1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle

1948 Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle

A woman dressed in shorts, with a scarf over her head and a machine gun over her right shoulder, squats down and takes a cigarette from a packet being held in the right hand of an elderly man wearing a robe and a turban, who is sitting on the ground A female soldier from Israel's Yiftah Brigade takes a cigarette from an Arab resident in Lydda, after the fall of the city.
Date	12 July 1948
Location	Lydda, Ramla, and surrounding villages, then part of Palestine, now part of Israel
Also known as	Lydda death march
Participants	Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Arab Legion, Arab residents of Lydda and Ramla
Outcome	50,000–70,000 residents fled from, or were expelled by, the IDF

The 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramla refers to the flight or expulsion of 50,000–70,000 Palestinian residents when Israeli troops moved into the towns in July that year, following Israel's declaration of independence on 14 May. The military action occurred within the context of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, triggered when five Arab states invaded the area when the State of Israel was declared. Both towns, which had been Arab areas in Palestine, became predominantly Jewish areas in the new state, with Lydda becoming known as Lod, its Hebrew name.

Between 290–450 Palestinians and around 10 Israeli soldiers were killed during the conquest of Lydda. The death toll in Ramla is unknown, but presumed lower because it surrendered immediately. Once the Israelis were in control, expulsion orders were issued by the Israel Defense Forces. Ramla's residents were bussed out. The people of Lydda were forced to walk miles in the summer heat to a nearby town, from where the Arab Legion—Jordan's British-led army—helped them reach a refugee camp. The harsh conditions of the exodus, known as the Lydda death march, caused an unknown number of deaths among the refugees—with figures ranging from just a few to over 300—mostly from exhaustion and dehydration, though eyewitnesses said people were also killed by Israeli soldiers for refusing to part with their valuables.

According to the Israeli army, their actions averted an Arab threat to Tel Aviv, helped them gain control of the road to Jerusalem, and, by clogging the roads with refugees, thwarted an Arab Legion advance. The exodus accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab exodus from Palestine, known in the Arab world as al-Nakba ("the catastrophe"). Jewish immigrants were settled in the empty Palestinian homes, both because of a housing shortage—nearly 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel between May 1948 and December 1951—but also as a matter of policy to prevent former residents from reclaiming their houses. One of the key issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is whether the refugees ought to have the right of return, a demand that Israel sees as a threat to its identity as a Jewish state.

Until the late 1970s Israel's historians maintained that the Palestinians had been ordered to leave by their Arab leaders, or had simply fled, but in the 1980s newly released Israeli government documents showed that they had been expelled. The documents triggered a reassessment of Israel's role in the events of 1948 by a group of Israeli scholars known as the "New Historians."

Background

Strategic importance of Lydda and Ramla

Map

Palestine in 1947, showing Lydda and Ramla.

Lydda dates back to 5600–5250 BCE, the city in which Saint George, the patron saint of England, was martyred, according to Christian legend. Ramla, three kilometers away, was founded in the 8th century CE. Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi writes that the towns were strategically important because they sat at the intersection of Palestine's main north–south and east–west roads. In 1948 the area's largest British army camp and depot was just a few kilometers away; Palestine's main airport lay to the north; and its main railway junction was Lydda itself. The main source of Jerusalem's water supply was at Ras al-Ayn, 15 kilometers north of Lydda.

Israel's declaration of independence

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) declares Israel's independence, 14 May 1948.

Further information: United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine

Palestine was under British rule from 1917 to 1948. On 30 November 1947, after 30 years of conflict between the country's Jews and Arabs, the United Nations voted to divide it into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Lydda and Ramla to form part of the latter. The proposal was welcomed by Palestine's Jewish community but rejected by the Arabs, and civil war broke out between the communities. The British decided to pull out of the area, and on 14 May 1948, the day British rule ended, the State of Israel declared its independence. Several Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon—launched an attack on the new state the next day, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Operation Danny

Main article: Operation Danny

Throughout 1947 Jewish and Arab militias had been attacking each other on roads near the cities. Israeli geographer Arnon Golan writes that Ramla had became one of the focal points for blocking Jewish transport, forcing Tel Aviv–Jerusalem traffic to use a southern bypass. Following the creation of the State of Israel, there were several Israeli ground attacks, and one air attack, on Ramla between 21 and 30 May. Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had developed what Israeli historian Benny Morris calls an obsession with the towns, seeing them as serious threats to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary several times that they had to be destroyed, and on 16 June 1948 he told the Israeli cabinet that the "two thorns" had to be removed.

Israel subsequently launched a military operation, Operation Danny, to neutralize Arab forces and secure the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. On 7 July the IDF appointed Yigal Allon to head the operation, and Yitzhak Rabin, who became Israel's prime minister in 1974, as his deputy. It was carried out between 9 July 1948, the end of the first truce in the Arab-Israeli war, and 18 July, the start of the second truce, a period known in Israeli historiography as the Ten Days. Israel mistakenly believed the Arab Legion, Jordan's army, had a substantial force in the area, but in fact there were only 120–150 Arab Legion soldiers in Lydda and Ramla, bolstered by 1,500–2,000 local residents who had been trained and armed. Based on the faulty intelligence, the IDF assembled 8,000–9,000 men for its invasion of the towns—two Palmach brigades, Harel and Yiftah; the Eighth Armored Brigade's 82nd and 89th Battalions; and several battalions of Kiryati and Alexandroni infantry men.

