A Recent Film Spreads a Debunked Tale of Israeli Atrocities, and Earns Praise

Last year, the Israeli documentary Tantura made its U.S. debut at the Sundance film festival, where it won much acclaim for its telling of the story of a 1948 battle for the eponymous Arab village and the subsequent efforts to cover up what happened there. But the story of a massacre that stands at the movie’s core is, in the words of the historian Martin Kramer, “discredited” and “bogus.” Worse even than the filmmakers’ embrace of this myth, writes Meyrav Wurmser, are the efforts of journalists and historians to propagate it knowing full well that it is based on nonexistent evidence. Wurmser blames “a revisionist attempt to define Israel’s resurrection not as the return of an ancient nation, but as a deliberate European colonial effort to disempower Arabs in order to establish a European bridgehead in the Middle East.”