Utilisateur:Ceedjee/Exode palestinien de Lydda et Ramle

Rooftop views of Ramla (left) and Lydda around 1925

The exodus from Lydda and Ramla, also known as the Lydda Death March, took place in July 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when 50,000–70,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the cities and 25 nearby villages, as Israeli troops moved in. The expulsions—the orders for which were signed by Yitzhak Rabin and issued by David Ben-Gurion or Yigal Allon—averted a long-term Arab threat to Tel Aviv, thwarted an Arab Legion advance by clogging the roads with refugees, and caused demoralization in other Arab cities, in the view of the Israeli army.

Ramla's residents were mostly bussed to al-Qubab, from where they walked to Arab Legion lines in Latrun and Salbit. The people of Lydda had no transport: they walked six kilometers (four miles) to Beit Nabala, then 11 kilometers (seven miles) to Barfiliya, in temperatures of 30–35 °C (86–95 °F), carrying whatever possessions they could take with them. From there, the Arab Legion helped most of them reach a refugee camp in Ramallah some 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.

Around 290–450 Palestinians and 9–10 Israeli soldiers were killed during the battle to take Lydda, and in violence that followed. The death toll in Ramla is unknown but presumed much lower because the city surrendered immediately. The number of refugees who died during the march is also unknown: figures range from "a handful, and perhaps dozens," to 355, primarily from exhaustion and dehydration, though eyewitnesses also said refugees were killed for refusing to hand over their valuables to Israeli soldiers.

The expulsions accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab exodus from Palestine, an event commemorated in the Arab world as al-Nakba (lit. "the catastrophe").

Background to the conflict

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Palestine's territories held by Israeli and Arab armies on July 9, 1948 before the Ten Days campaign

On November 30, 1947, after 30 years of conflict between Jews and Arabs in British-ruled Palestine, the 1947 United Nations voted to support a partition plan for Palestine, dividing the area into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The plan was rejected by the Arabs. That marked the beginning of the 1948 War between Arabs and Jews, known in the Arab world as "the First Palestine War"; by Palestinian Arabs as "the Disaster" (al-Nakba); and by the Israelis as the War of Independence or War of Liberation.

In a first phase in early 1948, while the country remained under British rule, civil war broke out between Palestine's Jewish and Arab communities, largely guerrilla warfare mixed with acts of terrorism. It resulted in the collapse of Palestinian society and a massive exodus of its population. On the other side, the 100,000 Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem were isolated from the remainder of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine.

On May 14, 1948, the last day of the British Mandate of Palestine, the State of Israel declared its independence. Four of the neighboring Arab states opposed to the partition plan—Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Transjordan —immediately invaded Palestine. After a month of fighting, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) remained undefeated. Exhausted and depleted by heavy casualties, the forces on both sides agreed to a four-week truce.

The protagonists did not take equal advantage of the truce. Although they were all under an arms embargo, the Israelis managed to obtain heavy weapons from the Eastern bloc and massively reinforced their army. The day before the end of the first truce, the Egyptians launched an offensive, hoping to catch the IDF off guard, and on July 9, Israel launched three offensives, one of which was Operation Danny in the area of Lydda and Ramla.

Situation of Lydda and Ramla

Strategic importance

Lydda and Ramla area on July 9, 1948 before the Israeli invasion

Lydda's old city

Lydda dates back to the 6000 BCE, making it one of the oldest cities in Palestine. Ramla, three kilometers away, was founded in the 8th century CE and become the provincial capital of Jund Filastin.

The cities were strategically important, then and later, 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 lay a few kilometers south-west of Lydda at Sarafand, and one of the largest British depots was seven kilometers north-east of Lydda at Bayt Nabala. Palestine's main airport lay just to the north of Lydda, 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.

There had been attacks on Lydda and Ramla before July 1948. Arab militia had been attacking Jewish traffic on roads near the cities. The Haganah had launched a retaliatory strike on December 10, 1947, killing two guards in a parking lot in Ramla, and destroying 15 empty Arab vehicles. On February 18, 1948, the Irgun had detonated a bomb in Ramla's market, killing seven and injuring 24. Also in February, the Irgun had killed nine Arab men and one woman in Abu al-Fadl, near Ramla. There were further Israeli ground attacks on Ramla on the nights of May 21–22 and 24–25, and on May 30, the IDF bombed both towns, killing three and injuring 11.

As a result of the attacks, and because the electricity and water supplies kept failing and there was a shortage of fuel, Arab morale fell, leading to a mass flight of women, children, and the elderly from Ramla. Arab militiamen on the city's outskirts tried to prevent young men from leaving.

Residents and refugees

An aerial view of Lydda, 1932.

The presence of so many refugees in the towns did not help morale. In July 1948, there were altogether 50,000-70,000 inhabitants in both towns, around 20,000 of whom had recently arrived from Jaffa and elsewhere. Refugees had made their way to Lydda and Ramla because they lay outside the Jewish state proposed by the UN, and because King Abdullah's troops were there, implying that the towns were under his protection.

The presence of the refugees caused chaos: most had neither money nor food, and would make foraging raids outside the towns to gather wheat and vegetables, risking IDF attacks. Spiro Munayyer, who worked in Lydda at the telephone exchange, and who became a paramedic, wrote:

Life in the city became untenable. The alleys and streets were teeming with people and strewn with rubbish; although the city employed additional sanitation crews, the streets were so clogged with people that the workers were unable to perform their jobs.

Israel's attitude toward the cities

Ramla in the early 20th century

Israel's Kiryati Brigade, responsible for protecting Tel Aviv, reported to the IDF in May that the Arab Legion had a substantial force in the Lydda-Ramla area. Anita Shapira writes that the faulty intelligence suggested the Arabs had 2,000 soldiers based there, supported by 20 armored cars and 1,500 irregulars, but she argues that the reports were exaggerated. Morris writes that there were only around 120-150 Arab Legion soldiers in Lydda and Ramla together, bolstered by around 1,500-2,000 local residents who had been trained and armed, according to the IDF. [

Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had developed what Morris calls an obsession with the fate of Lydda and Ramla, seeing them as threats not only to Tel Aviv, but also to Jerusalem. He repeatedly wrote in his diary that they had to be "destroyed"; on June 16, he told the Cabinet of the need to remove these "two thorns":

We haven't succeeded in Latrun, and there remain the two thorns: Lod [Lydda] and Ramla. This is a serious flaw in our current status. If the war resumes, we won't destroy the Egyptian or Syrian nations, but if we fail and fall, they'll destroy us; and this is why we can't let them return to the places they desert."

