Was the expulsion by the Israeli army of 50 000 70 000 Arabs from the cities of Lydda and Ramle in July of 1948 justified ?
No it wasn’t, let’s get right into the history.
The first four-week truce declared in Palestine, which started on 11 June 1948, provided an opportunity for the Israelis to put the final touches on their plans to occupy Palestinian cities and villages and expel their residents. The cities of Lydda and Ramla were their next target. The Lydda Massacre, one of many that occurred during the Palestine War, took place between the end of the first truce on 9 July 1948 and the beginning of the second on 18 July. The massacre took place in two stages: the first during the time of the city's occupation, and the second during the operation of mass expulsion of its residents, which is considered one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansing (“transfer operations”) carried out by the Israelis.
Lydda and Ramla were considered twin cities; both are approximately located in the center of Palestine, and they are only three kilometers apart. Lydda dates back to at least 5600–5250 BCE. Ramle, was founded in the 8th century CE. Both cities were strategically important because they sat at the intersection of Palestine's main north–south and east–west roads. Lydda lies fifty meters above sea level and is southeast of Jaffa and northeast of Ramla. It was known for the presence of a railway line and a train station that was considered second in importance only to the Haifa station. The main source of Jerusalem's water supply was 15 kilometers away. During the British Mandate period, Lydda grew as a result of the Qantara -Haifa railroad, which passed through it, and the Lydda International Airport. In 1945, the city had an area of 3,855 dunums, and in 1946, its population was estimated at 18,250. (At that time no Jews were living there.) Lydda was famous for its olive and sesame oil presses, and its town market, held every Monday, was the hub of commercial activity for both itself and its surrounding villages and towns.
According to the UN Partition Plan of November 1947, the Lydda-Ramla region was to be part of the proposed Arab state. Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün), developed what Israeli historian Benny Morris calls an obsession with the cities; he wrote in his diary that they had to be destroyed, and on 16 June referred to them during an Israeli cabinet meeting as the "two thorns". In July 1948, both cities were occupied by Zionist forces. The massacre was preceded by the following events:
Between late April and mid-May, Jaffa and the surrounding villages fell to the Zionists, and its residents were evicted by force. Thousands of them sought refuge in Lydda. The twin cities were in a stranglehold.
Hassan Salameh , commander of the Army of Holy War [Jaysh al-jihad al-muqaddas] in the region, was killed at the battle of Ra's al-Ayn in late April. His death dented the morale of the people in the district. After the occupation of Ra's al-Ayn, the Lydda-Ramla area was cut off from the Palestinian “Triangle ” and with it the food supply lines.
The British Mandate ended on 15 May and the Arab armies entered Palestine. A company of the Jordanian army was stationed in an area between Lydda and Ramla. The company's commander soon realized that the two cities would not be able to withstand the Zionist offensive with its tanks and artillery for more than a short period of time; he also noted the lack of organization and training. And so, when the Israelis attacked Lydda in July, the company retreated.
Meanwhile, the people of Lydda were preparing to confront the Israeli attack, so they formed a national committee, a military committee, a health committee, and a business committee. The National Committee had reached an agreement with the mayor of the nearby settlement of Ben Shemen , which stipulated that the road between Lydda and the villages in the surrounding hillside would be kept safe for civilians and civilian traffic. This road was important because it was the easiest and most direct way to transport goods to and from the city. Haganah forces blocked it off in mid-June and paved a small airstrip to the northeast of the settlement to provide for airlifts of supplies and military reinforcements. Notably, Lydda fighters managed to shoot down one of these planes in late June.
To relieve pressure on the semi-besieged city of Jerusalem , the Israeli leadership decided to secure the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; Lydda, Ramla, al-Latrun , and the hilly areas north of the road that were at a greater elevation, including Ramallah , had to be occupied. It put into place several operational plans:
Operation Ludar, an acronym for the names of the two cities Lydda and Ramla;
Operation LRLR, which stood for the first letters of Lydda, Ramla, al-Latrun and Ramallah;
Operation Dani, named after a Palmach officer who was killed in January 1948. This plan was the one that was finally agreed upon, and the date was set for the night of 9–10 July to launch it from the Ben Shemen settlement. Yigal Allon was appointed as head of the operation, and Yitzhak Rabin, who became Israel's prime minister in 1974, as his operations officer.
