BDS group shares Holocaust photo, claims to be from ‘Palestinian massacre’

After the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel posted a photo on social media claiming it was taken from the so-called 1948 “Tantura Massacre,” a Holocaust expert demonstrated the photo was actually from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. 

The PACBI group claimed the black-and-white photo, which shows lines of corpses laid out before burial, was a picture of the “Tantura Massacre” and said the bodies were then buried under a parking lot. The group also called on the European Molecular Biology Organization to “relocate its workshop from apartheid Israel.” 

Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli responded on social media by saying the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement “breaks a Guinness record.” 

“The racist BDS movement breaks a Guinness record, uses a picture from the German concentration camp of Nordhausen to lie about a fictional massacre during Israel’s War of Independence,” Chikli wrote on Thursday. He also uploaded the original, uncropped picture from the Israel State Archives, showing that it was, in fact, a picture from the Nordhausen concentration camp. 

The racist @BDSmovement breaks a Guiness record, uses a picture from the German concentration camp of Nordhausen to lie about a fictional massacre during Israel's War of Independence.

Holocaust distortion, appropriation and denial,further victimizing Jewish people.
Pure evil. pic.twitter.com/rg8RLpO6Um

— עמיחי שיקלי - Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) February 16, 2023

“This a huge and ugly lie of the BDS movement,” said Chikli. “This is one of the most dramatic fake news stories they’ve made in the past few years.” 

The Tantura Massacre, or Tantura Affaire, refers to an alleged execution of men in the Arab village of Tantura in 1948, after the residents of the village had surrendered to Israeli forces. 

According to some reports including a student’s thesis, members of the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade rounded up all the men of Tantura, killed them and, according to a documentary film released last year, the men were then buried under the Dor Beach parking lot off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Veterans of the brigade denied committing a massacre and the student who claimed as much faced a lawsuit in December 2000 for defamation.

Initial Arab reports of the incident did not mention killings, and the supposed massacre has been debated by Israeli scholars, with several noting that there is no evidence for such an incident at Tantura.

The PACBI group later issued an apology for using the wrong photo, but continued to accuse Israel.