TANTURA (Alon Schwarz, Israel, 2022) 7
Israel’s founding generation will not be with us much longer, as the talking heads in TANTURA make clear by their mere presence. Whether IDF veterans, kibbutz residents or Arab survivors, this is a geriatric movie about the events of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and their memory while those memories are still alive. Or rather, this is a movie about one specific and highly-contested incident: the seizure by the Alexandroni Brigade of the Arab coastal village of Tantura. Teddy Katz, a 1990s student at the University of Haifa, wrote an interview-based thesis accusing the Brigade of massacring hundreds of civilians after taking over the village; all hell then broke loose in the Israeli public square. An ailing Katz was a historical consultant to director...