Six lines are deleted from the minutes of the Cabinet meeting at this point.

Israel subsequently launched "Operation Danny", the aim of which was to destroy and capture Arab forces in the Lydda-Ramla-Latrun-Ramallah area, and to bring relief to Jerusalem and the Tel-Aviv–Jerusalem road. On July 7, the IDF appointed Yigal Allon as the operation's commanding officer, with Yitzhak Rabin, then commander of the Harel Brigade, as his operations officer. The operation was carried out over a ten-day period between July 9, 1948, the end of the first truce in the Arab-Israeli war, and July 18, the start of the second truce. The period is known in Israeli historiography as the Ten Days.

Based on the faulty intelligence reports, the IDF assembled an enormous force for its attacks on the towns, its largest until that point, consisting of 8,000-9,000 men. There were two Palmach brigades—Harel and Yiftah—which meant five battalions in all; the Eighth Armored Brigade's 82nd and 89th Battalions; and several battalions of Kiryati and Alexandroni infantrymen, including the Kiryati's 44th Battalion. They also had thirty artillery pieces. The Eighth Armored Brigade had a high proportion of World War II veterans from the U.S., Britain, France, and South Africa, volunteering under the Mahal program and acting under the order of Yitzhak Sadeh, founder of the Palmach.

Lydda's defenses

Although several Palestinian towns had falled since April—Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Acre, and Baysan—Lydda and Ramla had managed to hold out. Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that Lydda's military preparations were unique among Palestinian towns and villages. Because of the fear of Israeli invasion, its National Committee, an emergency body, assumed civic and military powers. It mobilized resources, acquired arms, conducted training, constructed trenches and other obstacles, requisitioned vehicles, and assembled armoured cars complete with machine guns. It organized local medical services, trained paramedics, and procured ambulances. By March-April 1948 the city had become a center for arms supply and military coordination for surrounding towns and villages, such as Jaffa.

Although the influx of refugees had placed an additional burden on the town, the National Committee incorporated the arrivals into their training program, and made them part of its militia.

By the time of the Israeli invasion, according to Kadish and Sela, the local militia in Lydda numbered 1,000 men, who were equipped with rifles, submachine guns, 15 machine guns, five heavy machine guns, 25 anti-tank launchers, 6–7 light field-guns and 2–3 heavy ones, and armored cars armed with machine guns. In addition, the IDF estimated the Arab Legion force to be 200–300 men, 50 of them stationed in the two police stations. Against Kadish and Sela's account, Walid Khalidi writes that the only troops defending Lydda were 125 men from the Fifth Infantry Company of the Arab Legion, the rest of them volunteer civilian residents under the command of a retired Arab-Legion sergeant.

In addition to defending the city, 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 Arab residents leaving their cities under threat of Israeli invasion was common at the time, in part because of a deep fear of atrocities, particularly rape of the women, and in part because of what they call the "unthinkable idea" of living 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.

Transjordan and Arab Legion involvement

King Abdullah of Jordan (1882–1951) sent his troops into Lydda to help defend it. He later became the target of Palestinian anger over the loss of the city.

In addition to the local militia, 200–300 Bedouin volunteers from Transjordan arrived in Lydda and Ramla in April, after being recruited by the Arab Legion (al-Jaysh al-Arabī), Transjordan's army. At the beginning of June, a company-sized force of the Arab Legion set itself up in the old British police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramla road, with armoured cars and other weapons. The Arab Legion forces took their orders from the Jordanian 4th Battalion's headquarters in Latrun's sector. Kadish and Sela write that the local forces also reportedly received arms and ammunition from the Egyptian Army at the beginning of June.

In addition to the external military input, an Arab Legion officer was appointed military governor of Lydda and Ramla, responsible for civil, as well as military, affairs. Kadish and Sela write that this signaled the desire of King Abdullah of Transjordan to stake a claim in those parts of the British Mandate of Palestine allotted by the UN to an Arab-Palestinian state. Abdullah was also concerned about an Arab shortage of ammunition and money, which motivated him to ensure that the first truce in the Arab-Israeli war was observed, making control of the militia in Lydda an imperative.

According to Kadish and Sela, the varying levels of authority in Lydda, with the Arab Legion reporting not to the Arab Legion governor, but to its 4th Battalion headquarters, and the lack of effective cooperation between the Legion's forces and the local militia, contributed to the military confusion in the town when Israel invaded it on July 11.

John Bagot Glubb, the British soldier who led the Arab Legion, wrote in his memoirs in 1957 that he made it clear to King Abdullah and the Jordanian prime minister, Tawfik Abu al-Huda, before the end of the British Mandate on May 15, that the Legion could not hold Lydda and Ramla, because its troops were already overstretched. As a result, he wrote, Abdullah ordered the Legion to assume a defensive position only, and the Legionnaires already in Lydda withdrew during the night of July 11–12.

Fall of the cities

July 9–10: Air attacks on the towns

The strategically important airport at Lydda following its capture by the IDF in July 1948

The bombing and shelling of the cities began on the night of July 9-10, and continued the next night, designed to induce panic and flight, and it seemed to work in Ramla: at 11:30 hours on the morning of July 10, Operation Danny headquarters (Danny HQ) told the IDF that there was a "general and serious flight from Ramla," advising that, "[t]here is great value in continuing the bombing." 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. That day, the IDF took control of Lydda airport, now Ben-Gurion International Airport, as well as Wilhelma, a former Templer colony nearby.

Spiro Munayyer writes in the Journal of Palestine Studies that a sergeant with the British army, a Scotsman who was helping to defend Lydda, told him — based only on an educated hunch — that the city would fall at noon the next day.

July 11: Moshe Dayan raid on Lydda

Israeli commander Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) was reported to have led a jeep commando column into Lydda "blasting at everything that moved."

During the late afternoon of July 11, the 89th (armored) Battalion, led by Lt. Col. Moshe Dayan, moved into Lydda, driving from east to west, because Dayan believed the locals were not expecting an attack from the east. He had gathered some former Lehi veterans, and had organized a column of jeeps headed by a "terrible tiger", an armored vehicle with a cannon. They launched the attack in daylight, fully exposed and using enormous firepower, reportedly spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved, before proceeding to Ramla.

Kenneth Bilby, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune who was in the city at the time, wrote, "Moshe Dayan led a jeep commando column into the town ... 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."

Kadish and Sela write that Dayan's troops faced heavy fire from the Arab Legion troops in the police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramla road.

