Before 1948, Tantura was a Palestinian coastal fishing village of 1,500 residents located just north of the Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov. As war threatened and conditions worsened for Palestinian residents, the wealthier fled to Haifa. About 1,200 remained to tend to their farmland. Because Tantura was located along the coastal highway connecting Tel Aviv to Haifa it was deemed a key strategic target to protect access between the two major Israeli cities. A week before the war began, historian Benny Morris writes that the Palmach decided to expel the residents of Tantura and several other nearby Palestinian villages. Two days later, according to Ilan Pappe’s account, David Ben Gurion implicitly urged them on in this task, reminding the Palmach to “focus on its primary task,” which was to ethnically cleanse the area and eliminate any possible security threats.
On May 23rd, the Palmach’s Alexandroni Brigade surrounded Tantura on three landward sides with infantry and a naval vessel prevented fishermen from escaping by sea. The soldiers were armed with machine guns and, though the town had agreed to surrender, they commenced an attack. Within hours the town was in Israeli hands and they encountered little resistance. 500 residents were taken prisoner.
Soldiers believed the villagers concealed weapons in their homes and began interrogating them. In order to pressure them into giving up the information, they began killing the civilians. When this did not have the desired effect, eyewitnesses say the soldiers became agitated and angry with the Palestinians. That led to a wholesale massacre:
Another combat soldier in the brigade, Micha Vitkon, talked about an officer “who in later years was a big man in the Defense Ministry. With his pistol he killed one Arab after another. He was a bit disturbed, and that was a symptom of his disturbance.” According to Vitkon, the soldier did what he did because the prisoners refused to divulge where they had hidden the remaining weapons in the village.
A conservative estimate says that over 50 were killed by Israeli forces. But another Israeli eyewitness claims even more died:
According to one testimony, provided by a resident of Zichron Yaakov who helped bury the victims, the number of dead exceeded 200, though this high figure does not have corroboration.
The troops also engaged in large-scale looting indicating a total lack of unit discipline.
One soldier forced people into a barrel and proceeded to shoot it till blood ran out into the street. Another, who his comrades said had mental issues, machine-gunned victims by the dozen:
According to Diamant, speaking now, villagers were shot to death by a “savage” using a submachine gun, at the conclusion of the battle.
Another veteran of the incident added further evidence:
Another combat soldier, Haim Levin, now relates that a member of the unit went over to a group of 15 or 20 POWs “and killed them all.” Levin says he was appalled, and he spoke to his buddies to try to find out what was going on. “You have no idea how many [of us] those guys have killed,” he was told.
A soldier who became a senior IDF commander offered his own gruff tough-nosed, but unapologetic assessment:
“What do you want?” asked Shlomo Ambar, who would rise to the rank of brigadier general and head of Civil Defense, the forerunner of today’s Home Front Command. “For me to be a delicate soul and speak in poetry? I moved aside. That’s all. Enough.” Ambar…made it clear that the events in the village had not been to his liking, “but because I didn’t speak out then, there is no reason for me to talk about it today.”
Finally, the most blood-curdling account:
Amitzur Cohen, who talked about his first months as a combat soldier in the war: “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners.” Cohen relates that if a squad of Arab soldiers was standing with their hands raised, he would shoot them all. How many Arabs did he kill outside the framework of the battles? “I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many.”
After the killing spree ended, the perpetrators dug a large pit on the beach and shoveled the bodies into it. There were so many bodies, it took a week to complete the task. After their work was done, an officer found that the pit remained exposed and the unit commander was disciplined Further work concealing the evidence was done and another officer who followed up, sent a written message that the work had been satisfactorily completed.
Today, the pit is a parking lot for Dor beach near Kibbutz Nachsholim. Special aerial radar probes have identified precisely where the bodies are buried underneath (pictured above).
Some survivors of the massacre sought refuge in the Lebanese city of Tyre. Others became refugees in the Tulkarem camp. To this day, they are forbidden to visit their ancestral home. After the War, Israel founded a kibbutz and moshav on the land which had been ethnically cleansed. Initially, the new Jewish immigrants squatted in the homes of the Palestinians who had been expelled.
Perpetrators and Their Crimes
For decades, none of the surviving perpetrators wanted to talk about what they had done. They either were silent or, even worse, denied it. They did so for their own personal and ideological reasons. Israel for decades has maintained that Zionism observes a special moral code. Its army supposedly honored a value system called “the purity of arms.” Subsequent history has given the lie to this notion. Israel’s military history is replete with mass murder, rape, looting, and forced expulsion.
The veterans who committed the atrocity and denied it were driven by nationalist motives. They knew that if the truth were known it would stain not only their reputations, but the entire nation. It would give Israel’s enemies ammunition to mount their own attack on the state and its founding national ideology.
One of the darkest ironies of this tragedy is that the Alexandroni soldiers spent a week digging a mass grave for 200 Palestinian dead, just as Nazis dug graves for hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Babi Yar is perhaps the most infamous example. The voices of these Palestinian dead cry out just as loudly as those of the Jewish dead. There are hundreds of monuments and historical markers acknowledging the Jewish dead, but not a single word commemorating the victims of Tantura. There can never be true peace, true justice, true reconciliation until both sides, but especially the Israeli Jews, can acknowledge their crimes.
Teddy Katz: the Code of Silence and Paying the Price
In 1999, University of Haifa graduate student, Teddy Katz, wrote his master’s thesis on the massacre. He did extensive research, interviewed Palestinian survivors and Israeli soldiers, went into the State and IDF archives and examined all the documentary evidence he could find. When he presented his thesis to his academic committee it was judged excellent work and earned a mark of 97. Katz’s plan was to continue with doctoral studies. But it was not to be.
The next development is where things went awry. A journalist discovered Katz’s thesis and decided to write an article about it that was published in Maariv. When the remaining Alexandroni veterans read the report they were outraged. Katz, in their eyes, had stained not only themselves, but the cause for which they shed their blood in the fight to establish the State.
Several of them brought a libel case against Katz. He went from being a star student to being pilloried in the media. He became a target for every right-wing flag-waver. The pressure was enormous. He had also suffered a stroke a year earlier. After meeting with his accusers, his family pressured him to recant his work. Under tremendous duress, he agreed to do so. In exchange, the libel suit was dropped. Within hours, Katz changed his mind and recanted his recantation. But the damage was done. In a subsequent Supreme Court case, it refused to hear his appeal seeking to undo the settlement agreement.
In light of these developments, the University of Haifa formed a second academic committee to re-examine his work. Doing so was purely a political, rather than academic act. It is unprecedented for a university to do such a thing. Academic precedent is always respected. You simply don’t second-guess your colleagues once they have made a considered judgment. That engenders mutual respect, which is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Unsurprisingly, the second, hand-picked committee found the work deficient and failed him. Katz never returned to academia. His career ended in a manufactured scandal.
If anyone ever argues against an academic boycott of Israeli state universities let them remember this incident, which smells to high heaven. Israeli universities are the handmaidens of Occupation and apartheid. They go hand in hand with the military-security-political apparatus. They are not ivory towers. They are not shining beacons of truth and academic purity. They are ordinary state institutions following social consensus, even when it is wrong or even worse, evil.
Prof. Ilan Pappe, who consulted with Katz during the process of preparing the thesis, wrote the definitive account of the controversy. In fact, after Pappe came to Katz’s defense the university (where he was a faculty member) turned against him. As a result, he took a leave of absence and took a position on the faculty of the University of Exeter, where he has taught for the past fifteen years.
Now, over twenty years later, Israeli documentary director, Alon Schwarz, has returned to many of the same individuals Katz interviewed as part of his research. He has put them on camera and, as the saying goes: the camera does not lie. It also offers irrefutable visual evidence. Schwarz premiered his film, Tantura (Hollywood Reporter review, Walla profile), which is screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. No one can dispute what they say. And many of them concede the truth: there was a massacre. They did it. They may have objected to it. They may have found what their comrades did to be distasteful or embarrassing. But they confirm what Katz had said all along.
A question begging to be asked: as important as this film is in revising and restoring historical truth, why did it take a film by an Israeli Jew to force Israelis to confront and accept the truth? Why didn’t they accept the eyewitness accounts of Palestinians? Why are Palestinians erased from their own history, just as the graves of Tantura’s victims were covered and hidden underground?
In Haaretz, Adam Raz quotes another Israeli eyewitness:
Now, at the age of 90 and up, a number of combat soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ brigade have admitted that a massacre did indeed take place in 1948 at Tantura
He quotes their testimony:
“They silenced it,” the former combat soldier Moshe Diamant says, trying to be spare with his words. “It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It happened.”
The film was funded by Israel’s leading cable channel, Hot and the Israel Film Fund. Apparently, the atmosphere has changed since 1999. Not necessarily because Israel has become a more honest place willing to confront its sins. But perhaps for the opposite reason: Israel has become a place in which such outrages have become commonplace. No one is shocked by them. They happen virtually every day. In this atmosphere, the survivors may feel freer to speak since their crimes were, to their minds, not much worse than what happens today. Perhaps a cynical point of view. But one learns that cynicism is warranted when it comes to Israeli war crimes and the subsequent writing of history.
Haaretz has published several columns following up on Raz’s article. One by Gideon Levy, another by Zehava Galon, and an editorial.
Ironic that these Tantura stories burst as Holocaust memorial stories approached. They are related in more than surface ways I think, not just for the double shame. Maybe the one caused the other. Take it out on the Arabs… and then prove how we belong here… exclusively. The Tantura massacre happened as a part of the birth of Israel, the imperative of a Jewish Israel because of what happened in the war, the urgency of traumatized refugees, shock, their inability to find security and protection elsewhere- such emotions.This affect remains today in many Jews with re Israel; it’s been passed on.This history and suffering is the basis of rationales of Israel’s moral exceptionalism. We belong, they don’t. Holocaust remembrance is a two sided coin and Tantura shows the other side.
We are familiar with Nachsholim, have friends there, go there. You would not know we are by those graves. Maybe now there will be a memorial worthy, not a Yad Vashem but something for goodness sake!.
I want to also say, knowing the kibbutz, I had researched somewhat this story several years ago during my useless “hot arguing days” on this subject. This story, this truth, has been suppressed, maligned, in discussions/ arguments on the internet, and finally buried. Nice propaganda work. It’s good to see that this movie has been made and that people at the end of their lives want to tell the story- and that Sundance is giving it a showing.
Dear Richard: I don’t normally answer some of these fools who post under your articles, Zionists who have never been to Israel or aren’t old enough to remember the steady massacres done by European Jewish terrorists in 1948. I’m making an exception today. Below is the account of my husband, Ribhi M. Kalla, on what happened to him when he tried to defend his town of Safed in 1948. I wrote this report 15 years later when I first met him. The Palmach, a Jewish terrorist group, lined up 70 defenders of their homes in Safad and murdered them. They were kids with repeating rifles against the might of Jews from Europe armed by the British (which is another story completely)
He told me how, at 19, he’d fought the Jewish militias in l948, coming away with shrapnel still embedded in his larynx, giving his voice a throaty, sexy sound on top of the lilting accent. He’d lost everything; his heritage, his homeland, some of his family, part of himself. He was one of the ‘local Palestinian militia’ trained by a Syrian colonel and was the proud possessor of some kind of repeating rifle.
One day, his younger brother, Subhi, raced home from school and yelled that Jews were killing children in a playground, and he had to come right away. Ribhi grabbed the rifle, ran to the school, and hid behind small sandbags, shooting at a better-armed Jewish militia. He was hit by shrapnel when a grenade exploded in front of him, wounding him in several places. Screaming for help, his brother had picked him up in his arms and taken him home, both of them covered in blood. Although the wounds were all superficial, one piece had severed his vocal cords, so his father wrapped his throat and made arrangements for him to leave. Another had pierced his helmet, and if he hadn’t worn it that day, he would have been dead.
He didn’t want to leave, but he had no choice. On an early morning in April, l948, he climbed onto the back of a small donkey, his blood-soaked neck bandaged, and rode the back roads from Safad to Tyre to Beirut to see a doctor his father knew. Along the way, he saw mutilated bodies and the corpses of horses and donkeys. He’d lost the ability to talk, but somehow, he got word back to his family to run and hide.
They gathered what they could, took the key to their house, and fled to Damascus. A jeep with a blaring bullhorn had come through Safad the same morning Ribhi had left and told them to leave, that the same thing would happen to them that happened at Deir Yassin, and everyone would be massacred. That jeep was driven by the Irgun, one of the European Jewish militias. A couple of weeks later, the young men of Safad who stayed to protect the town were lined up against a wall and murdered when Palmach took over the town. Ribhi’s family was lucky to escape with their lives.
in 1948 there were 18,000 Arabs and 2,000 Jews in Safed. There were soldiers from 5 Arab countries surrounding Safed before the declaration of independence by the Jewish authorities. The Arabs were allowed to possess guns and the Jews not.
I live in the Jewish quarter of Safed which has been Jewish for approx 500 yrs or even more. When I bought my house and was doing renovations I found many rifle bullets in several ‘slicks’ or hiding places so the British would not find them. The Brits left Israel and the Jews with no apparent way to defend themselves. It was war and the goal was to win. Unfortunately for the Arabs 18,000 could not beat 2,000. I see no reason to complain just because the Jews in their small numbers beat the Arabs.
@ Naor Israeli: The British left Jews with no apparent way to defend themselves?” The Palmach didn’t need the British to do that. First of all, they raided British armories and stole weapons when they could. They received millions in aid from Diaspora Jews which they used to buy Czech weapons. Not to mention, what the Russians agreed to send via the Czechs. How did the Jews get the superior weaponry they had to the Palestinians? Did they conjure it out of thin air? A neat trick, no?
“It was a war.” War criminals and their apologists throughout history hit the same notes and the tune bores after a while from the repetition. Contrary to you, I see a profound reason to “complain” when Israel claims the high moral ground while massacreing Palestinians then and up to the present day.
You are done in this thread.
[comment deleted: this is off topic. Dragging in tangentially related historical events happening far outside the time frame of the Nakba (the period and subject under discussion) are off-topic. You may seek to divert attention from the specific topic of the post. But I will not permit it. Stay on topic. Failure to do so may result in moderation.]
“However and whenever people learn and accept the truth, I’m glad they did. But I’m so tired of the anti-Palestinian racism that allows the world to dismiss and deny our history until confirmed by our colonizers and oppressors.”
Couldn’t have said it any better Margaret Zaknoen DeReus @mzdereus
The Israeli Babi-Yar.
The recollections of the Jewish eyewitnesses are all over the place, with descriptions of the numbers of victims who were shot dead from “a few” to “several dozen” or “more than 200”.
Contemporaneous, archival documents found by Revisionist historian, Benny Morris, said that there were dozens of corpses.
What I really find the most galling is how Richard and Tony ignore the fact that the same week as the battle for Tantura, Arab soldiers had massacred unarmed Jews during a battle near Jerusalem.
link to haaretz.com
@ Nate: You simply have no clue how witness accounts of historical events work. Of course with hundreds of Palestinian eyewitnesses as well as a similar number of Palmach eyewitnesses accounts will vary based on the location of the witnesses, what they saw, when they saw it. Each account may vary slightly and in certain nuances. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence will agree on the general outlines of what happened. And in this case that is precisely what happened.
Yes, there are certain discrepancies between accounts for precisely this reason. But as I said, Adam Raz is a professional researcher and historian who has combed through tens of thousands of pages of archival material and eyewitness accounts. He has seen the film and probably seen all the outtakes of interviews. Unlike you, I trust academic historical standards. You may continue to vainly attempt to cast doubt. But we know what & who you are. You are uninterested in historical truth. You have a clear agenda to avoid it and suggest every other possibility no matter how lame.
Teddy Katz estimated that 250 were killed. Another eyewitness who participated in the burial said the number was at least 200. Other untested accounts by figures seeking to downgrade the historical accounts estimate as few as 12 and a number say 50. But there is one way to find out. Excavate the parking lot and do a forensic archaeological dig and count them. Let me know when you and your bosses at Hasbara Central agree to do this. Then when you urge Hasbara Central to lobby Israeli officials to do so, you can inform us of the progress you make. Till you do any of that, stop nattering away about nonsense.
As for the massacre of Jews, of course there were. But there were far more massacres of indigenous Palestinians than Jews. Which repeats subsequent history showing the numbers of Israeli Jews killed compared to Palestinians ranges anywhere from 6 to 1 to 25 to 1 depending on which war or historical period you’re talking about.
You are done in this thread.
“Which repeats subsequent history showing the numbers of Israeli Jews killed compared to Palestinians ranges anywhere from 6 to 1 to 25 to 1 depending on which war or historical period you’re talking about.”
Source please…
@ Dan Lev: These UN statistics show comparison of the respective dead from 2008-2020 is over 22 to 1. Here you go…
Problem is… you talk about a whole other period.
Please bring a source from 1920- 1960’s
@ Dan Lev: No, the problem actually is that you’re misrepresenting what I wrote. I was not “talking about a whole other period.” And in fact, this is the portion of my comment which you omitted:
Nowhere did I say that the ratio of dead between Palestinian and Israeli Jews was the same between 2008-2020 as it was “from 1920-1960.” Actually, you said that, not me.
But I did find an informative graph which notes the respective Israeli Jewish and Palestinian dead in 1948. There were approximately 1,100 Palestinian dead to approx. 300 Israeli Jewish dead. The graph does not include the 200 Palestinian dead at Tantura, which is inexcusable, so I’ve added them to the total number presented in the graph. That’s almost 4 to 1 ratio. The ratio has vastly increased since then because the lethality of Israeli weaponry has increased while the Palestinians are restricted to rocks, the occasional gun, and explosive devices. That explains the 22 to 1 ratio of late.
In future, do not take my words out of context. IF you quote or refer to something I write, quote it in full context. If not, I will take it as an act of bad faith on your part.
a very good article. Ignore racist ignoramuses like Sasha. The Nazis did the same thing when the Einsatzgruppen shot Jewish civilians, albeit on a larger scale. However the principle is the same. Sasha is defending Nazi like behaviour
Tony Greenstein. That old Trot?
Before the Final Solution, when the Nazis entered a village, they’d round up every Jew they could find, kill them all, and bury all the bodies.
No mutual combat. No dead or injured Nazis. Just lots of dead Jews.
In the instance of Tantura, the Alexandroni Brigade fought a pitched battle with the village’s defenders, killing many and expelling the remaining villagers.
Did the Alexandroni Brigade commit War Crimes in Tantura? Absolutely.
No on knows to what extent.
No not a ‘Trot’ just someone who speaks up about racism unlike Sasha.
It is a lie that the Alexandroni Brigade fought a pitched battle with the villagers. Try reading and getting rid of the Zionist spectacles.
‘“I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners.” Cohen relates that if a squad of Arab soldiers was standing with their hands raised, he would shoot them all. How many Arabs did he kill outside the framework of the battles? “I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many.”
Or try this:
‘Soldiers believed the villagers concealed weapons in their homes and began interrogating them. In order to pressure them into giving up the information, they began killing the civilians. When this did not have the desired effect, eyewitnesses say the soldiers became agitated and angry with the Palestinians. That led to a wholesale massacre:’
Doesn’t seem like a battle to me but it was part of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Of course the villagers had the right to defend their village.
There are Holocaust deniers and Nakba deniers. There is no principled difference between them. Sasha is one of the latter. He has a lot in common with the former
@Tony
Old memories can be tricky, as in a taped interview where Theo Katz asked an eyewitness a leading question, “Clearly people were shot after they surrendered”, and the eyewitness, Abu Fahmi, replied, “We did not see them killing after we raised our hands.”
link to ee.bgu.ac.il
The point isn’t that an Arab villager said he didn’t see anything, but that Katz failed to report what the Arab eyewitness had said after Katz had recorded that testimony in the taped interview.
So if the memories of an old Arab eyewitness can be faulted, why not the memory of an old Jew?
Remember. The Arab and the Jew were both at Tantura.
Both were eyewitnesses.
@ Sasha: This is casuistry. The fact is that multiple Israeli veterans who participated in the incident confirmed it happened. That’s all that’s necessary to prove the veracity of the account. Whether a Palestinian saw something and whether Katz distorted or omitted this element in his published research is barely relevant. A minor peccadillo, as Adam Raz noted. Further, Raz is the premier researcher on this subject. He has done all the research and reviewed all the accounts and acts as an objective outsider evaluator of the evidence. He says the issues with Katz’s research are minor. I believe him. You, who know barely anything and have not reviewed the evidence, say otherwise. Gee, that’s a tough one: who to believe?
The memories of many “old Jews” (Israelis btw, not old Jews) cannot be discounted, try as you might to do so.