On the Eve of the Massacre:
During the first two days of Operation Dani, and after fierce battles, the Zionists forces occupied the villages on the outskirts of Lydda on the northern and western fronts along with Lydda International Airport. They were able to establish communication with their forces in the neighboring settlements; the Jordanian Army was stationed with armored vehicles in Bayt Nabala, less than a kilometer away from the Zionist forces, but it took no action. In the nearby village of Jimzu, where Zionist troops were stationed, the commander of the Jordanian brigade sent a patrol to the village that managed to drive out the Israelis and eliminate a number of their soldiers, but the Israelis reoccupied the village soon after the withdrawal of the Jordanian patrol.
Just before the attack on Lydda and Ramla, Zionist warplanes carried out intensive bombing raids on the night of 9–10 July, intending to induce civilian flight from the two cities, while residents (who were observing Ramadan) were breaking their fast; dozens were killed and wounded. Lydda’s hospital overflowed with the wounded, and while doctors, nurses, and other workers were busy treating their injuries, the men of the city worked to build barricades and lines of defense, rejecting the idea of surrender.
Chronology of the Massacre:
On the morning of 11 July, Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets that called on the people of Lydda to surrender and leave the city before it collapsed on their heads. During the afternoon of 11 July, ‘’Israel's’’ 89th (armoured) Battalion, led by Lt. Col. Moshe Dayan commenced their assault on the city from the east, starting at the village of Daniel. Driving through the town from east to west machine-gunning anything that moved. The city defenders were able to repel the attack after a fierce battle in which they inflicted heavy losses on the Israeli forces, but they soon ran out of what little ammunition they had.
The raid lasted 47 minutes, leaving 100–150 Palestinian Arabs dead, according to Dayan's 89th Battalion.
The Zionists launched a new offensive backed by their armored vehicles. They entered the city in the evening and immediately began shooting indiscriminately.
On 12 July, the second day of the offensive, the Israelis concentrated their troops around the city center. Although Lydda never actually surrendered, and sporadic acts of resistance with modest capabilities continued, the Israelis managed to take full control of the city and detained dozens of civilians. They called on the male residents to gather in the Great Mosque , the Dahmash Mosque , and the churches, and they imposed a curfew in the city.
The Jordanian leadership sent a squad of armored vehicles to verify the actual situation in Lydda. The residents thought that it was a precursor to a larger force coming to launch a counterattack and rescue the city, so their morale was boosted and they began attacking the Zionist forces, especially on the northern side where the Jordanian armored vehicles had entered. To their surprise, the Jordanians withdrew after a short time, forcing the resistance fighters who had barricaded themselves in the police station to retreat toward the hills after they ran out of ammunition. A number of Israeli soldiers were killed, and as a result, the Israelis were even more brutal in their reprisals on the city's residents.
An Israeli woman conscript recounted that a soldier patrolled the streets of Lydda with a loudspeaker, promising that the residents would be safe as long as they remained at home or in the two mosques that hundreds of people had gone into. However, the Israeli soldiers claimed that snipers were in the homes and lobbed hand grenades into them; terrified residents ran out of their houses in an attempt to flee, and the Israelis opened fire on them. Yeruham Cohen, a Zionist intelligence officer, said around 250 died between 11:30 and 14:00 hours. Those who had taken shelter in the Dahmash Mosque were bombed and shot by the Israelis; between 80 and 176 people were murdered. In 2013, in testimony provided to Zochrot, Yerachmiel Kahanovich, a Palmach fighter present on the scene, stated he himself, amid the shelling of a mosque, had fired a PIAT anti-tank missile with enormous shock wave impact inside the mosque, and on examining it afterwards found the walls scattered with the remains of people. He also stated that anyone straying from the flight trail was shot dead.According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, dozens were killed, including unarmed men, women and children; an eyewitness published a memoir in 1998 saying he had removed 95 bodies from one of the mosques.When the massacre was over, bodies lay in the streets and houses in Lydda, and on the Lydda–Ramle road; Morris writes that there were hundreds. The Red Cross was due to visit the area, but the new Israeli military governor of Ramle issued an order to have the visit delayed. The visit was rescheduled for 14 July; Dani HQ ordered Israeli troops to remove the bodies by then, but the order seems not to have been carried out. A journalist said that the corpses of men, women, and children piled upin the city's streets and remained under the sun for more than ten days. It is estimated that inside the city, the total number of those massacred exceeded 425. 800 Palestinian were killed overall in the fighting.