Lydda's defenses

Lydda in 1920 with St. George's Church in the background

In July 1948 Lydda and Ramla had a joint population of 50,000–70,000 Arabs, 20,000 of whom were refugees from Jaffa and the surrounding area. Several Palestinian towns had already fallen to Jewish, and then Israeli, advances since April, but Lydda and Ramla had held out. In January, John Bagot Glubb, the British soldier who led Jordan's Arab Legion, had toured Palestinian towns and villages, including Lydda and Ramla, urging them to prepare to defend themselves. The Legion had distributed barbed wire and as many weapons as could be spared.

Israeli historians Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that Lydda's national committee had acquired arms, conducted training, constructed trenches, requisitioned vehicles, and organized medical services. They write that, by the time of the Israeli invasion, the militia in Lydda numbered 1,000 men equipped with rifles, submachine guns, 15 machine guns, five heavy machine guns, 25 anti-tank launchers, six or seven light field-guns and two or three heavy ones, and armored cars with machine guns. Walid Khalidi writes that the only troops defending Lydda were 125 men from the Arab Legion, the rest of them volunteer civilian residents under the command of a retired British Arab-Legion sergeant.

Abdullah of Jordan (1882–1951) withdrew most of his troops from Lydda.

The local militia stopped women and children from leaving, because their departure had acted elsewhere as a catalyst for the men to leave too. Kadish and Sela write that it was common for Palestinians to leave their homes under threat of Israeli invasion, in part because they feared atrocities, particularly rape, and in part because of a reluctance to live under Jewish rule. In Lydda's case, the fears were more particular: a few days before the city fell, a Jew found in Lydda's train station had been publicly executed and his body mutilated by residents, who, according to Kadish and Sela, now feared Jewish reprisals.

A number of Arab Legion soldiers, including 200–300 Bedouin volunteers, had arrived in Lydda and Ramla in April, and a company-sized force had set itself up in the old British police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramla road, with armored cars and other weapons. An Arab Legion officer was appointed military governor of both towns, signaling the desire of Abdullah I of Jordan to stake a claim in the parts of Palestine allotted by the UN to an Arab-Palestinian state, but Glubb advised the king and the Jordanian prime minister that the Legion was overstretched and could not hold the towns. As a result, Abdullah ordered the Legion to assume a defensive position only, and the Legionnaires already in Lydda withdrew during the night of 11–12 July.

Fall of the cities

Air attacks and Moshe Dayan raid

The IDF took control of Lydda airport on 10 July

The Israeli air force began bombing the cities on the night of 9–10 July, intending to induce civilian flight, and it seemed to work in Ramla: at 11:30 hours on the morning of 10 July, Operation Danny headquarters (Danny HQ) told the IDF that there was a "general and serious flight from Ramla." That afternoon, Danny HQ told one of its brigades to facilitate the flight of women, children, and the elderly, but to detain men of military age. On the same day, the IDF took control of Lydda airport.

During the afternoon of 11 July, Israel's 89th (armored) Battalion, led by Lt. Col. Moshe Dayan, moved into Lydda. Israeli historian Anita Shapira writes that the raid was carried out on Dayan's initiative without coordinating it with his commander. Using a column of jeeps led by an armored vehicle with a cannon, he launched the attack in daylight, fully exposed and using enormous firepower, before proceeding to Ramla. Kadish and Sela write that his troops faced heavy fire from the Arab Legion troops in the police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramla road. Kenneth Bilby, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune was in the city at the time. He wrote:

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) led a raid on Lydda "blasting at everything that moved."

[The Israeli jeep column] raced into Lydda with rifles, Stens, and sub-machine guns blazing. It coursed through the main streets, blasting at everything that moved ... the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children were strewn about the streets in the wake of this ruthlessly brilliant charge.

The raid lasted 47 minutes, leaving dozens of Arabs dead—up to 200 according to the Israeli and American press the next day; 100–150 according to Dayan's 89th Battalion; and 40 according to the IDF's Third Battalion intelligence, though Morris writes they may have meant 40 killed by them specifically. Six died and 21 were wounded on the Israeli side. Kadish and Sela write that the high casualty rate was caused by confusion over who Dayan's troops were. The IDF were wearing keffiyehs and were led by an armored car seized from the Arab Legion. Residents may have believed the Arab Legion had arrived, only to encounter Dayan's forces shooting at everything as they ran from their homes.

Surrender of Ramla

The Israeli air force dropped leaflets onto the towns on 11 July telling residents to surrender or die. That evening, 300–400 Israeli soldiers entered Lydda. Not long afterwards, the Arab Legion forces on the Lydda-Ramla road withdrew, though a small number of Arab soldiers remained in the Lydda police station. At dawn on 12 July, more Israeli troops entered Lydda. Community leaders in both towns were told to surrender, which they did in Ramla, after which the Israelis mortared the city and imposed a curfew. Two very different images emerged of Ramla under occupation. The family of Khalil Wazir, who later joined the PLO and became known as Abu Jihad, owned a grocer's store in Ramla. He was 12 years old at the time:

The men had gathered together. And they were saying that the Jews were going to do to us what they had done in Deir Yassin. ... The whole village went to the church. ... I remember the archbishop standing in front of the church. He was holding a white flag. ... Afterwards we came out and the picture will never be erased from my mind. There were bodies scattered on the road and between the houses and the side streets. No one, not even women or children, had been spared if they were out in the street. ...

