At a time when the slightest criticism of Israel would bring forth charges of anti-semitism, Tantura is akin to dynamite. Revolving around the claims and counter-claims about what happened during an elite platoon’s cleansing of a Palestinian village during the Jewish state’s “war of independence” in May 1948, Alon Schwarz’s documentary offers an explosive mix of archived evidence and new interviews which shed light on one of the lesser known chapters in the country’s history.
The lack of widespread debate in Israel or abroad about this incident – in which a much-feared Israeli brigade was said to have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pillaged their village after its residents had already surrendered – stems largely from the way the Israeli establishment has sought to suppress it with all its might. Until now, that is: bolstered with interviews in which some nonagenarian veterans incriminate themselves and then rationalise what they did back then, Tantura will certainly spark discussions aplenty after its premiere at Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.
While Tantura does resemble a crime-thriller at times, with much intrigue injected into the proceedings through the stylised examination of taped recordings and old maps in curtained rooms, the documentary is much more than merely an exposé. Going well beyond the actual atrocity itself, Schwarz seeks to explore the machinations of a regime hell-bent in sustaining and perpetuating its foundational myth, a brutal operation which crushes dissent and encourages self-denial at every turn.
Just like the work of his compatriot Avi Mograbi, who also made films (Z32, The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation) about more recent state-sanctioned killings by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian civilians, Schwarz’s treatise has a universal meaning. The film could very well serve as a warning against revisionist regimes trying to whitewash politically inconvenient incidents to shore up their legitimacy.
The beating heart of Schwarz’s documentary is Teddy Katz, a University of Haifa researcher who, in 1998, submitted an academic essay stating how soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade – one of the most revered companies in the Israeli army – murdered 240 Palestinians after occupying the ancient Arab village of Tantura in May 1948. Katz reached this conclusions after his meticulous trawling of existing documentation, and 140 hours of recorded interviews with both victims and perpetrators.
Rather than forcing Israeli authorities into a fact-finding and soul-searching mission, the research kick-started an all-round character assassination of Katz. Ex-soldiers sued him, the courts prevented him from setting records straight, his school disowned and sacked him, and the mainstream media called him a traitor. All this took a toll on the robust fighter as shown in his subsequent TV appearances: the man greeting Schwarz is broken and wheelchair-ridden, the result of the many strokes he suffered over the years.
As Schwarz plays back Katz’s crates of cassettes, it’s evident that a bloodbath had indeed taken place in Tantura, as retired Israeli soldiers revealed on tape the mayhem unleashed on the unarmed villagers. Katz’s material spurs Schwarz to undertake his own investigations, a harrowing task which culminated in searching a mass grave, which might have contained the remains of all those who were killed.
But the most chilling part of Tantura lies not with the revelations of the crime, but the scenes in which Schwarz come face to face with the culprits themselves. Conducted in broad daylight and with hardly their names and faces obscured, some of these old men are unrepentant of what they did. One says the Arabs were “evil” and were killed “with no qualms at all”, while another recalls how, during the first three of four months of warfare, he killed countless Palestinians and “didn’t take captives”. Others recall particularly unhinged colleagues who “went wild”, committing unspeakable atrocities.
There are those, however, who added how these atrocities were “silenced” – and it’s on this that Tantura reaches the most devastating chapter of this controversy, as Schwarz reveals how the institutions converged to bury a war crime and the whistleblower who dared to bring it to the open. The judge who presided over the defamation case against Katz admitted to have not heard the academic’s recorded testimonies of the soldiers; historian Yoav Gelber, meanwhile, admits more of the same, despite his insistence in brushing off the findings of Katz – whom he described as “evil” and “sloppy” – with the gobsmacking argument that “I don’t trust witnesses”.
Schwarz also shows how this systemic denial – which still holds, as official policy dictates how documents painting the Israeli army in a bad light will not be declassified – actually goes back a long way. Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, had long sought to establish a narrative about the country being built on land vacated by Arabs who left on their own accord, and Schwarz unspooled MGM newsreel footage which showed a benign “transfer of Palestinian population” by gentle Israel soldiers. But Schwarz also included some unused rushes showing looted and destroyed houses – images which reveal the truth beneath the PR exercise.
Today, the village of Tantura is no more, replaced by several new towns set up around its land and its seaside dotted with small, picture-pretty chalets for holiday-makers. Talking to the first generation of Jewish settlers, Schwarz discovers how they refuse to address what might have happened before they arrived and settled into those empty houses. “I’m fed up with bad memories,” said one of the pensioners, who goes on to say she would object to any kind of memorial being put up in her village because it would lead to Palestinian claims on the land. Her friend’s riposte, about the existence of Holocaust memorials in Poland, leaves her speechless.
Such a sympathetic view towards history seems rare, though. While Schwarz does manage to find some who dare to object to the Israeli national narrative – such as historian Ilan Pappe, an ardent defender of Katz throughout his ordeal – the majority seem to be either indifferent or belligerent about what they see as a challenge to their country’s legitimacy. “We are a pure nation, we’re so okay, we have high morals,” says one of the ex-soldiers. Tantura could very well bring such simplistic thinking into question.
Director: Alon Schwarz
Screenwriters: Alon Schwarz, Shaul Schwarz, Halil Efrat
Producers: Shaul Schwarz, Alon Schwarz, Maiken Baird
Executive producers: Ian Orefice, Mike Beck, Steve Cohen, Paula Froehle, Jamie Wolf, Nathalie Seaver, Barbara Dobkin, Eric Dobkin
Cinematographers: Or Azulay, Avner Shahaf, Yonatan Weitzman, Ilya Magnes
Editors: Halil Efrat, Amir Sevilla, Sagi Bornstein
Music composer: Ophir Leibovitch
Production companies: Reel Peak Films, in association with TIME Studios and Chicago Media Project
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
World sales: UTA
In Hebrew, Arabic and English
95 minutes
