Palästinensische Vertreibung aus Lydda und Ramle 1948

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{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2012}}
{{Infobox historical event
| Image_Name = File:YiftachSoldierOperationDanny.png
| Imagesize = 300
| Image_Alt = Photograph
| Image_Caption = An Israeli soldier accepts a cigarette from an Arab resident in Lydda after the fall of the city
| AKA = Lydda death march
| Participants = [[Israel Defense Forces]], [[Arab Legion]], Arab residents of [[Lod|Lydda]] and [[Ramle]]
| Location = Lydda, Ramle, and surrounding villages, then part of [[Mandatory Palestine]], now part of [[Israel]]
| Date = July 1948
| Result = 50,000–70,000 residents fled from, or were expelled by, the IDF
| URL =
}}
The '''1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle''' was the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 50,000–70,000 Palestinian Arabs when [[Israel]]i troops captured the towns in July that year. The military action occurred within the context of the [[1948 Arab-Israeli War]]. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the [[United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine|UN Partition Plan]] of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine,<ref>Roza El-Eini,[http://books.google.com.au/books?id=1sCRAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA436 ''Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929-1948,''] Routledge 2006 p.436</ref><ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 ''The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited''], Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 425.</ref> subsequently were transformed into predominantly Jewish areas in the new State of Israel, known as [[Lod]] and [[Ramla]].<ref>For population figures, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA425 Morris 2004, p. 425], [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA434 434]. He writes that, in July 1948 before the invasion, Lydda and Ramle had a population of 50,000–70,000, 20,000 of whom were refugees from Jaffa and the surrounding area (p. 425). All were expelled, except for a few elderly or sick people, some Christians, and some who were retained to work; others managed to sneak back in, so that by mid-October 1948 there were around 2,000 Palestinians living in both towns (p. 434).
*For the name change, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA29 Yacobi 2009, p. 29]. Yacobi writes that Lod was Lydda's biblical name.
*Palestinians called Lydda al-Ludd. Lydda was the Latin form of its name, which it was widely known by. See [http://books.google.com/books?id=jJY3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA801&lpg=PA798 Sharon 1983, p. 798].
*Ramle can also be written as Ramleh; it known as Ramla by the Israelis, and should not be confused with [[Ramallah]], the administrative center of the [[Palestinian National Authority]].</ref>

'The biggest expulsion of the war'<ref>Benny Morris, ''The Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited,'' Cambridge University Press 2004 p.4.</ref> took place at the end of a truce period, when fighting resumed, prompting Israel to try to improve its control over the Jerusalem road and its coastal route which were under pressure from the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian and Palestinian forces. From the Israeli perspective, the conquest of the towns averted an Arab threat to [[Tel Aviv]], thwarted an Arab Legion advance by clogging the roads with refugees, forcing the Arab Legion to assume a logistical burden that would undermine its military capacities, and helped demoralize nearby Arab cities.<ref name="case"/><ref>[[Yitzhak Rabin]],[http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Gb8sjKSTvFwC&pg=PA383 ''The Rabin Memoirs,''] University of California Press, 1996 p.383:'Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot toward the Ben Horon road, assuming that the Arab Legion would be obliged to look after them, thereby shouldering logistic difficulties which would burden its fighting capacity, making things easier for us.'</ref> On 10 July, [[Glubb Pasha]] ordered the defending [[Arab Legion]] troops to "make arrangements...for a phony war".<ref>[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CC7381HrLqcC&pg=PA287 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris]</ref> The next day, Ramle surrendered immediately, but the conquest of Lydda took longer and led to an unknown number of deaths; Israeli historian [[Benny Morris]] suggests up to 450 Palestinians and 9–10 Israeli soldiers died.<ref>The death toll in Lydda:
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 Morris 2004, p. 426]: '''11 July'''—Six dead and 21 wounded on the Israeli side, and "dozens of Arabs (perhaps as many as 200)".
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA452 Morris 2004, p. 452], footnote 68: Third Battalion intelligence puts the figure at 40 Palestinians dead, but perhaps referring only to the numbers they had killed themselves.
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA452 Morris 2004, p. 428]: '''12 July'''—Israeli troops were ordered to shoot at anyone seen on the streets: during that incident, 3–4 Israelis were killed and around a dozen wounded. On the Arab side, 250 dead and many wounded, according to the IDF.</ref> Once the Israelis were in control of the towns, an expulsion order signed by [[Yitzhak Rabin]] was issued to the [[Israel Defense Forces]] (IDF) stating, "1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age.…",<ref>{{Cite book
| last = Morris
| first = Benny
| authorlink = Benny Morris
| title = The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949
| publisher = [[Cambridge University Press]]
| series = Cambridge Middle East Library
| year = 1987
| location = Cambridge, United Kingdom
| page = 207
| isbn = 0521338891 }}
</ref>
Ramle's residents were bussed out, while the people of Lydda were forced to walk miles during a summer heat wave to the Arab front lines, where the Arab Legion, [[Jordan|Transjordan]]'s British-led army, tried to provide shelter and supplies.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA432 Morris 2004, pp. 432–434].
*Also see Gilbert 2008, pp. 218–219.</ref> Quite a few of the refugees died from exhaustion and dehydration. Estimates ranged from a handful to a figure of 350 based on hearsay, which is why the events are also referred as the ''Lydda death march''.<ref>For the use of the term "Lydda death march," see, for example, [http://www.google.com/books?id=ro8YAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Lydda+death+march%22&dq=%22Lydda+death+march%22&ei=XJICSou0KaP2yAS1zdHeAg&pgis=1 Fraser 2001], p. 64.
*For the number of refugees who died during the march:
*Morris 1989, pp. 204–211: "Quite a few refugees died – from exhaustion, dehydration and disease."
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=zL_1icJwNP0C&pg=PA177 Morris 2003, p. 177]: "a handful, and perhaps dozens, died of dehydration and exhaustion."
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA433 Morris 2004, p. 433]: "Quite a few refugees died on the road east," attributing a figure of 335 dead to [[Nimr al-Khatib|Muhammad Nimr al Khatib]], who Morris writes was working from hearsay.
*[http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/Memoirs/Munayyer,%20The%20Fall%20of%20Lydda.pdf Khalidi 1998], pp. 80–98: 350 dead, citing an estimate from [[Aref al-Aref]].
*[http://books.google.com/books?ei=oa_tTNj_C82NnQfNivn8CQ&ct=result&id=aIJtAAAAMAAJ&dq=The+Politics+of+Denial%3A+Israel+and+the+Palestinian+Refugee+Problem&q=350#search_anchor Nur Masalha 2003, p. 47] writes that 350 died.
*For the IDF and Ben-Gurion's analysis of the effect of the conquest of the towns and the expulsions, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA433 Morris 2004, pp. 433–434].</ref>

The events in Lydda and Ramle accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab [[1948 Palestinian exodus|exodus from Palestine]], known in the Arab world as ''al-Nakba'' ("the catastrophe"). Many Jews who came to Israel between 1948 and 1951 settled in the refugees' empty homes, both because of a housing shortage and as a matter of policy to prevent former residents from reclaiming them. One of the key issues of the [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]] is whether the refugees and their descendants ought to have either compensation for their loses or the [[Palestinian right of return|right of return]], a concession many Israelis object to as a threat to the nation's Jewish identity.<ref>That it was one-tenth of the overall exodus, see [http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 82.
*That most of the immigrants to Lydda and Ramle were from Asia and North Africa, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA427 Golan 2003].
*That refugees were settled in the empty homes to stop them from being reclaimed, see Morris 2008, p. 308, and [http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA45 Yacobi 2009, p. 45].</ref>

==Background==

===1948 Palestine War===
[[File:Palestine-20-48.png|right|thumb|160px|[[Palestine]] in 1947, showing Lydda and Ramle|alt=map]]
Palestine was under [[British Mandate of Palestine|British rule]] from 1917 to 1948. After 30 years of conflict between the country's Jews and Arabs, the British decided to pull out of the area and on 29 November 1947 the United Nations [[United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine|voted to divide it]] into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Lydda and Ramle to form part of the latter.

