Accounts from survivors describe how they were evicted at gunpoint by Israeli forces who repeatedly shot over their heads along the way to keep them moving, as well as a few incidents in which people were shot and killed, or became casualties as a result of the general panic.[5][6][7][8] In addition to losing their residential properties, many of those expelled were also stripped of their portable possessions by Israeli soldiers.[9] The majority of the survivors ended up in a refugee camp in Ramallah where many of them or their descendants continue to reside today.[10]
Brief background
After World War I and until the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Lydda and Ramla were towns in the District of Ramla in British Mandate Palestine. Before the 1948 war, both Lydda and Al-Ramla were exclusively Palestinian towns and according to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which proposed dividing Palestine into two states (one Jewish and one Arab) both were to form part of the proposed Arab state.[11][12]
Expulsion orders
Yitzhak Rabin was the Head of Operations for Israeli forces in the area in July 1948 and he sent the order for the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda which read: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age ... Yiftah (Brigade HQ) must determine the method."[2] A similar expulsion order was issued for the city of Ramla.[13] Between the 1950s and 1970s, Israeli historians differentiated between the cases of Lydda and Ramla, insisting that the inhabitants of Ramla had violated the terms of surrender, with Benny Morris writing that they "were happy at the possibility given them of evacuating."[13][14] However, Rabin himself admitted that "expulsions" had taken place in both Ramla and Lydda, and though this admission was excised from his text on the subject by Israeli censors, it was printed in the New York Times on 23 October 1979.[13]
It was Peretz Kidron, an Israeli journalist who translated Rabin's memoirs from Hebrew into English and who discovered Rabin's admission of the expulsions that took place in Lydda and Ramle, who passed the excerpt censored during its publication in Israel on to the New York Times.[15] Kidron writes that it was success in the first phase of what he calls Operation Larlar that led Israeli forces to occupy Lydda and Al-Ramla.[15] In Rabin's memoirs, it is recorded that, "while the fighting was still in progress, they could not leave the hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route to Yiftach, which was advancing eastwards."[15] Rabin says that it was Yigal Allon who asked David Ben-Gurion what was to be done with the population of Lydda, and that Ben-Gurion
"waved his hand in gesture which said: Drive them out! Alon and I held a consultation. I agreed it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot to the Bet Horon road, assuming that the Legion would be obliged to look after them, thereby shouldering logistic difficulties which would burden its fighting capacity, making things easier for us."[15]
Rabin also writes that "The population of Lod (Lydda) 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 10-15 miles to the point where they met up with the Legion." Of the population of Al-Ramla, Rabin writes:
"The inhabitants of Ramleh watched, and learned the lesson: their leaders agreed to be evacuated by the Legion. 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.[15]
Reflecting on these actions, Rabin concluded:
"To day, in hindsight, I think the action was essential. The removal of those fifty thousand Arabs was an important contribution to Israel's security, in one of the most sensitive regions, linking the coastal plain with Jerusalem. After the War of Independence, some of the inhabitants were permitted to return to their home towns."[15]
Eyewitness accounts
A Palestinian refugee camp in 1948. While the location is not indicated, the tent structures are typical of the type of temporary housing that was available to Palestinian refugees, like those from Lydda and Ramla, in the immediate wake of their displacement during the 1948 war.
