Tantura Massacre

Hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated in 1948. To Israelis it was the War of Independence, to Palestinians it was 'Al Nakba,' the Catastrophe. Director Alon Schwarz revisits former Israeli soldiers as well as Palestinian residents in an effort to re-examine what happened in Tantura, the location of an alleged, Israeli-perpetrated massacre.

Description: When Israeli graduate student Teddy Katz meticulously documented a massacre of Palestinian civilians surrounding Israel's independence, he was initially celebrated for his groundbreaking work. But soon, he was stripped of his degrees and was publicly shamed as a fraudulent traitor. Decades later, incendiary new evidence emerges to corroborate Teddy's initial findings, not just vindicating him, but raising profound questions about how Israelis — and we all — deal with the darker chapters of history.

IMDb: In the war of 1948 hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated. Israelis call it 'The War of Independence. Palestinians call it 'Nakba"'. The film examines one village - Tantura and why "Nakba" is taboo in Israeli society.

Tantura massacre: Documentary exposes Israel’s foundational myth There are accounts of Alexandroni fighters lining up Tantura residents and shooting them dead; of them raping at least one Palestinian teenage girl and killing her uncle who stood up for her; and of them randomly opening fire on Palestinians, or chasing them with flamethrowers and incinerating them. One former fighter with a Stalinesque moustache tells Schwarz he can’t remember how many Palestinians he killed: “I didn’t count. I can’t really know. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets.” Their bodies “were scattered like garbage on the roads, the paths, between the houses”, says Yaakov Haleli, a former fighter with the Alexandroni brigade.