Alice Spry (a journalist who writes about American foreign policy and violations of the military and security forces in various places, including Palestine) says that Israel is so afraid of its history that it passed a law in 2011 punishing anyone who commemorates its founding as a day of mourning, not a celebration.

The law - dubbed the "Nakba" law - embodies;

That word Palestinians have always used to refer to the establishment of the state of Israel and their displacement - the existential angst of a country that has never acknowledged its past, even as it continues to grapple with its repercussions.

In

an article

on the American "Intercept" website, Spry indicated that Israel's account of its origins is coordinated and under complete control.

Before the army opened its archives of the 1948 war, it issued a policy preventing the release of any documents detailing the forced transfer of Palestinians;

and any human rights violations, including war crimes committed by Israeli forces, or anything that may harm or expose the Israeli army's image as "devoid of moral standards".

Israel lies to itself

Sperry drew attention to the fact that few in Israel are interested in knowing this, and what happened in the days before and after the establishment of Israel, and the cost of establishing their state, which are questions that generations of Israelis have refused to ask.

In this, she mentioned what Israeli director Alon Schwartz told her recently, "For Israelis, the foundational myth is that the Palestinians fled on their own," adding, "Israel is lying to itself."

The result is the documentary Tantora, the product of more than two years of research and interviews with dozens of these men and women, now in their 90s, about events most of them never spoke of, and many of them openly denied.

In his documentary - named after a Palestinian beach village near Haifa that was wiped off the map during the Nakba - Schwartz investigates the massacre of an unknown number of villagers that took place just one week after the establishment of Israel.


A story they don't want to hear

The writer stated that the film - which will be shown in theaters in the United States next month - tells a story that few Israelis want to hear.

"A story they don't know what to do about," Schwartz said.

She commented that the film - made more alive by unseen archival footage of the Nakba and a modern-day forensic reconstruction of a mass grave long since erased into a parking lot - is a harrowing and shocking investigation into individual memory because what it presents is at odds with the untouchable narrative of a convinced nation. itself in its purity.

It is an attempt to find out the truth about what happened in Tantora, and it is more than that.

It is a film about Israeli society and the continuing damage of its founding sin. It is also a story that Palestinians never stop telling, but there is something unique about hearing it from the perpetrators themselves. "This is the story of Israel that turns a blind eye," Schwartz said.

The method of making national myths

The author concluded her article that what Schwartz hopes will ultimately come from this film is an acknowledgment of what the Israelis did to the Palestinians, when he said, "We robbed them of their history. Not only did we ethnically cleanse them, expel them, and reject their return, but we also robbed them of the real story. We robbed them of the right to remember, and that is terrible." ".

She added that Israel is not the only country that falsified the date of its founding to serve the national narrative, but because this history is very recent and because some of those who can contradict this narrative are still alive;

Tantora offers a rare insight into how national myths are made and defended, and at what cost.