Against this, the writer Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), working for The Times, visited Ramla a few hours after the invasion:

The Arabs were hanging about in the streets much as usual, except for a few hundred youths of military age who have been put into a barbed wire cage and were taken off in lorries to an internment camp. Their veiled mothers and wives were carrying food and water to the cage, arguing with the Jewish sentries and pulling their sleeves, obviously quite unafraid. ... Groups of Arabs came marching down the main street with their arms above their heads, grinning broadly, without any guards, to give themselves up. The one prevailing feeling among all seemed to be that as far as Ramleh was concerned the war was over, and thank God for it.

12 July deaths in Lydda

Unexpected shooting

No formal surrender was announced in Lydda, though people gathered in the streets waving white flags. According to a contemporaneous IDF account: "Groups of old and young, women and children streamed down the streets in a great display of submissiveness, bearing white flags, and entered of their own free will the detention compounds we arranged in the mosque and church—Muslims and Christians separately." The buildings soon filled up, and women and children were released, leaving several thousand men inside, including 4,000 in the town's Great Mosque.

On 12 July, at 11:30 hours, two or three Arab Legion armored cars entered the city, led by Lt. Hamadallah al-Abdullah from the Jordanian 1st Brigade. Israeli historian Yoav Gelber writes that the legionnaires in the police station were panicking, and had been sending frantic messages to their HQ: "Have you no God in your hearts? Don't you feel any compassion? Hasten aid!"

The Arab Legion armored cars opened fire on the Israeli soldiers who were combing the old city. The exchange of gunfire led residents to believe the Legion had arrived in force, and those still armed started firing at the Israelis. Kadish and Sela write that, according to the Third Battalion's commander, Moshe Kelman, the Israelis came under heavy fire from thousands of weapons from every house, roof and window. Morris argues against this that only a few dozen townspeople took part in what turned out to be a brief firefight. Brief or not, the Israeli soldiers were unnerved by it: there were only 300–400 of them to quell tens of thousands of residents, and they had been under the impression the locals had surrendered, albeit informally.

Israeli response

Gelber describes what followed as the bloodiest massacre of the Arab-Israeli war. Shapira writes that the Israelis had no experience of governing civilians and panicked. One of the Israeli battalion commanders, Moshe Kelman, ordered troops to shoot at any clear target, including at anyone seen on the streets. Kelman said he had no choice; there was no chance of immediate reinforcements, and no indication of where the attacks were coming from. Israeli soldiers threw grenades into houses they suspected snipers were hiding in. Residents ran out of their homes in panic and were shot.

The Dahmash mosque just after occupation

Yeruham Cohen, an IDF intelligence officer, said around 250 died between 11:30 and 14:00 hours. Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref placed the death toll at 426, including 179 he said were later killed in the mosque, during a confusing incident that has come to be known in the Arab world as a massacre separate from the shooting in the town. Around 4,000 male Muslim detainees had been taken to the Great Mosque the day before. There was also a smaller mosque called the Dahmash Mosque. Christian detainees had been taken either to the church or to the Greek Orthodox monastery nearby, leaving the Muslims inside the Great Mosque in fear of a massacre.

Morris writes that some of the Great Mosque detainees tried to break out, fearing they were about to be killed, and in response the IDF threw grenades and fired bazooka rockets into the mosque compound. Kadish and Sela write that it was in the smaller mosque that a firefight broke out between armed militiamen inside and Israeli soldiers outside; they say the Israelis fired an anti-tank shell into it, then stormed it, killing 30 inside. Whichever mosque the shooting was in, there is confusion about the number killed. An eyewitness published a memoir in 1998 saying he had removed 95 bodies from the Dahmash Mosque, though others spoke of 600 dead.

Bodies littered the streets in Lydda and the Lydda–Ramla road, posing a health risk and a political problem. The Red Cross was due to visit Ramla on or around 12 July, but the new Israeli governor of the town, a soldier from the Kiryati Brigade, issued an order to have the visit delayed. It was rescheduled for 15:00 hours on 14 July; Danny HQ ordered Israeli troops to "evacuate all the refugees [and] to get rid of the corpses" by that time. The order seems not to have been carried out. On 15 July, Dr. Klaus Dreyer of the IDF Medical Corps complained that there were still unburied corpses in and around Lydda, which constituted a health hazard and a "moral and aesthetic issue." He asked the IDF to commandeer trucks and Palestinian residents to fix the problem.

Expulsion orders

Decision to expel

Benny Morris writes that David Ben-Gurion and the IDF were left to their own devices to decide how Arab residents were to be treated. As a result, their policy was haphazard and circumstantial, depending in part on the location, but also on the religion and ethnicity of the town. The Arabs of Western and Lower Galilee, mainly Christian and Druze, were allowed to stay in place, but Lydda and Ramla, mainly Muslim, were almost completely emptied. There was no official policy to expel the Palestinian population, he writes, but the idea of transfer was, according to Morris, "in the air," and the leadership understood this. The 12 July resistance in Lydda seems to have sealed the townpeople's fate. That day, as the shooting in the city continued, a meeting was held at Operation Danny headquarters between Ben-Gurion, Yigael Yadin and Zvi Ayalon, generals in the IDF, and Yisrael Galili, formerly of the Haganah (the pre-IDF army). Also present were Yigal Allon, commanding officer of Operation Danny, and his deputy Yitzhak Rabin.

