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Tantura

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Summary

Large coastal Palestinian village of around 1,500 people, attacked by the Alexandroni Brigade on the night of 22 May 1948; in Pappe’s account its captured men were selected from the village file on the beach and executed, after a killing spree in the village itself.

Details

  • Tantura was an ancient village on the Mediterranean coast, its people’s livelihood agriculture, fishing and menial jobs in nearby Haifa; for the invading brigade it stuck like ‘a bone in the throat’, in the official Alexandroni war book’s phrase (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.165).

  • On 15 May 1948 its notables, including the mukhtar, rejected the Jewish intelligence officers’ surrender terms, suspecting surrender would lead to expulsion (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.165).

  • Attacked from all four flanks on 22 May — with no ‘open gate’ left for flight — its captured villagers were herded to the beach, the women and children expelled to nearby Furaydis, and the men ordered to sit and await the intelligence officer (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.165). Pappe also dates the Alexandroni capture of Tantura to 21 May 1948 (PDF p.165); both dates are recorded on the source page under Open questions.

  • The intelligence officer Shimshon Mashvitz, with a hooded local collaborator as at Ayn al-Zaytun, picked out men — all males between the ages of ten and fifty — from a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura’s village file, and they were taken away in small groups and executed; men who could not reveal a supposed ‘huge cache’ of weapons, which did not exist, were shot on the spot (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.166).

  • Before the beach selection, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and streets after the villagers signalled surrender with a white flag; a sapper in the battalion later heard it called one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army had fought, and the head of nearby Zikhron Yaacov, Yaacov Epstein, halted the killing, but too late (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.166).

  • The chapter’s epigraph is the Alexandroni senior officer Eli Shimoni in Maariv, 4 February 2001: “I have no doubt a massacre took place in Tantura.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.159).

  • Many survivors live today in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.166). The account continues in part 4.

  • The beach executions were systematic, in Pappe’s account: prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres aside and shot, with larger groups executed in retribution when a soldier’s brother, rather than a cousin, had been killed (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.167).

  • Witnesses’ counts differ and are recorded on the source page under Open questions: Abu Mashaykh saw eighty-five young men executed in groups of ten in the cemetery and the nearby mosque and estimated 110 in all; Fawzi Muhammad Tanj and Mahmud Abu Salih each reported ninety killed; Abu Jamil recalled 125 killed in summary executions (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.167-168).

  • Two Palestinians dug the mass graves under Mordechai Sokoler of Zikhron Yaacov, who owned the tractors brought in; in 1999 he said he remembered burying 230 bodies: “I lay them one by one in the grave.” Abu Fihmi, ordered to list the bodies, counted ninety-five (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.168).

  • Most survivor interviews were done in 1999 by the Israeli research student Teddy Katz for his Haifa University MA dissertation; the university retroactively disqualified his thesis and Alexandroni veterans sued Katz for libel. His senior interviewee, later general Shlomo Ambar, refused details: “I want to forget what happened there.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.168).

  • The massacre had already been recorded in 1950 in the memoirs of the Haifa notable Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who recorded a survivor’s testimony a few days after the battle, including a Jewish guard’s reply to the women: “We are taking revenge for our dead.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.169).

  • Sitta’s register lists Tantura al at S 327: depopulation date 20-05-48, Exodus Causes M/E, a Massacres M mark, Arab Population 48 of 1,728 on 14,520 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.10). Pappe dates the attack on Tantura to 22 May 1948; the register’s depopulation date is two days earlier, and both are kept as printed.

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ayn al-Zaytun, Village Files, Haifa

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