The Tantura case in Israel: The Katz research and trial

Abstract

Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies Article DOI: 10.1525/jps.2001.30.3.19 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2001.30.3.19 ©2001 by The Regents of the University of California. Copying and permissions notice: Authorisation to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on [JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/r/ucal)] or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.comThis article examines the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a graduate thesis using oral history—the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish witnesses—to document a massacre carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura in late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a Zionist, the case sheds light on the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as "ethnic cleansing." The article also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual massacre as it can be reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts from some of the transcripts