The proposal was welcomed by Palestine's Jewish community but rejected by the Arabs and [[1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine|civil war]] broke out between the communities triggering the [[1948 Palestinian exodus]], wherein 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, or fled. The British rule ended on 14 May 1948, the State of Israel [[Israeli Declaration of Independence|declared its independence]].<ref>Morris 2008, p. 37ff.</ref> Arab League intervened and Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Transjordan forces invaded Palestine and engaged Israeli troops. The [[1948 Arab-Israeli war]] started.

===Strategic importance of Lydda and Ramle===
Lydda (Arabic: Al-Ludd اَلْلُدّْ) dates back to at least 5600–5250 BCE. Ramle (ar-Ramlah الرملة), three kilometers away, was founded in the 8th century CE. Both towns were strategically important because they sat at the intersection of Palestine's main north–south and east–west roads. Palestine's main railway junction and its airport (now [[Ben Gurion International Airport]]) were in Lydda, and the main source of Jerusalem's water supply was 15 kilometers away.<ref>For Lydda's age, see Schwartz 1991, p. 39.
*According to Christian legend, Lydda was the birth place and burial ground of [[Saint George]] (ca. 270–303 CE), the patron saint of England; see [http://books.google.com/books?id=jJY3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA801&lpg=PA798 Sharon 1983, p. 799]. Sharon (p. 798) writes that the town may date back to King Thutmos III of Egypt. Also see [http://books.google.com/books?ei=6OLuTOf0IYiynwff9qDYCg&ct=result&id=RltCAAAAIAAJ&dq=saint+george+born+lydda&q=born+at+lydda#search_anchor Gordon 1907, p. 3].
*For Ramle, see [http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-111203784.html Golan 2003].</ref> Jewish and Arab fighters had been attacking each other on roads near the towns since hostilities broke out in December 1947. Israeli geographer Arnon Golan writes that the Arabs had [[Siege of Jerusalem (1948)|blocked Jewish transport to Jerusalem]] at Ramle, forcing the Israelis to build a bypass called the [[Burma Road (Israel)|Burma Road]]. Israel had launched several ground or air attacks on Ramle and Latrun in May 1948, and Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, developed what Benny Morris calls an obsession with the towns; he wrote in his diary that they had to be destroyed, and on 16 June referred to them during an Israeli cabinet meeting as the "two thorns".<ref>For Golan's article about Ramle being a focal point, see [http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-111203784.html Golan 2003].
*For the siege of Jerusalem, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=UcSUgrDsD_sC&pg=PA145 Gelber 2006, p. 145].
*See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D1EFD3D54157B93C0A8178DD85F4C8485F9&scp=1&sq=Jerusalem+siege&st=p Schmidt, 12 June 1948] for the temporary lifting of the siege. The siege was also broken by the opening in June of the [[Burma Road (Israel)|Burma Road]].
*For the attacks on Ramle and Lydda, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA424 Morris 2004, p. 424].
*For Ben-Gurion and the two thorns, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA424 Morris 2004, pp. 424–425], and [http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=94940&showEventsBefore=2450729 Segev 2000]. Segev writes that, just after Ben-Gurion's "two thorns" statement to the cabinet, six lines have been erased from the transcript. Segev interprets this to mean that expulsions were discussed.
*For the primary source, see Ben-Gurion 1982, "16 June 1948," p. 525.</ref>
Lydda's local Arab authority that was officially subordinated to the Arab Higher Committee assumed local civic and military powers. The records of Lydda's military command discuss military training, constructing obstacles and trenches, requisitioning vehicles and assembling armored cars armed with machine-guns, and attempts at arms procurement. In April 1948, Lydda had become an arms supply center, and a provided military training and security coordination for the neighboring villagers.<ref name="case">{{cite web|url=http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM|title=Myths and historiography of the 1948 Palestine War revisited: the case of Lydda|year=2005|author=Kadish, Alon, and Sela, Avraham}}</ref>

===Operation Dani===
Israel subsequently launched [[Operation Danny]] to secure the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and neutralize any threat to Tel Aviv from the Arab Legion, which was stationed in Ramallah and Latrun, with a number of men in Lydda.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA423 Morris 2004, pp. 423–424].</ref> On 7 July the IDF appointed [[Yigal Allon]] to head the operation, and [[Yitzhak Rabin]], who became Israel's prime minister in 1974, as his operations officer; both had served in the [[Palmach]], an elite fighting force of the pre-Israel [[Yishuv|Jewish community]] in Palestine. The operation was carried out between 9 July 1948, the end of the first truce in the Arab-Israeli war, and 18 July, the start of the second truce, a period known in Israeli historiography as the Ten Days. Morris writes that the IDF assembled its largest force ever: the [[Yiftah]] brigade; the [[8th Armored Brigade (Israel)|Eighth Armored Brigade]]'s 82nd and 89th Battalions; three battalions of Kiryati and Alexandroni infantry men; an estimated 6,000 men with around 30 artillery pieces.<ref>Kimche, Jon and David (1960) ''A Clash of Destinies. The Arab-Jewish War and the Founding of the State of Israel.'' Frederick A. Praeger. Library of Congress number 60-6996. Page 225. (number of men).</ref><ref>For the launching of Operation Dani and the forces assembled, see Morris 2008, p. 286.
*For the hiring of Allon and Rabin, see [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70813FC3F5410728DDDAA0A94D8415B898BF1D3&scp=5&sq=&st=p Shipler, ''The New York Times'', 23 October 1979].
*For the period known as the Ten Days, see Morris 2008, p. 273ff.</ref>

===Lydda's defenses===
[[File:St Georges Church Lydda.jpg|thumb|left|220px|Lydda in 1920 with St. George's Church in the background|alt=Ancient buildings, several with domed roofs, a church in the background, and palm trees.]]
In July 1948 Lydda and Ramle had a joint population of 50,000–70,000 Arabs, 20,000 of them refugees from [[Jaffa]] and elsewhere.<ref name=Morris2004p425/> Several Arab towns had already fallen to Jewish or Israeli advances since April, but Lydda and Ramle had held out. There are differing views as to how well-defended the towns were. In January 1948, [[John Bagot Glubb]], the British commander of Transjordan's Arab Legion, had toured Arab towns, including Lydda and Ramle, urging them to prepare to defend themselves. The Legion had distributed barbed wire and as many weapons as could be spared.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=zL_1icJwNP0C&pg=PA118 Morris 2003, p. 118].</ref> Lydda had an outer line of defense and prepared positions, an antitank ditch and field artillery as well as a heavily fortified and armed line northeast of central Lydda.<ref name="case"/>

Israeli historians Alon Kadish and [[Avraham Sela]] write that the Arab National Committee—a local emergency Arab authority that answered to the [[Arab Higher Committee]] run by the [[Grand Mufti of Jerusalem]]—had assumed civic and military control of Lydda, and had acquired arms, conducted training, constructed trenches, requisitioned vehicles, and organized medical services. By the time of the Israeli attack, they say the militia in Lydda numbered 1,000 men equipped with rifles, submachine guns, 15 machine guns, five heavy machine guns, 25 anti-tank launchers, six or seven light field-guns, two or three heavy ones, and armored cars with machine guns. The IDF estimated that there was an Arab Legion force of around 200-300 men. Lydda contained several hundred Bedouin volunteers and a large-sized force of the Arab Legion. They argue that the deaths in Lydda occurred during a military battle for the town, not because of a massacre.<ref name=KadishSela>[http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].</ref>

[[File:King Abdullah of Jordan and John Glubb Bagot.jpg|right|thumb|210px|alt=photograph|King Abdullah of Jordan (1882–1951) with [[John Bagot Glubb]] (1897–1986), the British commander of the [[Arab Legion]]]]
Against this view, Palestinian historian [[Walid Khalidi]] writes that just 125 Legionnaires from the Fifth Infantry Company were in Lydda—the Arab Legion numbered 6,000 in all—and that the rest of the town's defense consisted of civilian residents acting under the command of a retired Arab Legion sergeant.<ref name=Khalidi>{{Cite web |url=http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/Memoirs/Munayyer,%20The%20Fall%20of%20Lydda.pdf |title=The Fall of Lydda |last=Khalidi |first=Walid |year=1998 |page=81 |accessdate=27 August 2012}}</ref> According to Morris, a number of Arab Legion soldiers, including 200–300 Bedouin volunteers, had arrived in Lydda and Ramle in April, and a company-sized force had set itself up in the old British police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramle road, with armored cars and other weapons. He writes that there were 150 Legionnaires in the town in June, though the Israelis believed there were up to 1,500. An Arab Legion officer was appointed military governor of both towns, signaling the desire of [[Abdullah I of Jordan]] to stake a claim in the parts of Palestine allotted by the UN to an Arab-Palestinian state, but Glubb advised him that the Legion was overstretched and could not hold the towns. As a result, Abdullah ordered the Legion to assume a defensive position only, and most of the Legionnaires in Lydda withdrew during the night of 11–12 July.<ref>Morris 2008, pp. 286, 289.
*That the IDF ignored that the Legion was "on a defensive footing," see Gelber 2006, p. 158.</ref>

Kadish and Sela write that the National Committee stopped women and children from leaving, because their departure had acted elsewhere as a catalyst for the men to leave too. They say it was common for Arabs to leave their homes under threat of Israeli invasion, in part because they feared atrocities, particularly rape, and in part because of a reluctance to live under Jewish rule. In Lydda's case, they argue, 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.<ref name=KadishSela/>

==Fall of the cities==

===Air attacks and surrender of Ramle===
[[File:LyddaAirportCapture.png|thumb|left|230px|alt=photograph|The IDF took control of Lydda airport on 10 July.]]
The Israeli air force began bombing the towns on the night of 9–10 July, intending to induce civilian flight, and it seemed to work in Ramle: at 11:30 hours on 10 July, Operation Dani headquarters (Dani HQ) told the IDF that there was a "general and serious flight from Ramla." That afternoon, Dani HQ told one of its brigades to facilitate the flight from Ramle of women, children, and the elderly, but to detain men of military age.<ref name=Morris2004p425>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA425 Morris 2004, p. 425].</ref> On the same day, the IDF took control of Lydda airport.<ref name="gelber">[http://books.google.com/books?id=0_buePy517UC&pg=PA159 Gelber 2006, p. 159].</ref> The Israeli air force dropped leaflets over both towns on 11 July telling residents to surrender.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 86: The leaflets said: "You have no chance of receiving help. We intend to conquer the towns. We have no intention of harming persons or property. [But] whoever attempts to oppose us—will die. He who prefers to live must surrender.</ref> Ramle's community leaders, along with three prominent Arab family representatives, agreed to surrender, after which the Israelis mortared the city and imposed a curfew. ''The New York Times'' reported at the time that the capture of the city was seen as the high point of Israel's brief existence.<ref>Formal surrender discussed in a telephone message from Dani HQ, 12 July 1948, 10:30 am, cited in [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA427 Morris 2004, p. 427].
*For the ''New York Times'' account of the surrender, see [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30713FA385F167B93C1A8178CD85F4C8485F9&scp=1&sq=&st=p Currivan, ''The New York Times'', 12 July 1948].</ref>

Two different images emerged of Ramle under occupation. [[Khalil Wazir]], who later joined the [[PLO]] and became known as Abu Jihad, was evicted from the town with his family, who owned a grocer's store there, when he was 12 years old. He said there was fear of a massacre, as there had been at [[Deir Yassin massacre|Deir Yassin]], and that there were bodies scattered in the streets and between the houses, including the bodies of women and children.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?ei=DjDuTMXIO8SknQfUmOCyCw&ct=result&id=4Qm7AAAAIAAJ&dq=The+Palestinians&q=terribly+frightened#search_anchor Dimbleby and McCullin 1980, pp. 88–89]. He said: "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. ..."</ref> Against this, the writer [[Arthur Koestler]] (1905–1983), working for ''The Times'', visited Ramle a few hours after the invasion, and said people were hanging around in the streets as usual. A few hundred young men had been placed in a barbed wire cage, and were being taken in lorries to an internment camp. Women were bringing them food and water, he wrote, arguing with the Jewish guards and seemingly unafraid. He said the prevailing feeling seemed to be relief that the war was over.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=XEqTMSzQYUIC&pg=PA270 Koestler 1949, pp. 270–271]. He wrote: "The Arabs were hanging about in the streets much as usual, except for a few hundred youths of military age who have been put into a barbed wire cage and were taken off in lorries to an internment camp. Their veiled mothers and wives were carrying food and water to the cage, arguing with the Jewish sentries and pulling their sleeves, obviously quite unafraid. ... Groups of Arabs came marching down the main street with their arms above their heads, grinning broadly, without any guards, to give themselves up. The one prevailing feeling among all seemed to be that as far as Ramleh was concerned the war was over, and thank God for it."</ref>

