murkiness" of the picture derived from the memories of participants and survivors so long after traumatic events. But he was not interested in fine details; he wished to learn the overall picture, leaving behind, perhaps forever, certainties about exact chronology and names and precise numbers. He wished to learn the pain and suffering as it was experienced by people in the midst of war, and to show the kaleidiscope of perspectives from the various testimonies. Into these he wove the published and unpublished sources at his disposal--yet another perspective. And despite the inevitable discrepancies in the details, the broad picture he found is remarkably consistent. It is important to mention that he uses the same research technique for Um Zeinat, with witnesses, Palestinian and Jewish, each from their own vantage point, telling how they saw the village's occupation and the expulsion. Yet in the case of Um Zeinat, there is no mention of massacre. Katz was able to overcome the suspicion and indeed delegitimization that is usually applied in Israel to Palestinian oral history (and indeed, to Palestinian history in general) only because he succeeded in obtaining testimonies about the massacre not only from Palestinian witnesses but also from Jewish soldiers who had participated in the events. Had there not been corroborating Jewish testimonies on the Tantura affair, even the article in Ma'ariv would not have been taken so seriously. Katz interviewed 135 persons for his thesis. The Tantura chapter is based on the testimonies of 40 witnesses, by coincidence twenty Arabs and twenty Jews, all of them taped. Tracking down the Palestinian survivors was more difficult than finding the Jewish soldiers: Tantura had been captured by Battalion 33 of the Alexandroni Brigade, and the names of the veterans were readily obtainable. The Palestinians he interviewed, on the other hand, most of whom live in Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa, villages near Tantura, as well as Tulkarm in the West Bank, had to be found by word of mouth through Jews who knew them or through the intervention of Palestinians from Tantuara living abroad. Moreover, while the Jewish soldiers are accustomed to being sought out to talk about their war experiences, the Tantura survivors still living in Israel were reluctant to participate in a project in which they were asked to shed light on Jewish barbarism during the war. The thesis is not without its faults. When he wrote it, Katz was not aware of some important material (which in fact added confirmation to the story, of which more later), and he failed to address the important issue of why, in contrast to many other massacres of the 1948 war, knowledge of this one had apparently not gone beyond the immediate circles of the survivors: neither Walid Khalidi's seminal work All that Remains nor the exhaustive Palestinian Encyclopedia of Mustafa Dabbagh, for example, mentions it. Other relatively minor methodological deficiencies, typical in theses of this level and kind, later became the basis for the prosecution's case in the libel suit brought against Katz, which will be described below. Nonetheless, Katz's thesis is a solid and convincing piece of work whose essential validity is in no way marred by its shortcomings. Much of the subtlety of the academic work was lost in the bald summary of the Ma'ariv article, which made no mention of the methodological complexities involved. Still, the gist of story was accurately conveyed. The article also includes positive and negative evaluations by a number of scholars. Among those praising the work were Professor Asa Kasher, a philosopher from Tel Aviv University and the author of the IDF's ethical code, Meir Pail, a military historian of the 1948 war, and this writer. These scholars were more categorical than Katz in characterizing the Tantura events. Thus, while Katz had not used the word "massacre" either in his thesis or in interviews about his work, they did not shrink from the term, and Professor Kasher called the what happened in Tantura a "war crime." Three historians with negative assessments were also cited in the article. Only one of the three, Yoav Gelber, had actually read the thesis, but the others did not hesitate to join him in condemning it as, at best, the product of unfounded rumors or, at worst, a work written with the intention of weakening Israel's image and position in the peace negotiations. Gilat also succeeded in tracking down some of the witnesses Katz had interviewed. The Palestinians repeated what they had said to Katz, but some of the Jews recanted. Several of them even joined the law suit against him, submitting affidavits denying their testimony--despite the fact that their testimonies are on tape and very clear. One of those who recanted, Shlomo Ambar, affirmed in his affadavit that he does not recall anything he said to Katz. WHAT HAPPENED IN TANTURA? Since the thesis was written, several other pieces of evidence have come to light that reinforce Katz's findings. Three documents were extracted from the IDF archives. One was a report