75 years since Tantura massacre, when Israel butchered 200 Palestinians

By Ivan Kesic

On this day in 1948, at least 200 Palestinian civilians were massacred by the Zionist terrorist group Alexandroni Brigade in the coastal village of Tantura, 35 kilometers south of Haifa.

Tantura, a small hamlet on the Mediterranean coast, was one of the 64 Palestinian coastal villages on the road between modern Tel Aviv and Haifa, of which only two remain today.

The rest were ethnically cleansed, as were hundreds of other villages, towns and cities elsewhere in occupied Palestine by the Zionist terrorist groups in a campaign of unutterable horror.

The series of massacres followed the forcible expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, known popularly as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

On the intervening night of May 22-23, Tantura with a population of around 1,500 was among the last to be attacked and occupied by the Alexandroni Brigade, shaming humanity.

A critically acclaimed documentary film titled ‘Tantura’, which premiered late last year at the Sundance Festival, documented in detail the horrifying details of the massacre.

One of the vilest testimonies in the film was that of Amitzur Cohen, the Zionist mass murderer who boastfully spoke about his first months as the Israeli regime soldier and how he killed for sport.

“I do not remember the number of Arabs I killed in 1948. I never counted the number, because I was a murderer, and I did not take any prisoners,” Cohen admitted, bursting into peals of laughter.

“I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many,” he said on being asked how many Arab Palestinians he remembered murdering in the massacre of May 1948.

Amitzur Cohen, the “butcher of Tantura,” died two months ago at the age of 96 in the Binyamina settlement that he founded in 1922. Press TV website published an article on Cohen’s crimes.

While history remembers numerous massacres around the world in the last hundred years, and in almost all cases, today's governments distance themselves from the responsible individuals, groups or regimes, historiography acknowledges the crimes, and those responsible are often convicted.

In the case of the Israeli regime, the situation is starkly different. Israeli politicians, judiciary, media and historians have all made a conscious attempt to brush the Tantura massacre under the carpet.

No one is convicted of the massacres, and official historiography consciously manipulates historical crimes and indoctrinates school children with national myths, mislabeling ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a "voluntary retreat", massacres as "battles", and Zionists as "eternal victims."

The case of the Tantura massacre illustrates this best. Although the massacre was known to the world public since the early 1960s, thanks to Palestinian historians, it was not until 50 years later that the massacre began to be discussed in the occupied territories.

Teddy Katz, a student who investigated the massacre, interviewed dozens of witnesses and tried to publish a university thesis, was stripped of his degree and sued for defamation by veterans of the responsible unit.

Calls for the exhumation of the mass grave from Palestinian activists willing to face the past were quickly dismissed by Israeli regime authorities.

Instead, the so-called Israeli "academia" and the authorities focused on denial, arguing that the witness interviews were riddled with inconsistencies.

This is a bizarre redefinition of the famous prisoner's dilemma, into a Zionist butcher's dilemma: if all the butchers deny the crime, it officially did not happen. If one party admits to the crimes and the other party denies it, the crime again officially did not happen.

And if all butchers confess to the crime, as in all three cases, no one will still be convicted.

This is also the reason why Cohen spoke proudly and mockingly about the killing of Palestinian civilians. He knew very well that there would be no repercussions.

For the Israeli regime, acknowledging the massacre in Tantura, even with blaming the deceased individual, is evidently out of the question because it would trigger a domino effect in the form of dozens of other massacres.

Those responsible for all these crimes include the Zionist terrorist groups Haganah, Irgun and Lehi, on which today's armed forces, paradoxically named "Israeli Defense Forces", are based.

The leaders of those groups, terrorists Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin, became prominent Israeli prime ministers and today are considered national heroes.

Therefore, the Tantura massacre can be considered one of the foundation stones of the Israeli regime, along with other massacres and crimes.

The event is a symbol of Zionist ideology based on hatred, slaughter and lies that continues to this day.

Ivan Kesic is an independent journalist and researcher.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk