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This article examines
the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a
graduate thesis using
oral history--the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish
witnesses
--to document a massacre
carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal
village of Tantura in
late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a
Zionist,
the case sheds light on
the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in
discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the
1948 war as "ethnic
cleansing." The article
also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual
massacre as it can be
reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts
from some of the
transcripts.
ON 21 JANUARY 2000, the Israeli daily Ma'ariv published a long
article on the massacre
of Tantura. Written by
journalist Amir Gilat, the article was based mainly on a master's
thesis by Teddy Katz, a
student in the department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa
University. The thesis,
entitled "The Exodus of the Arabs from Villages at the Foot of
Southern Mount Carmel,"
had been awarded the highest possible grade for a master's
thesis several months
earlier. (It had been submitted in March 1998, but for complications
having nothing to do
with the case itself, was examined only at the end of 1999.)(n1) The
thesis is micro
historical research on the 1948 war focusing on five Palestinian
coastal
villages between Hadera
and Haifa, particularly on the villages of Umm Zaynat and Tantura.
The testimonies
reproduced by Katz in his fourth chapter tell a chilling tale of
brutal
massacre, the gist of
which is that on 22-23 May 1948, some 200 unarmed Tantura
villagers, mostly young
men, were shot dead after the village had surrendered following
the onslaught of Haganah troops.
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