[Nazi Pallywood] A BDS-affiliated organization tweeted that "the Palestinian Academy for Science & Technology calls on EMBO to relocate workshops from Israel, including the one at the site of the Tantura (supposed) "massacre"

A BDS-affiliated organization tweeted that "the Palestinian Academy for Science & Technology calls on EMBO to relocate workshops from Israel, including the one at the site of the Tantura massacre

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli responded on Twitter to the matter "the racist BDS movement breaks a Guinness record, uses a picture from the German concentration camp of Nordhausen to lie about a fictional massacre during Israel's War of Independence. Holocaust distortion, appropriation and denial, further victimizing Jewish people. Pure evil."

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-731876

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The Tantura Myth: It Makes No Sense That Palestinian Villagers Never Mentioned a Massacre

Alon Schwartz's documentary,'Tantura,' is basically fraudulent. It's illogical that in 1948, the villagers, who did report rape, didn’t mention the alleged ‘big massacre’ perpetrated in Tantura by Israeli troops. And subsequently, neither did Palestinian historians

Benny Morris, Oct 7, 2022.

Israeli University Head Slams Research on 1948 Tantura Massacre 'Used to Advance Political Agenda'

The author 'made every possible mistake' in his thesis and lacked the training to conduct it, Haifa University's rector argues Ofer Aderet

Jun 8, 2022

Palestinians leaving the village of Tantura in 1948Credit: Israel State Archives

The rector of the University of Haifa slammed Tuesday a graduate research paper at the university from the late 1990s alleging an Israeli "massacre[sic" of Palestinians in 1948.

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Israel’s Academic Extremists

by Solomon Socrates Middle East Quarterly Fall 2001, pp. 5-14

https://www.meforum.org/87/israels-academic-extremists

Veterans of the battle sued Katz for libel. They won. Indeed, in testimony before the district court judge Katz admitted his thesis was a fabrication.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/columnists/our-world-the-bothersome-annoying-truth-328715

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Tantura Back in the Spotlight

Israel Academia Monitor כללי 27 בJanuary 2022

27.01.22

Editorial Note

The battle of Tantura in the War of Independence is back in the spotlight. Akevot, an anti-Israel Israeli NGO, the house of several anti-Israel Israeli academics, advised the director of a new film on the Tantura battle, as Dr. Adam Raz, the researcher at Akevot, has written in Haaretz....
Katz admitted he received $8000 in cash from a Palestinian Authority research center to defend his case in court, a month before the Second Intifada erupted.
https://israel-academia-monitor.com/2022/01/27/tantura-back-in-the-spotlight/

The Tentura LIE (Jeninitis)

The direct line of Ashkenazi hatred between the children of Yemen and Tantura

Naama Riva, August 1, 2022

In recent years, the fashion that characterizes intellectuals in their own eyes is to inflate and distort history or reinvent it in order to attack the founders of the State of Israel, most of whom were.., Ashkenazim. It is not clear why those groups of people, who sometimes overlap, instead of dealing with the crimes and injustices that occurred and left behind a respectable archival trail, tell a new story based on oral testimonies given decades after the case itself, distort data and use violent language against researchers and interested parties who present documents and facts . Sometimes, those intellectuals tell a different kind of story, as if the education system and the academy are silencing a dramatic and important event in the history of the Jewish people, while completely ignoring the facts.
https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/2022-08-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/00000182-58ea-d9b3-a1a2-59fba0cd0000

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The legend of Tantura: It does not make sense that none of the villagers told about the massacre
Benny Morris, July 28, 2022

In my innocence, I thought that in the movie “Jenin, Jenin” (2002), directed by Muhammad Bakri, we reached the peak of historical falsehood, when manipulations and lies, visual and verbal, come together and give the viewer a distorted and false picture of what happened. But Alon Schwartz, in his film “Tantura”, which has just been released, definitely surpasses his teacher and his brother, at least in the field of manipulation, shticks and tricks. Now he also did this in his article, “This is how the ‘Tantura’ affair was silenced” (”Haaretz”, 7/22). Like the film, the article suffers from extreme dishonesty. Basically, this is an act of deception.
https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/2022-07-28/ty-article-opinion/.premium/00000182-4434-d854-ab9b-fcb61aad0000

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The story of Tantura - the end of the blood libel

In January 2000, the newspaper “Maariv” published an investigative report initiated by one, Tadi Katz, who claims to be a historian, about a massacre allegedly carried out by the soldiers of the 33rd Battalion on defenseless people after the battle in Tantura.