mentioning twenty Palestinians killed in the battle, followed by a report a week later from IDF headquarters complaining that the unburied bodies in the village could lead to the spread of epidemics and typhoid. In the third document, the Israeli General Chief of Staff inquired about reports that had reached him "about irregularities in Tantura," and was answered that "overenthusiasm because of the victory" had led to some damage inflicted "immediately after our people entered the place." Another piece of evidence Katz had not been aware of was a passage in a 1951 Palestinian memoir that includes a graphic description of the massacre. It is brought by Marwan Iqab al-Yihya, a survivor who had reached Haifa after the massacre and described to the author what he had seen with his own eyes. Additional testimonies were recently collected from Tantura survivors living in refugee camps in Syria by a Palestinian researcher, Mustafa al-Wali, and published in the Palestinian journal, Majalat al-Dirassat al-Filastiniyya. Some of these testimonies are reproduced in the current issue of this journal. The Jewish and Palestinian testimonies, in combination with the few written documents we have (including the official history of the Alexandroni brigade give us a clear overall picture of what happened in Tantura on 22-23 May 1948, though many details a still obscure and probably will remain so. On the eve of the occupation, Tantura was a large village with a harbor--fit for boats, not ships--on the coast thirty-five kilometers south of Haifa and a few kilometers west of the main road linking Haifa to Jaffa and Tel-Aviv. From the evidence, it transpires that after the battle ended and the village had surrendered to the Alexandroni Battalion, some two hundred more people were killed. The IDF documentation, as noted above, refers to about 20 Arabs killed during the battle itself, and the commander in charge of the operation affirmed in his interview with Katz that no more than thirty Palestinians had been killed in the fighting. Yet one of the Jewish witnesses Katz interviewed, who personally brought people in to bury the bodies, testifies two having counted two hundred and thirty Palestinian corpses. According to the witnesses, the killings took place in two stages. The first phase was a rampage. From Katz's interviews with the soldiers, it was unleashed by the soldiers' anger caused by shots fired at them after the village had officially surrendered. It appears that one or two snipers were still active and that they killed or wounded one, two, or even eight Jewish soldiers (the testimonies differ on the numbers) following the surrender. One of the Jewish eyewitnesses said that a particularly popular soldier had been killed in that fire. The rampage left about one hundred people dead. The second phase was more premeditated. It was carried out by intelligence units and people belonging to logistical units, most of whom lived in the nearby Jewish settlements of Zichron Yaacov, Atlit, Binyamina, and Maayan Zvi. These units systematically executed men suspected--often unjustifiably it seems--of concealing personal weapons in their homes or belonging to the Arab volunteers who had come to assist the Palestinians. These executions were finally stopped by people from Zichron Yaacov who accused the soldiers of killing the wrong people. Another hundred or so victims, according to the witnesses, were dispatched in this phase. After the rampage, the people of Tantura had been rounded up and led to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children (up to 12 or 13 years old). Aided by lists of names, the intelligence and logistics soldiers selected groups of seven to ten or even more and took them back to the village, either to the graveyard or a place near the mosque. They were either seated or made to stand against a wall, and shot at the back of the head. Those executed were between the ages of 13 and 30. The men within that age range who were spared were held in detention camps for a year and a half, separated from the women and children and old people who had been transported after the massacre to the nearby village of Furaydis. This village, by the way, along with Jisr al-Zarqa, were the only two out of 64 villages on the road between Haifa and Tel-Aviv that were not been wiped out by the Jewish forces. This was because men from these villages had traditionally worked in the nearby Jewish settlements, which pressed to have them spared so they could continue to benefit from the cheap labor. Most of the men of Tantura were expelled to the West Bank after their detention, where they were joined by their families. Most of those who remained in Israel were able to do so through the intervention of Jews who knew them. In general, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine as a whole and in the area between Hadera and Haifa in particular was carried out against a background of vague instructions from above, as is testified by the commander of the battalion occupying Tantura. According to these instructions, every commander occupying a village had