The Forced Expulsion of the People of Lydda:
The tragedy of Lydda was not limited to the indiscriminate killing and the massacre at the mosque. On the same day (12 July), a decision was taken by the Israelis to expel all the residents from the city, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris . When Palmach commander Yigal Alon asked David Ben-Gurion what was to become of the residents of Lydda and Ramla, the latter answered, along with an energetic, dismissive gesture with his hand: "garesh otam!"—"expel them!" Immediately after that, Yitzhak Rabin , the officer in charge of Operation Dani, signed a military order containing the following instruction:
“The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”
The next day (13 July), the Israeli soldiers forced the residents of Lydda (and the neighboring towns including Ramla, who numbered approximately 70,000), to leave the city within half an hour and take a rugged, treacherous path to reach Ramallah. While the residents were still in the city, IDF radio traffic had already started calling them "refugees" (plitim). Operation Dani 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."
Hundreds of Palestinians succumbed to thirst, dehydration, and fatigue on the way, in an exodus that was horrifying in its cruelty. Bodies of men, women, and children, were scattered along the way. It was called the ‘’Lydda death march’’. As Palestinians walked single file on this trail of death, a small Israeli military plane flew at low altitude over their heads to force them to continue moving. Morris quotes Shamaria Gottman , Israeli intelligence officer at the time:
A multitude of inhabitants walked one after another. Women walked burdened with packages and sacks on their head. Mothers dragged children after them… Occasionally, warning shots were heard… Occasionally, you encountered a piercing look from one of the youngsters … in the column, and the look said: We have not yet surrendered. We shall return to fight you.
From the Israeli perspective, the conquest of the towns, designed, according to Benny Morris,
"to induce civilian panic and flight".
The Yiftah Brigade was ordered to strip Palestinians of "every watch, piece of jewelry, or money, or valuables". Palestinians were stripped of their valuables en route by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints. The homes of Palestinian refugees were looted as well. There was so much looting that 1,800 trucks were said to have been loaded with stolen property from Lydda alone.
The London Economist described on 21 August that year for its readers the horrific scenes that took place when inhabitants were forced to start marching after their houses had been looted, their family members murdered, and their city wrecked:
"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."
There were also acts of rape done by Zionist soldiers toward 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 ..."
Israeli writer Amos Kenan, who served as a platoon commander of the 82d Regiment of the Israeli Army brigade that conquered Lydda told The Nation on 6 February 1989:
"At night, those of us who couldn't restrain ourselves would go into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women. I want very much to assume, and perhaps even can, that those who couldn't restrain themselves did what they thought the Arabs would have done to them had they won the war."
Kenan said he heard of only one woman who complained. A court-martial was arranged, he said, but in court, the accused ran the back of his hand across his throat, and the woman decided not to proceed. The allegations were given littleconsideration by the Israeli government.
Agriculture Minister of Israel, 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."
Palestinians being ethnically cleansed out of al-Ramla & al-Lydd in July 1948 by Zionists Jewish forces.
Testimonies:
Of the testimonies by Palestinians from Lydda that sum up the tragedy, three are by individuals who were to play a significant role in the Palestinian struggle: visual artist Ismail Shammut , who was eighteen years old at the time; Reja-e Busailah , who later became a professor in the United States; and George Habash, who led the Arab Nationalist Movement and then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine for several decades.
Shammut's testimony is related by Michael Palumbo, who interviewed him about the “death march” he and his eight brothers and sisters endured. (One of his brothers died of thirst during the march.):
While marching in the blazing heat, he [Shammut] spotted some water. He rushed to fill a pot he was carrying. He later recalled: “At that moment, a jeep pulled up with three people. One of them, a Zionist officer, got out. He pulled a gun and put it to my head and ordered me to put the water down.” The Arab teenager had no choice but to obey. Ismail would never forget the thirst of the thousands of people who trudged on, not knowing where they were going. He saw people chewing grass in the hope of obtaining a bit of moisture. Others drank their children's urine. By the roadside pregnant women were prematurely delivering babies, their labour brought on by the strain of their ordeal. None of these infants survived. Since no one had any opportunity to bury the dead, they were covered with grass and abandoned. Eventually Ismail managed to get some water out of sight of the Israeli soldiers. Although the water was dirty and obviously polluted he drank some while soaking his clothes in the reddish liquid. As Ismail attempted to return to his family, people followed him hoping to get a few drops of the precious fluid. One woman sucked at his moist shirt.
