Sunbathing at the crime scene: the Israeli resort that covers up a massacre
There are few clues today at the site of the single worst massacre
committed by the Israeli army during the 1948 war that established a
Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
For Palestinians, Tantura, the name of a coastal village south of Haifa that was once home to 1,700 inhabitants, has become a byword for the darkest episodes of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing of 1948.
For Israelis, the site is referred to by a different name — Dor,
known as a popular beach resort belonging to two neighboring kibbutzim,
Dor and Nahsholim, an hour’s drive north of Tel Aviv.
In May, some 300 activists met in the resort’s car park in an attempt
to end the long-enforced silence about Tantura in Israelis’ collective
memory. Precisely 67 years after the massacre, they staged the
first-ever commemoration at the site.
Activists carry placards reading the names of the Tantura massacre’s known victims.