full authority to do with the inhabitants as he saw fit, whether they surrendered or were taken prisoner. The usual practice followed by Alexandroni in occupying a village--the brigade also captured the villages of Hayriyya, Sakiyya, Kafar Saba, Um Zaynat, Qaysariya, and (later) Jaba, Ijzim, and Ayn Ghazal, among others--was to expell the inhabitants while the battle was in progress. Villages were purposely not fully encircled, and one of the flanks would be left open so that the inhabitants could be put to flight through this "open gate." But in Tantura, due to lack of coordination during the battle, the village was completely surrounded: with Jewish boats offshore blocking the sea route and the Alexandroni units on land, there was no "escape gate." The concentration of so large a village in the hands of the occupier--Tantura had about 1500 inhabitants--produced the rampage, the massacre, and the executions. From the testimony of the perpetrators, it would appear that some saw the executions as being in the service of the Zionist security apparatus (killing young men they saw as soldiers of the enemy), others as part of a personal vendetta. The pattern must have been similar in the almost forty other places where massacres occurred. Getting testimonies from both sides was sometimes painful. Those who actually witnessed the acts of killing during the execution phase, aside from the perpetrators, were generally young children or people who either worked with Jewish intelligence or were about to be killed and were saved at the last minute by Jews from nearby settlements. An air of uneasiness accompanies many of the testimonies. Mustafa Masri, who as a young child had witnessed the killing of his entire family before his very eyes, concludes a particularly chilling interview with Katz by uttering: "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble. I made a mistake in giving you the name of the person who handed my family over." I think it is even clearer why the Jews did not talk about the massacre. As one of the Jewish witnesses, Joel Solnik, said to Katz: "There were shameful things there, very shameful. It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . they did not leave anyone alive." The resistance to talking about what happened came out clearly in an interview with a veteran Israeli general Shlomo Ambar, who had been a young officer in the battle. He tells Katz that he had never gone back to Tantura and that he had seen things he does not want to talk about. Pressed by Katz, he says: "I associate [what had happened in Tantura] only with this. I went to fight against the Germans who were our worst enemy. But when we fought we obeyed the laws of the war dictated to us by international norms. They [the Germans] did not kill prisoners of war. They killed Slavs, but not British POWs, not even Jewish POWs--all those from the British army who were in German captivity survived". Katz prods him further. "Come on, we are fifty years later, you'll go to heaven and they'll say that you had a chance to talk and didn't." Ambar: "I had sinned so much in my life....On this I would be questioned in heaven?" Ambar looks at Katz's tape recorder: "Why are you using that?" Katz: "Because I can't remember everything." Ambar: "If I don't want to tell, it means I'm hiding something. It means that the occupation [of Tantura] was not one our most successful wars." Katz: "You talk about Tantura and you mention what even the Germans did not do." Ambar: "That's right. They did not kill Western prisoners, only Russians." A few minutes later, he adds: "Let me tell you, I do not recall too well. The intention was to empty the village, and people died in the process....People naturally are attached to their home place, and do not want to go, so under the pressure of an occupying army, they were made to leave, toward the east. Period. Ask me something else...." THE LEGAL AND ACADEMIC BATTLE A few days after the affair was publicized by Ma'ariv, the veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade sued Teddy Katz for libel, asking for more than one million shekels in damages. One would have assumed that the University of Haifa would stand behind Katz: given the high grade he had received, any discredit of his work--especially in so public a way--could only reflect badly on the university's standards. But the moment the legal process began, the university began acting as if he were already guilty of incompetence at best or fraud at worst. Spearheading the crusade against Katz within the university are senior members of the Department of Erez Israel Studies, which has always been in the forefront of providing scholarly scaffolding for the Zionist narrative. As a result of the campaign, the university refused to offer Katz any legal, moral, or practical support in facing the suit. It was a Palestinian legal NGO in Israel, Adalah, that provided assistance on a pro-bono basis. Katz was in disgrace. His name was summarily removed from a list of those to be honored for their work at a special ceremony (since the list had already been printed, his