One of Dayan's solders, "Gideon", spoke of his ambivalence about the raid:

[My] jeep made the turn and here at the ... entrance to the house opposite stands an Arab girl, stands and screams with eyes filled with fear and dread. She is all torn and dripping blood — she is certainly wounded. Around her on the ground lie the corpses of her family. Still quivering, death has not yet redeemed them from their pain. Next to her is a bundle of rags — her mother, hand outstretched trying to draw her into the house. And the girl understands nothing ... Did I fire at her? ... But why these thoughts, for we are in the midst of a battle, in the midst of conquest of the town. The enemy is at every corner. Everyone is an enemy. Kill! Destroy! Murder! Otherwise you will be murdered and will not conquer the town. What [feeling] did this lone girl stir within you? Continue to shoot! Move forward! ... Where does this desire to murder come from? What, because your friend ... was killed or wounded, you have lost your humanity and you kill and destroy? Yes! ... I kill every one who belongs to the enemy camp: man, woman, old person, child. And I am not deterred.

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Haaretz (top) and Davar, July 12: "Lod Conquered By IDF Forces," and "Lod Surrendered Last Night To Israel Defense Forces."

The raid lasted 47 minutes, leaving dozens of Arabs dead: up to 200, according to Morris; 40, according to the IDF's Third Battalion intelligence, though they may have meant 40 killed by them specifically; 100-150, according to Dayan's 89th Battalion. Six died and 21 were wounded on the Israeli side. The newspapers the next day said 200 had died.

Kadish and Sela write that the high casualty rate among civilians can be explained by confusion over who Dayan's troops were. They write that the IDF were wearing keffiyehs, a common practice, and were led by an armored car just seized from the Arab Legion. In addition, Lydda's southern entrance was "awash," as Dayan reported, with Arab fighters, and grenades were being thrown from all directions. In the confusion, Kadish and Sela argue, residents may have believed the Israeli attack was over and the Arab Legion had arrived to help, only to encounter Dayan's forces shooting at everything as they ran from their homes.

On the same day, the Israeli air force dropped leaflets onto the towns telling residents to surrender if they wanted to live. That evening, 300-400 soldiers from the Yiftah Brigade's Third Battalion entered Lydda. Not long afterwards, the Arab Legion forces on the Lydda-Ramla road withdrew, though the Arab soldiers in the police station remained.

Shapira writes that the initial raid on the city was launched entirely on Dayan's initiative, without even warning Sadeh, the brigade commander. It was illustrative of Dayan's lack of discipline, and contributed significantly to the legend that grew around him, though Shapira argues that it was actually the Yiftah Brigade who took the city, "advancing cautiously, step by step, without any of the glory of Dayan's trail-blazing action".

July 12: Alleged "uprising" and "massacre"

At dawn on July 12, Palmach troops combed the old town in Lydda and occupied a school that the local militia had been using.

Community leaders in Lydda and Ramla were advised to surrender and instruct residents to hand over their weapons. Ramla residents were told to go to Barriya, and people in Lydda to Jimzo, and to hold a white flag aloft. Khalil Wazir, who later joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, and became known as Abu Jihad, was 12 years old when Israeli troops moved into Ramla on July 12:

Abu Jihad (1935-1988) of the PLO was one of those expelled from Ramla when he was 12 years old.

I will never forget that day. 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. That they had surrounded the town and were about to enter it. ... And then my mother and my sisters and I went to the church. 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. ... Then they put us in the bus ... [After the bus], we spent four days walking."

Isma'in Nakhas, Haret Haji, Hussam al Khairi, and Imada Khouri signed the surrender documents on behalf of Ramla on the morning on July 12. The Kiryati Brigade's 42nd Battalion mortared the city, then entered it, imposing a curfew.

The Church of Saint George and the Great Mosque where thousands of detainees were held.

No formal surrender was announced in Lydda, though people gathered in the streets waving white flags after the 8 am curfew had ended. According to a contemporaneous, unsigned 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. Kadish and Sela write that around 4,000 men were detained in the Great Mosque.

Unexpected shooting

On July 12, at 11:30 hours, two or three Arab Legion armoured cars entered the city, led by Lt. Hamadallah al-Abdullah from the Jordanian 1st Brigade in Bet Naballah. Spiro Munayyer writes that the Jordanians were trying to rescue the Arab Legion troops by now besieged in the police station, and that they withdrew soon after.

Gelber writes that the legionnaires in the police station were panicking, and that their frantic messages to Ramallah had been filling the air: "Have you no God in your hearts? Don't you feel any compassion? Hasten aid!"

The Arab Legion armored cars opened fire on the Palmach soldiers who were combing the old city. The exchange of gunfire led some townspeople to believe the Legion had arrived to defend them, and those still armed started to engage in sniper fire against the Israelis. An Israeli patrol near the Dahmash Mosque was attacked. Kadish and Sela write that the Palmach came under heavy fire from "thousands of weapons from every house, roof and window," quoting the Third Battalion's commander, Moshe Kelman. Morris argues that this is "nonsense," and that only a few dozen townspeople took part in what turned out to be a brief firefight.

Brief firefight or not, the Israeli soldiers were unnerved by it: there were only 300-400 of them to quell tens of thousands, and they had been under the impression the locals had surrendered, albeit informally.

Israeli response

Israeli troops in Lydda or Ramla, July 1948

In response, Moshe Kalman ordered troops to shoot at "any clear target," and at anyone "seen on the streets." Kadish and Sela write that there was no chance of immediate reinforcements, and no clear indication of where the attacks were emanating from. Kelman said he had no choice: "it is a question of either them or us."

Spiro Munayyer writes that, at noon, there was suddenly a "crescendo of bullets and explosions in all parts of the city"; people started "running helter-skelter, screaming with fear." Residents ran out of their homes, fearing that a massacre was in progress, and were shot. Israeli soldiers threw grenades into houses they suspected snipers were hiding in. At 13:15 hours, Yiftah HQ told Danny HQ: "Battles have erupted in Lydda. We have hit an armoured car with a two-pounder [gun] and killed many Arabs. There are still exchanges of fire in the town. We have taken many wounded.

The shooting lasted until 13:30 hours. Morris writes that both Israeli and Arab historians describe the events as an "uprising," for different reasons, but he argues that the ratio of Arab to Israeli casualties—250–426 Arab dead against 3–4 Israelis—is not consistent with using the words "battle" or "uprising".

