The Warm Sand of the Coast of Tantura: History and Memory in Israel after 1948

Abstract

On May 23, 1948, Jewish forces occupied the Palestinian village of Tantura, expelled all its residents, and on June 13 a group of young Zionists settled in the village to build a new kibbutz in the nascent State of Israel, Nahsholim. 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 used to sit on hot summer evenings caressed by the cool breeze from the Mediterranean? How did the Israeli Jews engage with and transform the coast they now inhabited, and how did they remember its past and construct its new present? I tell this story via five aerial photos of the coast from 1946, 1952, 1957, 1966 and 1976.