The fighters of the brigade embarked on a legal and public battle to clear their names and remove the unjustified stain that that “historian” put on them. Below is a summary of the affair, in the end of which justice came to light.

A. introduction

1.
In March 1998, Mr. Tedi Katz, a master’s degree student, submitted a thesis in fulfillment of part of the requirements for receiving the master’s degree from the Department of Middle Eastern History, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa. The title of the work is “The exodus of the Arabs from villages at the foot of the southern Carmel in 1948-”.

2.
Chapter 4 of the master’s thesis, which is actually the main chapter in it, deals with the “A-Tantura village case”. The chapter describes the battle that took place in the village of Tantura and the sands around it, on the night between the 22nd and 23rd of May 1948.

3.
In the introduction to chapter 4 of the work, Mr. Katz writes the following:
“The total number of Jewish martyrs - 14 in number, including the man of the PALIM (PaliM - naval companies - the naval arm of the Palmach), who fell from the fire of our forces. Of the men of Tantura, no more than 10 or 20 fell in the battle itself, but at the end of that day there were no less than 200 to 250 dead men in the village, in circumstances where the people of the village were completely unarmed and defenseless. These are the dry facts that emerge from the evidence, parts of which will be presented later” (p. 88 of the thesis).

4.
And so Mr. Katz actually attributed to the soldiers and commanders of the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade who took an active part in the battles in which the brigade fought in the War of Liberation, including the battle to occupy the village of “Tantura”, a heinous war crime of mass slaughter of hundreds of people, in circumstances where they were unarmed and defenseless.

5. The
publication of these things subsequently caused many echoes, and even additional publications in the various media. In a significant part of the discussions held on the subject, Mr. Katz participated as a “guest of honor” and he announced that he stands firmly behind the things he wrote. The public reaction to the accusations hurled at the Alexandrian soldiers by Mr. Katz was extremely harsh, and in an article published in the Ma’ariv newspaper on January 21, 2000, Prof. Asa Koser, the author of the IDF’s code of ethics, is even quoted as calling the “massacre operations”, the existence of which he does not blame Doubt, as “war criminals”.

6.
Indeed, a difficult battle was fought in the village of Tantura and on the sands around it, in May 1948, as stated above. In that battle, the Alexandrian fighters lost 14 of their comrades, and even the enemy suffered many losses. However, at dawn the village surrendered and no one was shot by the Alexandroni warriors after the battle, being “unarmed and without a shield”, as Mr. Katz maliciously accused.

7.
Alexandrian soldiers, who fought in the war of liberation of the State of Israel as young men, did not know rest for their souls in the face of the false accusations that were hurled at them, and they decided to embark on a journey, perhaps the last of their lives, to clear their name. The journey was conducted on three fronts at the same time: the legal front, the academic front and the public front. Adv.

B. The legal front

8.
On April 16, 2000, eight of the Alexandroni fighters filed a libel suit against Katz in the District Court in Tel Aviv (T.A. 1686/00 Ben Zion Friedan and others against Tadi Katz).

9.
After Mr. Katz’s attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed outright and to prevent Borura from accusing her of various accusations failed, he filed a third-party notice against the University of Haifa, which, according to him, was responsible for supervising him and the manner in which his work was written.

10.
As part of the lawsuit, document discovery procedures were held, and as part of them, most of the recordings of the interviews conducted by Mr. Katz were handed over to the Alexandroni fighters. Alexandrian fighters took pains to transcribe the recordings and even translated into Hebrew the same conversations that originally took place in Arabic, and this through a professional translator whose mother tongue is Arabic.

11.
By comparing the tapes with the quotations appearing in Katz’s work, it was revealed to the Alexandroni fighters, to their astonishment, that Katz systematically and systematically distorted the things told to him by his interviewees and that his “academic” work is nothing but a dense web of distortions and false quotations. This is not about “mistakes” made in good faith but, as can be easily seen, a real method of false quotations that have one direction and whose purpose is to prove a pre-determined conclusion.

