Wednesday, May 15, 2002

The News & Observer

By Oren Dorell, Staff Writer

© Copyright 2002, The News & Observer.

TANTURA BEACH, ISRAEL - This is the place where, as a child, Jawdat Hindi swam and fished in the small bay and islands of Tantura. He remembers it as the most beautiful beach in Palestine.

"We thought we were in paradise," said Hindi, who grew up in Tantura, on the Mediterranean coast halfway between Acre and Jaffa. It is where, after 54 years, he still wants to return.

Just as vivid in his mind's eye, however, is the night of May 21, 1948, when Tantura was raided by Jewish fighters. Scores of people died, including Hindi's aunt and several friends. Hindi, his family and every other inhabitant of the Arab village were expelled, and two Jewish villages, named Dor and Kibbutz Nahsholim, were built where Tantura used to be.

Hindi's experience of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, took him to a prisoner-of-war camp, then to Jordan, Syria and Kuwait. Eventually he came to Raleigh, where he has lived since 1989.

Hindi and millions of other Palestinians whose families once lived in what is now Israel want "the right of return" to their homeland. The concept is a Palestinian demand and one of the tenets of the peace plan proposed by Saudi Prince Abdullah in April. Israeli Jews consider it a deal-breaking obstacle. Such an influx of Palestinian refugees would destroy the Jewish nature of Israel, they say.

In Nahsholim, mention of Tantura and Hindi's quest to reclaim his land was dismissed with open hostility.

"It will never be part of the talks," said Eyal Goren, the director of the agricultural commune.

Like the land of Israel itself, Tantura has long been a disputed place.

It changed hands among several civilizations dating back more than 3,500 years. The city was alternately controlled by Canaanites, Sikil "sea people," Phoenicians, Greco-Romans and Arabs.

Hindi recalls playing in Roman ruins on the north end of town and remembers that during winter storms, waves from the sea would surround his home.

"It was a very, very nice place," said Hindi, who lives with his wife, Arifa, in a ranch-style home in the River Bend Plantation subdivision in North Raleigh. The home is furnished with Oriental carpets and a ceremonial sword made by Syrian Jews. He owns two Subway restaurants in downtown Raleigh, bought with money saved during a career as an educator in Kuwait. Both restaurants are managed by his son, Zeyad. Another son, Iyad, is a post-doctoral research assistant at N.C. State University.

Hindi's father had been Tantura's mukhtar, or mayor, and was a close friend to the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov, the Jewish village on the hill. Hindi recalls that the Jewish mukhtar, with his wife and family, visited his home and sometimes stayed the night. When Hindi's father died, the village elders asked Hindi, a schoolteacher at the time, to replace him, but trouble was brewing in the land.

Jewish refugees, who had been streaming into Palestine from Nazi-occupied Europe, had become an armed political force and were organizing a state. The question of Jewish statehood came before the United Nations. Arab nations called for war. Villages such as Tantura had to take a stand.

Village elders and heads of families met to discuss what to do. After a heated debate, they decided not to attack the Jews but not to allow them into Tantura, Hindi said. They gathered weapons for protection. Sentries were posted.

Israel was declared an independent state on May 14, 1948. A week later, Tantura was attacked. As a port, Tantura could be used to supply Arab fighters, and it was near the main road and railroad connecting the major Jewish population centers of Haifa and Tel Aviv, said Benzion "Bentz" Frieden, 84, who commanded the Alexandroni Brigade, a Jewish force, in its assault on the village.

"After the old-timers of Zichron tried to persuade the old timers of Tantura to give up, I received an order to take Tantura," said Frieden, who was born in Norfolk, Va.

Frieden described the battle as fierce, costing the lives of 14 Jewish fighters and 70 to 80 Arabs.

"People forget this was war," Frieden said. "When people are fighting building to building, it's not a picnic."

On May 21, 1948, Hindi and his family awoke to the sound of explosions.

For an hour they waited, and then, "Armed men, soldiers came into the house crying some words in Arabic and Hebrew -- 'out' and 'hands up,' " he said. "When we were in the street, we saw other families also, all of our neighbors with soldiers pushing them."

The villagers were collected in an open space in the village, where they heard shots. Hindi said he saw four or five of his neighbors fall. "The eldest lady was my aunt. When the soldiers took me, I saw her in the street and had to step over her," he said, trembling. "Her name was Izza Al-Hindi."

