Genocide, Variations on a Theme #I
Part Six
That units of the IDF are currently taking Palestinians, blindfolding them, pushing them into pits, and shooting before burning them, should hardly surprise. The IDF has always worked within the tradition of its direct predecessors: the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS.
Those who served with both armies included Shlomo Perel, who served with the Wehrmacht on the eastern front, before joining the IDF and taking part in the battle for Jerusalem, Karel Heinz Meir, who served in the Wehrmacht, achieved the rank of a major in the IDF and served in the seventh IDF brigade, as well as Bob Winter, Siegfried Berndat, Afraim Gelzer, Nehamia Werman, Ginther Klauch, and Ulrich Shnaft who all served in the SS.
It is surely no accident that the IDF is modeled on the Wehrmacht; of the estimated 150,000 “Mischlings” (half Jews and quarter Jews) in the Nazi armies, 2 were Field Marshals, and 15 generals.
Teddy Katz
In 1998, Teddy Katz, a native of the city of Haifa, submitted an MA thesis to the University of Haifa. It focused on the fate of the Palestinian villages of Ein Razal, Um el Zeinat and Tantura. The thesis was approved and given a rating of 97%. A year later Teddy Katz was awarded a research MA from Haifa University.
In 2000 Amir Gilat wrote an article based on his findings. He reported that: “New research determines: In the course of the battle for the conquest of Tantura during the War of Independence, on the night between the 22 and the 23 of May 48, the soldiers of the ‘Alexandroni’ Brigade carried out a mass massacre of the village’s men. Theodore Katz’s research, which is based among other things on the testimonies given to him by the village refugees and the ‘Alexandroni’ soldiers about 50 years after the events, uncovers an array of atrocities including the shooting of men in the streets, in their homes and, in a concentrated fashion, in groups of six to ten at the village cemetery. More than 200 dead were counted and were buried in mass graves in the area that is today the parking lot of the Dor beach…”
Gilat continued: “Those scenes will never be forgotten by Fauzi Mahmoud Ahmed Tangi (Abu Haled). Even today, 52 years later, a tremor passes through his body when he remembers how his family members and his friends were massacred in front of his eyes.”
“‘They took us to the village cemetery and there they arranged us in rows. The commander of the Jews came and told his soldiers: ‘Take ten’, and they chose ten from among us, they led them near the sabra bushes and there they shot them. After that they returned and took another ten. Those were supposed to clear the bodies and after that they shot them too. That was the way this was repeated, they shot more and more people.’”
“‘These soldiers, whose faces I will never forget, looked to me like the angels of death. When I stood there, I was sure that these are my last moments, in one more minute they will take me too and shoot me. The Jews were supposed to have learned from what the Germans did to them. I don’t know why they did to us the same thing, I swear to you.’ The old man from Tul Karem, 74 years of age suddenly breaks out crying, ‘It would have been better if I had died there and did not have to carry with me this story until today.’”[1]
Soon after the publication of the article in “Ma’ariv”, a group of veterans from the “Alexandroni” Brigade sued Katz for libel.
It was claimed that the “thesis contained misquotations and that there were discrepancies between some of the oral testimony recordings and what was described in the thesis…Katz quoted an Alexandroni veteran as having used the word “Nazis” whereas, in fact, he had used the word “Germans”. In another instance, Katz reported that a Palestinian witness “saw” an incident whereas, in fact, he had said that he “heard” the incident.”[2]
Eventually “Katz agreed to an out-of-court settlement, signing an ‘apology’ in which he admitted that what had happened in Tantura was not a ‘massacre’ — this word was used in the apology and denying it seems to have been the entire point. The irony is that the real issue, whether civilians and unarmed ex-fighters were killed after the surrender, did not play a role. All that the veterans seem to have wanted was an apology for usage of the word ‘massacre’, a word which, it should be repeated, never appeared in Katz’s thesis.’”[3]
The legal affair had dramatic consequences in the world of academia: “…Following the court case, Haifa University appointed a committee of four to ‘re-inspect’ Katz’s thesis…the committee reported that it found some major errors. For example, it stated that the thesis ‘failed at the stage of presenting the raw material for the reader’s judgment, both in terms of its organization according to strict criteria of classification and criticism, and in terms of the apparent instances of disregard for the interviewees’ testimony.’” Katz’s degree was suspended.
