Who would've thought? Haaretz's Gideon Levy offers life support to expired Tantura "Massacre" Fallacy - by Hanan Amiur

At the end of the legal process, which Katz paid for with Palestinian Authority funding, he was compelled to publish at his own expense newspaper advertisements in which he completely repudiated the massacre lies, eliminating any possibility of generously referring to them as a “contentious version.”

Hanan Amiur..
CAMERA..
27 April '20..

In advance of Israel’s Memorial Day, which starts tonight and continues tomorrow, Haaretz yesterday published an Op-Ed by Gideon Levy about combat soldier Gideon Bachrach, the son of family friends who fell in battle at an Arab fishing village called Tantura during the 1948 war (“Why Didn’t You Tell Us About the Palestinian Village in Tantura?”). Levy, who is named after the fallen Gideon Bachrach, wrote:

According to historian Benny Morris in his book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-49, the [pre-state paramilitary organization] Haganah decided in advance to expel the inhabitants of Tantura. According to one contentious version there was a massacre there.

The prevaricating language, “contentious version,” lends a hand of legitimacy to the claim in which the Haganah allegedly engaged in a war crime: the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Arabs, not involved in hostilities, who were lined up against a wall and shot to death. (The Hebrew article refers to a “controversial version.”)

But the Tantura “massacre” allegation, which originated in a University of Haifa Master’s thesis submitted by student Teddy Katz, is not merely “contentious.” Rather, it was thoroughly debunked after veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade who took part in the battle, completely denied the allegations and sued Katz for slander, prompting a thorough examination of the chain of lies, fabrications and distortions of testimonies orchestrated to smear the soldiers as war criminals.

CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander previously wrote, the soldiers

maintained that the battle for Tantura was a strategic one, an attempt to stop the maritime smuggling of arms and food and to prevent the Haifa-Tel Aviv road from being cut off; and that throughout the fight for survival in a bloody war launched by the Arabs, they had maintained the strictest ethical standards. While the battle for Tantura was difficult – 14 members of the IDF battalion and about 40 Arabs were killed in street fighting – the veterans insisted Katz had lied about a massacre.

At the end of the legal process, which Katz paid for with Palestinian Authority funding, he was compelled to publish at his own expense newspaper advertisements in which he completely repudiated the massacre lies, eliminating any possibility of generously referring to them as a “contentious version.”

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