===Moshe Dayan raid on Lydda===
[[File:Mosche Dajan.jpg|right|thumb|130px|alt=photograph|[[Moshe Dayan]] (1915–1981) led a raid on Lydda "blasting at everything that moved."<ref name=Bilby43/>]]
During the afternoon of 11 July, Israel's 89th (armored) Battalion, led by Lt. Col. [[Moshe Dayan]], moved into Lydda. Israeli historian [[Anita Shapira]] writes that the raid was carried out on Dayan's initiative without coordinating it with his commander. Using a column of jeeps led by a [[Marmon-Herrington Armoured Car]] with a cannon—taken from the Arab Legion the day before—he launched the attack in daylight,<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=iogKjVDKRW4C&pg=PA225 Shapira 2007, p. 225].</ref> driving through the town from east to west machine-gunning anything that moved, according to Morris, then along the Lydda-Ramle road firing at militia posts until they reached the train station in Ramle.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 Morris 2004, p. 426].</ref> Kadish and Sela write that the troops faced heavy fire from the Arab Legion in the police stations in Lydda and on the Lydda-Ramle road and Dayan described "The town's [southern] entrance was awash with Arab combatants ... Hand grenades were thrown from all directions. There was a tremendous confusion."<ref name=KadishSela/> A contemporaneous account from Gene Currivan for ''The New York Times'' also said the firing met with heavy resistance. Dayan's men advanced until the train station where the wounded were treated, and returned to Bet Shemen under continued enemy fire from the police stations. Six of his men were killed and 21 were wounded.<ref name=case/><ref name=Currivan>[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30713FA385F167B93C1A8178CD85F4C8485F9&scp=1&sq=&st=p Currivan, ''The New York Times'', 12 July 1948].</ref>

[[Kenneth Bilby]], a correspondent for the ''New York Herald Tribune'' was in the city at the time. He wrote: "[The Israeli jeep column] raced into Lydda with rifles, Stens, and sub-machine guns blazing. It coursed through the main streets, blasting at everything that moved ... the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children were strewn about the streets in the wake of this ruthlessly brilliant charge."<ref name=Bilby43>[http://books.google.com/books?ei=PSnuTIuAL8TMngfJmYXyCg&ct=result&id=-gkcAAAAMAAJ&dq=New+Star+in+the+Near+East&q=coursed#search_anchor Bilby 1950, p. 43].</ref> The raid lasted 47 minutes, leaving 100–150 Arabs dead, according to Dayan's 89th Battalion. Six died and 21 were wounded on the Israeli side.<ref>The casualty figures vary widely. The figure from Dayan is cited in [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].
*There were dozens dead and wounded, "perhaps as many as 200," according to [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 Morris 2004, p. 426] and [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA452 p. 452], footnote 68, citing Kadish, Sela, and Golan 2000, p. 36.
*"[A]bout 40 dead and a large number of wounded," according to Third Battalion intelligence, though it is not clear whether they meant 40 killed by the Third Battalion alone; see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA452 Morris 2004, p. 452], footnote 68.
*Six died and 21 were wounded on the Israeli side, according to [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 Morris 2004, p. 426], again citing Kadish, Sela, and Golan 2000, p. 36.</ref> Kadish and Sela write that the high casualty rate was caused by confusion over who Dayan's troops were. The IDF were wearing ''[[keffiyeh]]''s and were led by an armored car seized from the Arab Legion. Residents may have believed the Arab Legion had arrived, only to encounter Dayan's forces shooting at everything as they ran from their homes.<ref name=KadishSela/>

===Surrender and unexpected shooting in Lydda by Arab legionnaires===
[[File:RuinsOfLydda.png|thumb|250px|Ruins of Lydda after Israeli offensive]]
Although no formal surrender was announced in Lydda, people gathered in the streets waving white flags. On the evening of 11 July, 300–400 Israeli soldiers entered the town. Not long afterwards, the Arab Legion forces on the Lydda–Ramle road withdrew, though a small number of Legionnaires remained in the Lydda police station. More Israeli troops arrived at dawn on 12 July. According to a contemporaneous 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, including 4,000 in one of the mosque compounds.<ref>For the IDF quote, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA427 Morris 2004, p. 427].
*For the 4,000 in the Great Mosque, see [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].</ref>

The Israeli government set up a committee to handle the Arab refugees and their abandoned property. The committee issued an explicit order that forbade "to destroy, burn or demolish Arab towns and villages, to expel the inhabitants of Arab villages, neighborhoods and towns, or to uproot the Arab population from their place of residence" without having previously received, a specific and direct order from the Minister of Defense. Regulations ordered the sealing off of Arab areas to prevent looting and acts of revenge and stated that captured men were to be treated as POWs with the Red Cross notified. Arabs who wished to remain were allowed to do so and the confiscation of their property was prohibited.<ref name="case"/>

The town dignitaries were assembled and after discussion, decided to surrender. Lydda's inhabitants were instructed to leave their weapons on the doorsteps to be collected by soldiers but did not do so. A curfew for that evening was announced over loudspeakers. A delegation of town dignitaries, including Lydda's mayor, left for the police station to prevail upon the Legionnaires there to also surrender. They refused and fired upon the party, killing the mayor and wounding several others. Despite this, the third battalion decided to accept the town's surrender. Israeli historian [[Yoav Gelber]] writes that the Legionnaires still in the police station were panicking, and had been sending frantic messages to their HQ in Ramallah: "Have you no God in your hearts? Don't you feel any compassion? Hasten aid!"<ref name="gelber"/> They were about to surrender, but were told by HQ to wait to be rescued.<ref name="case"/><ref>Gelber 2004, p. 23.</ref>

On 12 July, at 11:30 hours, two or three Arab Legion armored cars entered the city, led by Lt. Hamadallah al-Abdullah from the Jordanian 1st Brigade. The Arab Legion armored cars opened fire on the Israeli soldiers combing the old city which created the impression that the Jordanians had staged counterattack. The exchange of gunfire led residents and Arab fighters to believe the Legion had arrived in force, and those still armed started firing at the Israelis too. Local militia once again renewed hostilities and an Israeli patrol were set upon by a rioting mob in the market place. The Israeli military sustained many casualties, and viewing the renewed resistance as a surrender agreement violation, quickly quelled it, and many civilians died.<ref name="case"/><ref name="AG">{{cite web | title=Lydda and Ramle: From Palestinian-Arab to Israeli Towns, 1948-67 | publisher=Middle Eastern Studies, | work=Vol. 39 No. 4 | date=Oct 2003 | author=Arnon Golan | pages=121–139}}</ref> Kadish and Sela write that, according to the Third Battalion's commander, [[Moshe Kelman]], the Israelis came under heavy fire from "thousands of weapons from every house, roof and window". Morris calls this "nonsense" and argues that only a few dozen townspeople took part in what turned out to be a brief firefight.<ref>[http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA453 Morris 2004, footnote 78, p. 453].</ref>

===Massacre in Lydda===
[[File:LyddaDahmashMosque.png|200px|thumb|alt=photograph|An Israeli soldier outside the Dahmash mosque in central Lydda]]
Gelber describes what followed as probably the bloodiest massacre of the Arab–Israeli war. Shapira writes that the Israelis had no experience of governing civilians and panicked.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=0_buePy517UC&pg=PA162 Gelber 2006, p. 162].
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=iogKjVDKRW4C&pg=PA227 Shapira 2007, p. 227].
*{{Cite web |url=http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/Memoirs/Munayyer,%20The%20Fall%20of%20Lydda.pdf |title=The Fall of Lydda |last=Khalidi |first=Walid |year=1998 |page=81 |accessdate=27 August 2012}} calls it "an orgy of indiscriminate killing."
*[http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005] call it "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed."</ref> Kelman ordered troops to shoot at any clear target, including at anyone seen on the streets.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA427 Morris 2004, p. 427].</ref> He said he had no choice; there was no chance of immediate reinforcements, and no way to determine the enemy's main thrust.<ref name=KadishSela/> Israeli soldiers threw grenades into houses they suspected snipers were hiding in. Residents ran out of their homes in panic and were shot. Yeruham Cohen, an IDF intelligence officer, said around 250 died between 11:30 and 14:00 hours.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 87.</ref>