Rabin's account

Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) signed the expulsion order

According to Rabin's account in 1977, at one point he, Ben-Gurion, and Allon left the room. Allon asked what was to be done with the residents. Rabin said Ben-Gurion waved his hand and said, "garesh otam"—"expel them." In the manuscript of his memoirs in 1979, Rabin wrote that Ben-Gurion "waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'". "Driving out" is a term with a harsh ring," he wrote. "Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion." An Israeli censorship board composed of five Cabinet members removed this section from Rabin's manuscripts. Peretz Kidron, an Israeli journalist who translated the memoirs into English, passed the censored text to David Shipler of The New York Times, where it was published on 23 October 1979.

In an interview with The New York Times two days later, Yigal Allon took issue with Rabin's version of events. "With all my high esteem for Rabin during the war of independence, I was his commander and my knowledge of the facts is therefore more accurate," he told Shipler. "I did not ask the late Ben-Gurion for permission to expel the population of Lydda. I did not receive such permission and did not give such orders." He said the residents left in part because they were told to by the Arab Legion, so the latter could recapture Lydda at a later date, and in part because they were panic-stricken. Allon described it elsewhere as a "provoked exodus," rather than an expulsion.

Yoav Gelber also takes issue with Rabin's account. He attributes the expulsions to Allon, who he says was known for his scorched earth policy. Wherever Allon was in charge of Israeli troops, Gelber writes, no Palestinians remained. In 1950, Allon gave a lecture on the war to a KM Forum, during which Shapira writes that he was uncharacteristically frank. He said he blamed the Palestinian exodus on three factors. First, they fled because they were projecting: the Arabs imagined that the Jews would do to them what they would do to the Jews if positions were reversed. Second, Arab and British leaders encouraged people to leave their towns so as not to be taken hostage, so they could return to fight another day. Third, there were some cases of expulsion, though these were not the norm. In Lydda and Ramla, the Arab Legion continued to attack Israeli outposts in the hope of reconnecting with their troops in Lydda, he said. When the expulsions started, the attacks died down. To leave the towns' hostile populations in place would be to risk them being used by the Legion to coordinate further attacks. Allon said he had no regrets: "War is war. In war things must be measured according to the criteria of war, the criteria of revolution."

Orders issued

At 13:30 hours on 12 July, just as the shooting in Lydda had stopped, the IDF issued the expulsion orders for Lydda and Ramla. The Israeli cabinet reportedly knew nothing about the expulsion plan until Bechor Shitrit, Minister for Minority Affairs, appeared unannounced in Ramla that day. He was shocked when he realized troops were organizing expulsions. He returned to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok, who later met with Ben Gurion to agree on guidelines for how the residents were to be treated, though Morris writes that Ben Gurion apparently failed to tell Shertok that he himself was the source of the expulsion orders. The men agreed the townspeople should be told that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, but that anyone who stayed was responsible for himself and would not be given food. Women and children were not to be forced to leave, and the monasteries and churches must not be damaged, though no mention was made of the mosques. This order was passed to Operation Danny HQ at 23:30 hours on 12 July, ten hours after the expulsion orders were issued. Shertok believed he had managed to avert the expulsions, not realizing that, even as he was discussing them in Tel Aviv, they had already begun.

Exodus

Agreement to leave

Morris writes that, by 13 July, the wishes of the IDF and those of the residents had dovetailed. Over the past three days, the townspeople had undergone aerial bombardment, ground invasion, had seen grenades thrown into their homes and hundreds of residents killed, had been living under a curfew, had been abandoned by the Arab Legion, and the able-bodied men had been rounded up. Morris writes they had concluded that living under Israeli rule was not sustainable. Spiro Munayyer, an eyewitness, wrote that the important thing was to get out of the city. A deal was reached with IDF soldier Shmarya Guttman, normally an archeologist, that the residents would leave in exchange for the release of the prisoners; according to Guttman, he went to the mosque himself and told the men they were free to join their families. Town criers and soldiers walked or drove around the town instructing residents where to gather for departure.

Notwithstanding that an agreement may have been reached, Morris writes that the troops understood that what followed was an act of deportation, not a voluntary exodus. While the residents were still in the town, IDF radio traffic had already started calling them "refugees" (plitim). Operation Danny HQ told the IDF General Staff/Operations at noon on 13 July that "[the troops in Lydda] are busy expelling the inhabitants [oskim begeirush hatoshavim]," and told the HQs of Kiryati, 8th and Yiftah brigades at the same time that, "enemy resistance in Ramle and Lydda has ended. The eviction [pinui]" of the inhabitants ... has begun."

The march

Women and children rest during the three-day exodus.

