Israeli Historian Scoffs At Confessions By IDF Soldiers Of 1948 Slaughter At Tantura — ‘I Don’t Believe Witnesses’

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency) When it comes to “Holocaust” survivors, we are all expected to believe their “eyewitness” accounts as if they were directly given to us by God, but when it comes to the genocide of Palestinians, many of whom were burned alive by Jewish terrorists with flamethrowers at Tantura, Jewish historians are far less sympathetic to the witnesses — even Jewish eyewitnesses:

What really happened near a beach in Israel in 1948? The question, once debated in a 20-year-old libel suit that served as a microcosm for the battle over Israel’s historical record, reentered the public consciousness this week. Entities including the Palestinian Authority and the editorial board of Haaretz have begun calling for a commission to excavate land near Mount Carmel in search of an alleged mass grave site in which perhaps 300 Palestinians may be buried.

The renewed attention is due to an explosive new documentary, “Tantura,” directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, which premiered virtually Jan. 20 at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Schwarz interviews several Israeli veterans who, in the country’s 1948 war for independence, served in the Alexandroni Brigade, a regiment that forcibly displaced Arab residents of the village of Tantura following the formal conclusion of the war in order to build Dor Beach and the neighboring Kibbutz Nahsholim.

On camera, many of these former soldiers tell a disturbing story: They had participated in a massacre, one the Israeli government subsequently covered up. “We killed them. No qualms at all,” one of the interviewees says. Another says he “didn’t count” how many unarmed Palestinians he killed, except to note, “I had a machine gun with 250 bullets.” (Various accounts in the film estimate the death toll at between 200 and 300.) A third recounts witnessing a rape.

These elderly Israelis, many of them nonagenarians and four of whom have lived on Kibbutz Nahsholim since 1948, had told their stories at least once before: to the film’s protagonist, onetime historian Theodore Katz. In 1998, for his graduate thesis at Haifa University, Katz amassed more than 140 hours of tape interviewing witnesses and survivors of Tantura (half of them Israeli, the other half Arab) to compile an oral history of the events, for which no paper documentation exists or has yet been made public by the Israeli Defense Forces archives.

Two years after Katz submitted his thesis, its claim of a massacre was picked up by Israeli media and ignited a firestorm of controversy. Soon after, many of his interview subjects recanted their testimony and sued Katz for libel. Katz signed an apology recanting his research, only to immediately claim the apology was coerced. The university pulled his thesis from its shelves, and to this day his findings are questioned by the government and some Israeli academics (one of whom, IDF historian Yoav Gelber, criticizes Katz’s sole reliance on oral testimony by remarking in the film, “I don’t believe witnesses”).

“If you want to make a movie of them,” Katz warns Schwarz, referring to the taped testimonies, “be careful, because you’ll be hunted down as I was.” In the film, Katz’s defense attorney says his libel case was the first Israeli trial to deal directly with claims of Israeli war crimes during the 1948 war, known by Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

Tantura joined a small but potent group of allegations of Israeli violence against Palestinians in 1948 that have been hotly debated in Israeli society ever since, including incidents at Deir Yassin and Lydda/Lod. A similar documentary on Deir Yassin, in which Israeli director Neta Shoshani collected eyewitness and archival accounts from soldiers, premiered in 2017.

Prominent Israeli “New Historian” Ilan Pappé, whose work questions large parts of the Zionist historical narrative on 1948 and who had been a major supporter of Katz’s thesis, also becomes a character in the film. A vocal supporter of the “one-state solution” that would combine Israel and the Palestinian Territories into a single unified government, Pappé invokes the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe what took place not only in Tantura but also across the Zionist project as a whole, from 1948 to today.

The film never explores exactly why Katz’s subjects are now suddenly willing to come forward again and verify that their testimonies are true. In his director’s statement, Schwarz theorizes they opened up “as if they wanted to share a truth deep inside their soul.” Whichever the reason, Schwarz’s relitigation of the case, which includes playing Katz’s original audiotapes, produces shocking results. Subjects offer a steady drip-drip of half-remembered firsthand details: soldiers chasing villagers with flamethrowers; a mule-drawn cart carrying corpses to a mass grave.

Schwarz builds his interviews to a finale in which he uses historical mapping software to pinpoint a specific parking lot near the beach. Excavate the lot, the film’s participants essentially dare, and you may find the truth.

That’s exactly what the P.A. and various members of the Israeli left are now calling on Israel to do. Immediately following the film’s Sundance premiere, the groups began to demand that the government investigate the veterans’ claims, dig up the alleged gravesite and erect a memorial to the lost Tantura. The P.A. says an international commission should be formed to further probe the claims in the film.

Whether or not these efforts to resurface claims dating back to Israel’s very founding will prove successful, Schwarz’s film has already generated heated conversation around how the Jewish State commits itself to its own memory. If “Tantura” finds a distributor willing to back its post-Sundance release, that conversation is sure to grow even more intense. As one of the subjects notes, “A state is seized by the sword.”

Most Israelis — and Zionist Jews in the Diaspora — are completely ignorant of the extent of Jewish “crimes against humanity” — a term Jews created to accuse and prosecute their German captors after the end of World War II.

Nahum Goldmann — the former head of the World Jewish Congress — once cynically observed,

“After Aushwitz, the non-Jews had a guilty conscience and tended to treat us as privileged. This is the reason why they voted in favor of the establishment of [the Jewish state] in 1947.” (as quoted in the 1978 book, The Jewish Paradox)

And there’s a simple reason why Jews are so removed from reality — the Israeli Defense Forces have a secret unit whose job it is to continually purge their archives of any evidence of genocide against the Palestinians.

This secret IDF unit is literally modeled after the fictional character of Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 whose job it is to relegate inconvenient facts down the memory hole.

From cradle to the grave, Jews are fed a completely distorted and narcissistic narrative of suffering and victimhood that is completely divorced from reality.

The Capstone Jews — those at the top of the cabal — know exactly the lies they tell their underling Jews — their self-righteous “social justice” foot soldiers — their “willing executioners” who blindly do their bidding and experience the greatest brunt of the inevitable blowback from the “gentiles”.

Common Jews often live in fear — not only of “gentiles” who want to “throw them in gas ovens” — but even more so of their fellow Jews at the top of their kosher Mafia — “brutal killers” who are “not nice people” in the words of Donald Trump.

Jews worldwide are gaslighted on a daily basis — as the Israelis literally wipe the Palestinians off the map, the Israelis cry out in pain, accusing the Palestinians of wanting to wipe them off the map.

This Jewish filmmaker of “Tantura” has already been mercilessly attacked and cancelled for attempting to break out of this Jewish cult of lies — just as another Jewish filmmaker — David Cole — literally had his life threatened when he made a documentary film exposing the lies of mass murder in gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Truly, they are a people whose entire identity is based on trinity of monstrous lies — their rejection of ultimate reality embodied in Jesus Christ, their preposterous insistence that they are Israelites, and the “Holocaust”– it’s no wonder that Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of them, “For a Jew nothing is more insulting than the truth.”