[News] ‘The Blood in the Barrel’: Decades of Israeli Propaganda are Faltering

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-blood-in-the-barrel-decades-of-israeli-propaganda-are-faltering/>
‘The
Blood in the Barrel’: Decades of Israeli Propaganda are Faltering
February 9, 2022
------------------------------
The Palestinian village of Tantura before the 1948 massacre. (Photo: Matson
collection, via Wikimedia Commons)

*By Ramzy Baroud <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ramzy-baroud>*

A succession of events in recent weeks all points to the inescapable fact
that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the
truth about its origins and its current racially-driven apartheid regime
are miserably failing. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing
ground much faster than its ability to gain new supporters or to whitewash
its past or ongoing crimes.

First, there was Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants
were exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on May 23, 1948. Like
many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians throughout the
years, the massacre of Tantura was mostly remembered by the village’s
survivors, by ordinary Palestinians and by Palestinian historians. The mere
attempt in 1998 by an Israeli graduate student, Theodore Katz, to shed
light on that bloody event ignited
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2001.30.3.19> a legal, media, and
academic war, forcing him to retract his findings altogether.

In a recent social media post, Israeli Professor Ilan Pappé revealed
<https://www.facebook.com/ilan.pappe/posts/5324292800933541> the reasons
why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my
‘crimes’ was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura
in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz,” Pappé wrote.

Now, some Alexandroni Brigade veterans have finally decided to confess to
the crimes in Tantura.

“They silenced it. It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I
don’t want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It
happened.” These were the words of one Moshe Diamant, a former member of
the Alexandroni Brigade, who, with other veterans, revealed
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968>
in the documentary ‘Tantura’ by Alon Schwarz the gory details and the
horrific crimes that transpired in the Palestinian village.

An officer “killed one Arab after another” with his pistol, Micha Vitkon, a
former soldier, said
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968>
.

“They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the
blood in the barrel,” another explained
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968>
.

“I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners,” Amitzur Cohen admitted
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-there-s-a-mass-palestinian-grave-at-a-popular-israeli-beach-veterans-confess-1.10553968>
.

Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Tantura in cold blood. They were
buried in mass graves, the largest of which is believed <http://dor/> to be
under a parking lot at the Dor beach, which is flocked by Israeli families
on a daily basis.

The Tantura massacre and its aftermath is arguably the most glaring
representation of Israeli criminality: the mass murder, the cover-up, and
the dancing on the graves of the victims.

But this is not the story of Tantura alone. The latter is a representation
of something much bigger, of mass-scale ethnic cleansing, of forceful
evictions, and of mass killing. Thankfully, much truth is being unearthed.

In 1951, the Israeli army launched
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-documents-reveal-israel-s-intent-to-forcibly-expel-bedouin-from-their-lands-1.10579891>
a full-scale military operation that ethnically cleansed Palestinian
Bedouins from the Naqab. The tragic scenes of entire communities being
uprooted from their ancestral homes were justified with the typical Israeli
explanation that the terrible deed had to be done for “security reasons”.
In 1953, Israel passed
<https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/09/israel-land-acquisition-law-1953/#:~:text=Israeli%20Land%20Acquisition%20Law%20(1953,to%20various%20Israeli%20state%20institutions.>
the so-called Land Acquisition Law, which turned what was supposedly a
temporary situation into a permanent one. By then, Israel had unlawfully
expropriated 247,000 dunums in the Naqab, with 66,000 remaining
‘unutilized’. The remaining land is currently the epicenter of an ongoing
fight between Palestinian Bedouin communities and Israel, which argues that
the land is “essential” for Israel’s “development needs”.

But according to recently-revealed documents, uncovered by extensive
research conducted
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-documents-reveal-israel-s-intent-to-forcibly-expel-bedouin-from-their-lands-1.10579891>
by Professor Gadi Algazi, Israel’s version of the truth in Naqab was a
complete fabrication. According to numerous uncovered documents, Moshe
Dayan, then the head of the Israeli army Southern Command, was at the
center of an Israeli government and military ploy to evict the Bedouin
population and to “revoke their rights as landowners”, per the conveniently
created Israeli law, which allowed the government to ‘lease’ the land as of
its own.

“There was an organized transfer of Bedouin citizens from the northwestern
Negev eastward to barren areas, with the goal of taking over their lands.
They carried out this operation using a mix of threats, violence, bribery
and fraud,” Algazi told
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-documents-reveal-israel-s-intent-to-forcibly-expel-bedouin-from-their-lands-1.10579891>
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The entire scheme was organized in such a way as to provide the claim that
the Palestinians had moved ‘voluntarily’, despite their legendary
resistance and “the stubbornness with which they tried to hold onto their
land, even at the cost of hunger and thirst, not to mention the army’s
threats and violence”.

More still. A newly-released volume by French historian Vincent Lemire has
entirely dismissed
<https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220128-book-sheds-light-on-israel-role-in-destruction-of-jerusalem-mughrabi-quarter>
Israel’s official version of how the Moroccan Quarters of Jerusalem were
demolished in June 1967. Though Palestinian and Arab historians have long
argued that the destruction of the neighborhood – 135 homes, two mosques
and more – was done per the order of the Israeli government through the
then-Jewish mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, Israel has long denied that
version. According to the official Israeli account, the demolition of the
neighborhood was carried out by “15 private Jewish contractors (who)
destroyed the neighborhood to make space for the Western Wall plaza”.

In an interview with Agence France Press (AFP), Lemire stated
<https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220128-book-sheds-light-on-israel-role-in-destruction-of-jerusalem-mughrabi-quarter>
that his book offers “definitive, written proof on the premeditation,
planning and coordination of this operation,” and that includes official
meetings between Kollek, the commander of the Israeli army, and other top
government officials.

The story goes on; more heartbreaking revelations and a well-integrated
version of the truth are exposing long-hidden or denied facts. And the days
of Israel getting away with these crimes seem to be behind us. A case in
point is Amnesty International’s recent report
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/>,
“Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression
and Domination”.

Amnesty’s 280 pages of damning evidence of Israel’s racism and apartheid
did not shy away from connecting Israel’s violent present with its equally
bloody past. It did not borrow from Israel’s deceptive language and
self-serving division of Palestinians into disconnected communities, each
with a different claim and a different status. For Amnesty, as was the case
with Human Rights Watch’s report
<https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution>
in April 2021, Israeli injustices against the Palestinians must be
recognized and duly condemned in their entirety.

“Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of
establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing
its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the
number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their
ability to challenge this dispossession,” the report stated.

And that could only happen through mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide, from Tantura, to the Naqab, to the Moroccan Quarters, to Gaza and
Sheikh Jarrah.


*- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé,
is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and
Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research
Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is*
*www.ramzybaroud.net* <http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>
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