During the afternoon and evening of 12 July, thousands of Ramla's residents began moving out of town, on foot or in trucks and buses. The IDF used its own vehicles and confiscated Arab ones to move them. Lydda residents were made to walk, possibly because of their earlier resistance, or because there were no vehicles left. Whatever the reason, they walked around six kilometers to Beit Nabala, then around 11 more to Barfiliya, along dusty roads in temperatures of 30–35C, carrying their young children and their portable possessions, either in carts pulled by animals or on their backs. Possessions were slowly abandoned as people grew tired or collapsed. "To begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture," one Israeli witness wrote, "and in the end, bodies of men, women, and children." Shmarya Guttman of the IDF wrote that the march made him think of the exile of Israel, or a pogrom. Witnesses reported that soldiers moved among the refugees, telling them, "Go to King Abdullah, go to Ramallah." After walking for three days, the refugees were picked up by the Arab Legion and driven to Ramallah.

Reports vary regarding how many died. Many were elderly people and young children, who died from the heat and exhaustion. Morris has written that it was a "handful and perhaps dozens." He attributes a figure of 335 to Nimr al Khatib, but regards it as an exaggeration. Khalidi gives a figure of 350, citing Aref al-Aref. The expulsions clogged the roads eastward. Morris writes that IDF thinking was simple and cogent. They had just taken two major objectives and were out of steam. The Arab Legion was expected to counter-attack and now couldn't—the roads were cluttered, and they were suddenly responsible for the welfare of an additional tens of thousands of people. There were objections from within Israel to the use of the refugees in this way. Meir Ya'ari, Mapam party co-leader, told the Kibbutz Artzi Council on 12 December 1948: "How easily they speak of how it is possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say, the members of Hashomer Hatza'ir [a socialist-Zionist youth movement] who remember who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... I am appalled."

Looting of refugees and the cities

George Habash (1926–2008) who later led the PFLP, was among those expelled from Lydda.

The Sharett-Ben Gurion guidelines to the IDF had specified there was to be no robbery, but numerous sources spoke of widespread looting. The Economist wrote on 21 August that year: "The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind." Aharon Cohen, director of Mapam's Arab Department, complained to Yigal Allon months after the deportations that troops had been told to remove jewellery and money from residents so that they would arrive at the Arab Legion without resources, thereby increasing the burden of looking after them. Allon replied that he knew of no such order, but conceded it as a possibility. Father Oudeh Rantisi, who was 12 when he was expelled from Lydda, writes that he saw a man killed for refusing to hand over his money. George Habash, who later founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was born in Lydda to a Greek Orthodox family. He was in his second year at medical school in Beirut at the time, but returned to Lydda when he heard the Israelis had arrived in Jaffa, and was subsequently one of those expelled:

The Israelis were rounding everyone up and searching us. People were driven from every quarter and subjected to complete and rough body searches. You can’t imagine the savagery with which people were treated. Everything was taken—watches, jewellery, wedding rings, wallets, gold. One young neighbor of ours, a man in his late twenties, not more, Amin Hanhan, had secreted some money in his shirt to care for his family on the journey. The soldier who searched him demanded that he surrender the money and he resisted. He was shot dead in front of us. One of his sisters, a young married woman, also a neighbor of our family, was present: she saw her brother shot dead before her eyes. She was so shocked that, as we made our way toward Birzeit, she died of shock, exposure, and lack of water on the way.

As the residents left, the sacking of the cities began. One of the 3rd Battalion commanders, Lt. Col. Schmuel "Mula" Cohen, wrote of Lydda that, "the cruelty of the war here reached its zenith." Bechor Sheetrit, the Minister for Minority Affairs, said the army removed 1,800 truckloads of property from Lydda alone. Dov Shafrir was appointed Israel's Custodian of Absentee Property, supposedly charged to protect and redistribute Palestinian property, but his staff were inexperienced and unable to control the situation. The looting was so extensive that the 3rd Battalion had to be withdrawn from Lydda during the night of 13–14 July, and sent for a day to Ben Shemen for kinus heshbon nefesh, a conference to encourage soul-searching. Cohen forced them to hand over their loot, which was thrown onto a bonfire and destroyed, but the situation continued when they returned to town. Some were later prosecuted.

There were also allegations that Israeli soldiers had raped Palestinian women. Ben-Gurion referred to them in his diary entry for 15 July 1948: "The bitter question has arisen regarding acts of robbery and rape [o'nes ("אונס")] in the conquered towns ..." Lila Abu-Lughod and Diana Keown Allan write that fear of rape and the desire to protect sharaf al-bint—women's honor—was one of the key reasons for the flight of Palestinians. The allegations were given little consideration by the Israeli government. Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling told the Cabinet on 21 July: "It has been said that there were cases of rape in Ramle. I could forgive acts of rape but I won't forgive other deeds, which appear to me much graver. When a town is entered and rings are forcibly removed from fingers and jewellery from necks—that is a very grave matter."

Stuart Cohen writes that central control over the Jewish fighters was weak. Only Yigal Allon, commander of the IDF, made it standard practice to issue written orders to commanders, including that violations of the laws of war would be punished. Otherwise, trust was placed, and sometimes misplaced, in what Cohen calls intuitive troop decency. He adds that, despite the alleged war crimes, the majority of the IDF behaved with decency and civility. Some refused to take part in the expulsions. Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his memoirs:

Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach brigade included youth movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international fraternity and humaneness. The eviction action went beyond the concepts they were used to. There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action. Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these youth movement groups, and explain why we were obliged to undertake such harsh and cruel action.

