‘Tantura’ Review: An Israeli Documentary Remembers A Village Whose Truth Remains Buried [Sundance]

In May 1948, after the controversial approval of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, war broke out between Arab and Jewish factions in the region. The conflict began due to claims over the same land. Following the declaration of the new state of Israel by Israeli leader (and eventual Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion, the new country claimed the land for itself through a war of independence. Palestinians refer to the same conflict as “Al Nakba,” or the catastrophe. Over the nearly year-long dispute, at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees, and Israeli Defense Corp brigades razed hundreds of towns and villages. In their place, the State of Israel was born.

READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival

“Tantura,” the latest documentary from Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, looks at what happened after Alexandroni soldiers seized one of those villages on June 14, 1948. What truly happened remains shrouded in debate. The official story is simple. Doing their duty, IDF soldiers killed a dozen Palestinian men during the initial battle for Tantura, captured the small fishing village, and then rounded up the remaining residents for exile. Weeks later, tractors leveled most of the town, and Israeli citizens moved into Tantura to start their new lives there.  

If what happened was only that simple. The crux of “Tantura” centers around Terry Katz, an Israeli man who wrote a master’s thesis about Tantura’s seizure at Haifa University in the late 1990s. After nearly 140 hours of interviews with Arab and Jewish witnesses, Katz’s research came to a startling conclusion. A lot more had happened in Tantura than a small battle and round-up of refugees from what was now Israeli territory. Amid looting and other war crimes, there had also been a massacre of up to 280 innocent people, with most buried in a mass grave on site in the village itself.

Haifa University accepted Katz’s thesis, and he received high marks, but once a tabloid journalist got their hands on it, things quickly became volatile. Several IDF veterans Katz interviewed sued him for libel. Katz claims that in the court case that followed, Judge Drora Pilpel effectively silenced him. Under pressure from the government, Katz withdrew his claims in an official apology only to retract the statement shortly afterward. Pilpel disallowed the motion, and the trial never resumed. Twenty years later, academic libraries refuse to carry Katz’s thesis on their shelves, and the man himself, now frail from the after-effects of several strokes, lives in disgrace.

“Tantura” revisits Katz’s research to get to the bottom of the mystery, but despite Katz’s warnings, Schwarz’s efforts to do so only complicate things further. Nothing conclusive comes from reassessment. After Judge Pilpel listens to some of Katz’s tapes on camera, she tells Schwarz that Katz may have indeed won his libel case if she had heard the recordings in their entirety twenty years ago. New interviews Schwarz conducts with the Alexandroni veterans still alive sometimes contradict their testimony from Katz’s original recordings. Now in their nineties, the memories of these men are simply poor, and not just willfully so. While some remain frank in their recollections of violence and torture, others hide behind nervous laughter and tricky asides; “to each his morality, to each his interpretation,” goes one recounting. Katz’s older tapes point to a planned mass execution, but most veterans remain evasive in the present day. “That’s not who we are,” one of them claims.

But was it who they were? “Tantura” gets especially harrowing once it engages with the stories that fill the gap created as time pushes historical events and personal memory further apart. Should we take these old men at their word now, and should Katz have done so twenty years ago? Yoav Geller, a contemporary Israeli academic, dismisses Katz’s thesis entirely due to its over-reliance on oral sources. In Geller’s view, oral testimony is “good for folklore, but not for history” and instead endorses arguments backed by documented proof that’s not simply word of mouth. Two other academics, Hillel Cohen and Ilan Pappe, defend Katz with just that kind of hard proof. Wired correspondence between IDF authorities mentions a mass grave at Tantura, but not its location in the village. Schwarz investigates further with the help of a landscape scientist and scanned historical images of the village’s layout, but their findings are inconclusive. An open trench is visible in scans from 1949, where locals claim one of the mass graves lies under a parking lot, but it appears as if someone returned to clean up the area. If parties attempted an excavation now, would it even unearth the truth?

After so much time passed, what remains most prevalent is the grounding myth of Israel itself. That’s the story that David Ben-Gurian, the first Prime Minister of Israel, promoted when he declared Israelis as morally superior to the Palestinians the IDF expelled from their alleged homeland. To have an incident made public that Israeli soldiers enacted war crimes that violate The Geneva Convention would irreparably tarnish such a myth. Is that Tantura’s hidden truth? Defenders of Katz’s work point to damning evidence. After the Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Gurian wanted an official history written that stated the Palestinians left their homes by their own free will. He also sealed records from the public to help legitimate that history. To further protect that narrative, PR crews made doctored newsreels of Palestinian refugees that diminished the harsh reality of their exodus. An MGM film crew even shot a reenactment of the “battle” at Tantura devoid of any illicit activity by IDF soldiers.  

Schwarz prompts a troubling question here: should we believe what’s shown to us any more than what’s told to us? As one historian puts it, “The story is a lie perpetuated by the Israeli state that prevents its own residents from knowing the truth about their past.” With “Tantura,” Alon Schwarz calls for a recognition of that lie and a new sociopolitical reality for Israel and Palestine not built upon a state-sanctioned fiction. For that reason alone, this sobering movie is a triumph, but it’s also just a hugely compelling story about how power tries to silence all other narratives. [A-]

Follow along with all our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.