The Palmach reported around 250 Arabs killed and an unknown number wounded. Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref places the Palestinian death toll at 426, 179 of whom were killed in the mosque (see below). Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who describes the day as an "uprising," writes that 1,700 were killed, which Morris regards as an exaggeration. Kadish and Sela report Arab estimates, produced by unidentified sources sometime after the events, ranging from 176 to 3,000 combatants and civilians. An Arab intelligence report said, "the Jews massacred close to 3000."

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George Habash (1926-2008), a medical student who later founded the PFLP, dug his sister's grave with his hands.

There is no disagreement among historians and eyewitnesses that the killing appeared indiscriminate. Yoav Gelber describes it as the bloodiest massacre of the war; Walid Khalidi, "an orgy of indiscriminate killing," and Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela, "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed."

George Habash, who later founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was born in Lydda to a Greek Orthodox family. He was a second-year medical student at the time of the invasion, and helped out in Lydda's clinic treating the injured. On his way through the town, he saw: "terrible sights: Dozens of bodies lay in pools of blood, old and young had been shot. Among the dead, I recognized one elderly man, a neighbor who had a small falafel shop and who had never carried a gun." Amos Kenan, who served with the IDF in Lydda, writes that Habash buried his own sister in the backyard of her home. She had fallen ill and there were no medical supplies, and the curfew made burial in the cemetery impossible, so Habash dug her grave with his hands.

Mosque deaths

The Dahmash mosque just after the occupation of Lydda

Another of Lydda's great controversies concerns the deaths in the mosque on July 12, which have also come to be known as a massacre throughout the Arab world, though what happened remains unclear.

At some point during the afternoon of July 12, there was shooting in one of the mosques. Around 4,000 male Muslim detainees were being held in the Great Mosque. 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.

Spiro Munayyer writes that people sought refuge in one of the mosques when they heard the shooting in the town. Morris writes that some of the detainees tried to break out, hearing the shooting and fearing they were about to be killed. It is agreed that the IDF threw grenades and fired bazooka rockets into a mosque compound. Munayyer said his fellow paramedics told him they had carried out 93 bodies.

Kadish and Sela write that there was no military action taken against the Great Mosque, where the 4,000 detainees were being held; they write that Morris does not distinguish between the Great Mosque and the smaller mosque, the Dahmash Mosque. It was in the smaller mosque that a fire fight erupted, they say, between armed militiamen who had taken refuge there and Israeli soldiers outside. In response, the Israelis fired an anti-tank PIAT shell at a group of 50-60 armed men who were barricaded inside, then stormed the building, killing 30 militiamen. Israeli soldiers recalled that some women, children, and elderly men were also killed.

Nimr al-Khatib writes that all those within the small mosque were killed. An eyewitness published a memoir in 1998 saying he had removed 95 bodies from the Dahmash Mosque. Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref writes that 176 were killed in the mosque.

Fayeq Abu Mana, who was 20 years old at the time, said: "They said to go to the mosque and take the corpses out from there. How take them out? The hands of the dead were very swollen. We couldn't lift the corpses by hand, we brought bags and put the corpses on the bags and we lifted them onto a truck. We gathered everyone in the cemetery. Among them was one woman and two children. They said burn. We burned everyone."

July 13 onwards

The ruins of the city after the assault

Corpses 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 July 12, but the new governor of the town, from the Israeli's Kiryati Brigade, issued an order to have the visit delayed. It was rescheduled for 15:00 hours on July 14; Danny HQ ordered the Kiryati 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 July 15, Dr. Klaus Dreyer (Ya'akov Dror) of the IDF Medical Corps complained that there were still unburied corpses in Lydda and in the fields around it, which constituted a health hazard and a "moral and aesthetic issue." He asked IDF General Staff/Operations to commandeer trucks, and "some tens of [Arab] civilians from the towns themselves," to fix the problem. Fayeq Abu Mana, who took part in the removal of bodies, told Zochrot: "They were buried not far from here, near the main road. They buried them in a pit, I mean a jama’a [mass grave], everyone."

Allegations of rape

There were allegations that Israeli soldiers had raped Palestinian women. Ben-Gurion referred to the allegations in his diary entry for July 15, 1948: "The bitter question has arisen regarding acts of robbery and rape [o'nes ("אונס")] in the conquered towns ... Soldiers from all the battalions robbed and stole."

Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling (1901-1964) said of an allegation of rape in Ramla that he could forgive rape but not robbery.

Israeli writer Amos Kenan, who served in 1948 in Lydda as a platoon commander in the 82nd Battalion, alludes to rape in an article he wrote about his time there: "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 knows of only one woman who complained. A court-martial was arranged, but in court, the accused ran the back of his hand across his throat, and the woman decided not to proceed.

Fayeq Abu Mana, who lived in Lydda during the invasion, told a group of people at a Zochrot lecture: "[W]e saw six soldiers with a baby. They gave her to us. A month and a half old. Her mother fled. The six had raped her. She's a very young woman so she ran away. She didn't want to see, not her daughter and not anything. At the headquarters they told us to take care of the baby and maybe we would find the mother or father. We took her in a carriage and we found the mother downstairs. She said, 'They raped me and I can't do anything.' She took the girl."

The rape allegations were given little consideration by the Israeli government. Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling told the Cabinet on July 21: "It has been said that there were cases of rape in Ramla. I could forgive rape, but I will not forgive other acts, which appear to me much graver. When a town is entered and rings are forcibly removed from the fingers and jewellery from necks—that is a very grave matter."

Looting of the cities

The fall of the cities was followed by their looting. Bechor Sheetrit said he watched it for himself. From Lydda alone, he said, the army removed 1,800 truckloads of property.Fouzi El-Asmar, a child at the time, was able to sneak back into Lydda after being expelled:

I was shocked on this visit by the sight of this large city completely deserted, the houses open, the shops broken into and the remaining merchandise rotting. We were afraid of the trucks which were working every day without a break. The men who had come with the trucks would go into house after house and take out any article of value such as beds, mattresses, cupboards, kitchenware, glassware, couches, draperies and other such effects.

Dov Shafrir was appointed Custodian of Absentee Property two days after the cities fell, but the staff were unexperienced and unable to control the situation. In a report Shafrir later wrote that, "[t]he moral sense of the few who were attacked by the many and managed to survive, justified the looting of the enemy's property. Passions of revenge and temptation overcame great numbers of people".