name had to be erased with tippex). His status at the university was equivalent to that of an employee suspended, and his hopes of pursuing an academic career were shattered, at least for the time being. Before the trial began, Katz tried to persuade the court not to take the case on, arguing that it was a scholarly debate that should be determined not in court but within the university. If the university had supported this effort, he may have succeeded in canceling the trial. But the university refused, and the trial opened as planned. The trial began on 13 December 2000, with Katz being called to the witness box by the prosecuting attorney. The crux of the prosecution's case consisted in six references--out of 230--in which Katz either misquoted or interpreted too freely what the witnesses said. In Ambar's testimony, Katz substituted the word "Germans" with "Nazis." In another, he summarized the testimony of a Tantura survivor, Abu Fihmi, as describing a killing, where the witness did not say this directly (though in fact, this is clearly what he meant). In four other instances, Katz wrote something that does not appear in the tapes but only in his written summaries of the conversations. No discrepancies were found in any of the remaining 224 references concerning Tantura. The presentation of these discrepencies consumed the first two days of the trial. When the court broke for the day at the end of the second day, a member of Katz's team of lawyers (which had also checked through every reference against the tapes) exulted in a private conversation that the prosecution had exhausted its entire case. The cross examination by the defense concerning this material, and the defense's case, was to begin the following day. None of the Jewish soldiers had agreed to appear in court, but since it was expected to be a long trial there was speculation that they would be forced to testify. The defense and some of Katz's supporters were looking forward to a trial that would mark the first time in Israel's history that, in effect, Israel's role in the Nakbah was on trial. But that night, for reasons Katz himself can not explain even today, he signed an agreement that in essence repudiated his own academic research. Weakened by a stroke several weeks earlier and subjected to enormous pressures by his family, friends, and neighbors in the kibbutz where he lived, he acquiesced in the advice of one of his lawyers (a cousin of his) to bring an end to the whole affair; he was likewise assured by the university lawyer, an unofficial member of his legal team, that signing the agreement would be for his own good, appearing to hint that it would enable him to continue his studies at Haifa University. The agreement Katz signed took his other five lawyers totally by surprise. Titled "An Apology," the agreement is so sweeping as to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to a police "confession" extracted under dubious conditions. The section relating to his research reads as follows: I wish to clarify that, after checking and re-checking the evidence, it is clear to me now, beyond any doubt, that there is no basis whatsoever for the allegation that the Alexandroni Brigade, or any other fighting unit of the Jewish forces, committed killings of people in Tantura after the village surrendered. Furthermore, I wish to say that the things I have written must have been misunderstood [by the press] as I had never intended to tell a tale of a massacre in Tantura....I accept as truth [only] the testimonies of those among the Alexandroni people who denied categorically the massacre, and I retract from any conclusion which can be derived from my thesis that could point to the occurrence of a massacre or the killing of defenseless or unarmed people." Twelve hours later, Katz formally regretted his retraction and wanted to continue the trial, but the judge refused. The judge's ruling made no reference to the merits of the case, but only to the court's ability to accept Katz's retraction of his retraction. As this report is written, the matter now rests with the Supreme Court, which will decide by whether or not the trial can be resumed. The Israeli press, which had given front-page coverage to Katz's retraction, barely mentioned his efforts to rescind it. He was depicted in the three major newspapers as a fabricator, a pseudo historian who had invented a non-event for ideological reasons (a ridiculous allegation given that Katz, like the lawyer for the prosecution, is a member of Meretz). Because Katz had given in so early on, after two days of testimony wholly taken up with undeniable discrepancies, it was assumed that the six discrepencies were respresentative of the entire work. From there it was all too easy to conclude that there had been no massacre and probably not really a Nakbah in 1948. The national radio and television exulted in Katz's "exposure." Even left wing journalists like Tom Segev remarked that there may have been a massacre, but it met the wrong historian. The University of Haifa did not accept his retraction of his denial either, and acted as