Whenever Israel commits a war crime (which is alarmingly often), their so-called leaders and spokespersons, even their counterparts in the West, including their mainstream media, are quick to defend their virtue and the myth about their morality.
An abundance of evidence of the most immoral, vicious and degrading behaviour, even revoltingly of apparent war crimes broadcast by IDF soldiers themselves on various social media platforms, is bluntly dismissed or denied and accompanied by the familiar refrain, “We are the most moral army in the world.”
Historically, Israel has gone to considerable lengths to create and foster a foundational myth that the West can swallow without troubling their conscience too much, if at all. The dubious founding and creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was fashioned as a war of independence by their political elite but is emphatically remembered by the Palestinian survivors, their descendants, and those forever disenfranchised as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
The Palestinians who were forcefully evicted from the land they owned were consigned to become refugees in their own country through the perpetration of many war crimes by the Zionist colonizers. Since then, Palestinians resisting the brutal oppression have been branded as terrorists while the colonizers, who became newly minted Israeli citizens, still celebrate what they declared as a righteous war.
The aggrieved legal owners of the land became villains, while the Zionist oppressors have been claiming victim status ever since in defence against legitimate resistance. Thus, the false narrative about Palestinian nationhood birthed soon after 1948 became firmly entrenched with the collusion of Western mainstream media. Meanwhile, the sinister process of stealthy ethnic cleansing took root and went largely undetected or ignored… except by the victims, of course.
Over time, the Palestinian struggle faded from view. It did not feature prominently in the minds of the West and the rest of the world… until the violent Hamas retaliation of October 7th, 2023, shattered the illusions many, including myself, were under about what until then was politely termed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ensuing disproportionate and vengeful response by Israel is still being live-streamed to the world ten months later.
It could have been very different had the world paid heed to the few noble attempts by brave sympathizers to the Palestinian cause and taken action to address the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.
One such attempt was by Jewish filmmaker Alon Schwarz1, which laid bare the natural but violent history of the founding of Israel. While many atrocities were committed by the Israeli army, one massacre, that of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin2 on April 9th, 1948, by the Zionist Irgun and Lehi paramilitary forces (decreed as terrorist organizations by the British Mandate), is remarkably similar in many respects to the Hamas incursion of October 7th.
However, Schwarz focussed on another massacre in his documentary film, Tantura which premiered at Sundance in 2022- that of the murder of around 200 Palestinian villagers, some in execution-style3, in Tantura near Haifa by the Israeli Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade after they (the villagers) had already surrendered during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
The film I rented on Google TV last week resulted from more than two years of research by Schwartz and involved interviews with many of the surviving Alexandroni Brigade soldiers, now in their 90s. The documentary focuses on Teddy Katz, an Israeli graduate student who attempted to submit a doctoral thesis on the massacre based on interviews with and testimonies from the Alexandroni Brigade soldiers in the 1990s. It also features archived footage of the Palestinians’ forced dispossession of land and expulsion, known to them as the Nakba.
Needless to say, Katz suffered a similar fate to those people around the world who challenge the Israeli narrative are familiar with. He was taken to court, forced to abandon his thesis, sign a written apology, and never got his doctorate. However, Katz managed to retrieve the tape recordings and track down the surviving soldiers, who were also interviewed for the documentary.
While some Alexandroni Brigade soldiers denied involvement, others were cagey about theirs’. Yet others, astonishingly, not only admitted their involvement but displayed a great deal of perverse pleasure in the retelling of how they massacred the villagers. It is here that the veil on Israel’s much-professed morality starts to lift.
The film also exposed the existence of mass graves4 in Tantura, one of which is located under a parking lot constructed at some point after the massacre. It’s unlikely that Israel will permit the excavation of the grave site in what is today a kibbutz and tourist resort town known as Nahsholim.
While Katz expressed remorse in signing the apology, the film gave him some satisfaction and closure. On the other hand, Alon Schwartz received much criticism and was denounced as a fraud by some historians.
The film provided valuable insight into a history that Israel does not want the world to see. More importantly, however, it exposes the latent immorality of the Israeli Defense Force, nurtured by its founding members, the Zionist terrorists from the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi. That lack of humanity has since flourished and come to full bloom during the past ten months in what is now rightly being called the genocide of the Palestinians.
*Featured Image: Wikipedia Commons, Matson Collection
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