Did a massacre occur in the Palestinian village of Tantura in May 1948 during the Palestine war? In March 1998, Theodor (Teddy) Katz, an Israeli student, submitted his Master’s thesis “The Exodus of the Arabs from the Villages at the Foot of the Southern Carmel in 1948” to Haifa University. The thesis discussed the fate of the Palestinian villages of Tantura and Umm al Zinat. Katz asserted that as many as 250 of Tantura’s inhabitants were massacred by Israel’s Alexandroni 33rd Battalion after the village was conquered from May 22-23. Katz’s findings were based on the 130 oral testimonies he collected from Palestinian refugees from Tantura and Alexandroni veterans. Haifa University first approved the thesis but then reversed its decision after a group of Alexandroni veterans sued Katz for libel in a Tel Aviv District Court. Israeli historian Benny Morris states, “there can be little doubt that the [Israeli] troops went in [to Tantura] with the intention of driving out the inhabitants,” and “dozens of villagers were killed.” Yet, Morris is skeptical that the alleged massacre occurred because, “The charge of massacre was based solely on oral testimony.” Morris asserts that, “In light of the available evidence, it is doubtful whether there was a massacre at Tantura.” What is the value of oral testimony in establishing the historical facts of the 1948 war? Morris wrote that, “the Katz case highlights the ineluctable fragility of historiography based on oral testimony.” Can oral history be relied upon to reconstruct events that occurred decades before? This paper will explore the Palestinian claims that a massacre occurred in Tantura, and Israeli claims that it did not. The methodology will entail a literature review of published primary and secondary sources, primarily Israeli and Palestinian, and a comparison of previously collected oral histories with Tantura villagers, including my own oral histories, and any available contemporary documentary sources.

On September 23, 1902, a colonist in Rishon LeZion named Yaakov Abramovich was killed by a Christian Arab from Jaffa named Alfred Rok. The unpremeditated consequence of a petty quarrel, this was the first murder to take place in the then twenty-year-old colony and it forced the small collective of Ashkenzi Jewish immigrants, under the tutelage of the Paris-based Jewish Colonization Association, to navigate the unfamiliar field of Ottoman law and Palestinian custom in determining the appropriate course of action to take. Most accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mark 1908’s Young Turk Revolt or 1917’s Balfour Declaration as starting points and characterize the early years of Zionist settlement as relatively conflict-free. What in fact was the significance of these rare early violent incidents in the unfolding history of the Zionist movement, both at the time, and in retrospect. This paper, part of a larger microhistory of this murder case and its afterlives, looks at contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the event and the internal protocols of Rishon between 1902 and 1908 to understand the aftermath and significance of the murder in the context of its own times, using this incident to understand how the Yishuv of the first Aliyah understood and negotiated its position relative to the Ottoman authorities, the Palestinian nobility, the local fallahin, the French philanthropic organization which controlled its finances, and the Sephardi community of Palestine. In tracing these networks, this paper seeks to reread the history of the early Zionist colonies in reference to the economic and interpersonal networks that defined the Jaffa district.

In the aftermath of the Nahalal bombings, which killed a Jewish colonist and his nine year old son in December 1932, three men from the village of Ṣaffūriyya stood trial in the criminal assize court in Haifa. Testimony from witnesses at the trial revealed the existence of a secret society connected to the village’s branch of the Young Men’s Muslim Association. This secret society, it was alleged, was organized to “defend” the country from Zionist colonization through armed resistance. In the beginning of the 1930s the village of Ṣaffūriyya – about thirty-five kilometers west of Haifa – was at the epicenter of sustained, at times violent conflict with neighboring Jewish colonies over grazing rights and land ownership. By Yehoshua Porath’s count, at the height of the 1936-1939 Revolt, the village supplied more rebel band commanders than any other place in Palestine. A remarkable feat for a village of only a few thousand. This paper is a microhistory of Ṣaffūriyya in those intervening years: 1932-1935. The paper focuses in particular on encounters between villagers and a variety of external forces: new Jewish colonies, the British Mandate authorities, and urban nationalists of different stripes. While episodes like the Nahalal bombings and the subsequent trial of the members of the “secret society” brought the village’s role in armed resistance to national attention, it was hardly the only interaction between the village and the neighbouring settlements. Encounters between villagers and their Jewish neighbours were far more equivocal and ranged from “crimes” like assaults, rock throwing, thefts and vandalism to the more prosaic: meetings, social engagements, weddings, friendships. How do we reconcile these conflicting ideas about the politics and the practice of village life? This paper draws on a variety of sources including police files from the British National Archives and the Israeli State Archives; contemporary newspaper accounts in the English, Hebrew and Arabic press; memoirs and oral accounts of residents of Ṣaffūriyya and neighboring communities, to paint a broad picture of life in the village as it negotiated it’s place in a changing Palestine.

This paper examines personal letters and diaries of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood volunteers who came to Palestine in 1948 to fight alongside Palestinians against the Zionist forces. The letters and diaries were found in June-July 1948 by Israeli soldiers in an abandoned armored vehicle in the village Bir ‘Asluj in the Negev\Naqab area. They were collected for the purpose of gathering military intelligence, and eventually made their way to the Israeli archives. The ties between the Society of Muslim Brothers and Palestine go back to the 1936 Arab revolt in Palestine when Hassan al-Banna launched a campaign in Egypt to support Palestinians. By 1938 al-Banna had declared that “jihad for Palestine” was an individual duty for every Muslim (fard ‘ayn), although it is unclear whether any of the society’s volunteers actually fought in Palestine during the revolt. A decade later in 1948, several hundred volunteers were drafted by the society in Egypt and sent to Palestine. They launched a few independent attacks against Jewish settlements before being integrated into the Egyptian army when it entered Palestine in May 1948. The volunteers’ letters give us unique access to what they were saying about who they were, what they were doing and why, thereby going beyond the official statements of the society’s leaders which have been used extensively by historians to tell the story of the Muslim Brothers. To better understand the sources of influence on volunteers, I will supplement the analysis of the letters with examination of the official Brotherhood line in regards to Palestine from 1946 to 1948, as portrayed in the society’s newspapers al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin and al-Shihāb. One of the key themes examined in the paper is the relationship these young men had with their parents, who objected to their decision to volunteer. Although they did not challenge the importance of fighting to save Palestine, many parents asked their sons not to act on what they saw as “youthful zeal” and abandon their studies. Some of the questions I seek to answer in the paper are whether these volunteers held different religious ideas than their parents, and to what extent their leaving their studies to go to Palestine was an act of rebellion.