12.
After two days in which Mr. Katz was interrogated in court about his testimony in the Shetti and Arab investigation, by attorney Giora Ardinset, during which the false quotes of Mr. Katz in his work were exposed, and the irreconcilable gaps between the things quoted by Mr. Katz and the things as they were said were revealed In the interviews he conducted, Mr. Katz signed a letter of apology, the following being his words:

“In March 1998, I submitted a thesis which forms part of the fulfillment of the requirements for an accredited degree in the history of the Middle East at the University of Haifa (hereinafter - the “thesis”).

In the chapter of the work dealing with the village of Tantura, I wrote that the overall picture that emerges from the evidence is that soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade continued for several hours after the end of the battle in a deadly hunt for adult men in order to kill them, when at the end of the day there were no less than 200-250 in the village Men killed in circumstances where the villagers were completely unarmed and defenseless.

I would like to make it clear that after I sat down and checked the things, it is clear to me beyond any doubt that there is no basis for the claim that people were killed in Tantura, after the surrender of the village, by the fighters of the Alexandroni Brigade, or by any other force of the Hebrew settlement.

I would like to make it clear that the things I wrote were also probably misunderstood, since I did not mean to say that there was a massacre in Tantoura and even today I say that there was no massacre in Tantoura.

I believe the people of Alexandria who completely denied the massacre, and I retract any conclusion implied by the work regarding the occurrence of the massacre or the killing of unarmed and defenseless people.

In light of the above, I find it appropriate to express my sincere apologies to the fighters of the brigade, to their families, and to the families of the martyrs of the brigade, for false accusations of this kind being made against them.

This announcement will be published in a newspaper of an appropriate size and location.”

13.
As part of the settlement agreement that was signed between the parties (and which Mr. Katz tried to withdraw from the day after it was signed), Mr. Katz undertook to publish the half-page apology letter in two daily newspapers. The settlement agreement was given the effect of a judgment after the court rejected all of Mr. Katz’s claims as if the agreement was signed by him in a moment of “weakness of mind”. It goes without saying that the letter of apology signed by Mr. Katz was drafted in consultation with his lawyer, Adv. Ametsia Atlas, who was present at the meeting where the letter of apology and the settlement agreement were signed.

14.
To complete the picture, it should be noted that on January 17, 2001, Mr. Katz filed an appeal against the District Court’s judgment and its decision not to annul it (AA 456/01). On November 6, 2001, a hearing was held in the Supreme Court on the appeal before a panel of three judges: Judge Mazza and Judges Strasberg Cohen and Naor. The Supreme Court rejected the defendant’s appeal, did not allow him to retract his commitment to publish his apology and ordered him to pay the costs.

third. The academic front

15.
Mr. Katz’s master’s thesis was done under the guidance of Prof. Case Pirro and with the assistance of Dr. Ilan Pepe, who knowingly gave a hand to Katz’s false “thesis”, and even continues to spread lies and nonsense on every possible platform that comes his way.

16.
Following the serious matters that came to light during Mr. Katz’s cross-examination, on 12.26.2000, on behalf of the Alexandroni fighters, a letter of complaint was sent to the Rector of the University of Haifa, Prof. Aharon Ben Ze’ev, and the heads of other relevant bodies at the University of Haifa, detailing Katz’s lies and slurs in his thesis work, as revealed in court.

17.
Following the serious findings that were revealed, as detailed in the aforementioned letter, two committees were established by the Rector of the University of Haifa: one, to examine the inconsistencies between the things said to Katz by his interviewees, as they appear in the tapes of the interviews, and the quotations woven into his work, and the other, to examine the awarding procedures Advanced degrees (MA and PhD) at Haifa University in general, and in the case of Mr. Katz in particular.

18.
The committee to examine Katz’s work, whose members were Prof. Ametsia Baram, head of the Jewish-Arab Center, Prof. Rafi Talmon, head of the Arabic department, Dr. Ibrahim Jarees, from the Arabic department and Prof. Yosef Nevo, from the Eastern History department High school, found that there is a gap between the recordings and the lists and the text of the work.

On June 10, 2001, the committee’s report was submitted to the Rector of Haifa University, in which the said discrepancies were detailed according to three levels of severity.

For example, 14 cases were found in which there were discrepancies of a high degree of severity, in which elements were given in the quotes that have no trace in the recordings or in the lists written by Katz. The committee stated that “the general picture obtained from the summary of all the gaps is definitely unflattering”, and that “the work failed in the stage of presenting the raw material for the reader’s judgment, both in its organization according to strict criteria of sorting and review, and in what appears to be cases of disrespecting the testimonies of the interviewees”.

