It was published in 2000.

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.

 *Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.