Benny Morris
In 2004 Benny Morris wrote an article about the affair. He called Katz a “peace activist” and referred to the massacre as an “allegation”. He also mentioned the fact that Katz had received $8,000 from the PLO to help cover his legal fees. Furthermore, his most vocal supporter had been Ilan Pappé, who Morris termed an “anti-Zionist revisionist” who’d “strongly supported the boycott of Israel’s universities”.[4]
The matter of the reliability of Katz’s account could easily have been settled. The grave could have been dug up and the number of villagers who’d died determined. The problem was that the residents of Nahsholim and Dor were opposed: “it would inevitably be a media circus and would underline the fact that they live on confiscated Tantura lands. (Nahsholim was founded four weeks after Tantura was conquered).”[5]
Morris opined that: “Tantura in some ways epitomizes moral issues at the core of the Zionist experience in general and 1948 in particular. The village was conquered a week after the state was declared. Dozens (if not hundreds) of villagers, including many non-combatants, were killed and the remaining population, mostly women and children, were expelled. (Most of them ended up in West Bank refugee camps.) And the village was razed and the site almost instantly settled by Jews.”[6]
Morris knew what he was talking about. He’d written extensively about the subject. In the 1980s he wrote: “Ben-Gurion starkly outlined the emergent Jewish State’s main problem – its prospective population of 520,000 Jews and 350,000 Arabs. Including Jerusalem, the state would have a population of about one million, 40% of which would be non-Jews. ‘This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and sharpness. With such a (population) composition, there cannot even be complete certainty that the government will be held by a Jewish majority…’”[7]
Ilan Pappé
If Morris sketched Ben Gurion's “problem” and how he saw it, Ilan Pappé dealt with his solution: ethnic cleansing.[8]
“On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine.”[9]
Of course, Ben Gurion didn’t use the words: “ethnic cleansing”. He preferred the euphemism: “compulsory transfer”. And he didn’t use it in the heat of battle but long before. In 1938 he said: “I favor compulsory transfer; I see nothing unethical in it.”[10]
Morris concluded: “…atrocities – war crimes, in modern parlance – appear to have occurred. Many of the Tantura dead, even if they only numbered 70-75 as Alexandroni veterans would have it, were unarmed civilians or disarmed militiamen. A number of Alexandroni veterans said as much in undisputed interviews. We have Makovsky’s diary and Micha Vitkon’s statements, both to Katz and to Gilat, that there was execution of prisoners by B Company’s commander, Karni, and that there had been ‘killing.’”[11]
At roughly the same time another prominent Israeli historian, Yoav Gelber, wrote: “In the spirit of recent trends in world historiography that blur the boundaries between history, anthropology and ethnography, Katz’s dissertation rested mainly on oral evidence. He interviewed Arab villagers and Israeli veterans and used previous testimonies that Arab journalists had collected and published. However, the manner in which he assembled and used his oral sources was folkloristic rather than historical. The deficiencies were too numerous to recite and discuss here, but the principal flaws concerned uncritical use of the evidence: Katz did not compare the testimonies with each other and with other sources. He did not examine them critically, nor did he verify the accessibility of the witnesses to the events they described, nor did he question their general credibility. Katz made no effort to reconcile the many contradictions in various stories he heard from his interlocutors. He simply cited the testimonies, often quoting them in a faulty manner that interlaced his own notes, impressions and thoughts with the witnesses’ words.”[12]
The question of comparing sources is an important one but the problem was, according to Katz, that there was a paucity of documents.
Morris wrote: “He scoured the archives and conducted over 130 interviews with refugees and soldiers, taping many but not all. He unearthed no document from 1948 that even mentioned a ‘massacre’ in Tantura. But the witnesses were something else. “I first spoke to villagers in the Wadi Ara area (about 20 kilometers east of Tantura), and I noticed that whenever I said ‘Tantura’ they made a face. I asked why. And they said ‘A big massacre.’ Then I interviewed Tantura refugees, and I heard story after story.”[13]
Nevertheless, Gelber was unyielding and scathing in his criticism: “Based on hearsay or, in the best case, village folklore, and ignoring evidence to the contrary, Katz asserted that in Tantura, a village on the Mediterranean coast, soldiers of the IDF Alexandroni brigade committed war crimes that caused the death of 200–250 villagers. The outstanding grade of 97 (out of 100) that his supervisor and the lectors granted Katz’s thesis, excludes the possibility that the work had not been read carefully and that failure to catch the flaws was an oversight. In essence, their unequivocal ‘stamp of approval’ makes the panel accomplices to a blood libel. However, the real inspiration for Katz’s thesis was Dr. Ilan Pappé, whom the author warmly acknowledged in the opening of his work. While Pappé was not Katz’s thesis advisor, he was Katz’s mentor in many respects.”[14]
On the use of oral history Ilan Pappé is quite emphatic: “Oral history is not a substitute for written evidence, but it is particularly important in validating and filling in the gaps in the documentary evidence, which gives us the ‘bare bones.’ Thus, what is in the official Israeli record (the ‘History of the Haganah’, for example) a brief reference to the act of occupying a village—or ‘cleansing’ it, to use the actual term of the Jewish texts—becomes in Palestinian history a detailed account of assault, expulsion, and in some cases massacre. Indeed, in the case of Tantura, the massacre might not have come to light at all had it not been for oral testimony on the Palestinian side—later corroborated by Jewish testimony—because the piecemeal evidence currently available in the Israeli archives is too fragmentary…to more than hint at what happened. In this case, then, it is the documents that fill out the oral history, rather than the reverse.”
