’Everyone knew’: Israeli soldiers speak of mass Palestinian grave from 1948

In a new documentary that premiered at Sundance, Israeli veterans of the battle at Tantura village confess to the mass killing of Arabs after the village's surrender

“THEY SILENCED IT,” the former combat soldier Moshe Diamant says, trying to be spare with his words. “It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It happened.”

Twenty-two years have passed since the furore erupted over the account of what occurred during the conquest by Israeli troops of the village of Tantura, north of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, in the War of Independence. The controversy sprang up in the wake of a master’s thesis written by an Israeli graduate student named Theodore Katz, that contained testimony about atrocities perpetrated by the Alexandroni Brigade against Arab prisoners of war. 

The thesis led to the publication of an article in the newspaper Maariv headlined The Massacre at Tantura. Ultimately, a libel suit filed against Katz by veterans of the brigade induced him to retract his account of a massacre.

For years, Katz’s findings were archived, and discussion of the episode took the form of a professional debate between historians. Until now. Now, at the age of 90 and up, a number of combat soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ brigade have admitted that a massacre did indeed take place in 1948 at Tantura – today’s popular Dor Beach, adjacent to Kibbutz Nahsholim. 

The former soldiers describe different scenes in different ways, and the number of villagers who were shot to death can’t be established. The numbers arising from the testimonies range from a handful who were killed, to many dozens. According to one testimony, provided by a resident of Zichron Yaakov who helped bury the victims, the number of dead exceeded 200, though this high figure does not have corroboration.

FULL STORY There's a mass Palestinian grave at a popular Israeli beach, veterans confess (Haaretz)

‘Tantura’ director: Israelis have been lied to for years about alleged 1948 massacre (Times of Israel)
With a shocking documentary out this month, director Alon Schwarz says Israel can only move forward as a Jewish democratic state by being honest about the killing of Arab villagers

Explosive new Israeli documentary ‘Tantura’ is prompting calls to excavate a possible Palestinian mass grave (JTA)

Photo: Tantura residents flee their village, May 1948 (Benno Rothenberg/Meitar Collection, Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel)