Tantura: A Zionist Massacre in Myth and Memory
Something horrible happened at Tantura. Even the people who try hardest to wave it away admit that — they quibble over how horrible it was. Were forty or fifty Arab fighters killed while defending their village from Zionist fighters? Were 200 or more civilians, mostly male but including some women, machine-gunned after they surrendered? Was a young woman raped, or did a Zionist try to rape her, only to be caught and beaten by his fellows? How should Tantura be remembered?
That’s the question asked in a controversial documentary, Alon Schwarz’s Tantura.
“For me, the film is more than anything else an intimate, eye-opening document about our culture — a nation of people wanting to keep their story pure and beautiful — and a historical reality that must be faced and acknowledged as we mature as a society.” —Alon Schwarz
I admire the documentary because it’s not just about what happened at Tantura in 1948. It’s about the people who try to remember the past and the people who try to rewrite it. Perhaps my favorite comment in the film is by an old Jewish woman who came to Tantura after its inhabitants had been expelled and helped make a kibbutz. She says she recently visited Poland and saw that the Holocaust was being remembered there. Why couldn’t there be monuments in Israel to the Nakba?