19.
In light of the seriousness of the findings, the report was forwarded to the Authority for Advanced Studies, which is the body responsible at the University of Haifa for MA and PhD theses. On November 20, 2001, the Council for Advanced Studies issued a decision, according to which the thesis cannot be accepted in its current form.

The university decided to postpone the approval of the thesis and the grade Katz received for six months, during which Katz would have to correct his work, and announced that if he did not do so, the recognition of the work would be definitively revoked. In addition, the rector of the university ordered the work to be removed from the university’s shelves, and asked other university libraries to do the same.

20.
The results of the struggle of Alexandrian fighters on the academic front show that Mr. Katz is not a “new historian” and he is not an “old historian”, but rather a systematic swindler who misled the academic institution, which gave him its patronage and gave his work the legitimacy it needed, as he deceived many others.

d. The public front

21.
The extensive media review that the Tantura affair received during the last two years brought it up to the public agenda. Therefore, the purpose of the public front is to remove the stain that Mr. Katz and his supporters put on the Alexandroni fighters. Therefore, apart from the legal and academic proceedings conducted against Katz, Alexandroni fighters have acted and continue to act against the enthusiastic supporters of Katz’s “innovative” and unfounded thesis.

22.
Dr. Ilan Pappe, an anti-Zionist “historian,” who assisted in the preparation of the master’s thesis, stood and still stands behind Katz and pulls the marionette’s strings as he wishes. All inquiries directed to Dr. Pepe were met with an onslaught of lies and threats, which are nothing . Dr. Pepe’s blunt and rude style, which includes profanity, slander, profanity and aggression and verbal violence, also infuriates his fellow members of the academic staff. Recently, there was even a lawsuit to prosecute him for his disrespectful behavior, which is a blatant violation of the rules of ethics in an academic institution.

23.
In order to understand who Ilan Pappe is, we recall that Dr. Pepe recently distributed an article on the Internet (written by other “luminaries”), according to which the M.. and the CIA were behind the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.

24.
Alexandroni fighters also appealed to Prof. Asa Kasher, the author of the IDF’s code of ethics who accused them of committing a war crime, demanding that he apologize to them for the malicious things that were quoted from him in connection with the findings of Tadi Katz’s “academic” research and retract his statements.

As of today, Prof. Asa Kasher did not even bother to respond to their appeal, thus proving that the ethics are from him onwards, and that he is in a hurry to align himself with the “choir line” even when it sings false songs.

25.
On January 20, 2003, Prof. Asa Kasher, who at the beginning of the affair stated that “a war crime was committed in Tantura”, retracted his accusations, and in a letter he sent to the fighters of the brigade said that he was misled into thinking so from reading the first work. After reading the large amount of material accumulated on the subject, during the struggle waged by the brigade’s fighters, he came to the conclusion that the facts described in the work are not true, and expressed his apology to the brigade’s fighters for the anguish his words caused to the brigade’s veterans.

26.
The historian Meir Pa’il, who from the beginning was among the enthusiastic supporters of Tadi Katz’s innovative “thesis”, retracted his accusations against the Alexandrian fighters on March 7, 2002, after re-reading the full material that was handed to him by them. And this is how the words were written by him:

“In order to remove doubt about my concluding opinion on Tedi Katz’s research on the occupation of Tantura in the War of Independence, I consider it a moral, scientific and social duty to inform you that, after further study and re-examination [...] and after carefully reading the decision of the Council for Advanced Studies of the University of Haifa, I have come to the conclusion , because there is not, and there was no justification in imposing any moral blame on the fighters of the 33rd Battalion of the “Alexandroni” Brigade, who captured Tantura on the 24th of May 1948.”

I have already stated publicly that one should not rely on the findings of the above-mentioned research work by Tedi Katz; and I hope that Tedi Katz will set the record straight in his renewed research.”

God. It’s over and we won’t pay

27.
Alexandrian warriors were successful on the legal front, the academic front and the public front. The general public now knows that there was no massacre at Tantura and that the weapons of the Alexandrian warriors were pure. Not only Alexandrian warriors won the battle for Tantura’s legacy - the truth won.

28.
On April 10, 2003, the Council for Advanced Studies of the University of Haifa met, and rejected the revised “research” thesis of Tedi Katz. The council also determined that Tedi Katz would not be able to receive an accredited degree in a research track.

