Tantura and the Politics of Atrocities

Tantura is a film about the Nakba that was shown yesterday by local activists at a public library, not too far from where I live. “Nakba” is a Palestinian term for “catastrophe” that refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 during the Israeli war for independence, the conflict that established the state of Israel. I’m not going to relitigate that event.

In one sense there is really nothing to litigate, seeing as how Jews needed to get out of Europe in the worst way. There is plenty of room to argue about how it was done, and how it has unfolded since then. I have previously written that up to that point, there was no single Zionism. There were Zionism(s), some of which did not entail establishing a literal state, and certainly not clearing it of its Arab inhabitants. The Zionism that survived was the one upholding a state and the expulsion of the indigenous population. The one that has evolved now positively demands mass extermination of the non-Jewish population. Liberal Zionism in Israel has been reduced to insignificance. Liberal Zionism in the U.S. is drowning in delusion and denial.

My pet peeve is that it is obvious that Zionism as ideology has been totally driven by needs, however perceived and served, for the security of Jews in Israel. The allegedly foundational Biblical apologetics are pure invention.

(Any honest Hasid will admit this.)

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is described vividly in the case of a single village that was cleared, and its adult male inhabitants executed — Tantura. The striking thing is that everybody in Israel knows that this sort of thing, including the specific case of Tantura (a relatively well-to-do Palestinian village), occurred, but it became nearly a crime to say so. A young scholar who collected evidence on Tantura was ruined, what we today call being “cancelled.” I had never heard of Tantura. When I was younger, the archetypal case in point was Deir Yassin.

As an amateur scholar, one item that stuck out for me in the film was the charge by an Israeli academic that verbal testimony is not legitimate historical evidence. By contrast, if somebody says something and it is recorded, it is then a document and somehow better. Come on. In fact, years ago a book that knocked my socks off was Righteous Victims, by Israeli historian Benny Morris, that chronicles the Nakba, in my recollection based on official government documents. It is quite obvious from the film that everybody knew the Tantura massacre took place, including those who denied it up and down.

This film, incidentally, was created by Israeli Jews and includes interviews with Jewish survivors of the affair. Their testimony is mixed, but it was clear to me that the deniers were just lying. There was a kind of gradient in the testimony, from those who freely acknowledged the crime, and sometimes justified it, to those who admitted they didn’t want to talk about it, to those who said maybe it happened but I saw nothing, to flat denials that any offenses took place. It’s this concert that makes the episode clear.

So here we are in the politically benighted state of Virginia, in one of the relatively liberal counties — Loudoun. When activists took their cause to our county governing Board of Supervisors, the word “Holocaust” was thrown back at them.

Thing is, we are well past that now. The Holocaust used to be the one-word justification for whatever crimes the state of Israel committed. Now the ongoing, real-time disaster of Gaza (and less nakedly, the West Bank) trumps the Holocaust. There is no way to deliberately kill 40,000 people without knowing that most of them are innocent. Not for the first time, the Israeli military is murdering American citizens.

Tantura provides evidence of a crime, but nobody much cares about evidence, especially in Israel, where evidently the public has evolved beyond the need to display any “shoot and cry” concern for the state’s Palestinian victims. The heartening, massive demonstrations by Jews were focused on Netanyahu’s judicial finagling, and on the fate of the hostages held by Hamas. Orthodox Israeli Jews are protesting requirements for their own military service, not what their military is doing. However courageous the Jewish activists in Israel, their actions are not about justice for Palestine.

The current dilemma in Virginia and nationally is that fear of a Trump presidency pushes the Democratic establishment to extreme caution, which includes making no waves about Israel. The party has a tight set of issues that polling shows can be used to gut Trump, but Gaza is not one of them. There is perhaps some leverage in Michigan, where there is a combination of the party’s desperate need for that state’s electoral votes and the extent of pro-Palestine sentiment among Arab Americans.

I know of no way to fix this. It may be unsatisfactory, but true, that nothing can be done before a Harris victory. It should be clear that a Trump victory would entirely unleash Netanyahu, if not lead to a catastrophic regional war entangling Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. It should be obvious that Trump would love a chance to play field marshal and wreck Iran. Recent decades show conclusively that a U.S. president can do whatever he likes with the military. For all practical purposes, what Congress thinks does not matter. Why does nobody take note of this, amidst all the “Genocide Joe” nonsense? It drives me crazy!

A Harris victory will be the signal to jump-start the peace movement. Make no mistake, the U.S. is at war, but with Harris, dissent will be feasible.

A Trump victory will be the setting for attacks on Iran, to provoke a retaliation that will be portrayed as a new 9-11. Then the world and anybody left of center in the U.S. itself, is down a deep rabbit hole. The funny thing about Trump is that he really has no real regard for Israel, much less for Jews, so there could be surprises on that front. There is nobody he wouldn’t sell out.

In an effort to try and dig a little deeper, I want to caution against over-emphasis on Israel’s political machinations in the U.S. Without doubt they are extensive and repulsive, but that as well as the “settler colonialism” trope glosses over a fundamental reality: defense of Israel is an established feature of U.S. foreign policy and geopolitical strategy for world domination. Israel is the tail, not the dog. That foreign policy consensus goes back seventy years and is fundamental to Democratic Party elites. Of course Israel was a settler colonialism project, but that was the design of the British Empire, which is a thing of the past.

Relatively speaking, Trump has no regard for the U.S. imperialist foreign policy tradition, which makes him a wild card, his arrogance, ignorance and stupidity making him capable of great, destabilizing misdeeds. Harris and associates are the devil we know. I’ve seen enough of the other one, thank you very much.

I want to give a shout-out to this piece by Max Elbaum on the politics of the moment, who covers some of the same ground.