The Jewish fighters, wearing army uniforms and carrying Sten guns, separated the men from the women and children, rounded up groups of 10 to 15 men to dig graves, and took others, like Hindi, to show them where weapons were hidden.

Eventually, the mukhtar from Zichron Yaacov arrived, shouting at the Jewish soldiers.

"After maybe a half-hour, one of the soldiers came with a list in his hand and began calling names, asking them to call out," Hindi said. "They were heads of families, [mostly] elderly, well-known persons in the village. I was one of them."

The group, which numbered 12 to 15 people, entered a large building and sat in a big room with their Jewish neighbors.

"All of them were very sad and shocked, and they were shouting at the soldiers," Hindi said. "The mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov talked to us, and almost he was crying, saying that we did not expect such a day and such a happening to our neighbors. And he told us that they were angry because of what happened but at the same time they could do nothing because the order was in the hands of the military people."

Then "we were loaded into trucks as if we were cattle and driven to a police station near Zichron," he said.

Tantura is well-known in Israel.

It is considered one of the finest beach spots in the country. Families continue to vacation on its creamy sands, and Israeli teenagers from Zichron Yaacov still come to frolic on the shores and sing songs of peace.

Lachan Sharabi, 16, and a group of friends recently gathered on the beach with to celebrate end-of-term exams at Ort Shimron Binyamina, a local high school.

"I don't want to go kill anybody," Sharabi said of his impending military service. "But I will defend my home if I have to."

The events surrounding Tantura's conquest remain a subject of public controversy in Israel.

In 2000, a graduate student at Haifa University, Teddy Katz, published a thesis saying that 240 people were killed during and after the battle. Katz based his conclusion on interviews with Palestinian and Jewish witnesses. Members of the Alexandroni Brigade, including Frieden, sued Katz for libel. After two days in court, where discrepancies were revealed in Katz's research, Katz apologized for his work, then tried unsuccessfully to retract the apology.

The plight of the Palestinians whose families used to live in Israel remains one of the great unresolved issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, 3.9 million Palestinian refugees live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. About a third live in 59 refugee camps, some of which are the site of the world's most crowded living conditions and desperate poverty.

Where they will eventually live is a matter of deep dispute.

Becky Kook, professor of comparative politics at Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, Israel, said how the Palestinian refugees came to exist is not as important as how leaders on both sides will negotiate a solution.

"Given the identity of Israel as a Jewish state, bringing in large numbers of non-Jews -- that is the crucial question. ... They see the Palestinians as threatening their identity," Kook said. "For Palestinians, it's about more than just reclaiming what they had, but [about] reconstituting themselves as a nation."

Palestinian right of return is flatly rejected by Israelis now living in the area where Tantura used to be. Many say that any Palestinian insistence on the right of return is a sign that Palestinians are not serious about negotiating for peace.

Danny Eliahu, 47, who lived his entire life and raised three children in Dor, called the notion "a waste of time."

His family arrived as refugees from Iraq in 1951, with a wave of immigrants from Arab nations where anti-Jewish sentiments exploded after the creation of Israel. "Everyone has his story. You have to drop it and move on," he said.

Anat Beger, 41, a potter who has lived her entire life in Dor and is raising three sons there, said she and her husband had been very left-leaning in the past, supporting the Palestinian desire for a homeland and willing to give up on the territories and even East Jerusalem if it would lead to peace.

Beger insisted, however, that the right of return would threaten the state of Israel.

"I very much understand them," she said while standing on her patio cradling her 9-month-old son, Yam. "But they can't base it on the right of return. It's just not possible. It's a sign that they're not serious about peace. It would destroy us."

Hindi believes some Palestinians must be allowed to rejoin their families in Israel, while others should be settled in the West Bank, Arab nations and the United States. He said he would be just as happy to live among Jews as Arabs. And he urges his grandchildren to remember "the land of your grandfather."

Back on the beach, Revital Michaeli, a young waitress at the Bardag Restaurant, looked out at the soft orange sunset beyond the islands of Hindi's childhood.

"It's the most beautiful beach in Israel, even American tourists say so," Michaeli said.

Staff writer Oren Dorell can be reached at 829-8963 or odorell@newsobserver.com. Staff photographer Scott Lewis contributed to this report.