The work, prepared after the university decided to remove the previous work from its shelves, and allowed Mr. Tedi Katz to submit a revised work, was submitted to five different judges. Two of the judges completely rejected the work, and the other three accepted it, but added very critical and strict comments. All five judges pointed to “substantial research flaws” related to the research methodology and the level of analysis.

“The harsh criticism did not allow the Council for Advanced Studies to approve the revised research work and award Katz with a qualified degree,” said university rector Prof. Aharon Ben-Zev.

29.
The storm caused by the blood plot of Tedi Katz in the academic world, brought Prof. Danny Censor from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to set up a website, where all the documents from the libel trial conducted by Tedi Katz against the fighters of the brigade were gathered. The site can be reached from the page .. here .

and. The defamation continues

In 2021, a documentary film was produced by Alon Schwartz, called “Tantura”. This film insists on returning to Tedi Katz’s unfounded thesis, and confirming it through “new” testimonies of Alexandroni fighters, who were present when the said “massacre” was carried out. The film presents Tadi Katz as a victim, and the Alexandroni fighters as those who hid the truth and harmed Tedi Katz except that since the previous affair, 22 years ago, most of the fighters of the brigade from 1788 have passed away. Advocate Giora Erdinst, who was the lawyer of the Alexandroni fighters in the defamation trial against Tedi Katz, came to defend their honor. Below is the article he published in the “Haaretz” newspaper on Friday, February 4, 2022, as a response to Adam Raz’s article in the newspaper’s Shabbat supplement, about three weeks earlier.

“Tantura” is a false craft that presents a liar as the hero

The hero of Alon Schwartz’s film, “Tantura” , is Tedi Katz, a master’s degree student in history at the University of Haifa. In 1998, Katz submitted a thesis in the Department of Jewish Studies in which he claimed that the soldiers of the 33rd Battalion of the “Alexandroni” Brigade committed a massacre They mobbed the residents of the village of Tantura and killed more than 200 unarmed men. His work was written by Katz, apparently, inspired by Ilan Pappe, who is dedicated to him in the work Sh.Toda. In April 2000, Alexandroni fighters, through me as their attorney, filed a defamation lawsuit against Katz. He was required to make available to them the tapes of the interviews he conducted, these were submitted to the court, and when the transcripts were compared to the quotes in the thesis itself - the chain of lies and manipulations from which Katz’s work was built She was revealed in all her ugliness. It turned out that Katz systematically twisted the things he was told.

On December 13, 2000, at the opening of the Katz’s investigation at the trial, he retracted the claim that Tantura had committed a massacre and said that he had never claimed so. There is no trace of this fact in Schwartz’s film. Judge Drora Pilpel, who heard the case and heard the tapes, also commented at the same time in front of everyone present in the courtroom, because it seems that the fate of the case is clear and that there was no massacre in Tantura. There is no trace of this matter in the film either. Following the things that were revealed in the first days of the trial, and during the course of which it is very far from the way things are presented in the film “Tantura”, he addressed me, through his lawyer Amatzia Atlas, and offered to sign a letter of apology that would end the legal process. This is what Katz wrote, without any pressure being put on him: “It is clear to me beyond any doubt that there is no basis for the claim that the killing of people was carried out in Tantura after the surrender of the village by fighters of the Alexandroni Brigade or by another force of the Hebrew settlement... I find it appropriate to express My sincere apologies to the fighters of the brigade.” The letter was signed by Katz accompanied by his wife and his lawyer.

It is clear, therefore, that when Avigdor Feldman, Katz’s other lawyer, says in the film that he was “forbidden” to attend the meeting during which the letter of apology was signed on December 19, 2000 in my office (while implying that I “banned” his arrival) - he is not telling the truth. Katz, for his own reasons, chose to go with Atlas (an experienced and honest lawyer) and not with Feldman. He later tried to retract what was said in his letter, but the district court, and later the Supreme Court rejected his requests - and rightly so.

After revealing the substantial discrepancies between the tapes of the interviews and the quotes in the work and after the scope of the falsification of the evidence became clear, the Alexandroni fighters contacted the University of Haifa, which appointed a committee of experts to re-examine the work. The members of the committee were Baruch Marzan, Prof. Amatsia Baram, Dr. Avraham Jarais, Prof. Rafi Talmon and Prof. Yosef Nevo, renowned academics who know a thing or two about academic freedom and falsification of evidence. The committee accepted the claims of the Alexandroni fighters and as a result His work was rejected in 2003 and his title in the research track was revoked.