No this is not a minor peccadillo.
We don’t know what else Katz might have omitted in the way of exculpatory evidence.
Adam Raz doesn’t know either.
@ Nate: “Not a minor peccadillo” says the hasbarist with no degree in history in general or Zionist history in particular. I’ll stick with Adam Raz, Israel’s foremost researcher on this period, who says precisely that. Since you mention Benny Morris, he has examined both the historical record and commenting on the libel trial, he said he was “very troubled” by it and what we now know were the false claims of witnesses at the trial.
As for “omitting exculpatory evidence”–historians don’t do that. They gather as much evidence as they can, no matter whether it supports or opposes their own personal viewpoint. They sift through all of it to come up with their best account of what happened. That’s the way historical writing works, but not the way hasbara works. That’s what you peddle.
@Sashah
Certainly old memories can play tricks but what’s your excuse? You can’t even remember what you’ve read 5 minutes before!
What does it matter if one witness, Abu Fahmi said ‘we didn’t seem them killing after we raised our hands’ the fact is that as the article states:
‘Amitzur Cohen, who talked about his first months as a combat soldier in the war: “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners.” Cohen relates that if a squad of Arab soldiers was standing with their hands raised, he would shoot them all. How many Arabs did he kill outside the framework of the battles? “I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many.”
It must be difficult these days being a propagandist and hasbarist for Israel given the evidence of what did happen. I just hope that the job is well paid. Perhaps you could consult with David Irving as your techniques lack a certain something.
@ Sasha: You are done in this thread.
As for your attempted insult regarding Tony’s ideological views: we don’t disparage people for their ideological views, unless those views lead to war crimes. Not to mention that you couldn’t even get his ideological viewpoint right. So whether Tony is a “Trot” or Marxist or Zionist has nothing to do with the substance of his arguments. Deal with substance. Not irrelevant side issues.
As for the “pitched battle” at Tantura. It was not much of one. All the documentary evidence says resistance was minimal. So no, there were hundreds of Israeli soldiers and a handful of residents who had weapons. The vast majority of the remainder were innocent bystanders swept up in the Haganah’s killing spree.
As for the Nazis, they engineered a process of extermination and genocide. That much is true. But instead of killing all the Palestinians in ’48, which would have been impractical since Israel didn’t have the technology to do so, as the Nazis did–it simply expelled the majority of them. In that way, it washed it’s hands of them. It’s just a different way of dealing with a similar “problem”
In your earlier comment, you dismiss the charge of war crimes. In this one, you concede it. Which is it? Don’t bother answering. It was a rhetorical question.
Tantura Massacre? That old saw?
I’ve read a lot of anti-Zionist articles on this subject, and Richard’s is particularly rancid, so I’m not going to waste my weekend fisking it.
What I will say, though, is that thirteen Alexandroni Brigade soldiers died in this combat.
@Sasha: Says the guy whose response to Goldstein’s mass murder was “ho-hum.”
“Old saw?” Gee, Adam Raz thinks it’s a critically important issue, as do his editors at Haaretz who have been publishing a series of his critical historical accounts of the period.
I’m afraid we will have to report you to Hasbara Central since you’re violating one of the principle instructions of the Hasbara protocol: always begin by expressing a limited amount of common ground with the opposition position. Then once you’ve established a minimum of accommodation, state your real position which totally contradicts your opponent. Starting with common ground makes your opponent more receptive to your real argument.
Not saying you should change your approach here. We’ll see through either one. But Frank Luntz’ “Hasbara Handbook” clearly lays out the guidelines. Somehow in the midst of your training you skipped that lesson.
Another important point: clearly my comment rules require a comment to state a substantive argument. That means expressing a full, articulate point of view. Dismissal simply because you’re disdainful of the subject is the opposite. Don’t bother to post this sort of comment in future.
As for fisking: I object to use of this term in this context. It’s offensive and should be left to whatever the original context of it is.
As for 13 soldiers dying–they did so in a military operation. That’s what soldiers do. They fight and some of them die. They accept this as part fo the burden of being a soldier. But unarmed civilians don’t. And murdering them in cold blood is a war crime. Plain and simple. The fact that you value Israeli lives and reject claims about mass murder because they involve Palestinians is not only offensive, it’s racist as well.
All in all, not your best presentation here.