Attitude of the troops

Morris writes that the shootings and looting of the town — described by the Israelis as "commandeering enemy property" — undermined the morale of the Israeli Third Battalion to the point where they had to be withdrawn during the night of July 13-14, and sent for a day to Ben Shemen for kinus heshbon nefesh, a conference to encourage soul-searching. One of the Third Brigade commanders, Lt. Col. Schmuel "Mula" Cohen, wrote of Lydda that, "the cruelty of the war here reached its zenith," and that the conquest of a city regarded as a key enemy base, "gave rise to vengeful urges" among Israeli troops.

Stuart Cohen writes that central control over the Jewish fighters was still 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. Allegations of indiscriminate killing, rape, expulsions, and looting were rife, he writes, which outraged sections of the Israeli government, but criminal convictions were rare. Cohen adds that, despite the alleged war crimes, the morality of the majority of IDF troops ensured that they functioned, on the whole, with decency and civility.

Some soldiers refused to take part in the events at Lydda. Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his memoirs that:

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.

Expulsions

Benny Morris writes that David Ben-Gurion (above, 1886–1973) said different things to different people about expulsion. Before the invasion of Lydda, he warned Israeli troops that there should be no uprooting of Arab residents without explicit orders. He was later accused by Yitzhak Rabin of having issued the expulsion order himself.

Cabinet guidelines

On June 14, the Israeli government established the Committee for Abandoned Property, whose mandate included the treatment of Arabs and their property, and who would decide about the transfer of Arabs from one place to another. On June 16, the government decided that Arabs who fled from their towns would not be allowed to return.

Just before the start of Operation Danny, on July 4, the Committee for Abandoned Property issued a warning to the IDF, a warning Morris attributes to Ben-Gurion himself:

«	Outside the time of the actual fighting, it is forbidden to destroy, burn or demolish Arab cities and villages, to expel Arab inhabitants from villages, neighbourhoods and cities, and to uproot inhabitants from their places without special permission or explicit order from the Defence Minister in each specific case. Anyone violating this order will be put on trial.	»

Kadish and Sela write that local and foreign Arab fighters were to be treated as POWs, and the Red Cross was to be given their names. Property was not to be confiscated without clear instructions. Men of military age who were not fighters could be taken as POWs or removed to the border of Arab-held territories. Arabs who wished to remain in the towns should be allowed to do so.

July 12 meeting: Decision to expel

Yigael Yadin (1917–1984), chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, also attended the July 12 meeting

David Ben-Gurion's direct role in the Lydda expulsions remains unclear. Benny Morris argues that Ben-Gurion and the IDF generals acted behind the Cabinet's back and without its authorization, and in Ben-Gurion's case subsequently deceived it.

Despite the establishment of the Committee for Abandoned Property, Morris writes that Ben-Gurion and the IDF were left largely to their own devices to decide how Arab residents were to be treated. As a result, he argues, 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.

The resistance in Lydda appears to have sealed the townpeople's fate, according to Morris. On July 12, as the shooting in the city continued, a meeting was held at Operation Danny headquarters, attended by David Ben-Gurion; Generals Yigael Yadin and Zvi Ayalon of the IDF; and Yisrael Galili, formerly of the Haganah National Staff. 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

At one point during the July 12 meeting, Ben-Gurion, Allon, and Rabin left the room. Allon asked what was to be done with the Arab population. Ben-Gurion is reported by Yitzhak Rabin to have waved his hand and said, "garesh otam" — "expel them."

An Israeli censorship board composed of five Cabinet members, headed by Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, removed Rabin's claim about Ben-Gurion from Rabin's memoirs, published in 1979. Peretz Kidron, an Israeli journalist who translated the memoirs from Hebrew to English, passed the censored excerpt to The New York Times, which published it on October 23, 1979:

Not even Ben-Gurion could offer any solution, and during the discussions at operational headquarters, he remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave Lod's hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route to Yiftah [another brigade], which was advancing eastward.

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question: What is to be done with the population? B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said, "Drive them out!"

Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot toward 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.

"Driving out" is a terms with a harsh ring. 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.

Arguments against Rabin's account

Eliezer Kaplan, Israel's finance minister, said Ben-Gurion ordered inhabitants to be "encouraged" to leave, but not expelled.

Yigal Allon denied Rabin's version of events in the same New York Times article; he said that he (Allon) gave no order to expel, and neither requested nor received permission from Ben-Gurion to do so. "There was no expulsion order," he said, "but rather a provoked exodus." He told Kol Yisrael radio that the Arab Legion had given an order to evacuate the towns.

Arieh Itzchaki, former director of the IDF General Staff/History Branch archive, writes that Ben-Gurion made only the hand gesture, but did not actually say "expel them." It was Allon and Rabin who made the decision to go ahead with the expulsions, according to Itzchaki.

Historian Yoav Gelber also takes issue with Rabin's account. Ben-Gurion was known, he writes, for clearly formulating his policies, not for announcing them with a wave of his hand. Gelber points out there is no record of any consultation where a deliberate expulsion was discussed before battles were resumed and cites Ben-Gurion's apparent agreement with Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit and Moshe Sharett (see below) not to force the expulsion of residents, as evidence that expulsion was not his intention, rather than as evidence of Ben-Gurion's duplicity, as Benny Morris implies.

Gelber attributes the expulsions to Yigal Allon, known for his "scorched earth policy": wherever Allon was in charge of Israeli troops, Gelber writes, no Palestinians remained. Gelber argues that Allon had ignored Ben-Gurion on several occasions, and did not require his permission to take advantage of the situation in Lydda. By the end of the Ten Days campaign, the IDF had become harsh and unforgiving, according to Gelber. They blamed the Palestinians for everything that had happened to the Jews since the Arab states had attacked Israel on May 15, and felt the Palestinians deserved their fate.

Israeli finance minister, Eliezer Kaplan, said that Ben-Gurion told him, on July 12 or 13, that "the young male inhabitants [of Ramla and Lydda] were to be taken prisoners. The rest of the inhabitants were to be encouraged to leave the place [yesh le'oded la'azov et hamakom], but whoever stayed—Israel would have to take care of his maintenance."

Expulsion orders

At 13:30 hours on July 12, just as the shooting had stopped, Danny HQ issued the expulsion order regarding Lydda to Yiftah Brigade HQ and 8th Brigade HQ, and to Kiryati Brigade at around the same time:

«	1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed towards Beit Nabala. Yiftah [Brigade HQ] must determined the method and inform Dani HQ and 8th Brigade HQ. 2. Implement immediately.	»

A cable from Kiryati Brigade HQ to Zvi Aurback, its officer in charge of Ramla, read:

«	1. In light of the deployment of 42nd Battalion out of Ramle - you must take [over responsibility] for the defence of the town, the transfer of prisoners [to PoW camps] and the emptying of the town of its inhabitants. 2. You must continue the sorting out of the inhabitants, and send the army-age males to a prisoner of war camp. The old, women and children will be transported by vehicle to al Qubab and will be moved across the lines - [and] from there continue on foot.."	»

Sheetrit's intervention

Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit (1895–1967), Israeli minister for minority affairs, tried to stop the expulsions.

