Empathy and the Telling of History: Forced Migration and Memory in Israel after 1948

The coast of Tantura--with its soft, pale sand, the small bays and miniature islands, the winding shoreline marked by numerous pink and brown shells, and the smooth murmur of the waves—changed dramatically when on May 23, 1948 Jewish forces occupied the Palestinian village, later that day expelled all the Tanturians, and on June 13 a group of young, idealist Zionists settled down in the village with the aim of building a new kibbutz named Nachsholim in the nascent State of Israel.  What happened in the following weeks, years, and decades to the several hundred houses of Tantura and their narrow alleys, to the village school, and to the makeshift cafés on the beach, where Tanturians use to sit on hot summer evenings, relaxing after a day of work, caressed by the cool breeze from the Mediterranean? How did the young Israeli Jews engage with and transform the coast they now inhabited? How did they remember its past and construct its new present, and why? The events at Tantura, as well as the transformation of the coast and its memory in the following decades, were part of a larger, dramatic changes of Palestine and Israel. By focusing on the coast and telling in detail one story of the history and memory of 1948 I seek to give a human, everyday face to impersonal historical processes we often know under the name of the war and memory of 1948. I tell this story via five aerial photos of the coast from 1946, 1952, 1957, 1966, and 1976. They allow us to commingle, on the one hand, the local, immediate, everyday-life community that lived on the coast, and, on the other hand, the transformation of the coast’s natural, built, and human environment embedded within broad trends.