Father Oudeh Rantisi, a survivor, describes his recollections of the death march, recorded in detail in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees (2007). Besides those who died of dehydration and exhaustion, Rantisi recounts seeing people killed along the way in the general panic, as in this excerpt:
There was in front of us, a woman holding her small baby and a cart with large wheels pulled by a horse. From the greatness of crowding and anxiety and fear, the child fell from his mother's arms to the ground and the wheel went over his neck. It was the first of this type of scene which passed before my eyes.[8]
In another excerpt, he recounts episodes of looting by Israeli soldiers and having witnessed the shooting and killing of a few people by Israeli soldiers:
When we entered this gate, we saw Jewish soldiers spreading sheets on the ground and each who passed there had to place whatever they had on the ground or be killed. I remember that there was a man I knew from the Hanhan family from Lod who had just been married barely six weeks and there was with him a basket which contained money. When they asked him to place the basket on the sheet he refused - so they shot him dead before my eyes. Others were killed in front of me too, but I remember this person well because I use to know him.[8]
The looting conducted by Israeli soldiers is also mentioned by Benny Morris who writes that many were "stripped of their possessions."[9] Of the third day of the march, Rantisi says:
[...] the things I saw on the third day had a big effect on my life. Hundreds lost their lives due to fatigue and thirst. It was very hot during the day and there was no water. I remember that when we reached an abandoned house, they tied a rope around my cousin's child and sent him down into the water. They were so thirsty they started to suck the water from his clothes ... The road to Ramallah had become an open cemetery.[16]
Another survivor, Raja e-Basailah, describes how after making it to the Arab village of Ni'ilin, he pushed himself through the crowds to procure some water to take back to his mother and a close friend.[11] He hid the water from others who were begging for it and describes being haunted for years afterward by his "hard-hearted" denial of their needs.[11] Because he was blind, Basailah did not see those who perished on the way, but he recalls hearing the exclamations of others describing "[...] that some of those who lay dead had their tongues sticking out covered with dust and down," and how someone recounted to him, "[...] having seen a baby still alive on the bosom of a dead woman, apparently the mother ..."[11]
United Nations official Count Bernadotte who visited the refugee camp in Ramallah which housed the majority of the survivors in July 1948 said: "I have made the acquaintance of a great many refugee camps in my life but never have I seen a more ghastly site."[17]
Aftermath
After the war's end, Lydda and Al-Ramla became predominantly Jewish mixed towns and were renamed Lod and Ramla respectively by the newly declared Israeli state.[12] Residual Palestinian populations that had managed to remain in both towns were concentrated in bounded compounds and were vastly outnumbered by the influx of Jewish immigrants that followed.[12] The residential property rights of the former Palestinian communities of Lydda and Ramla were officially transferred to the Israel's Custodian of Absentee Properties in March 1950.[12] The majority of the survivors and their descendants reside in Ramallah in the West Bank where most of them ended up in a refugee camp after the forced march of 1948.[10]
Artistic representations
The Palestinian artistIsmail Shammout was 19 years old when he was among those forced to leave Lydda in the long march to exile. He portrayed his experience and those of tens of thousands of other Palestinian refugees in the piece Whereto? (1953). The oil painting on canvass is considered his best known work and enjoys iconic status among Palestinians. In the foreground, it depicts a life-size image of an eldery man dressed in rags carrying a walking stick in his left hand while his right hand grasps the wrist of a crying child. A sleeping toddler on his shoulder is resting his cheek upon the old man's head. Just behind them is a third child crying and walking alone. In the background there is a skyline of an Arab town with a minaret, while in the middle ground there is a withered tree. A visual of the painting and a discussion of its symbolic dimensions and iconic status are included in the work Palestinian Art (2006) by Gannit Ankori, an Israeli art historian.[18]
^Father Audeh Rantisi (May 1998). "Would I ever see my home again?" (Special edition commemorating 50 Years of Arab Dispossession since the creation of the State of Israel ed.). Al-Ahram.
^ abAudeh G. Rantisi and Charles Amash (July–August 2000). "Death March". Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU). Retrieved 2009-04-29.((cite web)): CS1 maint: date format (link)
^Benny Morris does not deny that there was a forced exodus in the case of Lydda in which hundreds died. He writes that, "All the Israelis who witnessed the events agreed that the [Lydda] exodus, under a hot July sun, was an extended episode of suffering for the refugees..." (Ron, 2003, p. 145.)
^ abcdefPeretz Kidron: Truth Whereby Nations Live. In Said and Hitchens, 1998, pp. 90-93.
Edward W. Said; Christopher Hitchens, eds. (1988), Blaming the Victims, Verso, ISBN0860911756
Thomas, Baylis (1999), How Israel was won: a concise history of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Illustrated ed.), Lexington Books, ISBN0739100645, 9780739100646((citation)): Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
