A SUCCESSION of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the truth about its origins and its current racially driven apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than its ability to gain new supporters, or to whitewash its past or ongoing crimes.

First, there was Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on May 23 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians throughout the years, the massacre of Tantura was mostly remembered by the village’s survivors, by ordinary Palestinians and by Palestinian historians. The mere attempt in 1998 by an Israeli graduate student, Theodore Katz, to shed light on that bloody event ignited a legal, media and academic war, forcing him to retract his findings.

In a recent social media post, Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe revealed why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my ‘crimes’,” Pappe wrote, “was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz.”