Aftermath

In Ramallah, Amman, and elsewhere

Further information: Lausanne Conference, 1949

King Abdullah of Jordan (left) with John Bagot Glubb (1897–1986), the British commander of the Arab Legion. After the fall of Lydda and Ramla, Bagot was spat at as he drove through the West Bank.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramla poured into Ramallah. For the most part, they had no money, property, food, or water, and represented a health risk, not only to themselves. The Ramallah city council asked King Abdullah to remove them. Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator in Palestine, visited the refugee camp they were eventually sent to, and said he had never seen a more ghastly sight. Some of the refugees reached Amman, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and the Upper Galilee, and all over the area there were angry demonstrations against Abdullah and the Arab Legion for their failure to defend the cities. People spat at John Bagot Glubb as he drove through the West Bank. Wives and parents of Arab Legion soldiers tried to break into King Abdullah's palace. Palestinians drove out the Jordanian governor of Nablus. The Iraqi army had to use force to quell protests. Alec Kirkbride, the British ambassador in Amman, described one protest in the city on 18 July:

A couple of thousand Palestinian men swept up the hill toward the main [palace] entrance ... screaming abuse and demanding that the lost towns should be reconquered at once ... The King appeared at the top of the main steps of the building; he was a short, dignified figure wearing white robes and headdress. He paused for a moment, surveying the seething mob before, [then walked] down the steps to push his way through the line of guardsmen into the thick of the demonstrators. He went up to a prominent individual, who was shouting at the top of his voice, and dealt him a violent blow to the side of the head with the flat of his hand. The recipient of the blow stopped yelling ... the King could be heard roaring: so, you want to fight the Jews, do you? Very well, there is a recruiting office for the army at the back of my house ... go there and enlist. The rest of you, get the hell down the hillside!" Most of the crowd got the hell down the hillside.

Morris writes that, during a meeting in Amman on 12–13 July of the Political Committee of the Arab League, delegates—particularly from Syria and Iraq—accused Glubb of serving British, or even Jewish, interests, with his excuses about troop and ammunition shortages. Egyptian journalists said he had handed Lydda and Ramla to the Jews. King Abdullah eventually did the same, deciding it was safer to accuse Glubb, particularly after Iraqi officers alleged that the entire Hashemite house was in the pay of the British. Abdullah wanted Glubb's resignation, but London asked him to stay on to fight the war. As a result, Britain's popularity with the Arabs reached an all-time low.

The United Nations Security Council called for a ceasefire to begin no later than 18 July, with sanctions to be levelled against transgressors. The Arabs were outraged: "No justice, no logic, no equity, no understanding, but blind submission to everything that is Zionist," Al-Hayat responded, though Morris writes that cooler heads in the Arab world were privately pleased that they were required not to fight, given Israel's obvious military superiority.

Situation of the refugees

Further information: Palestinian refugee camps

The situation of the refugees was dire. They camped in public buildings, in abandoned British barracks, and under trees, many with no aid and no obvious access to food. Most of the aid that did reach them came from the West through the Red Cross and the Quakers. Morris writes that the Arab governments did little for them. Poor management in the aid distribution centers in Beirut and Damascus meant that thousands of tents donated by Britain remained in warehouses. A new UN body was set up to get things moving, and a year later, in December 1949, it became the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which many of the refugees and their descendants, now standing at four million, still depend on. The mediation efforts of Count Bernadotte on behalf of the UN—which resulted in a proposal to split Palestine between Israel and Jordan, and to hand Lydda and Ramla to King Abdullah—ended on 17 September 1948, when he was assassinated by four Israeli gunmen from Lehi, an extremist Zionist faction.

Resettlement of the cities

Further information: Law of Return and Palestinian right of return

File:Transfer of control from the military governor to the first mayor, Pesach Lev, Lod, April 1949.jpg

Power is handed from the military governor of Lydda, now called Lod, to the first mayor, Pesach Lev, April 1949.

On 14 July 1948, the IDF told Ben-Gurion that "not one Arab inhabitant" remained in Ramla or Lod, as Lydda was now called. In fact, several hundred remained, including the elderly, the ill and some Christians, and others managed to sneak back in over the following months. In October 1948, the Israeli military governor of Ramla-Lod reported that 960 Palestinians were living in Ramla, and 1,030 in Lod. Military rule in the towns ended in April 1949.

Nearly 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel between May 1948 and December 1951, doubling the state's Jewish population; in 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return, giving people of Jewish ancestry and their spouses the right to settle there. They were assigned Palestinian homes, and could buy refugees' furniture from the Custodian for Absentees' Property. The refugees' homes were used in part because of a housing shortage, but also as a matter of policy to make it harder for the Palestinians to return. Jewish families were occasionally placed in houses that belonged to Palestinians still living in the cities, the so-called "present absentees," who were regarded as physically present but legally absent, with no legal standing to reclaim their property. By March 1950, there were 8,600 Jewish and 1,300 Palestinian living in Ramla, and 8,400 Jews and 1,000 Palestinians in Lod.

The Palestinian workers allowed to remain in the cities were confined to ghettos. The military administrator split the region into three zones—Ramla, Lod, and Rakevet, a neighborhood in Lod established by the British for rail workers—and declared the Arab areas within them "closed," with each closed zone run by a committee of three to five members. Many of the town's essential workers were Palestinians, but they were not trusted. Palestinian train workers, for example, were required to live in the Rakevet area and were subject to a curfew from evening until morning, with periodic searches to make sure they had no guns.

