1948: Israeli Forces Massacre Villagers of Tantura

The Scene

Today, there is no village of Tantura.

In its place is Nahsholim, a kibbutz and beach resort that beckons tourists with images of seaside villas and palm trees. It’s “one of Israel’s most beautiful stretches of beach,” as the website chirps, “adjacent to clear blue lagoons, a natural bay, small islands close to the beach, fish, birds and magical sunsets.”

There’s no mention of Nahsholim’s history: just a directory that boasts events, restaurants, and charming photos in a rustic pastel-ish palette. But the beautiful stretch of beach was not always claimed by Israel, and much like the United States’ most popular tourist destinations, the settlement is built upon another people’s land.

What Happened?

In 1948, Tantura was a thriving Palestinian fishing town of 1,650 homes, and it had plenty to offer. With its fishing port, fruit orchards, field crops, schools, shops, mosque, and roadway connecting it to the city of Haifa, it was one of the most highly developed towns in the region. It was also on the swath of land signed over to the Zionist movement by the British.

“In its occupation, depopulation, subsequent destruction, and seizure of all its lands by Israel, the fate of Tantura was similar to that of more than 400 other Palestinian villages during the 1948 war,” writes Mustafa Al-Wali in the Journal of Palestine Studies. “But it also shared with some two score of these villages the additional agony of a large-scale massacre of its inhabitants.”

The town was connected to the city of Haifa by a roadway. After Haifa was conquered by Israel, Zionist forces were quick to set their sights on Tantura. According to Israeli sources, the citizens of Tantura were given the option to surrender without a fight — or rather, to be expelled without resistance.

The townspeople chose to defend their homeland. But they were civilians, not soldiers. They were quick to surrender.

This didn’t stop the Israeli unit from advancing anyway. When Palestinian snipers shot at them, injuring a few, the Israeli forces rendered the village a bloodbath.

Some 200 people, including children as young as 13 years old, were murdered.

Theodore Katz, an Israeli student at Haifa University who chose Tantura as the topic of master’s thesis, takes credit for bringing light to the massacre. As part of his research, he interviewed 40 witnesses in all, 20 Jewish and 20 Palestinian.

Katz sums up the slaughter in his thesis:

“All of the men of Tantoura were taken to the cemetery of the village, and they put them in lines, and they ordered them to begin digging, and every line that finished digging just was shot and fell down to the holes. Which I guess reminds at least a few of you, something that had to do with Germans, three years after the end of the Second World War.”

What do Palestinian testimonies say?

Salih ‘Abd al-Rahman tells Katz in a taped interview, “[Shimshon Mashvitz] killed [those who surrendered]. They stood next to the wall, facing the wall, he came from the back and killed them all, shooting them in the head… Every group twenty or thirty people.”

Najiah Abu Amr recounts, “I saw the soldiers trying to harass the women, but they were pushed away by the women. And when they saw the women not suc- cumbing, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and try to undress them, claiming they have to check their bodies. They took a lot of gold from the women. I also saw them tying one young man, Salim Abu Shaqr, and killing him…”

“They entered the village, stood us in a row next to the beach, positioned a Bren [a submachine gun] from here and from there, and brought our boats, twelve in number, in order to shoot us,” recalls Ali ‘Abd al-Rahman Dekansh.

Later, he says, “Shimshon Mashvitz gave me two notebooks and two pencils, gave me ten people and two stretchers to pick up the dead from the streets and take them to our graveyard. He told me to write down the names of all of them. He asked me, ‘Are you a native here?’ And I said, ‘This is my village, and this is my house’ — our house was near the harbor. . . . I wrote
down ninety-five men and two women.”

What do Israeli testimonies say?

Katz’s interviews of Israelis who had witnessed the Tantura massacre are also jarring. An Israeli war veteran, Shlomo Ambar, told Katz he had “seen things he did not want to talk about.”

“If I don’t want to tell, it means I’m hiding something,” Ambar says on tape. “It means that the occupation [of Tantura] was not one of our most successful
battles.”

“You talk about Tantura, and you mention what even the Germans did not do,” Katz replies.

“That’s right,” Ambar says. “They did not kill Western prisoners, only Russians… Let me tell you, I do not recall too well. The intention was to empty the village, and people died in the process.”

In another interview, Katz poses a question to Mordechai Sokoler, a guide who accompanied the Israeli forces. “How many people of Tantura surrendered with their hands over their head?”

“Two hundred and thirty,” Sokoler says. “After they were killed, we counted them.”

“How many were killed in the battle?”

“They were all killed in the battle. The sniper hit one of the soldiers in the leg, shooting began. And then they were killed, all hell broke out. They did not know who was shooting.”

“For killing 230 people, it takes time,” Katz remarks.

Sokoler laughs. “They were concentrated in one spot.”

Yosef Graf, another guide, recalls seeing the moment of the surrender. “The Arabs raised the white flags, the kuffiyya, the hatta. . . . Before that, there were clashes, sure. Skirmishes. Our guys had taken cover and shot back at the Arabs who then raised the white flags. . . . I called to our guys: ‘Don’t advance!’ They did not heed and were shot at, and then they [the soldiers] assaulted and killed them all.”

“After the surrender, actually?” Katz presses, after Graf mentions that people were also shot in their homes.

“There was no surrender,” says Graf. “It was occupation… I am telling you, these [Israeli forces], they massacred.”

Another Jewish witness, Joel Solnik, puts it bluntly: “There were shameful things there, very shameful. It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . they did not leave anyone alive.”

There were survivors, though. The group of predominantly women and children was sent to Furaydis, a nearby village that had already fallen to the occupation. The surviving men were imprisoned.

Just weeks after the razing of the village, the site of Tantura was settled by Palmach members, and later Holocaust survivors from Poland. It was then named Nahsholim and claimed as part of Israel.

And this is where the beach resort now stands. Palm trees, a balmy breeze, and mass graves beneath tourists’ toes.

A Crime: Massacre Denial

Just like its crimes of apartheid, illegal occupation, and restriction of natural resources for Palestinians, Israel isn’t keen to acknowledge the massacres inflicted not just on Tanpura, but hundreds of other Palestinian villages as well. Wikipedia refers to the incident as an “alleged massacre.” A headline in Tablet Magazine labels it a “battle,” and then immediately directs the reader’s attention away from Palestinian victims: “The fight over alleged war crimes from 1948 is a window into the kaleidoscopic nature of history and memory in Israeli culture.”

Theodore Katz faced massive backlash for his thesis, including being sued for libel by the veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade, who demanded one million shekels in damages. Katz initially put out a statement titled “An Apology,” where he declared that “that there is no basis whatsoever for the allegation that the Alexandroni Brigade, or any other fighting unit of the Jewish forces, committed killings of people in Tantura after the village surrendered.”

Just 12 hours later, he walked back his apology.

Other Survivor Testimonies

One of the ways Israel attempts to deny massacres like Tanpura is by claiming that testimonies can be fabricated, and oral history is unreliable. Historians in general would disagree.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, “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… oral history has gained increasing recognition in the past decades in the academic community worldwide.” He also adds, “Nor is written documentation still seen as necessarily more authentic or reliable than oral history.”

Another Israeli historian, Omer Bartov, writes about the importance of oral history in piecing together the stories of both the Holocaust and the Nakba:

“The memory of trauma is often murky, unstable, contradictory, untrustworthy. . . . What we learn from [memoirs of camp survivors in this case] are not the fine details of camp administration, train schedules, ideological purpose and genocidal organization. These are matters far better left for historians. What we learn is the infinity of pain and suffering that makes the memory of those years into a burden whose weight stretches far beyond the ephemeral human existence, a presence that clings to the mind and inhabits the deep recesses of consciousness long after it should have been cleansed and washed away.”

Below are some more oral history accounts collected from survivors of the Tantura massacre, some of whom were children at the time. The link to read other testimonies can be found at the bottom of the page.

Muhammad Abu Hana, born in 1936, resident of the Yarmuk camp:

We were awakened in the middle of the night by heavy gunfire. The women began to scream and ran out of the houses carrying their children, and they gathered in several places in the village.

I also left the house during the fighting and went around the streets trying to see what was going on. Suddenly a woman shouted to me, “Your uncle is wounded! Quick, bring some alcohol!” I saw my uncle with a wound in his shoulder and the blood gushing out like a fountain. Because I was young, I didn’t know fear. I grabbed an empty bottle and ran to the clinic. The nurse, a Christian from the village named Zahabiyya, filled the bottle with rubbing alcohol and I ran back to my uncle. The women cleaned the wound and took my uncle to our house, where they hid him from the Israelis in the grain attic.