if the agreement with the prosecution were valid. On 26 December 2000, the prosecutor urged the university to strip Katz of his title. The university set up two committees, one to check the tapes against the quotations in the thesis, the other to investigate whether there had been failures of the supervision process. The fact that Katz's academic advisor was a Druze and that one of his examiners was rumored to be Palestinian (the examination process in Israel is anonymous) was the subtext that nobody openly talked about. Nonetheless, these additional factors undoubtedly made it easier for the university to move ahead with the procedure of stripping Katz of his title. His own department, the department of Middle Easten History, stopped it just in time, demanding that some of the measures be frozen until the court has finally given a verdict. As a faculty member of Haifa University, I posted on the university's internal website some of more important transcripts of the more than 60 hours of Katz tapes, most of which had not been referred to in court. They include horrific descriptions of execution, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture. They come from both the Jewish and the Palestinian witnesses. As a result of these transcripts, a number of people, even if they had reservations about the quality of Katz' research, no longer had any doubts about what happened in Tantura, which is after all the important issue. I also published an open letter accusing the university of moral cowardice. A lecture of mine at the History school scheduled long before, was abruptly cancelled without explanation. Only two of my colleagues, in a university with hundreds of faculty members, openly protested this basic violation of free speech. But then again, this was in January 2001, the same month that Israel's famed technical university, Technion, took a decision giving its president the authority to expel students and lecturers involved in political activity on campus. Without doubt, the response to the Tantura case reflects the hardening of attitudes in Israel that has followed the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and especially the October events involving the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Since then, the moral voice of Jews in Israel has been all but silenced. "Prophets of peace" such as A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and David Grossman have publicly stated that they were wrong to trust the Palestinians and, far more important, signed a petition published on the front pages of the newspapers emphasizing their unequivocal opposition to the Palestinian right of return. It is probable that had the Katz case begun before the outbreak of the present intifada, or even better during the more optimistic days of the Oslo process, the public and academic reaction would have been somewhat more moderate. Poor Teddy Katz, himself a Zionist, could not have chosen a worse time to bring evidence of a massacre, raising the possibility of Israeli responsibility in crimes of war in 1948. But all is not bleak. Before the trial opened, an association organized to help Teddy Katz convened an impressive conference in November 2000 in Tel Aviv, where for the first time old timers in the Israeli peace camp, including Uri Avineri and Shulamit Aloni, talked openly about the 1948 ethnic cleansing. The event included screening of the film 1948 by Muhammad Bakri, itself an impressive piece of oral history, in which Jews and Palestinians testify about the ethnic cleansing in 1948. Indeed, this was one of the first public gathering where the term "ethnic cleansing" was freely used, and where the central question was not whether collective crimes been committed in 1948, but rather their current implications with regard to a peaceful settlement of the Palestine conflict. Many speakers wondered how research in Israel on the Nakbah could be furthered and protected. [continued below] add your comments Source file

Continued.... by Dr. Ilan Pappe 8:20pm Fri Nov 23 '01 print comment More recently, on 2 February 2001, a group of highly respected academics from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University organized a day of study on the relationship between the legal system and academia. Among the participants, surprisingly, were the presiding judge in the Katz affair and the rector of Haifa University. The general tenor of the meeting seemed to be against any interference by the legal system in the academic research; more concretely, many participants criticized the University of Haifa for its conduct in the Katz affair. Professor Asa Kasher and Meir Pail reiterated their support for Katz's research, specifically stating that the inaccuracies uncovered by the prosecution did significantly undermine the quality of the dissertation. SOME IMPLICATIONS Thus far, the Katz affair sheds light and raises issues in three areas: the place of Palestinian oral history in the historiography of 1948 and the relationship of the Israeli judiciary and academia to the Nakbah. Concerning the first, one of the