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Guardian Promotes New Tantura "Massacre" Claim

(CAMERA-UK) Adam Levick - A Guardian article on May 25 uncritically amplifies a report commissioned by Adalah, a Palestinian NGO, which claims that a massacre was carried out in the Palestinian village of Tantura, near Haifa, by Israeli forces in the 1948 war. The journalist, Bethan McKernan, refers to "the events of 1948," without noting that there wouldn't have been a single Palestinian casualty or refugee if Arab armies - supported by Palestinian leaders - hadn't invaded the nascent Jewish state with the objective of annihilating it, three years after the Nazis murdered one out of every three Jews on earth. Over 6,000 Israelis (including many Holocaust survivors) lost their lives in that war - 1% of the entire population. The "Tantura massacre" claim, which originated in a University of Haifa Masters' thesis by Teddy Katz, was debunked by veterans of the brigade who took part in the battle and sued Katz for slander. Katz quoted a central witness called Abu Fahmi saying that the IDF had rounded up villagers, lined them up against the walls and murdered them. But after Katz handed over the tapes of his interviews, it was clear that there were no such quotes. On the contrary, Abu Fahmi repeatedly asserted that the IDF did NOT murder the villagers. Confronted with many such discrepancies, Katz insisted that he had never believed there was a massacre. Historian Benny Morris wrote: "It's noteworthy that a memorandum of the Arab Higher Committee, titled "The Atrocities of the Jews," which was sent to the UN in July 1948, makes no mention of Tantura. He noted that a "book deemed the Nakba bible, the six-volume Al-Nakba published between 1956 and 1960 by the chronicler Aref al-Aref, does not mention a massacre at Tantura....Similarly, Mahmoud al-Yihiya Yihiya, who...in 1998 published a book called Al Tantura about his native village, did not mention a massacre."
2023-06-01 00:00:00
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