But the soldiers saw the trail of blood and soon burst in, asking my grandfather where my uncle was. My grandfather said he didn’t know. They left but came back several times with the same question. At some point my uncle, who was in pain, asked for a cigarette, and my grandmother gave him one. When the soldiers came back again, the smell of burning tobacco clinched the matter. They grabbed him and took him away. On their way out they insulted my grandfather, shouting that he was a liar, and he answered back that he had only tried to defend his son, as anyone would…

By morning, the shooting had stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach. They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads. Female soldiers searched the women and took all their jewelry, which they put in a soldier’s helmet. They didn’t give the jewelry back when they expelled us toward Furaydis. During the entire operation, military boats were offshore.

On the beach, the soldiers led groups of men away, and you could hear gunfire after each departure.

Toward noon we were led on foot to an orchard to the east of the village, and I saw bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura who emptied their cargo in a big pit. Then trucks arrived, and women and children were loaded onto them and driven to Furaydis. On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about.

Muhammad Ibrahim Abu `Amr, born in 1935, resident of the Yarmuk camp:

We had gathered at the center of the village, in the house of Hajj Mahmud al-Yahya. When the village fell and the soldiers entered, they herded us to the beach. On the way, near the house of Badran on the street leading to the mosque, I counted the bodies of seven young people from the village.

A woman, `Izzat Ibrahim al-Hindi, started to scream at the horror of the sight, but a burst of gunfire silenced her for good. This woman was the mother of the martyr `Abd al-Wahhab Hassan `Abd al-`Al, who had been killed at the end of 1947 by bombs planted by the Jews at the Haifa market.

When they loaded us onto trucks, we saw bodies piled along the road like stacked wood. A woman recognized her nephew among the dead — it was Muhammad Awad Abu Idriss. She started to scream. She didn’t know yet that her three sons had met the same fate. Her sons, Ahmad Sulayman, Khalil, and Mustafa, had been killed, but we only learned this later, in exile. But the mother always refused to believe it and insisted that they had escaped to Egypt and would come back to find her one day. She spent the rest of her life waiting for them.

Amina al-Masri (Umm Mustafa), born in 1925, resident of the Qabun quarter of Damascus:

From the time that the village of Kafr Lam was captured after the fall of Haifa, we began to fear an attack on Tantura. The night of the assault, men were on guard duty at the various entrances to the village, but they were poorly armed. I heard gunfire and thought it came from al-Bab [the gate], that is to say from southeast of the village. I woke up my husband. At first he thought I was dreaming, but the firing grew louder, and there were explosions and all. They came from the hill of Umm Rashid in the south and from the direction of al-Burj [the tower], on the coast to the north where the Roman ruins are located. We got the children out and hurried to the house of my parents. They were terrified. The shooting had died down a little and people thought that the battle was over. How naive we were! Abu Khalid `Abd al-`Al even believed that the Jewish attack had been countered, and cried out, “We won! We got them!” A few minutes later the gunfire resumed with a vengeance, accompanied by shelling. People began running in all directions shouting, “The Jews are inside the village! The Jews are in the village!”

In the morning, when they were leading us to the collection point on the beach, they killed Fadl Abu Hana at the place known as the Marah. Fadl was unarmed, but he wore a khaki jacket. Before our eyes, they took a group of men away and shot them all except for one. To him they said, “Go tell the others what you saw.”

In their search for money and gold, they even went through the swaddling clothes of our infants, and when a little girl tarried in taking off an earring, a woman soldier ripped it off, and the little one began to bleed.

They then herded us to a piece of land that belonged to the Dassuki family. We had walked there barefoot over stones and brambles, and then they loaded us onto trucks which took us to Furaydis. There, my grandfather, Hajj Mahmud Abu Hana, sent one of his daughters to find him a shroud in `Ayn Ghazal or Ijzim, for he sensed that his hour had come. She couldn’t find one in either place and returned empty-handed. But he had already drawn his last breath after having bowed to the ground twice and read verses of the Qur’an, calling on the Almighty not to let him die outside Palestine. We then found a coverlet, which we split open to remove the wool filling to make a shroud with the material and wrapped him in it for burial.

In Furaydis, a military vehicle driven by a female soldier purposely ran down a woman of Tantura, Amina Muhammad Abu `Umar, the wife of Falih al-Sa`bi, who had been returning from the field with a bundle of wheat on her head that she had gathered to feed her children. A woman who witnessed the scene rushed to pull the dead woman’s body off the roadway. Another vehicle barrelled toward her. It missed her but ran over the dead woman a second time.

That day, I told myself that the End of Days had come and that none of us would survive these events.

We spent a month in Furaydis. A child was born there, the first child of Tantura born after the massacre. The family, the Abu Safiyyas, had lost most of their menfolk the day the village fell.

More testimonies can be found here: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/41048