The Lydda Death March and the Israeli State of Denial
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the single largest mass
expulsion of Arabs from Palestine during the Jewish ethnic cleansing
campaign of 1948-49, the infamous Lydda Death March, in which attacking
Israeli troops murdered and pillaged the people and property of Lydda,
Ramle and
surrounding villages while forcing some 80,000 men, women and
children into the scorching wilderness, never to return.
“No Room for Both People”
In late 1947 Britain, worn down by a ferocious Jewish terror campaign led by men who included future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir,
announced it would end its 30-year occupation of Palestine. The
Palestine problem would now be for the fledgling United Nations to solve
and, to that end, the world body devised a plan to partition the
territory between Jews and Arabs. The latter were not consulted. Under
the UN plan Jews,
who comprised just over a third of Palestine’s population at the time,
were given 55 percent of its land. This understandably enraged Arabs but
even this heavily favorable distribution wasn’t enough for the
Zionists. They wanted all of Palestine for themselves, despite the fact
that it had been thousands of years since Jews constituted anything
remotely approaching a majority there. As Joseph Weitz, director of the
Jewish National Land Fund, had so unambiguously stated:
Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country… and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries… We must not leave a single village, a single tribe.
The neighboring Palestinian Arab
towns of Lydda and Ramle, home to some 50,000 people in 1948, were
located inside the UN-designated area of Arab control. But they were
also situated near strategically critical road and rail junctions, and
Lydda was home to what would later be called Ben-Gurion International
Airport. As fighting between Jews and Arabs intensified as British
forces prepared to withdraw, Arab militants attacked Jewish military and
civilian traffic along the roads, blocking important routes and
prompting Jewish commanders to plan countermeasures.
The Nakba Comes to Lydda and Ramle
Israel declared its independence on
May 14, 1948, with neighboring Arab nations then immediately launching
coordinated attacks in a bid to destroy the nascent Jewish state. By
this time there had been fighting ranging from skirmishes to pitched
battles between attacking Jewish troops and defenders in villages and
towns near Lydda and Ramle, but it wasn’t until Israeli Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion ordered Operation Dani, a major offensive to conquer
Lydda and Ramle, that the two towns would face — and fail — an
existential challenge.
By July 1948, Lydda and Ramle were
swollen with tens of thousands of refugees fleeing what would come to be
called the Nakba, or “catastrophe;” the wholesale ethnic cleansing of
more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs by Jews, many of them Holocaust
refugees, seeking their own lebensraum in the land they ruled
more than 2,500 years ago. The towns had been preparing for the
inevitable Zionist assault, stockpiling food, medicine and weapons and
reinforcing defensive positions. However, there were only 125 regular
Arab troops stationed there, with the remaining defenders consisting of
local and Bedouin volunteers. They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned
by the newly-created Israel Defense Forces, which deployed some 6,000
troops, 30 artillery pieces, as well as armored vehicles and aircraft
for the attack. Yet the Arabs were able to mount impressive resistance
when the onslaught came.
“Orgy of Indiscriminate Killing”
On July 9, IDF troops commanded by
Yigal Allon and future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin launched
Operation Dani and by the following day Lydda and Ramle were attacked
from the air and ground. At around noon on July 11 a mechanized commando
battalion led by future Israeli foreign and defense minister Moshe
Dayan stormed Lydda, firing indiscriminately at defenders and civilians
alike. New York Herald-Tribune reporter Kenneth Bilby, who was there, said the
Israeli column rolled in “with guns blazing… blasting at everything
that moved,” leaving “the corpses of Arab men, women and even children
strewn about the streets.” Dozens of men, women and children perished
during this 47-minute bloodbath. Six Israeli attackers died in this
assault.
The Arab National Committee, the
local emergency authority ultimately commanded by the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, bears some blame for the high civilian death toll at Lydda
and Ramle, having prevented women and children from fleeing the towns in
the fear that the men would follow. Arabs often fled imminent attack by
Jewish fighters, who had developed fearsome reputations as bloodthirsty
murderers and rapists following brutal massacres like the one at Deir Yassin on
April 9. Indeed, Jewish militias successfully used both massacre and
the threat of massacre as psychological weapons to induce Arabs to
flight. They sometimes even broadcast recordings of shrieking women over
loudspeakers aimed at targeted villages.
By the evening of July 11, many
residents of Lydda had gathered in the streets to wave white flags of
surrender. The hospital was overflowing with victims, blasted bodies
lined the streets and morale was abysmal after two days of ferocious
Israeli onslaught. While women and children were mostly released after
surrendering, thousands of local men were crowded into mosques where
they feared they would face mass execution. Such killings never
occurred, but other atrocities would soon follow.
When a pair of Jordanian armored
vehicles entered the conquered town and opened fire on the Israelis just
before noon on July 12, local resistance renewed and panicked Israeli
soldiers threw grenades into Arab houses and fired anti-tank rockets
into the Dahmash mosque, where terrified civilians huddled seeking
refuge. “We shot shells into a mosque where many people were hiding,
there was no choice,” recalled Israeli
soldier Yerachmiel Kahanovich, who described a grisly aftermath in
which the remains of innocent men, women and children were “scattered on
the walls.” Spiro Munayyer, a local volunteer medic, recounted how
colleagues removed the remains of more than 90 bodies from the blasted
mosque. According to Munayyer, “about 250 civilians died in an orgy of
indiscriminate killing” that day.
