Tantura

Director: Alon Schwartz
Release Date: 20th Jan 2022
Duration: 01:34:00
Actor: Teddy Katz
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/15238

In the war of 1948 hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated. Israelis call it 'The War of Independence. Palestinians call it 'Nakba"'. The film examines one village- Tantura and why "Nakba" is taboo in Israeli society.

The Tantura massacre took place on the night of 22–23 May 1948 during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, when around 40-200 Palestinian Arab villagers from Tantura were massacred by the Israeli Defense Force's Alexandroni Brigade. The massacre occurred following Tantura's surrender, a village of roughly 1,500 people in 1945 located near Haifa. The victims were buried in a mass grave, which today serves as a car park for the nearby Tel Dor beach.

Oral testimonies by surviving Palestinians were met by skepticism. A corroborative 1988 thesis by an Israeli Haifa University graduate Theodore Katz, who interviewed survivors, was also met with denial. In 2022 an Israeli documentary film called Tantura, several Israeli veterans interviewed said they had witnessed a massacre at Tantura after the village had surrendered. In 2023 Forensic Architecture published its commissioned investigation of the area and concluded that there were three potential gravesites in the area of the Tel Dor beach that were connected to a massacre.