Tantura, Netanyahu, Hope

The JCC near my apartment, an opulent Upper West Side gym, populated with successful psychotherapists and other talkative exercisers (people go there for community reasons as well as fitness)has a gym and beautiful movie theater. For the 16th year, they showed films in a festival called The Other Israel.

The festival is the idea of Carol Zabar, a strong woman, lawyer and social justice activist.  She chooses  films from Israel with Israeli and Palestinian advisors, and says her intention is to work toward fair social change.

Last week, right after Netanyahu was elected (even that sentence is hard to say) the festival showed a strong film called Tantura.

Tantura  was a Palestinian Arab fishing village 5 miles northwest of Zikhron Ya'akov] on the Mediterranean coast.

The village stood on a low limestone hill overlooking the shoreline of two small bays. The water was supplied from a well in the eastern part of the village.[9] The al-Bab gate was in the southeast of the village. The Roman ruins were on the coast to the north with the hill of Umm Rashid to the south In 1945 it had a population of 1,490. 

The village was targeted in the early stages of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, with its houses looted and its Arab Palestinian inhabitants expelled and others massacred by the Palmach underground Alexandroni Brigade. The Tantura massacre was first documented by a Palestinian politician in 1951, decades before a 2021 Israeli documentary revealed testimony from several IDF veterans affirming that a massacre, involving somewhere between several to 200 Palestinian victims, had taken place at that time.

The film’s hero, a kibbutznik named Teddy Katz, interviewed 136 people about the massacre, including Israeli soldiers and Palestinian inhabitants of the village.  He wrote his Masters dissertation for Haifa University on the massacre the mass grave made for Arabs is now a parking lot. And although Katz received high marks on his thesis, when the Israeli press wrote about the story, the university removed his thesis, and his degree.

He sued the university and lost.  The filmmaker found the presiding judge and asked her why she dismissed the suit.  He played some of the testimony tapes for her, which she’d never heard.  “I was wrong,” she now says.

(Though one academic from Haifa University said that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remains on the library shelves.)

Many deny that Tantura happened, in spite of so much evidence.

Acknowledgement, and reparations, and what we do with what we know were three of the film’s larger questions.

An older Kibbutznik who lives on Tantura’s land tells the filmmaker that she was just in Warsaw, where her family endured the Holocaust.  There are historical signs everywhere she says.
At least we should do that.

The director, Alon Schwartz, who calls himself the Z word, calls on the American Jewish community.   “Without an outside cry for moral consciousness, Israel will be lost,” he says.

What we do in relationship to Israel has always been a problem for so many American Jews.

My old friend Dale said “I can’t just walk away.  But I want to.”

Netanyahu is entirely horrible.  There is no other side to his election.  Although some of his compatriots are worse.

We must act, but how?

The entire week before the US elections, another difficult time, I played

an old Southern church song sung by everyone from Mississippi John Hurt

to Elvis.  Mavis Staples version still gives me hope. (I found out today that Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples courted for seven years.  She says he’s the love that she lost.  I don’t know why, but that gives me hope too.)