Death March
On July 12 Israeli forces also
seized neighboring Ramle, warning residents via loudspeaker that they
had 48 hours to leave their homes forever. The order to ethnically
cleanse the area of Arabs came straight from Rabin, who directed that
they all “must be expelled quickly without regard to age.” What
followed was the forced mass exodus of some 80,000 Palestinians from
dozens of area towns and villages in the largest single act of Jewish
ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, what is now known as the Lydda Death
March. Israeli troops went from house to house, dragging terrified
residents into the streets and ordering them to leave town and never
return. They threatened to summarily execute anyone who didn’t comply.
Arab families then streamed out of Lydda, Ramle and surrounding
villages, forming a seemingly endless column that slowly and sadly
plodded eastward under the scorching July sun as Israeli soldiers fired
shots over their heads to hasten their flight. Wrote Israeli author and
journalist Ari Shavit:
The road was narrow, the congestion unbearable. Children shouted, women screamed, men wept. There was no water. Every so often, a family withdrew from the column and stopped by the side of the road to bury a baby who had not withstood the heat; to say farewell to a grandmother who had collapsed from fatigue. After a while, it got even worse. A mother abandoned her howling baby under a tree. [Another] deserted her week-old boy. She could not bear to hear him wailing with hunger.
Meanwhile, the victorious Israelis
now occupying Lydda and Ramle occupied themselves with stealing
everything of value that the fleeing Arabs left behind. Homes, stores
and other businesses were looted wholesale, with trucks carting off
everything the conquerers could carry. There were worse crimes than
larceny. Ben-Gurion wrote of “acts of robbery and rape;” Amos Kenan, who
served as platoon commander of the IDF’s 82nd regiment when it captured
Ramle, later admitted that
“at night, those of us who couldn’t restrain ourselves would go into
the prison compounds to fuck Arab women.” Kennan explained that he
“wanted very much to assume… that those who couldn’t restrain themselves
did what they thought the Arabs would have done to them had they won
the war.”
While the Israelis plundered, Arabs
continued marching and dying under the blazing 100-degree sun.
Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, who interviewed survivors at the
time, estimated that 350 people, mostly elderly and children, died of
thirst and exhaustion as they marched eastward toward the Arab lines.
The heat wasn’t the only danger the refugees faced. Not content with
stealing everything the fleeing Arabs left behind in their homes and
businesses, Israeli soldiers had set up roadblocks and were searching
and robbing refugees of their money, jewelry and other precious family
heirlooms.
Israel: State of Denial
By July 14, the Lydda, Ramle and
some two dozen nearby Arab villages no longer existed. Lydda is now the
Jewish city of Lod, while Ramle is now Ramla. While millions of Jews
around the world with no connection to or even knowledge of Palestine
have been granted automatic Israeli citizenship and the right to settle
on stolen Arab land and in stolen Arab homes, the more than 700,000
expelled Palestinians are to this day denied the right to return guaranteed by the United Nations nearly 70 years ago.
In addition to cleansing Palestine
of Arabs, Israel also earnestly set about cleansing the very memory and
truth of the events of 1948 from historical memory. Zionists in Israel
and abroad, but especially in the United States, vehemently deny there
was any massacre at Lydda, or at Deir Yassin, or at any of the dozens
of other towns and villages where Jewish usurpers committed mass murder
in service of their new state. Even the more honest Israelis who
acknowledge the horrors of the Nakba tend to fall into the “we did what we had to do” category.
Shavit wrote that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arabs “laid the
foundation for the Jewish state.” To him, “the choice is stark: either
reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” He
wrote:
I know that if not for [the IDF] the State of Israel would not have been born. If not for them, I would not have been born. They did the filthy work that enables my people, my nation, my daughter, my sons, and me to live.
Still, honest voices like Shavit’s
are the exception to the rule. Earlier Zionists were far more truthful.
While serving as Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan declared that:
We came to this country, which was already populated by Arabs, and we established a… Jewish state here… Jewish villages were built in place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because those geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal rose in place of Malalul; Givat in the place of Jibta; Sarid in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar Yehoshua in the place of Tell Shamon. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Today, denial dominates the
conversation, where there is any conversation at all, about Israel’s
past and present crimes. Not only are the massacres and ethnic cleansing
of past decades denied, so is the illegality — or even the existence
— of the ongoing half-century occupation of the West Bank. The same goes
for the economic asphyxiation of Gaza, or what prominent international
observers including Nobel peace laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter
have called an
apartheid worse than what befell South Africa in dark decades past. The
very existence of the Palestinian people, to say nothing of their right
to return to their stolen homes or to earn a decent living or to even
live with dignity and basic human rights, is also throughly denied by
Israel. But the survivors of Lydda, Ramle and all the other atrocities
of the Nakba will never forget, and the horrors of 1948 fuel the fire of
Palestinian resistance to this very day.
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