Spiro Munayyer's account begins immediately after the United Nations General Assembly

partition resolution of 29 November 1947 and culminates in the cataclysmic four days of

Lydda's conquest by the Israeli army (10-14 July 1948) during which 49,000 of Lydda's

50,000 inhabitants ("swollen" with refugees) were forcefully expelled, the author himself being

one of those few allowed to remain in his hometown. Although the author was not in a

position of political or military responsibility, he was actively involved in Lydda's resistance

movement both as the organizer of the telephone network linking up the various sectors

of Lydda's front lines and as a volunteer paramedic, in which capacity he accompanied the

city's defenders in most of the battles in which they took part. The result is one of the very

few detailed eye-witness accounts that exists from the point of view of an ordinary

Palestinian layman of one of the most important and tragic episodes of the 1948 war.

The conquest of Lydda (and of its neighbor, Ramla, some five kilometers to the south)

was the immediate objective of Operation Dani-the major offensive launched by the Israeli

army at the order of Ben-Gurion during the so-called "Ten Days" of fighting (8-18 July 1948),

between the First Truce (11 June-8 July) and the Second Truce (which started on 18 July

and lasted, in theory, until the armistice agreements of 1949).

The further objective of Operation Dani was to outflank the Transjordanian Arab Legion

positions at Latrun (commanding the defile at Bab al-Wad, where the road from the coast

starts climbing toward Jerusalem) in order to penetrate central Palestine and capture

Rumallah and Nablus. Lydda and Ramla and the surrounding villages fell within the boundaries

of the Arab state according to the UNGA partition resolution. Despite their proximity

to Tel Aviv and the fall of many Palestinian towns since April (Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa,

Safad, Acre, and Baysan), they had held out until July even though little help had reached

them from the Arab armies entering on 15 May.

Their strategic importance was enormous because of their location at the intersection of the

country's main north-south and west-east road and rail lines. Palestine's largest British army

camp at Sarafand was a few kilometers west of Lydda, its main international airport an

equal distance to the north, its central railway junction at Lydda itself. Ras al-Ayn, fifteen

kilometers north of Lydda, was the main source of Jerusalem's water supply, while one of

the largest British depots was at Bayt Nabala, seven kilometers to its northeast.

The Israeli forces assembled for Operation Dani were put under the overall command

of Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander. They consisted of the two Palmach brigades

(Yiftach and Harel, the latter under the command of Yitzhak Rabin), the Eighth Armored Brigade

composed of the Second Tank Battalion and the Ninth Commando Battalion (the former

under the command of Yitzhak Sadeh, founder of the Palmach, the latter under that of

Moshe Dayan), the Second Battalion Kiryati Brigade, the Third Battalion Alexandroni Brigade,

and several units of the Kiryati Garrison Troops (Khayl Matzav).

The Eighth Armored Brigade had a high proportion of World War II Jewish veterans

volunteering from the United States, Britain, France, and South Africa (under the so-called

MAHAL program), while its two battalions also included 700 members of the Irgun

Zva'i Le'umi (IZL). The total strength of the Israeli attackers was about 8,000 men.

The only regular Arab troops defending Lydda (and Ramla) was a minuscule force of 125

men-the Fifth Infantry Company of the Transjordanian Arab Legion. The defenders of

Lydda (and Ramla) were volunteer civilian residents, like the author, under the command

of a retired sergeant who had served in the Arab Legion. The reason for the virtual

absence of Arab regular troops in the Lydda-Ramla sector was that the Arab armies closest

to it (the Egyptian in the south, the Arab Legion in the east, and the Iraqi in the north)

were already overstretched.

The Egyptian northernmost post was at Isdud, thirty-two kilometers north of Gaza and a

like distance southeast of Ramla-Lydda as the crow flies. The Iraqi southernmost post

was at Ras al-Ayn, where they were weakest. And although the Arab Legion was in

strength some fifteen kilometers due east at Latrun, the decision had been taken not

to abandon its positions on the hills between Ras al-Ayn and Latrun for fear of being outflanked

and cut off by the superior Israeli forces in the plains where Lydda and Ramla were situated.

Indeed, as General Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion, informs us, he had told King Abdallah

and the Transjordanian prime minister Tawfiq Abu Huda even before the end of the

Mandate on 15 May that the Legion did not have the forces to hold and defend Lydda

and Ramla against Israeli attacks despite the fact that these towns were in the area

assigned to the Arabs by the UNGA partition resolution. This explains the token force of

the Arab Legion-the Fifth Infantry Company.

Thus, the fate of Lydda (and Ramla) was sealed the moment Operation Dani was launched.

The Israeli forces did not attack Lydda from the west (where Lydda's defenses facing

Tel Aviv were strongest), as the garrison commander Sergeant Hamza Subh expected.

Instead, they split into two main forces, northern and southern, which were to rendezvous

at the Jewish colony of Ben Shemen east of Lydda and then advance on Lydda from there.

After capturing Lydda from the east they were to advance on Ramla, attacking it from the

north while making feints against it from the west. Operation Dani began on the night of 9-10 July.

Simultaneously with the advance of the ground troops, Lydda and Ramla were bombed from

the air. In spite of the surprise factor, the defenders in the eastern sector of Lydda put up

stout resistance throughout the 10th against vastly superior forces attacking from

Ben Shemen in the north and the Arab village of Jimzu to the south. In the afternoon,

Dayan rode with his Commando Battalion of jeeps and half-tracks through Lydda in a

hit-and-run raid lasting under one hour "shooting up the town and creating confusion and a

degree of terror among the population," as the Jewish brothers Jon and David Kimche put it.

This discombobulated the defenders, some of whom surrendered. But the following morning

(11 July) a small force of three Arab Legion armored cars entered Lydda, their mission being

to help in the evacuation of the beleaguered Fifth Infantry Company. Their sudden appearance

both panicked the Israeli troops and rallied the defenders who had not surrendered.

The Israeli army put down what it subsequently described as the city's "uprising" with utmost

brutality, leaving in a matter of hours in the city's streets about 250 civilian dead in an

orgy of indiscriminate killing.

Resistance continued sporadically during the 12th and 13th of July,

its focus being Lydda's police station, which was finally overrun.

As of 11 July, the Israeli army began the systematic expulsion of the residents of Lydda

and Ramla (the latter having fallen on 12 July) toward the Arab Legion lines in the east.

Also expelled were the populations of some twenty-five villages conquered during

Operation Dani, making a total of some 80,000 expellees-the largest single instance of

deliberate mass expulsion during the 1948 war. Most of the expellees were women, children,

and elderly men, most of the able-bodied men having been taken prisoner.

Memories of the trek of the Lydda and Ramla refugees is branded in the collective consciousness

of the Palestinians. The Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, who interviewed survivors at the time,

estimates that 350 died of thirst and exhaustion in the blazing July sun, when the temperature

was one hundred degrees in the shade. The reaction of public opinion in Ramallah and

East Jerusalem at the sight of the new arrivals was to turn against the Arab Legion for its

failure to help Lydda and Ramla. Arab Legion officers and men were stoned, loudly hissed

at and cursed, a not unintended outcome by the person who gave the expulsion order,

David Ben-Gurion, and the man who carried it out, Yitzhak Rabin, director of operations

for Operation Dani.

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The Lydda Death March

and the Israeli state of denial

Palestinian women and children flee their homes forever during the 1948-49

Jewish ethnic cleansing campaign Arabs call the Nakba, or "catastrophe."

Originally published at Counterpunch 

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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