I doubt if anyone among those who are now calling for Katz’s defense, including the author of the editorial of “Haaretz” dated January 24 , stating that Katz is the victim of the plot and not the Alexandrian fighters, bothered to read the work, the document submitted to the expert committee or her conclusions. It is worth clarifying that this is not mere negligence and charlatanism, but actual substantial forgeries that justified not only disqualification of the work, but disciplinary prosecution. In my opinion, the committee was content with rejecting the work for unjustified reasons.

Abu Fahmi’s testimony

On page 118 of Katz’s work, for example, a man named Abu Fahmi is mentioned as “one of the key witnesses to Tantura matters”. Abu Fahmi was about 40 years old in 1948, and despite his extreme age, Katz testifies to him in his work that he is “one of the wisest people in the village” . Abu Fahmi is quoted as saying the following: “But what happened is that they gathered all the residents of the village to the square, put all those who remained with their faces against the walls and murdered them in cold blood. I was a witness to this crime. About 95 people were murdered. I wrote down the names of those who died “. And later: “At this point, when the ammunition ran out, we put down our weapons and signaled that we were surrendering. Then the Jewish soldiers entered the village and gathered all the men in groups to the beach near some building that was there. Meanwhile, soldiers with ‘Bern’ machine guns walked on both sides The people occasionally shot and killed and wounded people” (pp. 119-120).

In complete contrast to these words, from listening to the transcript of the interview, it appears that not only does Abu Fahmi not tell Katz that he witnessed the shooting of people after the surrender, but he explicitly tells Katz the exact opposite. No less than four times he tells him that “no one was shot after the surrender”. And so the words were said:

” Tedi: Is that what is 100% true? Did people inform after they surrendered? After you raised your hands? 100%

Abu Fahmi: We did not see that they killed after we raised our hands .

Interpreter: He didn’t see .

Abu Fahmi: They did not kill. We gather, we gathered, all the villagers, we gathered in a spacious place, no, they did not kill. One soldier fired several bullets up into the ceiling of the house. A big house that is still on the sea, but we didn’t see that they were killed .”

As I mentioned, this is a man whom the Katz defines as one of the key witnesses in Tantura matters. There is no doubt, and there can be no doubt, that the quotation of his words is a false quotation that turns the meaning of the words 180 degrees. Moreover, the examination of the transcript shows that indeed Abu Fahmi testifies that the men were led as a group to the seashore when they are accompanied on both sides by soldiers armed with “Bern” machine guns. However, the words “and from time to time they shot and killed and wounded people”, which are quoted, were not said by him. They were added by Katz as a “quotation” from Abu Fahmi. There is an abysmal difference between a description of prisoners being led to the concentration place accompanied by soldiers carrying weapons (a situation in which there is nothing unusual during a war) and the same description to which the author adds the words that were not spoken in the original.”

In this way, with a forgery, Katz turns Abu-Fahmi, a key witness among the Tantura refugees, who explicitly denies the occurrence of a massacre, into a key witness who confirms the existence of the massacre. He is just one example among many. Similarly, the testimonies of many others were falsified (Abu-Naif, Abu-Riach, Nimr Div Ali Jarvan, Najiya Hasan Ayyub, Abu El Abd and others). It should be noted that the OT did not “discriminate” between Jewish and Arab witnesses and also the testimonies of Alexandrian warriors themselves (Shlomo Amber, Elhanan Anani and others) he twisted and distorted as I will show below.

Everything is edited

Schwartz, the film’s creator, presents Katz as a hero. He, like Katz, is not interested in truth but in confirming the massacre thesis. With blatant techniques of frantic and fragmented editing and cinematic manipulations, which would be out of place in a work that claims to be a documentary, he creates a misleading and distorted image. The viewer does not know what has been left out of the picture or how things are disconnected from their context. He does not know, for example, that Motel Sokoler, who according to him helped bury 230 bodies (the only witness on whom Katz’s thesis relies and his conclusion regarding the 200-250 men who were killed after the battle being unarmed and shieldless), is a demented person who insists that the occupation of Tantura was done During the austerity period of Dov Yosef.

