Made-Up Massacre
The Tantura affair, in which post-Zionist Israel libels its own past.
by Meyrav Wurmser
9/1/2001, Volume 006, Issue 48

SHORTLY AFTER KOSOVO leapt into the headlines worldwide and war crimes became the international subject of the hour, the Palestine Liberation Organization, ever quick to exploit political trends, set about likening Israel to Serbia. Spokesmen for the Palestinian cause demanded that the international community bomb Israel and ostracize and pursue its leaders, as it had Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic. They soon got help from an unexpected quarter: Far-left Israeli historians answered the call to elaborate the comparison. Before long, their effort to tarnish their nation had precipitated a major scandal in Israeli historiography known as the Tantura affair.
The stakes were clear: In the current climate of concern about war crimes, to tar Israel with atrocities—especially atrocities in its war of independence in 1948—would be deadly. The Serbs, after all, were in the dock for crimes committed in pursuit of empire. Once Serbia changes its behavior, it will rejoin the community of nations. But to show that Israel was born in sin, that the very act of its creation was a crime, would be to discredit the Jewish state once and for all.
The problem was, the postmodernist, "post-Zionist" historians lacked the raw facts from which to make the comparison—until, conveniently, a master’s thesis produced at Haifa University provided them with useful fodder. Written by a graduate student named Teddi Katz, this thesis addressed a delicate topic: the evacuation of Arab villages at the foot of southern Mount Carmel during the war of independence. Katz maintained that the Israel Defense Forces had ...