The military administrators did satisfy some of the Palestinians' needs, such as building a school, supplying medical aid, allocating them 50 dunams for growing vegetables, and renovating the interior of the Dahmash mosque, but the refugees felt like prisoners. One wrote an open letter in March 1949 to the Al Youm newspaper on behalf of 460 Palestinian Muslim and Christian train workers: "We, the Arab inhabitants of Lod train station, did not participate in any defiant acts against the Israeli army ... Since the occupation, we continued to work and our salaries have still not been paid to this day. Then our work was taken from us and now we are unemployed. The curfew is still valid ... [W]e are not allowed to go to Lod or Ramla, as we are prisoners. No one is allowed to look for a job but with the mediation of the members of the Local Committee ... we are like slaves. I am asking you to cancel the restrictions and to let us live freely in the state of Israel.

Key figures after the expulsions

Yitzhak Rabin's historic handshake with Yasser Arafat at the White House, 1993.

Yigal Allon, who may have ordered the expulsions, became Israel's deputy prime minister in 1967. He was a member of the war cabinet during the 1967 Arab Israeli Six-Day War, and the architect of the post-war Allon Plan, a proposal to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank. He died in 1980.

Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Lydda expulsion order, became Israel's prime minister in 1974, and again in 1992, making a name for himself as a man of peace. He was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli radical opposed to Rabin's involvement in the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement with the PLO.

George Habash was behind the September 1970 Dawson's Field hijackings.

George Habash, the medical student expelled from Lydda, went on to lead one of the best-known of the Palestinian militant groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In September 1970 he masterminded the hijacking of four passenger jets bound for New York, an attack that put the Palestinian cause on the map. The PFLP was also behind the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 27 people died, and the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight to Entebbe, which famously led to the IDF's rescue of the hostages. Habash spoke to Robert Fisk in 1993 about Lydda: "I will never rest until I can go back. The house is still there and a Jewish family lives in it now. Some of my friends tried to find it and some relatives actually went there and sent me a message that the trees are still standing in the garden, just as they were in 1948. ... It's my right to go directly to my house and live there." He died of a heart attack in Amman in 2008.

Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), the grocer's son expelled from Ramla, became one of the founders of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the PLO, and specifically of its armed wing, Al-Assifa. He organized the PLO's guerrilla warfare, and the Fatah youth movements that helped spark the First Intifada. He was assassinated by Israeli commandos at his home in Tunis in 1988.

Artistic representations

Further information: Palestinian art

Ismail Shammout's Where to ..?

The Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout was 19 years old when he was expelled from Lydda. He created a series of oil paintings about the march, the best known of which is Where to ..? (1953), which enjoys iconic status among Palestinians. A life-size image of a man dressed in rags holds a walking stick in one hand, the wrist of a child in the other, a toddler on his shoulder, with a third child behind him, crying and alone. There is a withered tree behind him, and beyond that in the distance the skyline of an Arab town with a minaret. Gannit Ankori writes that the absent mother is the lost homeland, the children its orphans.

Israeli poet Nathan Alterman (1910–1970), described by Bernard Avishai as the laureate of the Zionist revolution, wrote about Lydda in his poem Al Zot ("On This"), published in Davar on 21 November 1948. Avishai writes that when David Ben-Gurion first read the poem, he ordered that it be recited the next day during inspection in every army camp:

Let us sing then also about "delicate incidents"
For which the true name, incidentally, is murder
Let songs be composed about conversations with sympathetic interlocutors
who with collusive chuckles make concessions and grant forgiveness.

Historiography

Benny Morris writes that Israeli historians during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—who wrote what he calls the "Old History"—were "less than honest" about what had happened in Lydda and Ramla, in part because they relied on censored IDF documents and interviews with primary sources, and in part because they felt Israel was fighting for its survival and should not be weakened by having its image blackened.

The IDF's official history, Toldot Milhemet HaKomemiyut ("History of the War of Independence"), written by employees of its history branch and published in 1959, said that residents of Lydda had violated the terms of their surrender, and left because they were afraid of Israeli retribution. The head of the history branch, Lt. Col Netanel Lorch, wrote in The Edge of the Sword (1961) that residents had even requested safe conduct from the IDF. American political scientist Ian Lustick writes that Lorch admitted in 1997 that he left his post because the censorship made it impossible to write good history. Another employee of the history branch, Lt. Col. Elhannan Orren, wrote a detailed history of Operation Danny in 1976, Baderekh el Ha'ir ("On the Road to the City") that made no mention of expulsions. Other histories were written by intelligence officers such as David Kimche, or military commanders such as Yigal Allon. Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, told the Knesset in 1961 that the Palestinians had left on orders from Arab leaders or in response to radio broadcasts from other Arab states. Anita Shapira writes that Ben-Gurion not only led the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, but also wrote its history, and his version of events was almost completely accepted in Israel until the 1980s; anyone who challenged it was treated as a pariah. Morris writes that the first person to acknowledge publicly that the residents of Lydda and Ramla had been expelled was Yitzhak Rabin in the manuscript of his 1979 memoirs, Pinkas Sherut ("Service Notebook").