The viewer also does not know that Shlomo Ember, in which Schwartz was also hanged, did not fight Tantura at all at the stage when, according to the claim, the “massacre” was carried out. Ember was an explosives officer who only got as far as the village gate that he blew up and did not go inside. The viewer also doesn’t know that Alchanan Anani, who also hanged Schwartz, told Katz in an interview with him that he did not enter the tentura at all but led the fighters to the battle line and left.

The viewer is also led to the false assumption that the court did not hear the tapes of the interviews held by the OT, and is not aware of the testimony of Abu Fahmi (”They did not kill after they raised their hands”) nor of the testimony of Gideon Phillips, a member of Kibbutz Ma’in Zvi, who arrived at Tantura immediately after captured him and testified that the men were concentrated in the coastal area and that no one harmed them. Schwartz apparently also did not bother to read the protocol of Katz’s interrogation in court (”I never claimed that there was a massacre in Tantura”) nor the affidavits that were submitted, or worse, it is possible that Read the stuff, but choose to leave it out of the movie.

All the film’s failures did not end there. One of Alexandroni’s fighters, Haniyo, a man about 95 years old, is heard saying, in a close-up photo, with a trembling voice, “I find it difficult to talk about what happened.” The innocent viewer is led to believe that he is talking about the “terrible massacre”. Only later does it become clear that there is no basis for creating the context between his difficulty in talking about the difficult battle, and the massacre’s claim and that this is nothing more than another gross editorial manipulation. Another fighter, Amitzur Cohen, also over 90 years old, is heard bragging about the killings he committed and the viewer is led to believe that these were acts that took place in Tantura. However, this is also a matter of manipulation, since Cohen’s words were said in the context of another battle, which took place a few months later and under circumstances that go beyond the story of the conquest of Tantura.

Mass grave? conspiracy

In the margins of Schwartz’s film, another conspiracy theory was born according to which the “mass grave” under the parking lot was dug up in later years and the bones of the buried were removed and moved to another location. This conspiracy claim is not innocent - its purpose is to deny the people of Alexandria the opportunity to prove their righteousness and innocence. Even if the grave is dug up, as the men of the brigade requested, and it turns out that there were buried in it about 50 of the Arabs who were killed in the battle (as claimed by the people of Alexandroni) and not 250-200 as claimed by those who claim the massacre, this will not exonerate them from the plot they plotted against, because - according to the film And according to the newly born conspiracy theory - the area was excavated later and the remains of the bodies buried there were moved to another place. Was it so? who did this When? how? There is no explanation for this, let alone any documentation or reference.

It should be noted that the historian Meir Kaif, who, based on the testimony of Katz, initially accused the people of Alexandria of war crimes, received all the evidence and recordings, examined them carefully, and found it appropriate to apologize for his words: “After further study and renewed examination... I came to the conclusion that there is and has never been any justification for casting moral blame on the soldiers of the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade who occupied Tantura on May 24, 1948.” So did Prof. Asa Kasher, who, relying on the work, was quick to accuse the Alexandroni men of committing a war crime, and when it became clear to him These things, he chose to apologize to them and wrote: “I am sorry that I trusted a work that later became clear that it was not appropriate to trust it, and more than that, I am sorry for the heartache that the publication of my words caused to the veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade.”

Despite all the facts detailed above, Adam Raz, who published the article in “Haaretz” and even assisted Schwartz in the making of the film “Tantura”, exaggerates and emphatically states that “the debate (regarding the massacre in Tantura - HM) has been decided”. Next to Katz, at the center of the group of liars who make the latter, whose weight was exposed in the libel trial and then by the University of Haifa, a hero.

Those who are really interested in the events of that difficult night between May 22 and 23, 1948, are invited to read the words written by the historian Yahya Mahmoud, a member of the Tantura family, in his book “Al-Tantura”. Mahmoud, who lives in Damascus, provides a complete Semitic list of the Arabs who fell in defense of the village - 52 in number, a number that matches the IDF records and Alexandroni’s reports. He adds and recounts a case of killing a number of Arab fighters after they surrendered (a claim that is also supported by several testimonies of Alexandroni veterans alongside Evidence of Arab fighters who raised a white flag and then shot soldiers who approached them, and evidence of Arabs shooting wounded soldiers of Alexandroni). Massacre, he also does not make any claim regarding the massacre that took place there.