However, Kadish and Sela state that there is no direct first-hand evidence that a massacre took place, other than a few dubious Arab sources. They say that a reconstruction of the battle suggests a "better, albeit more complex, explanation of the Arab losses" which also "casts severe doubt on, if it does not completely refute, the argument for the massacre in the al-'Umari Mosque."<ref name="case"/> This view has been criticised. Quoting from Kadish and Sela's paper, John W. Pool concluded: ""... on the morning of July 12, 1948, ‘The Palmach forces in (Lydda) came under heavy fire from ‘thousands of weapons from every house, roof and window’ sustaining heavy casualties.” These assertions seem to be the foundation for much of the argument advanced in the article. I think that the authors should have furnished much more information about their precise meaning, factual validity, and sources." He continues with "he (Benny Morris) does not say how many townspeople were involved in the fighting but his account certainly suggests a number of Arab gunmen very much smaller than several thousand (noted by Kadish and Sela).<ref>http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4330311?uid=3737952&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102574460991</ref> James Bowen is also critical. He places a cautionary note on the UCC web site: "... it is based on a book written by the same authors which was published in 2000 by the Israeli Ministry of Defence."<ref>http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=41785</ref>

Palestinian historian [[Aref al-Aref]] placed the death toll at 426, including 179 he said were later killed in one of the mosques, during a confusing incident that sources variously refer to as a massacre or a battle.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA428 Morris 2004, p. 428], [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA453 453, footnote 81]. For more casualty figures, see [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].</ref> Thousands of male Muslim detainees had been taken to two of the mosques the day before. Christian detainees had been taken to the church or a nearby Greek Orthodox monastery, leaving the Muslims in fear of a massacre.<ref name="Khalidi">page=93–4.</ref> Morris writes that some of them tried to break out, thinking they were about to be killed, and in response the IDF threw grenades and fired anti-tank rockets into one of the mosque compounds. Kadish and Sela say it was a firefight that broke out between armed militiamen inside the mosque and Israeli soldiers outside and responding to attacks originating from the mosque, the Israelis fired an anti-tank shell into it, then stormed it, killing 30 militia men inside.<ref name="case"/> According to Morris, dozens died, including unarmed men, women and children; an eyewitness published a memoir in 1998 saying he had removed 95 bodies from one of the mosques.<ref>For a discussion about which mosque this happened in, and for the 95 bodies, see [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005], particularly footnote 40.
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA428 Morris 2004, p. 428]: "dozens" were shot and killed
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA453 Morris 2004, p. 453], footnote 81, cites Kadish, Sela and Golan's ''The Conquest'', who say it was a battle that took place in the mosque, not a massacre. He adds that Kadish et al acknowledge that women, children, and unarmed older men were among the dead.
*An eyewitness, Fayeq Abu Mana, 20 years old at the time, told an Israeli group in 2003 that he had been involved in removing the bodies; see [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/en Zochrot 2003].</ref>

When the shooting was over, bodies lay in the streets and houses in Lydda, and on the Lydda–Ramle road; Morris writes that there were hundreds. The Red Cross was due to visit the area, but the new Israeli military governor of Ramle issued an order to have the visit delayed. The visit was rescheduled for 14 July; Dani HQ ordered Israeli troops to remove the bodies by then, but the order seems not to have been carried out. Dr. Klaus Dreyer of the IDF Medical Corps complained on 15 July that there were still corpses lying in and around Lydda, which constituted a health hazard and a "moral and aesthetic issue." He asked that trucks and Arab residents be organized to deal with them.<ref name=Morris2004p434>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA434 Morris 2004, p. 434].</ref>

==Exodus==

===Expulsion orders===
Benny Morris writes that David Ben-Gurion and the IDF were largely left to their own devices to decide how Arab residents were to be treated, without the involvement of the Cabinet and other ministers. As a result, 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 Ramle, mainly Muslim, were almost completely emptied.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA415 Morris 2004, p. 415].</ref> There was no official policy to expel the Palestinian population, he writes, but the idea of [[Transfer Committee|transfer]] was "in the air", and the leadership understood this.<ref>[http://web.archive.org/web/20080515210330/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986&contrassID=2 Shavit 2004].</ref>

[[File:Yitzhak Rabin (1986) cropped.jpg|thumb|left|130px|alt=photograph|[[Yitzhak Rabin]] (1922–95) signed the expulsion order.<ref name=Morris2004p429/>]]
As the shooting in Lydda continued, a meeting was held on 12 July at Operation Dani headquarters between Ben-Gurion, [[Yigael Yadin]] and Zvi Ayalon, generals in the IDF, and [[Yisrael Galili]], formerly of the [[Haganah]], the pre-IDF army. Also present were Yigal Allon, commanding officer of Operation Dani, and Yitzhak Rabin.<ref name=Shipler1>[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70813FC3F5410728DDDAA0A94D8415B898BF1D3&scp=5&sq=&st=p Shipler, ''The New York Times'', 23 October 1979].</ref> At one point Ben-Gurion, Allon, and Rabin left the room. Rabin has offered two accounts of what happened next. In a 1977 interview with [[Michael Bar-Zohar]], Rabin said Allon asked what was to be done with the residents; in response, Ben-Gurion had waved his hand and said, "''garesh otam''"—"expel them."<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986, p. 90, footnote 31.]</ref> In the manuscript of his memoirs in 1979, Rabin wrote that Ben-Gurion had not spoken, but had only waved his hand, and that Rabin had understand this to mean "drive them out."<ref name=Shipler1/> The expulsion order for Lydda was issued at 13:30 hours on 12 July, signed by Rabin.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA429 Morris 2004, p. 429].
*The orders for Lydda were from Dani HQ 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 (Prior 1999, p. 205).
*The IDF archives holds two nearly identical copies of the expulsion order. According to [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA454 Morris 2004, p. 454], footnote 89, Yigal Allon denied in 1979 that there had been such an order, or an expulsion, saying that the order to evacuate the civilian population of Lydda and Ramle came from the Arab Legion.
*A telegram from Kiryati Brigade HQ to Zvi Aurback, its officer in charge of Ramle, 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.." (Kiryati HQ to Aurbach, Tel Aviv District HQ (Mishmar) etc., 14:50 hours, 13 July 1948, Haganah Archive, Tel Aviv), cited in [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA429 Morris 2004, p. 429].</ref>

In his memoirs Rabin wrote: "'Driving out' is a term 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." An [[Censorship in Israel|Israeli censorship board]] removed this section from his manuscript, but Peretz Kidron, the Israeli journalist who translated the memoirs into English, passed the censored text to David Shipler of ''The New York Times'', who published it on 23 October 1979.<ref name=Shipler1/>