most noteworthy elements of the debate over the Katz affair was the way in which Palestinian oral testimony was treated. Traditionally, Palestinian oral history--and indeed written works in general by Palestinians concerning 1948--have been branded in Israel as sheer propaganda and wild flights of 'oriental' imagination. Yet the legal challenges to Katz's thesis centered not on the truthfulness of the Palestinian testimonies per se nor on the validity of oral hsitory as a tool in research, but on Katz's mishandling of the testimony. Furthermore, several historians, in dismissing Katz's findings, used as evidence to support their case the fact that the massacre is not mentioned in Walid Khalidi's All That Remains --a work not treated in Israel as an authority before. This is not to say that a "revolution" in Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian history has occurred, and it is obvious that the Palestinian sources were considered reliable only insofar as they did not mention the massacre. Still, if the trial resumes, the oral testimonies by Palestinians on the Nakbah--like the testimonies of Jews on the Holocaust in the Eichmann and Demaniuk trials--will have to be treated as a legitimate source, both in court and in scholarly debate. The second issue raised by the case is the attitude in principle of the judicial system on the question of the Nakbah. Zionist historiography on 1948 has been almost universally accepted in Israel; even the "new historians" have refused to use the term "ethnic cleansing" in reference to 1948, and with few exceptions have been unwilling to concede that there was a "master plan" of expulsion or conquest. It is thus that the concept of war crimes in relation to the 1948 war has never been raised. Yet it is difficult to see the expulsion (direct and indirect) of some 750,000 Palestinians, the systematic destruction of more than 400 villages and scores of urban neighborhoods, as well the perpetration of some forty massacres of unarmed Palestinians in any other terms. Criminal suits are unlikely to be brought by Palestinians, which legally speaking would face the principle of obsolescence (only grandchildren who can prove direct harm can sue, at least theoretically). This is why the Tantura case is so important. It is the only case so far in the history of Israel where the Nakbah was discussed in court. By not allowing the trial to continue, the judge prevented Palestinian survivors from telling their story in court. It also indirectly pre-empted future research on 1948 that does not subscribe to Zionist ideology by giving future scholars reason to worry about the legal consequences of taking on the struggle over the past. This becomes a particular sensitive field of research in that it deals with issues of the past that are relevant to the nature of a future comprehensive settlement of the Palestine question. The third issue is Israeli academia's approach to the Nakbah. A number of members of the academy were only too happy to swoop down like vultures on the methodological defects in the work of a historian just starting out on his academic career--an easy prey by all accounts. One could speculate that the motivation was not simply denial of the massacre--in fact the Nakbah--but a kind of recognition that if Katz had won the case, Israeli academia's role for more than fifty years in suppressing the truth about the Nakbah would itself be on the dock. Jewish participants in the 1948 war were surprised when approached by a Jewish researcher who did not, as is usually the case in Israel, want to hear about their heroism in 1948 but rather confronted them with their barbarism. The more honest among them were not afraid to tell what they had seen, because they were confident, given the reigning ideology that is not opposed to killing Arabs, that even such acts would be protected as exceptional or legitimate. For some, the opportunity to confide in Katz helped to alleviate personal guilt and remorse. Zionist scholars of 1948, it would appear, are less in need of such alleviation, and have lived comfortably enough with their role in covering these crimes. One can perhaps find extenuating circumstances in the actions of the perpetrators, but not for the deniers. It is difficult to preduct the final results of the Katz case. But based on reactions so far, one can assume that the Jewish academic establishment will continue to try to prevent the legitimization of oral history for 1948, and that it will be more vigilant in making sure that fresh historians confirm the broad lines of the Zionist narrative on 1948. Admittedly, certain foundational myths such as the "few against many" and "the Arab voluntary flight" have already shattered, but the overall narrative has survived these setbacks. The argument now runs as follows: yes, some Palestinian were expelled during the war, but it was simply a byproduct of the fighting, certainly not because of any plan of mass expulsion. Hence, such expulsions as did take place were an integral part of any conventional war and have nothing to with ethnic cleansing and war