AL-QUDS
The Lydda Death March
This week marks 73 years since the single largest mass expulsion of Palestinians took place during the first Arab-Israeli War. Known as the Lydda Death March, Israeli troops attacked, murdered and pillaged the people and property of Lydda and surrounding areas and forcing tens of thousands of men, women and children to march east, never to return.
By the summer of 1948, the Arab-Israeli War had entered a new phase in which Israel was now up against neighbouring Arab armies. The first and foremost being the Transjordan Arab Legion which was deployed in Jerusalem and east of Jewish towns on the coastal plain. On 4 July 1948, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, approved Operation Larlar, an acronym for Lydda, Ramle, Latrun and Ramallah. The military plan aimed to open a broad corridor to Jerusalem, which was under threat of being severed from the Jewish state. The first phase, Operation Dani, aimed to take the cities of Lydda and Ramle.
Lydda, located along the route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, was an Arab city with a population of around 20,000 inhabitants (Kramer, 2014). By July, the population had significantly increased due to an influx of refugees from neighbouring villages that had been captured by Israeli forces. Approximately 125 soldiers from the 5th Infantry Company of the Transjordan Arab Legion had already been deployed in the city, alongside many other locals who had been preparing for battle (Kramer, 2014).
On the night of 9-10 July, the Israeli Air Force bombed the cities of Lydda and Ramle which caused panic and flight among the Palestinian population, mostly from Ramle. On 11 July, in a psychological warfare effort, the Israeli Air Force dropped leaflets over both cities stating:
“You have no chance of receiving help. We intend to conquer the towns. We have no intention of harming persons or property. [But] whoever attempts to oppose us-will die. He who prefers to live must surrender (Morris, 1986).”
On the same day, Israel’s 89th Battalion, under the command of Moshe Dayan, moved into Lydda. According to Morris (2004), the troops drove through the city from east to west, machine-gunning anything that moved; they also fired at militia posts along the Lydda-Ramle road until they reached the train station in Ramle. When the troops reached the police stations in Lydda, they were met with heavy fire from the Arab Legion which made them withdraw (Kadish and Sela, 2005). Kenneth Bilby, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, was in the city at the time and wrote in his book:
“[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 and resulted in the death of hundreds of Palestinians, ‘perhaps as many as 200’, according to Morris (2004). While Israeli troops suffered 21 casualties and 6 deaths. Units of the 3rd Battalion of the Yiftah Brigade entered parts of the city during the evening of July 11. These units consisted of 300 foot soldiers who were under the command of Mula Cohen (Friedman, 2014). An Arab Legion platoon and several dozen locals managed to hold out in the town’s police fort, refusing to listen to their repeated calls to surrender. Within hours, the soldiers were in control of the city centre and ordered the population to report to either the Great Mosque or the Church of St. George (Kramer, 2014). Soon Palestinian civilians became confined in both places of worship. Most of the city had to be taken yet there were only about 300 Israeli soldiers present.
On the following day, 12 July, two or three armoured vehicles of the Arab Legion entered Lydda and opened fire on Jewish forces. Arab Legion forces that were already there and other local fighters launched a counter-attack. After intense fire, the Jewish forces maintained their hold on part of the city centre. During this attack, 250 Palestinians were killed (Shavit, 2013). Overnight, ‘all but one injured [Arab Legion] fighter in the police station had abandoned the city’, thus ending the possibility of an Arab counterattack (Friedman, 2014).
When the news reached the headquarters of Operation Larlar, the military commander, General Yigal Allon, asked David Ben-Gurion what to do with the Palestinians. According to Shavit (2013), Ben-Gurion waved his hand: Deport them. Hours later, the operations officer, Yitzhak Rabin, signed and issued a written order to the Yiftah Brigade stating: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age’ (Morris, 1987). Rabin wrote in his memoirs (which were initially censored, though the original version was later leaked):
“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 (Kurzman, 1998).”
The next day, an agreement was made between Shmarya Guttman, the newly appointed military governor of Lydda, and local Arab notables which was that the civilian population would depart from Lydda and move eastward. By nightfall, an estimated 35,000 Palestinian Arabs had made their way to the east, emptying the city (Shavit, 2013). They were made to walk for miles during a summer heatwave while carrying their children and some possessions in carts pulled by animals or on their backs. According to Shmarya Guttman, warning shots were occasionally fired and some of the refugees were stripped of their valuables en route by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints (Morris, 2004). During the march, several refugees died from dehydration, starvation (especially as many were fasting due to Ramadan), heat and exhaustion. Reports regarding how many Palestinians died vary. Nimr al Khatib gave a figure of 335 (Morris, 2004), while Benny Morris (2003) wrote that it was a ‘handful and perhaps dozens.’
While the Arabs continued to march east under the blazing sun, the Israelis plundered their homes and villages. Some soldiers even set up roadblocks and searched and robbed refugees of their money, jewellery and other precious family heirlooms. After a three day march, the refugees were picked up by the Arab Legion and driven to Ramallah. They arrived deprived of money, property, food and water and represented a health risk to themselves and those around them. Ari Shavit (2013) wrote that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arabs ‘were [a] crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state.’
“The expulsion of the Arab populations of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948 and accounted for a full one-tenth of the Arab exodus from Palestine; it was the largest operation of its kind in the first Israeli-Arab war.”
Today, denial dominates the conversation, if there is any at all, about the crimes committed by the State of Israel. But the survivors of Lydda and all the other atrocities of the Catastrophe will never forget and the horrors of the past fuel the fire of Palestinian resistance to this very day.
Bibliography
Bilby, K.W. (1950). New Star in Near East. New York: Doubleday.
Friedman, N. (2014). ‘What primary sources tell us about Lydda 1948.’ [online]. The Jerusalem Post. Available at: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/what-primary-sources-tell-us-about-lydda-1948-341696
Kadish, A. and Sela, A. (2005). ‘Myths and historiography of the 1948 Palestine War revisited: the case of Lydda’, The Middle East Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4
Kramer, M. (2014). ‘What Happened at Lydda.’ [online]. Mosaic. Available at: https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/uncategorized/2014/07/what-happened-at-lydda/
Kurzman, D. (1998). Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Morris, B. (1986). ‘Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 82-109.
Morris, B. (1987). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morris, B. (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shavit, A. (2013). ‘Lydda, 1948.’ [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/lydda-1948
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