In an interview with ''The New York Times'' two days later, Yigal Allon took issue with Rabin's version of events. "With all my high esteem for Rabin during the war of independence, I was his commander and my knowledge of the facts is therefore more accurate," he told Shipler. "I did not ask the late Ben-Gurion for permission to expel the population of Lydda. I did not receive such permission and did not give such orders." He said the residents left in part because they were told to by the Arab Legion, so the latter could recapture Lydda at a later date, and in part because they were panic-stricken.<ref name=Shipler2>[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B12FE3C5C12728DDDAC0A94D8415B898BF1D3&scp=2&sq=&st=p Shipler, ''The New York Times'', 25 October 1979].
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=iogKjVDKRW4C&pg=PA232 Shapira 2007, p. 232]: Allon gave a lecture on the war in 1950, during which [[Anita Shapira]] writes that he was uncharacteristically frank. He said he blamed the Palestinian exodus on three factors. First, they fled because they were [[Psychological projection|projecting]]: the Arabs imagined that the Jews would do to them what they would do to the Jews if positions were reversed. Second, Arab and British leaders encouraged people to leave their towns so as not to be taken hostage, so they could return to fight another day. Third, there were some cases of expulsion, though these were not the norm. In Lydda and Ramle, the Arab Legion continued to attack Israeli outposts in the hope of reconnecting with their troops in Lydda, he said. When the expulsions started, the attacks died down. To leave the towns' hostile populations in place would be to risk their use by the Legion to coordinate further attacks. Allon said he had no regrets: "War is war." Allon described it elsewhere as a "provoked exodus," rather than an expulsion; see [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].
*Also see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA454 Morris 2004, p. 454], footnote 89.</ref> Yoav Gelber also takes issue with Rabin's account. He writes that Ben-Gurion was in the habit of expressing his orders clearly, whether verbally or in writing, and would not have issued an order by waving his hand; he adds that there is no record of any meetings before the invasion that indicate expulsion was discussed. He attributes the expulsions to Allon, who he says was known for his [[scorched earth]] policy. Wherever Allon was in charge of Israeli troops, Gelber writes, no Palestinians remained.<ref name=Gelber2006p162>[http://books.google.com/books?id=0_buePy517UC&pg=PA162 Gelber 2006, pp. 162–163].</ref> Whereas traditional historiography in Israel has insisted that Palestinian refugees left their lands under the orders of Arab leaders, some Israeli scholars have challenged this view in recent years.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20War%20of%20the%20Israeli%20Historians.html|title=The War of the Israeli Historians|author=[[Avi Shlaim]]|quote=The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 War goes roughly as follows. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on 29 November 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which called for the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. . . . [H]undreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful co-existence was possible. . . . For many years the standard Zionist account of the causes, character, and course of the Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. The fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, however, was accompanied by the publication of four books by Israeli scholars who challenged the traditional historiography of the birth of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. . . }}</ref>

===Shitrit/Shertok intervention===
The Israeli cabinet reportedly knew nothing about the expulsion plan until [[Bechor Shitrit]], Minister for Minority Affairs, appeared unannounced in Ramle on 12 July. He was shocked when he realized troops were organizing expulsions. He returned to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Foreign Minister [[Moshe Shertok]], who met with Ben Gurion to agree on guidelines for the treatment of the residents, though Morris writes that Ben Gurion apparently failed to tell Shitrit or Shertok that he himself was the source of the expulsion orders. Gelber disagrees with Morris's analysis, arguing that Ben-Gurion's agreement with Shitrit and Shertok is evidence that expulsion was not his intention, rather than evidence of his duplicity, as Morris implies.<ref name=Gelber2006p162/> The men agreed the townspeople should be told that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, but that anyone who stayed was responsible for himself and would not be given food. Women, children, the old, and the sick were not to be forced to leave, and the monasteries and churches must not be damaged, though no mention was made of the mosques. Ben-Gurion passed the order to the IDF General Staff, who passed it to Dani HQ at 23:30 hours on 12 July, ten hours after the expulsion orders were issued; Morris writes that there was an ambiguity in the instruction that women, children and the sick were not to be forced to go: the word "''lalechet''" can mean either "go" or "walk". Satisfied that the order had been passed on, Shertok believed he had managed to avert the expulsions, not realizing that, even as he was discussing them in Tel Aviv, they had already begun.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA430 Morris 2004, p. 430].
*Also see [http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 92.
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=0_buePy517UC&pg=PA161 Gelber 2006, pp. 161–162], also says the residents were already on their way out when this order was given.</ref>

===The exodus===
[[File:RefugeesEscortedFromRamlaOperationDanny.jpg|left|thumb|230px|Refugees being escorted from Ramle]]
Thousands of Ramle residents began moving out of the town on foot, or in trucks and buses, between 10 and 12 July. The IDF used its own vehicles and confiscated Arab ones to move them.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA429 Morris 2004, p. 429].
*That the Ramle residents were supplied buses by the Kiryati brigade, see [http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472115419-ch1.pdf Morris 1988].</ref> Morris writes that, by 13 July, the wishes of the IDF and those of the residents in Lydda had dovetailed. Over the past three days, the townspeople had undergone aerial bombardment, ground invasion, 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. Morris writes they had concluded that living under Israeli rule was not sustainable.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA431 Morris 2004, p. 431].</ref> Spiro Munayyer, an eyewitness, wrote that the important thing was to get out of the city.<ref name="Khalidi"/> A deal was reached with an IDF intelligence officer, [[Shmarya Guttman]], normally an archeologist, 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 men they were free to join their families.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], pp. 93–4. Morris finds Guttman's account subjective and impressionistic (p. 94, footnote 39). Guttman later wrote about Lydda under the pseudonym "Avi-Yiftah".</ref> Town criers and soldiers walked or drove around the town instructing residents where to gather for departure.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA432 Morris 2004, p. 432].</ref>

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. While the residents were still in the town, IDF radio traffic had already started calling them "refugees" (''plitim'').<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA455 Morris 2004, p. 455], footnote 96.</ref> Operation Dani HQ told the IDF General Staff/Operations at noon on 13 July that "[the troops in Lydda] are busy expelling the inhabitants [''oskim begeirush hatoshavim'']," and told the HQs of Kiryati, 8th and Yiftah brigades at the same time that, "enemy resistance in Ramle and Lydda has ended. The eviction [''pinui'']" of the inhabitants... has begun."<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA432 Morris 2004, p. 432]: At 18:15 hours that day, Dani HQ asked Yiftah Brigade: "Has the removal of the population [''hotza'at ha'ochlosiah''] of Lydda been completed?"</ref>