Reja-e Busailah was a visually impaired teenager during the forced departure from Lydda and relied on his sense of hearing to make his way:
The Jews were stationed here and there with loudspeakers and guns, loaded and ready. One loudspeaker repeated that we better leave in order to avoid what happened in the mosque. We were quickly directed off the main road and herded… onto a road, if you can call it that.... Indeed, it was now a road, now a path, now nothing but rock and stone, hill, ravine, bush, and thorn... For a long time we had no idea where we were heading… but the general movement was eastward and to higher ground. Jewish soldiers were stationed all along the “road” for a distance of two hours from the town. They were there apparently to make sure that the procession would keep moving. Mostly they would shoot into the air... That surely kept our fright and panic alive and accelerating. Every now and then, they would use the butts of their guns and shout obscenities in Arabic. They would search and take whatever they found. And there was much to find and take: cash, gold, jewelry, watches, fountain pens. Throughout that day and later, I heard of several incidents in which, whether in impatience or in wantonness, earlobes were taken with the earrings, fingers with the rings, hands and even arms with the bracelets. I heard of other incidents where young men paid with their lives simply because they were handsome or a bit taller or more muscular than the average.
George Habash had returned from studying medicine at the American University of Beirut to be with his family in Lydda. He remembers the sight of children dying and the sick and elderly walking with the sun beating down directly over their heads with no shade. He had used up all the strength and courage he had just to stay alive:
"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."
The trauma of this suffering would mark a turning point in Habash's life. He did not forget, and on that day vowed to avenge the tragedy of his people.
One of the most detailed accounts on what unfolded in al-Lydd was published in the summer of 1998 by the sociologist Salim Tamari in the Journal of Palestine Studies. It drew on interviews with Spiro Munayar, who had lived all his life in Lydda and was an eye witness to the events on that terrible day in July. He saw the occupation, the massacre in the mosque, the way Israeli troops barged into the houses and dragged out the families sparing not a single house. He watched as the houses were then looted and the refugees robbed before they were told to start marching towards the West Bank, in one of the warmest months of the year, in one of the hottest places in Palestine.
He was working as a young physician in the local hospital, alongside the dedicated Dr George Habash, the future founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He recalls the endless numbers of corpses and the wounded who were brought in from the scene of the slaughter, and these were the same horrible experiences that were to haunt Habash and drive him to take the road of guerilla warfare in order to redeem his town and homeland from those who had devastated it in 1948. Munayar also recounted the anguished scenes of expulsion he witnessed:
During the night the soldiers began going into the houses in areas they had occupied, rounding up the population and expelling them from the city. Some were told to go to Kharruba and Barfilyya, while other soldiers said: 'Go to King Abdullah, to Ramallah'. The streets filled with people setting out for indeterminate
The systematic robbery was also recollected by Munayar:
The occupying soldiers had set up road blocks on all the roads leading east and were searching the refugees, particularly the women, stealing their gold jewelry from their necks, wrists, and fingers and whatever was hidden in their clothes, as well as money and everything else that was precious and light enough to carry.
Another testimony by Haj As'ad Hassouneh, described by Saleh Abd al-Jawad as "a survivor of the death march", shared his recollection in 1996:
"The Jews came and they called among the people:
"You must go."
"Where shall we go?"
"Go to Barfilia." ... the spot you were standing on determined what if any family or possession you could get; any to the west of you could not be retrieved. You had to immediately begin walking and it had to be to the east. ... The people were fatigued even before they began their journey or could attempt to reach any destination. No one knew where Barfilia was or its distance from Jordan. ... The people were also fasting due to Ramadan because they were people of serious belief. There was no water. People began to die of thirst. Some women died and their babies nursed from their dead bodies. Many of the elderly died on the way. ... Many buried their dead in the leaves of corn".
The same sights were observed by the few foreign journalists who were in the town that day. Two of them were Americans apparently invited by the Israeli forces to accompany them in the attack, what today we would call 'embedded' correspondents. Keith Wheeler of The Chicago Sun Times was one of the two. He wrote:
'Practically everything in their [the Israeli forces'] way died. Riddled corpses lay by the roadside.'
The other, Kenneth Bilby of The New York Herald Tribune, reported seeing
'the corpses of Arab men, women and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge.'
Bilby also wrote a book on these events, New Star in the Near East, published two years later.
One might wonder why newspaper reports of a massacre on this scale did not provoke an outcry in the United States. For those who have been shocked by the callousness and inhumanity that US troops have sometimes displayed towards Arabs in the operation in Iraq, the reports from Lydd may seem strangely familiar. At the time, American reporters like Wheeler were astonished by what ironically he called the Israeli 'Blitzkrieg', and by the resoluteness of the Jewish troops. Like Bilby's description ('ruthlessly brilliant'), Wheeler's account of the Israeli army's campaign sadly neglected to provide a similarly probing report on the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, or expelled from their villages. The correspondents' reports were totally one-sided.