Morris writes that most of the able-bodied young men in Lydda were still being held in detention centres, including the mosques and churches. The streets were littered with bodies, and a curfew was in place. Two companies from Kiryati's 42nd Battalion were sent during the night of July 12–13 to reinforce the Third Battalion, which was reportedly shocked and demoralized by the killing.

The Israeli cabinet reportedly knew nothing about the expulsion plan, until Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, minister for minority affairs – who was responsible for the welfare of the Arab citizens – appeared unannounced in Lydda on July 12. He was allegedly shocked when he saw that troops were organizing expulsions. Kiryati brigade commander Ben-Gal told him that the IDF was about to take men of military age in Ramla prisoner, and that the rest of the men, as well as the women and children, were to be "taken beyond the border and left to their fate." The same was to happen in Lydda, Sheetrit said he was told.

Sheetrit returned to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, who later met with Ben Gurion to agree on guidelines for how the residents of Lydda and Ramla were to be treated, though Morris writes that Ben Gurion apparently failed to tell Sharett that he himself was the source of the expulsion orders. The men agreed that the townspeople should be told 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. These guidelines were passed to Operation Danny HQ at 23:30 hours on July 12:

«	1. All are free to leave, apart from those who will be detained. 2. To warn that we are not responsible for feeding those who remain. 3. Not to force women, the sick, children and the old to go/walk [lalechet: Morris adds that this word was ambiguous, and may have left troops thinking it was all right to expel these people so long as they were not made to walk]. 4. Not to touch monasteries and churches. 5. Searches without vandalism. 6. No robbery.	»

Regarding point 4, Morris notes that neither the original guidelines from Sharett and Ben Gurion, nor the summary from Operation Danny HQ, said that mosques should be left untouched along with monasteries and churches, but he adds that this may have been a simple oversight.

The guidelines convinced Sharett that he had managed to avert the expulsions. He failed to realize that, even as he was discussing the issue in Tel Aviv, they had already begun.

July 12–15: Exodus

An image of the march out of Lydda

Fichier:Women and children on the march out of Lydda, July 1948.JPG

Women and children rest during the three-day march

During the afternoon and evening of July 12, thousands of Ramla's residents began moving out of town, on foot or in trucks and buses. Arab vehicles were confiscated and the brigade's own vehicles were used to move them. Kiryati OC Ben-Gal radioed the IDF's General Staff for more vehicles on the night of July 12-13.

Morris writes that, by July 13, the wishes of the IDF and those of the residents of Ramla and Lydda had dovetailed. Over the previous three days, the townspeople had undergone aerial bombardment, raids from troops on the ground, had been told to surrender or die, 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, and killed or detained. The residents almost certainly concluded that living under Israeli rule was not sustainable. The important thing, wrote Spiro Munayyer, was to get out of the city.

On July 13, representatives of the Lydda residents asked the IDF for permission for the townspeople to leave, Morris writes, though a minority insisted they wanted to stay. Morris writes that they refused to leave while their families were being detained. A deal was reached with Shmarya Guttman of the IDF 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 detainees they were free to join their families. Town criers and soldiers walked or drove around the town instructing residents where to gather for departure.

Morris writes that Lydda residents were made to walk all the way, possibly because of the earlier sniper fire, or perhaps simply because there were no vehicles, or because the Third Battalion was unconcerned about their fate. Whatever the reason, Lydda residents had to walk 6–7 kilometers to Beit Nabala, then 10–12 kilometers to Barfiliya, along dusty roads in temperatures of 30-35C, carrying their young children and whatever possessions they were able to leave with, either in carts pulled by animals, or on their backs.

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. Before the residents had left, IDF radio traffic started calling them "refugees" (plitim). Operation Danny HQ told the IDF General Staff/Operations at noon on July 13 that "[the troops in Lydda] are busy expelling the inhabitants [oskim begeirush hatoshavim]," and told the HQs of Yiftah, Kiryati, and 8th Brigades at the same time that, "enemy resistance in Ramle and Lydda has ended. The eviction [pinui]" of the inhabitants ... has begun." At 18:15 hours that day, Danny HQ asked Yiftah Brigade: "Has the removal of the population [hotza'at ha'ochlosiah] of Lydda been completed?"

Shmarya Guttman wrote that the exodus conjured up "the memory of the exile of Israel." Soldiers moved among residents telling them, "Go to King Abdullah, go to Ramallah." Guttman said it reminded him of "after a pogrom":

A multitude of inhabitants walked one after another. Women walked burdened with packages and sacks on their heads. Mothers dragged children after them ... Occasionally, [IDF] 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."

Other villages

Walid Khalidi writes that the residents of 25 other villages conquered from July 9–13 during Operation Danny were expelled at the same time, making 80,000 people in all, the largest instance of deliberate expulsion during the 1948 war.

On July 10, Yiftah Brigade told Danny HQ: "Our forces are clearing the Innaba-Jimzu-Daniyal area, "and are torching everything that can be burned." Yiftah added a few hours later that Kharruba, Khirbet al Kumeisa had been captured, and the houses blown up. Fifty "sappers" to were to sent to "destroy" the village of Innaba. On July 11, Yiftah told Danny HQ that they were blowing up the houses in Jimzu and Daniyal ('oskot betihur hakfarim u'fitzutz habatim). Yiftah Brigade was instructed: "In all the places you have conquered you should ... destroy every house that you do not intend to garrison." Morris writes that "demolition ... presupposed depopulation." Other villages captured in the area as part of Operation Danny were Beit Safafa, al Maliha, Ein Karim, Suba, Sataf, Khirbet al Lawz, Deir Amr, Aqqur, Sara, Kasla, Ishwa, Islin, Deir Rafat, and Artuf. Most of the inhabitants had already fled; those who hadn't did so when the troops approached. Anyone remaining was expelled.

The Harel, Yiftah, 8th, and Kiriyati brigades were told on July 19, in an order signed by Yitzhak Rabin, to prevent the return of the inhabitants, "with live fire" (emphasis in the original).

