In 2000, a Newspaper Headline Opened a Wound in Israeli Society. It Still Hasn’t Healed.
In Tablet, Batya Ungar-Sargon reports on and reexamines the work of Teddy Katz, whose master’s thesis exposed an alleged massacre by Israeli forces in the 1948 takeover of the Palestinian town of Tantura—a work that got him sued by the brigade that took over the town. The case against Katz “seems to linger like an open wound,” she writes, “as academic freedom and protected speech are coming under attack in Israel.” The continued fight for the truth, Ungar-Sargon writes, “underscores the difficulty—perhaps even the impossibility—of establishing a commonly accepted narrative about Israel’s founding more than 65 years after the fact.”