crimes. The only way to confront this reality is to encourage independent NGO-type research institutions in Palestine and in Israel entrusted with the task of expanding research on the Nakbah. The first priority is to establish a bank of oral testimonies, before it is too late and there is no one left to interview. It should be clear by now that no true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians can ever take place without full awareness of what happened in the Nakbah. It is for this reason that research on the Nakbah by Jewish scholars has to be part of a public campaign based on clear positions vis a vis the conflict and its solution. The questions of compensation, the Palestinian right of return, and Israeli moral responsibility are anyhow already in the public mind of both Israelis and Palestinians as negotiable issues. Finally, research on the Nakbah requires some kind of international protection. The historical research, the public campaign, and the legal defense should be part and parcel of the same political action in Palestine, Israel and abroad. add your comments

Ilan lies by Baruch Cohen 3:18am Sat Nov 24 '01 Baruch_Cohen@hotmail.com print comment Teddy Katz like you is a liar. Teddy Katz made the thing all up. Teddy Katz is a well known peace now activist. He made this whole story up about a massacre. The soldiers he interviewed every one called Teddy Katz a liar and how Katz put words in there mouth. Its sad, that left wing Jews have to make up stories, to do there Pro Palestinian Propaganda. In todays age, where Israel and Americans have to deal with Arab terrorism all the time. Ilan and Teddy katz are the dream of every Arab terrorist. Ilan, your a well know communist. Didn't you lose the Cold War. By the way Ilan, do you have any stories how Hajj Amin Al Husseini was a genocidal partner of Hitler. Ofcourse not. This site documents the genocidal deal Husseini made with Hitler. http://notendur.centrum.is/~snorrigb/muftism.htm add your comments

Truth by Baruch Cohen 3:47am Sat Nov 24 '01 print comment I'm trying to understand your comments. Israel was attacked by 5 Arab Armies to anihilate the Jews. Who wanted ethnic cleasing. Lets see what you think, by these statements. On March 1 1944, the Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin Al Husseini who was in Cahoots with Hitler. Husseini said in a broadcast from Berlin: "Arabs Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor." After the 5 Arab Armies attacked Israel in 48, the Arab League Secretary General, Azzam Pasha said, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the massacres of the Crusades". Hajj Amin Al Husseini stated, "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" The armies of lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq invaded the tiny new country with the declared intent of destroying it. Its well known, it was the surrounding Arab countries, that Told the Arab population to leave there Holmes. The Arab Armies requested and ordered, that the Arab population leave there holmes to clear the Area, so that the Arab armies could kill the Jews. According to a research report by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, the majority of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled and "68%" left without seeing an Israeli soldier. How about some more Arab statements. Azzam Pasha regarding the 1 million Jews in the Arab countries. Assam in May 1948 said "There are over one million Jews in the Arab Lands. Their lives will be forfeit as well when we conquer the Jews. The Real ethnic cleasing happened, when the Arabs kicked out 800,000 Jews from the Arab countries in 48. Israel took in every single of those 800,000 Jewish Refugees, while the Arabs with 22 countries, refuse to take in any of the Refugees they created, when they attacked Israel in 48. The reason the Arab countries dont take in these Refugees, is because they want to use them, for some kind of sick western media propangada. Did you know, that Hajj Amin Al Husseini dispatched a terrorist squad led by Hassan Ali Salameh to Israel during the second World War, with the object of poisoning Lake Kinneret and other water sources to kill all Israeli Jews? They were discovered by the British and prevented from carrying out their murderous Deed. his is well documented in the book "The quest for the Red Prince. Right now as we Speak, Israel has 20 percent of the actual British Mandate borders of 1917. The Arabs have 80 percent. Jordan was part of the British Mandate. The British created Jordan and named the country after the Jordan River in 1922 add your comments

I don't undestend by lidia 7:00pm Sat Nov 24 '01 lidiavolgina@yahoo.com print comment Baruh, if arabs are so bad, why our brave solgers could not kill as many of them as possible in 1948 and after? Maybe all tapes of Teddy are genuine.Maybe our noble heros simple told the truth about such wonderful feat - the massacre of unarmed teens and young men. But I am not sure that any of theis murdered was an associate of Hitler. Maybe You can clear this little blur. add your comments