http://www.arabhra.org/wrap/wrap15/7.htm

12-18/12/2000

Trial starts over history research on 1948 Tantura
        massacre 
          
        A libel suite was filed by Israeli veterans of the 1948 War
        against a scholar who wrote a research on the killing of
        civilians during the conquest of the Palestinian town of
        Tantura. The trial opened this week in Tel Aviv. 

                     On Wednesday the Tel Aviv Central Court
                     started examining a petition for libel submitted
                     by Israeli veterans of the 1948 War against
                     Teddy Katz, a Haifa University scholar. In his
                     Masters research conducted two years ago,
        Katz shed light on a massacre committed by IDF Alexandroni
        Brigade during the conquest and subsequent evacuation of
        Tantura, a large Palestinian coastal town (25km south of Haifa).
        Wednesday's Al-Ittihad explained that Israeli military authorities
        have tried to conceal the massacre, and denied accounts that it
        had happened. According to Katz's thesis, the massacre would
        have been perpetrated as a retaliation for the killing of 14 Israeli
        soldiers in the fighting that preceded the town's capture.
        Following the war, Tantura was leveled and two Kibbutzim,
        Nachsholim and Dor were established on its site 

        Katz, who interviewed 66 Arab eyewitnesses, and a number of
        Jewish veterans, concluded that up to 150 people might have
        been executed by Israeli troops. 73-year-old Fawzi Taniji, now a
        refugee residing in the West Bank Tulkarem Refugee Camp,
        was cited by Katz's lawyers as a witness. He told Kull Al-Arab:
        "they gathered men and women in different places, they
        ordered men to form groups of seven to ten. Then they fired at
        them near the mosque. All in all, probably 90 men were killed".
        Katz also collected testimonies of members of Jewish veterans
        who admitted that arbitrary executions were carried out, but
        refused to talk about a massacre. As to the petitioners, they
        rejected Katz's conclusions altogether. "In Tantura, nothing at all
        happened," Alexandroni Veteran Tuvia Hiller told Kull Al-Arab,
        "the Arabs started writing about the massacre only nine years
        ago. When it comes to Katz, he initiated a media campaign
        with only pictures of bullet holes in the walls of the mosque" (1). 

        Notes: 
        (1) See "The Teddy Katz trial", by Tom Segev. Ha'aretz Weekend, 1st December 2000.