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by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
Throughout my life I have had many Christians tell me that the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
This idea is drilled into Christians, mainly Evangelical Christians, from an early age through the teaching of Christian pastors and Sunday School programs.
Hidden behind this unbiblical belief is the true history of the war of 1948, and the ethnic cleansing massacre that took place by Israeli military forces against innocent civilians, including women and children, a history that is also censored among most Jews.
The Palestinian people refer to it as the “Al-Nakba,” which means “massacre”.
The Israeli government does not allow the word “Nakba” to be used in textbooks for school children, not even Palestinian school children.
But in recent years some Jewish documentary producers have exposed the truth of what really happened in 1948, by interviewing the people who actually lived through it.
One of the most explosive documentaries exposing the horrors of 1948 is the documentary “Tantura: The Untold Story of the 1948 Massacre“, which was directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz in 2022.
Explosive new Israeli documentary ‘Tantura’ is prompting calls to excavate a possible Palestinian mass grave
What really happened near a beach in Israel in 1948?
The question, once debated in a 20-year-old libel suit that served as a microcosm for the battle over Israel’s historical record, reentered the public consciousness this week.
Entities including the Palestinian Authority and the editorial board of Haaretz have begun calling for a commission to excavate land near Mount Carmel in search of an alleged mass grave site in which perhaps 300 Palestinians may be buried.
The renewed attention is due to an explosive new documentary, “Tantura,” directed by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, which premiered virtually Jan. 20 at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the film, Schwarz interviews several Israeli veterans who, in the country’s 1948 War of Independence, served in the Alexandroni Brigade, a regiment that forcibly displaced Arab residents of the village of Tantura following the formal conclusion of the war in order to build Dor Beach and the neighboring Kibbutz Nahsholim.
On camera, many of these former soldiers tell a disturbing story: They had participated in a massacre, one the Israeli government subsequently covered up.
“We killed them. No qualms at all,” one of the interviewees says. Another says he “didn’t count” how many unarmed Palestinians he killed, except to note, “I had a machine gun with 250 bullets.” (Various accounts in the film estimate the death toll at between 200 and 300.)
A third recounts witnessing a rape.
These elderly Israelis, many of them nonagenarians and four of whom have lived on Kibbutz Nahsholim since 1948, had told their stories at least once before: to the film’s protagonist, onetime historian Theodore Katz.
In 1998, for his graduate thesis at Haifa University, Katz amassed more than 140 hours of tape interviewing witnesses and survivors of Tantura (half of them Israeli, the other half Arab) to compile an oral history of the events, for which no paper documentation exists or has yet been made public by the Israeli Defense Forces archives.
Two years after Katz submitted his thesis, its claim of a massacre was picked up by Israeli media and ignited a firestorm of controversy. Soon after, many of his interview subjects recanted their testimony and sued Katz for libel. Katz signed an apology recanting his research, only to immediately claim the apology was coerced.
The university pulled his thesis from its shelves, and to this day his findings are questioned by the government and some Israeli academics (one of whom, IDF historian Yoav Gelber, criticizes Katz’s sole reliance on oral testimony by remarking in the film, “I don’t believe witnesses”).
“If you want to make a movie of them,” Katz warns Schwarz, referring to the taped testimonies, “be careful, because you’ll be hunted down as I was.” (Full article.)
Zionist critics tried to discredit the film, but you can read the response to these critics from the Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz himself, in an article he published on the Israeli English news site Haaretz.com. See:
How to Cover Up a Massacre
This is a masterful documentary, as Schwarz interviews all parties involved, including former military personnel who admit to the facts, and others who deny them.
I learned a lot about how many Jews view this period in their history, which is very controversial, and how those who know the truth handle knowing this horrible truth.
The dialog in the film is in both Hebrew and Arabic, but here is a copy with English subtitles that I watched this week on YouTube.
Five years before this documentary was published, a similar documentary was published in 2017 titled “Born in Deir Yassin“, by Israeli Director Neta Shoshani.
Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: ‘They Piled Bodies and Burned Them’
A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun.
The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process even 70 years after the fact. (Full article.)
This one is also in Hebrew with some Arabic dialog, but here is a copy with English subtitles that I watched earlier today on YouTube.
I strongly recommend that you download and store these documentaries, before they are completely scrubbed from the Internet by the Zionists.
If you are a Christian who has been taught this evil lie that God orchestrated the entire campaign of the Israeli forces to conduct ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people in 1948 resulting in fulfilled prophecy, or if you are a Jew who has been taught that only Arab soldiers died in battle in 1948 and that the Palestinian people left their homeland willingly, please take some time to watch these documentaries and learn the truth from the mouths of the people who were actually there, and who participated in this awful war.
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