===The march===
[[File:Refugees from Lydda.jpg|left|thumb|280px|alt=photograph||Refugees from Lydda and Ramle after the three-day exodus<ref>Glubb 1957, plate 8, between pp. 159 and 161. The caption says: "Arab refugee women and children from Lydda and Ramle, resting after their arrival in the Arab area."</ref>]]
Lydda's residents began moving out on the morning of 13 July. They were made to walk, perhaps because of their earlier resistance, or simply because there were no vehicles left. They walked six to seven kilometers to [[Beit Nabala]], then 10–12 more to [[Barfiliya]], along dusty roads in temperatures of 30–35°C, carrying their children and portable possessions in carts pulled by animals or on their backs.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], pp. 93–4; see p. 97 for the temperature.</ref> According to Shmarya Guttman, an IDF soldier, warning shots were occasionally fired.<ref name=Morris2004p433>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA433 Morris 2004, pp. 433–4].</ref> Some were stripped of their valuables en route by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.<ref name=Morris2004p433/> Another IDF soldier described how possessions and people were slowly abandoned as the refugees grew tired or collapsed: "To begin with [jettisoning] utensils and furniture, and in the end, bodies of men, women, and children, scattered along the way."<ref name=Morris2004p433/>

Haj As'ad Hassouneh, described by [[Saleh Abd al-Jawad]] as "a survivor of the death march", shared his recollection in 1996: "The Jews came and they called among the people: "You must go." "Where shall we go?" "Go to Barfilia." ... the spot you were standing on determined what if any family or possession you could get; any to the west of you could not be retrieved. You had to immediately begin walking and it had to be to the east. ... The people were fatigued even before they began their journey or could attempt to reach any destination. No one knew where Barfilia was or its distance from Jordan. ... The people were also fasting due to [[Ramadan]] because they were people of serious belief. There was no water. People began to die of thirst. Some women died and their babies nursed from their dead bodies. Many of the elderly died on the way. ... Many buried their dead in the leaves of corn".<ref name=Jawadp71>{{cite book|title=Israel and the Palestinian Refugees|year=2007|publisher=Springer|isbn=978-3540681601|pages=70–71|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=bWCN0OUiTJkC&pg=PA70|author=[[Saleh Abd al-Jawad]]|editor=[[Eyal Benvenisti]], Chaim Gans, Sari Hanafi|chapter=Zionist Massacres: the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War}}</ref>

After three days of walking, the refugees were picked up by the Arab Legion and driven to Ramallah.<ref>Morris 2008, p. 291.</ref> Reports vary regarding how many died. Many were elderly people and young children who died from the heat and exhaustion.<ref name =Shipler1/> Morris has written that it was a "handful and perhaps dozens."<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=zL_1icJwNP0C&pg=PA177 Morris 2003, p. 177].</ref> Glubb wrote that "nobody will ever know how many children died."<ref name=Morris2004p433/> [[Nimr al Khatib]] estimated that 335 died based on hearsay.<ref name=Morris2004p433/> Walid Khalidi gives a figure of 350, citing Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref.<ref name="Khalidi">page=80–98.</ref> The expulsions clogged the roads eastward. Morris writes that IDF thinking was simple and cogent. They had just taken two major objectives and were out of steam. The Arab Legion had been expected to counter-attack, but the expulsions thwarted it: the roads were now cluttered, and the Legion was suddenly responsible for the welfare of an additional tens of thousands of people.<ref name=Morris2004p433/>

===Looting of refugees and the towns===
[[File:George Habash.jpg|thumb|130px|alt=photograph|[[George Habash]] (1926–2008) who later led the [[PFLP]], was among those expelled from Lydda.]]
The Sharett-Ben Gurion guidelines to the IDF had specified there was to be no robbery, but numerous sources spoke of widespread looting. ''The Economist'' wrote on 21 August that year: "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."<ref>Pappé 2006, p. 168.</ref> Aharon Cohen, director of Mapam's Arab Department, complained to Yigal Allon months after the deportations that troops had been told to remove jewellery and money from residents 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.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 97.</ref>

[[George Habash]], who later founded the [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]], was born in Lydda to a Greek Orthodox family. He was in his second year at medical school in Beirut at the time, but returned to Lydda when he heard the Israelis had arrived in Jaffa, and was subsequently one of those expelled. Recalling the events of 1948 in 1990, he said that the Israelis took watches, jewellery, gold, and wallets from the refugees, and that he witnessed a neighbor of his shot and killed because he refused to be searched; he said the man's sister, who also saw what happened, died during the march from the shock, exposure and thirst.<ref name=Brandabur>[http://www.peuplesmonde.com/spip.php?article680 Brandabur 1990]. Habash said: "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, jewelery, 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."</ref>

As the residents left, the sacking of the cities began. The Yiftah brigade commander, Lt. Col. Schmuel "Mula" Cohen, wrote of Lydda that, "the cruelty of the war here reached its zenith."<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986], p. 88.</ref> Bechor Sheetrit, the Minister for Minority Affairs, said the army removed 1,800 truckloads of property from Lydda alone. Dov Shafrir was appointed Israel's Custodian of Absentee Property, supposedly charged to protect and redistribute Palestinian property, but his staff were inexperienced and unable to control the situation.<ref>Segev 1986, pp. 69–71</ref> The looting was so extensive that the 3rd Battalion had to be withdrawn from Lydda during the night of 13–14 July, and sent for a day to [[Ben Shemen]] for ''kinus heshbon nefesh'', a conference to encourage soul-searching. Cohen forced them to hand over their loot, which was thrown onto a bonfire and destroyed, but the situation continued when they returned to town. Some were later prosecuted.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA454 Morris 2004, p. 454], footnote 86.</ref>

There were also allegations that Israeli soldiers had raped Palestinian women. Ben-Gurion referred to them in his diary entry for 15 July 1948: "The bitter question has arisen regarding acts of robbery and rape [''o'nes'' ("אונס")] in the conquered towns ..."<ref>Ben-Gurion, Volume 2, p. 589.</ref> Israeli writer [[Amos Kenan]], who served as a platoon commander of the 82d Regiment of the Israeli Army brigade that conquered Lydda told ''The Nation'' on 6 February 1989: "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."<ref name=Kenan>[http://www.thenation.com/archive/four-decades-blood-vengeance Kenan 1989]; [http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0059831.html courtesy link].</ref> Kenan said he heard of only one woman who complained. A court-martial was arranged, he said, but in court, the accused ran the back of his hand across his throat, and the woman decided not to proceed.<ref name=Kenan/> The allegations were given little consideration by the Israeli government. Agriculture Minister [[Aharon Zisling]] told the Cabinet on 21 July: "It has been said that there were cases of rape in Ramle. I could forgive acts of rape but I won't forgive other deeds, which appear to me much graver. When a town is entered and rings are forcibly removed from fingers and jewellery from necks—that is a very grave matter."<ref name=Zisling>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/4327250 Morris 1986, p. 105].
*See also Segev 1986, pp. 71–72.
*For a discussion of Ben-Gurion's concern, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=dL29_RBATv0C&pg=PA313 Tal 2004, p. 311].</ref>

Stuart Cohen writes that central control over the Jewish fighters was 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. He adds that, despite the alleged war crimes, the majority of the IDF behaved with decency and civility.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=mVV4i-KbzoAC&pg=PA139 Cohen 2008, p. 139].</ref> Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his memoirs that some refused to take part in the evictions.<ref>[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70813FC3F5410728DDDAA0A94D8415B898BF1D3&scp=5&sq=&st=p Shipler, ''The New York Times'', 23 October 1979]. Rabin wrote: "Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach brigade included youth movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international fraternity and humaneness. The eviction action went beyond the concepts they were used to. There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action. Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these youth movement groups, and explain why we were obliged to undertake such harsh and cruel action."</ref>