According to Morris, a series of myths lay at the heart of the pre-1980s history:

Benny Morris, one of Israel's New Historians, argues that Israel's pre-1980s history of what happened in Lydda and Ramla was "less than honest."

The essence of the Old History is that Zionism was a beneficent and well-meaning, progressive national movement; that Israel was born pure into an uncharitable, predatory world; that Zionist efforts to achieve compromise and conciliation were rejected by the Arabs; and that Palestine's Arabs, and in their wake the surrounding Arab states, for reasons of innate selfishness, xenophobia, and downright cussedness, refused to accede to the burgeoning Zionist presence and in 1947 launched a war to extirpate the foreign plant. ... Poorly armed and outnumbered, the Jewish community in Palestine, called the Yishuv, fought valiantly, suppressed the Palestinians "gangs" .. and repelled the "five" invading Arab armies. In the course of that war, says the Old History—which at this point becomes indistinguishable from Israeli propaganda—Arab states and leaders, in order to blacken Israel's image and facilitate the invasion of Palestine, called on or ordered Palestine's Arabs to quit their homes and the "Zionist areas"—to which they were expected to return once the Arab armies had proved victorious. Thus was triggered the Palestinian Arab exodus ...

A group calling itself the "New Historians" emerged in Israel in the 1980s. Morris, arguably the best-known of the group, writes that the 30-year rule of Israel's Archives Law, passed in 1955, meant that hundreds of thousands of government documents were released throughout the 1980s, including Foreign Ministry papers from 1947 to 1956, and documents from the Prime Minister's Office. In addition, he writes, the age of the "New Historians"—who were born around 1948—meant they had weaker emotional ties to the stories that surrounded Israel's creation. Between 1987 and 1993, four of these historians—Morris, Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe, and Avi Shlaim—three of them Oxbridge-trained, published a series of books that changed the historiography of the Palestinian exodus and 1948 in general. Their work is not without its critics, most notably Israeli historian Efraim Karsh, who writes that there was more voluntary Palestinian flight than Morris and the others concede. He acknowledges that there were expulsions, though he argues, as does Morris, that they were unplanned, and that they accounted for a small percentage of the overall exodus.

Lydda and Ramla today

Ramla in 2006

As of 2004 around 67,000 people were living in Ramla. The town became briefly known around the world in 1962, when former SS officer Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Ramla prison in May that year. The population in Lod as of 2010 was around 45,000 Jewish, 20,000 Arab, its main industry its airport, re-named Ben-Gurion International Airport in 1973. The town's racial tension and economic deprivation make it "the most likely place to explode," according to Arnon Golan, an Israeli expert on racially-mixed cities. In addition to existing racial problems, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia were housed there in the 1990s, which increased the tension. A fifth of the town's population are Bedouins living in illegal dwellings on agricultural land, and receiving no municipal services such as trash collection or sewage disposal. The Arab community has complained that, when Arabs became a majority in the city's Ramat Eshkol suburb, the local school was closed rather than turned into an Arab-sector school, and in September 2008 it was re-opened as a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school. In 2010 a three-meter-high wall was built to separate the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.

Eitan Bronstein of Zochrot places a sign on the former ghetto.

The refugees are occasionally able to visit their former homes. Zochrot, an Israeli group that researches former Palestinian towns, visited Lod in 2003 and 2005, erecting signs in Hebrew and Arabic depicting its history. They highlighted a spot near the main road where there is allegedly a mass grave, and posted a sign on the wall of the former Arab ghetto: "Here were concentrated and placed under military rule approx. 1000 men and women who remained in Al Lydd after the expulsion from the city and its environs of 45,000 Palestinians." The visits are met with a mixture of interest and hostility. Father Oudeh Rantisi, a former mayor of Ramallah who was expelled from Lydda in 1948, visited his family's former home for the first time in 1967:

As the bus drew up in front of the house, I saw a young boy playing in the yard. I got off the bus and went over to him. "How long have you lived in this house?" I asked. "I was born here," he replied. "Me too," I said ...

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Further reading

• Alterman, Nathan (1948). "Al Zot", accessed 23 November 2010. Template:He icon
• Karsh, Efraim (1997). Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians'. Routledge. ISBN 0714650110
• Karsh, Efraim (2002). The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948, Osprey Publishing, 2002. ISBN 1841763721
• Kelman, Moshe (1972). "Ha-Hevdel bein Deir Yasin le-Lod" ["The Difference between Deir Yasin and Lydda"], Yedi'ot Aharonot, 2 May 1972. Template:He icon
• Khalidi, Walid (1961). "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine", Middle East Forum, Vol. 37, p. 11, accessed 23 November 2010.
• Khalidi, Walid (1988). "Plan Dalet Revisited", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 18: Nos. 1, 5, accessed 23 November 2010.
• Khalidi, Walid (1992). "All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948". Institute for Palestine Studies. ISBN 088728 224 5.
• Lorch, Netanel (1997). "A Word from an Old Historian," Haaretz, 23 June 1997.
• Monterescu, Daniel and Rabinowitz, Dan (2007). Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 0754647323
• Munayyer, Spiro (1997). Lydda During the Mandate and Occupation Periods. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies.
• Rantisi, Audeh G. Would I ever see my home again?, Al-Ahram, accessed 23 November 2010.
• Zochrot. Remembering al-Lydd, 2005, accessed 23 November 2010.