Lydda Death March

Reports of how many died vary. Many of them were elderly people and young children who died from the heat and exhaustion. Morris has written that it was a "handful and perhaps dozens," and "quite a few." He attributes a figure of 335 to Nimr al Khatib, but regards it as an exaggeration. British historian Martin Gilbert writes that it was an estimated 355. Walid Khalidi gives a figure of 350, citing an estimate from Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref.

John Bagot Glubb of the Arab Legion wrote: "Perhaps 30,000 people or more, almost entirely women and children, snatched up what they could and fled from their homes across the open fields .... It was a blazing day in July in the coastal plains — the temperature about 100 degrees in the shade. It was 10 miles across open hilly country, much of it ploughed, part of it stony fallow covered with thorn bushes, to the nearest Arab village of Beit Sira. Nobody will ever know how many children died."

A Palestinian refugee camp in 1948. While the location is not indicated, the tent structures are typical of the temporary housing available to Palestinian refugees, like those from Lydda and Al-Ramla, in the wake of their displacement during the 1948 war.

The Arab Legion's Fourth Regiment reported that, "Some 30,000 women and children from among the inhabitants of Lydda, Ramla, and the area are dispersed among the hills, suffering from hunger and thirst to a degree that many of them have died." They were picked up by the Legion and driven to Ramallah.

Father Oudeh Rantisi, one of the survivors, wrote about some the deaths he witnessed along the way, such as a baby falling from his mother's arms and accidentally being crushed by a cart, as a result of the general crowding and anxiety of those trying to enter a farm to get food and water:

«	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 used to know him ... 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.	»

Another refugee, Raja e-Basailah, describes how, after making it to the Arab village of Ni'ilin, he pushed himself through the crowds for some water to take back to his mother and a close friend. 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. Because he was blind, Basailah could only hear what was happening. He recalls the exclamations of others that, "some of those who lay dead had their tongues sticking out covered with dust and down," and how someone saw, "a baby still alive on the bosom of a dead woman, apparently the mother ..."

Clogging the roads

Refugees being escorted from Ramla

The expulsions clogged the roads eastward with what Morris calls "human flotsam." He writes that IDF thinking was "simple and cogent." The IDF had just taken two major objectives and was 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. An IDF logbook of July 15 notes:

The refugees from Lydda and Ramla are causing the Arab Legion great problems. There are acute problems of housing and supplies ... In this case, the Legion is interested in giving all possible help to the refugees as the Arab public is complaining that the Legion was unforthcoming in assistance Ramle and Lydda.

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 December 12, 1948: "Many of us are losing their [human] image ... 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, who remember who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... I am appalled."

Looting of refugees

Although the Sharett-Ben Gurion guidelines specified that there was to be no robbery, numerous sources spoke of widespread looting of the refugees during the expulsions.

The Economist published a report on August 21 that year, saying that residents were not allowed to take much with them: "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."

Spiro Munayyer writes that: "The occupying soldiers had set up roadblocks on all the road leading east and were searching the refugees, particularly the women, stealing their gold jewelry from their necks, wrist and fingers and whatever was hidden in their clothes, as well as money and everything else that was precious and light enough to carry."

Aharon Cohen, director of Mapam's Arab Department, complained to General Allon months after the deportations that troops had been ordered to remove from residents every watch and piece of jewellery, and all their money, 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.

George Habash, founder of the PFLP, had been studying medicine in Beirut, but when he heard that Jaffa had fallen to the Israelis, he returned to Lydda, his hometown, to be with his family, only to find himself expelled with them. He told A. Clare Brandabur:

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, jewelry, 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."

A British teacher in Amman who investigated the condition of the refugees in late July said she had heard the same story of refugees being allowed to leave with some valuables, only to have them removed on the outskirts of the town. Some residents were so exhausted after walking three days in the heat that they had to throw away whatever possessions they were carrying just to survive, or so that they could carry their children instead.

Aftermath

In Ramallah, Amman, and elsewhere

Count Folke Bernadotte of the UN said he had never seen a more ghastly sight than the refugee camp in Ramallah.

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. United Nations official Count Folke Bernadotte, who visited the refugee camp they were sent to, said that he had never seen a more ghastly sight. Some of those expelled from Lydda and their descendants still live in the Am'ari camp two kilometers south of Ramallah.

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. 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 July 18:

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.

During a meeting in Amman on July 12-13 of the Political Committee of the Arab League, delegates — particularly from Syria and Iraq — accused Glubb or serving British, or even Jewish, interests, with his claims of troop and ammunition shortages mere excuses. Egyptian journalists accused him of handing Lydda and Ramla to the Jews. King Abdullah eventually did the same, deciding it was safer to accuse Glubb. 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.

In Lydda and Ramla

On July 14, the IDF told Ben-Gurion that "not one Arab inhabitant" remained in Lydda or Ramla. 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-Lydda said in his monthly report that 960 Palestinians were living in Ramla, 580 in Lydda, and 450 in the Lydda train station. Morris writes that Kadish, Sela, and Golan use these figures to argue that there was only a partial expulsion from the area.

Resettlement

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

The first city council as the city of Lod.

Military rule in Lod and Ramla ended in April 1949. Over the following three years, Lod was transformed, in the words of its first mayor, Pesach Lev, speaking in 1952, from "a neglected Arab town that was Judenrein to a "Hebraic city."

By March 1950, there were 8,600 Jewish and 1,300 Palestinian residents in Ramla, and 8,400 Jews and 1,000 Palestinians in Lydda.

Jews

Modèle:See Nearly 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel in 1948–51 from Europe and Arab countries. The inevitable housing crisis led the Jewish Agency, the organization in charge of receiving Jewish immigrants, or olim, to ask the Ministry of Defence in August 1948 for permission to place immigrants in Ramla. Lydda was at first excluded from the request: King Abdullah had asked for the return of both cities to the Arabs, but had a stronger case with Lydda, according to Kadish and Sela, because of the expulsions and the brutality of the fighting. The negotiations went nowhere and Lydda was added to the repopulation request.

From around August, the Israeli government allowed Jewish-Israeli farmers to begin cultivating the cities' agricultural land, roughly 59,000 dunams. In November, a survey of properties in Lydda showed there were 4,912 rooms that could house the 10,000 Jewish immigrants the government had decided to settle in the city. Approval to allow Jewish families to move into Ramla was given on November 5, the Jewish Agency deciding that 2,400 olim would be housed in Ramla over the following four months. By February 1949, 1,700 Jewish families were living there, around 6,000 people altogether. By March 1950, the two towns had a joint population of 20,000 inhabitants, about 2,300 of them Arabs. Most of the immigrants were from Europe (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania); a minority were Mitzrahi Jews from Morocco, Tunis, and Turkey.

