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.
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