Ramla, or Ramleh as is it is known today, the home town of one of the PLO's most respected leaders, the late Khalil al-Wazir, Abu Jihad, lay nearby. The attack on this city with its 17,000 inhabitants had started two days earlier on 12 July 1948, but the final occupation was only completed after the Israelis had taken al-Lydd. The city had been the target of terrorist attacks by Jewish forces in the past; the first one had taken place on 18 February 1948, when the Irgun had planted a bomb in one of its markets that killed several people.
Terrified by the news coming from Lydd, the city notables reached an agreement with the Israeli army that ostensibly allowed the people to stay. The Israeli units entered the city on 14 July and immediately began a search-and-arrest operation in which they rounded up 3000 people who they transferred to a prison camp nearby, and on the same day they started looting the city. The commander on the spot was Yitzhak Rabin. People of Ramla suffered the same fate as the people of Lydda. The people of both cities were forced to march, without food and water, to the West Bank, many of them dying from thirst and hunger on the way. As only a few hundred were allowed to stay in both towns, and given that people from nearby villages had fled there for refuge, Rabin estimated that a total of 50,000 people had been ‘’transferred’’ in this inhuman way.
Two different images emerged of Ramleh under occupation. Khalil Wazir, who later joined the PLO and became known as Abu Jihad, was ethnically cleansed from the town with his family, who owned a grocer's store there, when he was 12 years old. He said there was fear of a massacre, as there had been at Deir Yassin, and that there were bodies scattered in the streets and between the houses, including the bodies of women and children.
Palestinian refugees being ethnically cleansed from Ramla.
Palestinian men, behind barbed wire fence, before being expelled. Ramla, 10 July 1948.
As is often the case with massacres and instances of forced migration, there is no accurate count of the number of victims, but it is likely that the number of those killed in Lydda itself and those who died during the march of death were over one thousand.
The fall of Lydda and Ramla symbolized a real catastrophe, especially since it took place in the period separating the two ceasefires, which the Israelis used to their advantage. The capture of the twin cities happened precipitously, while the Arab armies stood by as passive onlookers. Through the operation, the Israelis were able to achieve strategic goals, the most important of which were getting rid of the military threat to the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, seizing control of Lydda's airport and railway station, and expelling the residents of Lydda, Ramla, and the surrounding villages.
When the refugees arrived in Ramallah, they were distributed across already overcrowded camps, and the city could not handle this additional burden. Hundreds of refugees died after reaching the refugee camps. On 2 August 1948, Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator for Palestine, visited the refugees in Ramallah, and was deluged by thousands who demanded to return to their homes. Bernadotte later wrote about this visit in his diary, saying that he had visited many refugee camps in Europe during World War II, but never had he encountered such terrifying scenes as the ones he encountered in Ramallah. He described the displaced refugees as a group of frightened faces amidst a sea of human suffering. In the first Progress Report dated 16 September 1948 submitted by the UN-appointed Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, the Mediator recognized the right of return as key to a resolution of the conflict in Palestine. Bernadotte wrote:
"No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the homes from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the Right to Return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."
The Count's first proposal argued for fixed boundaries through negotiation, an economic union between both states, and the return of Palestinian refugees - the proposal was turned down.
On 17 September, the day following his UN report, Count Bernadotte's motorcade was ambushed in Jerusalem. He was shot and liquidated by terrorists of the Jewish Stern gang.
The killing was approved by the three-man 'center' of Lehi: Yitzhak Yezernitsky (the future Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir), Nathan Friedmann (also called Natan Yellin-Mor) and Yisrael Eldad (also known as Scheib).
The United Nations convened the Lausanne Conference of 1949 from April to September 1949 in part to resolve the refugee question. On 12 May 1949, the conference achieved its only success when the parties signed the Lausanne Protocol on the framework for a comprehensive peace, which included territories, refugees, and Jerusalem. Israel agreed in principle to allow the return of all of Palestinian refugees because the Israelis wanted United Nations membership, which required the settlement of the refugee problem. Once Israel was admitted to the UN, it retreated from the protocol it had signed, because it was completely satisfied with the status quo, and saw no need to make any concessions with regard to the refugees or on boundary questions.
Many scholars, including Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, have characterized what occurred at Lydda and Ramle as ethnic cleansing. Many Jews who came to Israel between 1948 and 1951 settled in the Palestinian refugees empty homes, as a matter of policy to prevent former Palestinian residents from reclaiming them. Ari Shavit noted that the "events were crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state."