New arrivals were assigned houses or apartments, and they could buy furniture, which had been taken from the Arabs, from the Custodian for Absentees' Property. Apart from the housing shortage, one of the reasons immigrants were placed in Arab homes was to help prevent the former residents from trying to reclaim them.

Some factories were also turned over to immigrants, and 600 shops in Ramla had been re-distributed by the end of 1949. The Custodian reported in March 1950 that there were 478 stores and 4,912 apartment rooms in Lydda, 3,600 of which were occupied; and 507 stores and 4,349 apartment rooms in Ramla, 2,980 of which were occupied. Jewish families were also occasionally placed in houses that belonged to Arabs still living in the city, but who were not allowed to live in their homes.

By 1951, the housing shortage was such that the government created transit camps for Jewish immigrants, called ma'abarot. Three were constructed near Ramla and Lydda, housing 2,000 families. By 1969, 50 percent of the Jewish immigrants were from North Africa; 18 percent from other Middle Eastern countries, and 24 percent from Europe. The addition of so many immigrants brought problems of unemployment, poverty, racism, and a high housing density, and there were complaints about ethnic groups practicing their own rituals and culture, rather than assimilating.

Arabs

Modèle:See The Arabs who had been allowed to remain in the cities were kept in special fenced areas, which they themselves called ghettos. Alnakib Abd Al Hamid, who lived inside one of them, told Zochrot: "Lots of Jews demonstrated against the use of the word ghetto... They demonstrated against us being put in the ghetto ... The demonstrations were against the name ghetto but also against the act."

The military administrator of the Ramla-Lod area split the region into three zones where Palestinians lived—Ramla, Lod, and Rakevet (a neighborhood in Lod established by the British for rail workers)—and declared the Arab areas within them "closed." In Lod, the Palestinian area was near the main mosque and the St. George Church. A curfew was declared, which lasted from the evening until the next morning. Each closed zone was run by a committee of three to five members.

According to the IDF, a small number of Palestinians lived in their own homes, but most lived in houses that had belonged to other expelled people. Aaraf Muharaba, a member of Lod's municipal council in 2003, told a Zochrot meeting:

What's interesting is that people who were in this ghetto ... wanted to return to their private houses, but the authorities didn't let them do so. In most cases they gave them alternate houses but in an obsessive way they didn’t let them return to their own homes. There was a clear policy not to permit people to return to their houses in order to determine the principle of return to one house. And thus the absurd situation was created of present absentees, because the people were residents of the city but they didn’t live in their own houses. Ownership of the house was transferred according to the absentee property law to the custodian of absentee property. The person was present but was absent in his city."

That many of the town's labourers were Palestinians caused its own special tensions: Arab train workers, for example, were regarded as "necessary," but at the same time were not trusted. Workers were required to live in the Rakevet area and were subjected to a strict curfew, and periodic searches to ensure they were not armed. One resident wrote an open letter to the Al Youm newspaper, published on March 2, 1949, on behalf of a group of 460 train workers, 360 of them Muslim and 100 Christian:

We, the Arab inhabitants of Lod train station, did not participate in any defiant acts against the Israeli army ... Neverthless, we were treated in a hard manner ...

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.

The military administrators did supply some of the Arab residents' needs, such as building a school, supplying medical aid, and allocating them 50 dunams for growing vegetables. They also renovated the interior of the Dahmash mosque. The main mosque had refugees living in it, and the Dahmash mosque had been used as an Arab military hospital during the war, so neither were fit for prayer. The authority's willingness to renovate it was part of their policy of protecting the holy places of both the Christian and Muslim Arab residents.

Artistic representations

Fichier:Ismail Shammout's Where to ....JPG

Ismail Shammout's Where to ..?

The events in Lydda and Ramla have elicited literary and artistic responses from both Palestinians and Israelis. The Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout was 19 years old when he left Lydda in the exodus. Shammout created a series of paintings about the expulsions, the best known of which is his oil painting on canvas Where to ..? (1953), which enjoys iconic status among Palestinians.

In the foreground, it depicts a life-size image of an older 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 rests his cheek on the man's head. Just behind them is a third child crying and walking alone. In the background is a skyline of an Arab town with a minaret, and in the middle ground, a withered tree.

Israeli poet Nathan Alterman described Lydda in Al Zot ("On This"), published in Davar on November 21, 1948. David Ben Gurion said it should be read out to all IDF troops:

"Let us sing then also about 'delicate incidents'/For which the true name, incidentally, is murder/Let us sing about conversations of those in the know/about nods of forgiveness and clemency."

Today

Lydda town center in 2005

As of 2004, 63,462 people were living in Ramla, 20 percent of them Arab. The town became briefly known around the world in 1962, when Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Ramla prison on May 31 that year.

Lod's main industry is its airport, named Ben-Gurion International Airport in 1973, the largest in Israel, and the home base for the country's airline, El Al. Other local industries include oil refining, and the manufacture of electrical appliances, paper, and cigarettes. As of 2001, the population of the city was 66,100, of which 19.7 percent are Arab. The Jewish Agency's Absorption Centre, the main facility for handling Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel, is based there.

Racial tensions and economic deprivation make Lod "the most likely place to explode," according to Arnon Golan, Israel's leading expert on racially-mixed cities. A fifth of the town's population are Bedouins who have set up illegal dwellings on agricultural land, as a result of which they receive no municipal services, such as trash collection or sewage disposal. Its Ramat Eshkol neighborhood is regarded as the crime capital of Israel; in addition to existing racial problems, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia were housed there in the 1990s, which led to minor clashes. The Arab community has complained that, when Arabs became a majority in Ramat Eshkol, 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. The local council admits that it wants Lod to become a more Jewish city.

Zochrot places a sign on the area Lod's Arabs regarded as a ghetto.

Zochrot, an Israeli-Jewish organization that draws attention to the former Arab towns and villages that stood where Israeli towns are now situated, visited Lod in 2003 and 2005, placing signs in the streets to draw people's attention to the city's history. They pointed out where there is allegedly a mass grave near the main road, and posted a sign on the former 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 were met with a mixture of interest and hostility.

Father Oudeh Rantisi, who was expelled from Lydda in 1948, visited his family's former home for the first time 20 years later:

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 ...

See also

• 1948 Palestinian exodus
• Jewish exodus from Arab lands
• Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine War
• List of villages depopulated during the Arab-Israeli conflict