The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé Read Free Book Online

Khirbat Qumbaza and Khirbat al-Shuna. A small number of villages courageously put up strong resistance, and the Alexandroni Brigade was unable to take them; neverthess, they were finally cleansed in July. That is, the ethnic cleansing operations in the central coastal plain developed in two phases: the first in May and the second in July. In the second half of May, the most important ‘trophy’ was the village of Tantura, which the Alexandroni captured on 21 May 1948.
THE MASSACRE AT TANTURA 15
     
    Tantura was one of the largest of the coastal villages and for the invading brigade it stuck like ‘a bone in the throat’, as the official Alexandroni war book puts it. Tantura’s day came on 22 May.
    Tantura was an ancient Palestinian village on the Mediterranean coast. It was a large village for the time, having around 1500 inhabitants whose livelihood depended on agriculture, fishing and menial jobs in nearby Haifa. On 15 May 1948, a small group of Tantura’s notables, including the mukhtar of the village, met the Jewish intelligence officers, who offered them terms of surrender. Suspecting that surrender would lead to the villagers’ expulsion, they rejected the offer.
    A week later, on 22 May 1948, the village was attacked at night. At first, the Jewish commander in charge wanted to send a van into the village with a loudspeaker calling upon people to capitulate, but this scheme was not carried out.
    The offensive came from all four flanks. This was uncommon; the brigade usually closed in on villages from three flanks, tactically creating an ‘open gate’ on the fourth flank through which they could drive the people out. Lack of coordination meant that the Jewish troops had fully encircled the village and consequently found themselves with a very large number of villagers on their hands.
    Tantura’s captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach. The Jewish troops then separated the men from the women and children, and expelled the latter to nearby Furaydis, where some of the men joined them a year and half later. Meanwhile, the hundreds of men collected on the beach were ordered to sit down and await the arrival of an Israeli intelligence officer, Shimshon Mashvitz, who lived in the nearby settlement of Givat Ada and in whose ‘district’ the village fell.
    Mashvitz went along with a local collaborator, hooded as at Ayn al-Zaytun, and picked out individual men – again, in the eyes of the Israeli army, ‘men’ were all males between the ages of ten and fifty – and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura’s village file, and included everybody who had participated in the 1936 Revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti, and anyone else who had ‘committed’ one of the ‘crimes’ that automatically condemned them.
    These were not the only men executed. Before the selection and killing process took place on the coast, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets. Joel Skolnik, a sapper in the battalion, had been wounded in this attack, but after his hospitalisation heard from other soldiers that this had been ‘one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army had fought.’ According to him, sniper shots from within the village as the soldiers entered had caused the Jewish troops to run amok soon after the village was taken and before the scenes on the beach unfolded. The attack happened after the villagers had signaled their surrender by waving a white flag.
    Solnik heard that two soldiers in particular had been doing the killing, and that they would have gone on had not some people from the nearby Jewish settlement of Zikhron Yaacov arrived and stopped them. It was the head of the Zikhron Yaacov settlement, Yaacov Epstein, who managed to call a halt to the orgy of killing in Tantura, but ‘he came too late’, as