I do not discount the seriousness of acts that may have been committed on the sidelines of the battle (as mentioned, by both sides), including perhaps the killing of a number of fighters after they surrendered, but the distance between these and the claim of the mass slaughter that was allegedly committed among the villagers is great. The Pappe-Katz-Schwartz-Tantura affair is not a debate between right and left, it is not a matter of political view and it does not belong to the disputes between “new historians” and “old historians”. This is a case of forgery, lies, ugly cinematic manipulation, abuse of academic freedom and aid to anti-Semitism of the old and familiar type. There is no doubt that the film will be received with applause by people in the world who call for the boycott of Israel and deny its very right to exist, but it is appropriate that decent people in Israel - regardless of political positions of one kind or another - should know the facts as they are and not be fooled by manipulations and lies.

The writer served as an unpaid attorney for veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade, most of whom are no longer alive

Port operation - opening the road to Haifa

With the liberation of Haifa, the departure of the Arabs of Caesarea and the cutting off of the Arab villages located along the Zichron Ya’akov road, the enemy was left with only one base in these villages. One base, in order to maintain the external connection, was on the sea road and it was the village of Tantura, which was located on the seashore, north-west of Zikrhon Ya’akov.

It will not be surprising, therefore, that the village soon became the main supply base for all the surrounding villages. A fleet of dozens of boats and small ships has regular contact with Lebanon and the voyage to Tantura supplies, weapons and equipment and took fleeing refugees to Lebanon with it.

As a result of this doubt, the harassment of Jewish transport on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road by the villages of the “Little Triangle” increased, to the point that the road was completely blocked by the rioters. Tantura’s importance was in her ability to maintain the momentum of Arab harassment of Jewish transportation between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The location of this enemy base within our territory was more serious than it was possible to put up with.

The attempts to negotiate with the villagers about surrender, a negotiation that was conducted by one of the Haganah members in Zichron Ya’akov, who was in close contact with the dignitaries of the village before the war broke out.

The negotiations failed because of the resistance of the young people of the village and the foreigners who were in it, unlike what happened in Pouridis and Jisr-e-Zarqa, where the residents agreed to surrender.

In light of the failure of the negotiations, it was decided to occupy the village and clear the beach of the enemy forces.

According to the intelligence that our forces had, there were about 300 fighters in the village, equipped with approximately 100 rifles, several dozen pistols and submachine guns, several “3” mortars and a 40 millimeter Bofors cannon (there was no clear confirmation of this information). At the head of the fighters were probably four Englishmen, deserters from the British army, Arab deserters from the police and a number of Bosnian Muslim fighters.

The task was assigned to the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade. An early tour of the commanders was conducted, via a train journey from Hadera to Atlit. The train was still operating under the auspices of the British who held the Haifa port area. At the request of the patrol commander, the train slowed down near Tantura to get a broader idea, when the train stopped at Zichron Ya’akov station, it was attacked by an Egyptian plane that missed. In retrospect it turned out that the intelligence was quite accurate.

In light of the intelligence and the reconnaissance, the course of action was decided:
an attack on two main axes - Company A will move north, cross the track, split into three heads and simultaneously attack the ruins of al-Burj on the seashore, the “Mazgga” (the glass factory established by the baron Rothschild) and the village to the north and east. Company C will move from the train station in Zichar, between the track and the beach and attack from the south. A force from Company B will attack the school on the hill overlooking the village to the east. The rest of the force from Company B will serve as a reserve force. The auxiliary weapons company will open fire with mortars and anti-aircraft guns for the designated assistance purposes, and a navy unit will block the enemy’s escape from the sea side. The date of the operation is set for 5/23/48, after midnight. at the point of attack.

The movement to the target began as planned, however Company A was discovered upon crossing the railroad and then the order was given to the rest of the forces to attack. The operation proceeded as planned, despite skilled and accurate sniper fire from the eastern hill range that slowed down the movement of the force. After a heavy house-to-house battle and the extensive use of hand grenades and the elimination of about 10 snipers, the battle ended at approximately 08:00. The forces were prepared for perimeter defense, units were engaged in collecting weapons and gathering the men for investigation and identification and moving them, together with the rest of the residents, to other places that were decided and done by other authorities and units.

The enemy had about 70 dead.

In the battle for the conquest of Tantura, 14 fighters fell. One of the fighters was from the navy.

In
https://www.alexandroni.org/tantura/

https://www.danielpipes.org/comments/292367

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