“Since the thesis was written, several other pieces of evidence have come to light that reinforce Katz’s findings. Four documents were extracted from the IDF archives. One was a report mentioning twenty Palestinians killed in the battle, followed by a report a week later from IDF headquarters complaining that the unburied corpses in the village could lead to the spread of epidemics and typhoid. In the third document, the Israeli general chief of staff inquired about reports that had reached him ‘about irregularities in Tantura’ and received the response that ‘overenthusiasm because of the victory’ had led to some damage inflicted ‘immediately after our people entered the place.’ Finally, a document from the Alexandroni Brigade to IDF headquarters in June notes: ‘We have tended to the mass grave, and everything is in order.’”[15]
In October 2013 the Jerusalem Post published a piece by Caroline B. Glick. It detailed how the “Maariv” article had “caused an uproar. 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.”
“Katz later recanted his admission and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling that Katz had libeled the soldiers. The university appointed a panel of scholars to review his research materials. They found Katz had fabricated statements he alleged came from interviews with eyewitnesses.”
“The university cancelled its acceptance of Katz’s thesis. Had that been the end of that, the ‘Tantura Affair’ – that is, Katz’s blood libel against the IDF – would have been long forgotten. But Katz’s academic supervisor, then-senior lecturer at Haifa and celebrated anti-Israel propagandist Ilan Pappé, refused to let the truth get in his way.”[16]
Ironically it was the words of the veterans themselves which vindicated Katz and proved that Ilan Pappé was anything but a liar.
In 2005, the filmmaker Eyal Sivan and the Israeli NGO Zochrot began gathering testimonies from Jewish soldiers of 1948. More than 30 agreed to testify on the events of those days. “Why had fighters now agreed to testify, a mere few years later? According to Pappé the…director of the project, for three reasons. They did all agree on the necessity, in 1948, of forcing Arab populations into exile in order to build the State of Israel.”
“First, most were approaching the end of their lives and were no longer afraid of speaking out. Second, the former fighters had fought for an ideal that had deteriorated with the rise in Israel of religious circles and the far right, as well as the neoliberal electroshock imposed by Netanyahu during his successive mandates.”
“Third, they were convinced that sooner or later the younger generations would discover the truth of the Palestinian refugees, and they believed it was their duty to pass on the knowledge of the disturbing events.”[17]
[1] The Massacre in Tantura, Amir Gilat, Ma’ariv Weekend, 21.1.2000
[2] Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University, Zalman Amit, CounterPunch, May 11, 2005
[3] Ibid
[4] The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair, Benny Morris, February 4, 2004, The Jerusalem Report
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] p.28 The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949
[8] The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappé
[9] The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Author: Ilan Pappé, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Autumn 2006), pp. 6-20
[10] p.53 Ten Myths About Israel Ilan Pappé
[11] The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair, Benny Morris, February 4, 2004, The Jerusalem Report
[12] p.319 Palestine 1948, Yoav Gelber
[13] The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair, Benny Morris, February 4, 2004, The Jerusalem Report
[14] p. 319 Palestine 1948, Yoav Gelber
[15] p. 20 The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial, Ilan Pappé, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2001), University of California Press
[16] Our World: The Bothersome, Annoying Truth, Caroline B. Glick, October 14, 2013, The Jerusalem Post
[17] The crimes of 1948: Jewish fighters speak out Thomas Vescovi, Middle East Eye, 28 June 2018
https://www.bitchute.com/video/8AFzp0YkYUW1/?fbclid=IwAR22L0C4WzJ15gECyIyE15jd8qitevfvmCTYYwioTO0XRVvDzYQgIAD8EKo