This post is part of a long series I plan to report about Palestine as a country, culture, and humans across multiple communities in hopes that I spread the world about Palestine and what is happening there.

The fact that I am an Arab obviously comes with perceived bias which is a perception that I accept considering that most of the people on this platform are not Arabs. As much as I believe it is something I am able to refute using my own history, I prefer to keep the focus of this series on Palestine itself and let the series speak for itself.

However, considering the aforementioned fact of my identity, I have challenged myself and limited myself to use mostly sources that are outside of the Arab world when it comes to facts. Therefore, all the events mentioned here come from non-Arab sources which you will be able to verify yourself by reading the sources below. In fact, I implore you to check out those sources regardless of the series.

Dear Reader

I would like you for a second to imagine yourself as a seagull flying around toward the east. At a certain moment, you find yourself flying over a spot on the shore between Haifa and Tel Aviv. There, is a magical and beautiful place known as Dor Beach, a beautiful beach that is no less beautiful than the most beautiful beaches in Cyprus and Greece, behind it lies a beautiful green pasture.

If you're into history, you'd also find many beautiful spots for antiques and artefacts that go all the way back to the Bronze Age. Between all of those, you'd find houses that are very reminiscent of Florida. If you look around, you'll also find many resorts that offer different services.

If you're still imagining that you are a seagull, then I would like you to fly above and look at the beach from a bird's eye view and you'll spot an old resort known Nahsholim, a few meters away from it is a building that looks out of place and it breaks the harmony of the scenery inside the place. It is an old Arabic-style building.

Only A Few Meters Away

Next to the aforementioned Arabic-style house lies a very dark story.

In 1991, a man wanted to build a scopa diving school next to that house. He got the permits and everything and started digging. However, as the workers were digging, they found remains of human bones buried not that deep. The workers saw it, stopped digging, and moved away. That is what Fouad Hasadiyah, a man who lives in a nearby village called Al-Faradis.

When Fouad approached the man behind the project and asked why he left, the man responded, "We found bones and remains from Napoleon's age". Fouad's response was, no, these remains and bones belong to Palestinians who were killed in 1948 and were buried in that spot. This is, of course, a story that Fouad's father and grandfather told him about.

It was a story of a massacre committed by Israeli soldiers and the victims of said massacre, along with many more, were buried in various mass graves. One of these graves lies beneath a parking lot that belongs to the Nahsholim Resort. That was, of course, before the resort was built and of course, before the beach was renamed into Dor. It happened way back when it was a fishing Palestinian village called.

Al-Tantura

Al-Tantura was a Palestinian village south of Haifa, until 1948 it had a population of roughly around 1,500 people, many of whom worked in fishing and agriculture. It was a very calm and beautiful village. Fifty years after "Al-Nakba", until the year 2000, all Israelis knew about the village was that it was a place where battle was fought in Israel's "War of Independence" between Israel and "Arabs". Israel won and the Arabs "Immigrated" into the nearby village known as "Al-Faradis".

After that, settlers came in and established Kebuts known as Nahsholim. That was the official story until 1998 specifically when a Haifa University student by the name of Theodore Katz published his Master's thesis titled "The Exodus of Arabs from the Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948".

This topic was covered in last year's documentary "Al-Tantura", the documentary can be found on YouTube and I will soon be doing a review of it on CineTV

Here's what you need to know about the thesis and you can confirm this easily by watching the documentary above: Katz interviews a bunch of old soldiers from a military brigade of the Israeli Army called Alexondroni Brigade. Those soldiers were behind the invasion of the village on May 22, 1948. While listening to the soldiers, Katz quickly realized that what happened there wasn't a battle because, despite the village's resistance to the invasion, it wasn't an equal battle as it was between poorly armed men with no fighting experience against and heavily armed soldiers which ended the "Battle" before it even began.

The Masacare

The families and villagers did surrender but it didn't save them from death. In fact, it was the beginning of the massacre as between the night of the 22nd of May and the morning of the 23rd, the Alexondrion Brigade invaded the entirety of Al-Tantura village and separated the women from men. The women were stripped of their gold, money, and anything of value before getting expelled to wander away from the village. As for the men, they were gathered near the old Arabic house I told you about above.

Before I get into what happened, which I think you could already conclude, let me tell you that the term "men" isn't accurate as it applies to any boy who looks over 13. Near the Arabic-styled house, the execution began. What Katz heard from the soldiers was horrifying, and it is important to emphasise that he heard it from the soldiers, these weren't statements he heard from survivors, but from the actual soldiers who presumably would be attempting to humanize it.

One of the soldiers said that they stuck the villagers into barrels and then shot at the barrels, they would continue doing this to villagers individually. A soldier described what those blood-soaked barrels looked like. Another soldier said that another soldier showed up, a soldier who would go on to become a high-ranking officer in the Ministry of Defense, and took out his gun and shot people at the beach, one after one.

A soldier who went by the name of Amitzur took out his submachine gun and started shooting at the unarmed, captured villagers. How many did he kill? Not even he knows. According to him, he had a submachine gun with 250 bullets and he just kept shooting until he ran out of bullets.

It should also be noted, that many of these statements were shared by those soldiers as they were laughing. This applies to the time they were interviewed by Katz and when they were interviewed by Tantura director Alon Schwarz.

Let me reiterate that these aren't the statements from the victims, but the killers. Imagine what really happened without the soldiers attempting to humanize it. As for the statements from the victims, well, you can check them in the sources below.

The survivors lived in camps in Syria or immigrated to Al-Faradis village and remain there until today. This means that many of them live a few kilometres away from the village from which they were forced to immigrate. They don't even know where their fathers and grandfathers were buried.

Maybe that slightly changed because, in May 2023, a research agency called "Forensic Architecture" published the results of an investigation to answer the question regarding where were those bodies buried. They brought air shot photographs of where Tantura village was between 1946 and 1949, before and after the Masacare and compared it to satellite images then created a 3D modelling of all the changes that occurred since the massacre coupled with statements from the survivors.

That resulted in a report that could accurately tell where the mass graves were. The largest two exist as follows: One exists near the village's cemetery, and the second is the aforementioned one under the Nahsholim Resort.

If you were to Google these places today, you would find beautiful images of beaches and resorts along with hotel booking sites. But all of that is built above public execution fields and mass graves.

To me, this serves as a perfect metaphor for Israel, a thin and fragile layer of civilization, a sign of Western Ubranilation standing above evidence of murders, ethnic cleansing, and genocides.

Follow-Up Parts

Sources

The Arabs: A History - Eugene Rogan
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
Ten Myths About Israel - Ilan Pappe
Palestine: ...it is something colonial (Decolonizing the mind)
One hundred questions and answers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Pedro Brieger
Tantura Documentary
Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura - Forensic Architecture
Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is apartheid – UN human rights expert
"Nakba Law" - Amendment No. 40 to the Budgets Foundations Law
Eye Witnesses Statments
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 1 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 2 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 3 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 4 | Featured Documentary
Anatomy of the Israeli mind
Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement, And The Partition Of Palestine - Avi Shlaim

The Tragic Story of Palestine - Part 1: Tantura