==Aftermath==

===In Ramallah, Amman, and elsewhere===
[[File:Glubb Pasha 1940.jpg|right|thumb|220px|alt=photograph|[[John Bagot Glubb]], the Arab Legion's British commander, was spat on as he drove through the [[West Bank]] for having handed Lydda and Ramle to the Jews.]]
Tens of thousands of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle 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.<ref>IDF Intelligence Service/Arab Department, 21 July 1948, cited in Morris 2008, p. 291.</ref> 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 Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, as he drove through the [[West Bank]], and wives and parents of Arab Legion soldiers tried to break into King Abdullah's palace.<ref name=Morris2008p290>Morris 2008, pp. 290–291.</ref> [[Alec Kirkbride]], the British ambassador in Amman, described one protest in the city on 18 July:

<blockquote>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.<ref>Kirkbride 1976, p. 48, cited in Morris 2008, p. 291.</ref></blockquote>

Morris writes that, during a meeting in Amman on 12–13 July of the Political Committee of the [[Arab League]], delegates—particularly from Syria and Iraq—accused Glubb of serving British, or even Jewish, interests, with his excuses about troop and ammunition shortages. Egyptian journalists said he had handed Lydda and Ramle to the Jews. Perie-Gordon, Britain's acting minister in Amman, told the Foreign Office there was a suspicion that Glubb, on behalf of the British government, had lost Lydda and Ramle deliberately to ensure that Transjordan accept a truce. King Abdullah indicated that he wanted Glubb to leave, without actually asking him to—particularly after Iraqi officers alleged that the entire [[Hashemite]] house was in the pay of the British—but London asked him to stay on. Britain's popularity with the Arabs reached an all-time low.<ref>Morris 2008, pp. 291–292.
*For Perie-Gordon, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=D30D_GzUKfMC&pg=PA208 Abu Nowar 2002, p. 208].</ref> The United Nations Security Council called for a ceasefire to begin no later than 18 July, with sanctions to be levelled against transgressors. The Arabs were outraged: "No justice, no logic, no equity, no understanding, but blind submission to everything that is Zionist," ''Al-Hayat'' responded, though Morris writes that cooler heads in the Arab world were privately pleased that they were required not to fight, given Israel's obvious military superiority.<ref>Morris 2008, p. 295.</ref>

===Situation of the refugees===
Morris writes that the situation of the 400,000 Arabs who became refugees that summer—not only those from Lydda and Ramle—was dire, camping in public buildings, abandoned barracks, and under trees.<ref name=Morris2008p309>Morris 2008, p. 309ff.</ref> [[Count Folke Bernadotte]], the United Nations mediator in Palestine, visited a [[Palestinian refugee camps|refugee camp]] in Ramallah and said he had never seen a more ghastly sight.<ref>Sayigh 2007, p. 84.</ref> Morris writes that the Arab governments did little for them, and most of the aid that did reach them came from the West through the Red Cross and Quakers. A new UN body was set up to get things moving, which in December 1949 became the [[United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East]] (UNRWA), which many of the refugees and their descendants, now standing at four million, still depend on.<ref name=Morris2008p309/> Bernadotte's mediation efforts—which resulted in a proposal to split Palestine between Israel and Jordan, and to hand Lydda and Ramle to King Abdullah—ended on 17 September 1948, when he was assassinated by four Israeli gunmen from [[Lehi (group)|Lehi]], an extremist Zionist faction.<ref>[http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jfouAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HNwFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6344,4611106&dq=bernadotte+assassination&hl=en "Bernadotte Murder Stuns Whole World"], ''Ottawa Citizen'', 18 September 1948.</ref>

===Lausanne Conference===
The United Nations convened the [[Lausanne Conference of 1949]] from April to September 1949 in part to resolve the refugee question. On 12 May 1949, the conference achieved its only success when the parties signed the [[Lausanne Protocol]] on the framework for a comprehensive peace, which included territories, refugees, and Jerusalem. Israel agreed in principle to allow the return of all of Palestinian refugees because the Israelis wanted [[United Nations]] membership, which required the settlement of the refugee problem. Once Israel was admitted to the UN, it retreated from the protocol it had signed, because it was completely satisfied with the status quo, and saw no need to make any concessions with regard to the refugees or on boundary questions. Israeli Foreign Minister [[Moshe Sharett]] had hoped for a comprehensive peace settlement at Lausanne, but he was no match for Prime Minister [[David Ben-Gurion]], who saw the armistice agreements that stopped the fighting with the Arab states as sufficient, and put a low priority on a permanent peace treaty.<ref>{{cite book
|last= Pappe
|first= Ilan
|authorlink= Ilan Pappe
|title= The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict 1947–1951
|publisher = [[I.B. Tauris]]
|year = 1992
|isbn = 1-85043-819-6}}Chapter 9: The Lausanne Conference.</ref>
On August 3, 1949, the Israeli delegation proposed the repatriation of 100,000 refugees, but not to their former homes, which had been destroyed or given to Jewish refugees from Europe; Israel would specify where the refugees would be relocated and the specific economic activities the refugees would be permitted to engage in. Also, the 100,000 would include 25,000 who had already returned illegally, so the actual total was only 75,000. The Americans felt it too low: they wanted to see 200,000-250,000 refugees taken back. The Arabs considered the Israeli offer was "less than token." When the ‘100,000 plan’ was announced, the reaction of Israeli newspapers and political parties was uniformly negative. Soon after, the Israelis announced their offer had been withdrawn.<ref>{{cite book
|last= Palumbo
|first= Michael
|authorlink= Michael Palumbo
|title= The Palestinian Catastrophe
|pages = 184–189
|publisher = [[Quartet Books]]
|year = 1987
|isbn = 0 7043 0099 0}}</ref>

===Resettlement of the cities===
{{further|Absentees' Property Laws|Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim lands}}
[[File:LodTransferOfControl.png|right|thumb|230px|alt=photograph|Power is handed from the military governor of Lydda, now called Lod, to the first mayor, Pesach Lev, April 1949.]]
On 14 July 1948 the IDF told Ben-Gurion that "not one Arab inhabitant" remained in Ramla or Lod, as they were now called. 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-Lod reported that 960 Palestinians were living in Ramla, and 1,030 in Lod. Military rule in the towns ended in April 1949.<ref>For "not one inhabitant," and the hundreds remaining, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA434 Morris 2004, p. 434].
*For the numbers in October 1948, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA455 Morris 2004, p. 455], footnote 110.
*For military rule ending, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA39 Yacobi 2009, p. 39].</ref>

Nearly 700,000 Jews [[Aliyah|immigrated to Israel]] between May 1948 and December 1951 from Europe, Asia and Africa, doubling the state's Jewish population; in 1950 Israel passed the [[Law of Return]], offering Jews automatic citizenship.<ref name=Yacobi2009p42>[http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA42 Yacobi 2009, p. 42].</ref> The immigrants were assigned Palestinian homes—in part because of the inevitable housing shortage, but also as a matter of policy to make it harder for former residents to reclaim them—and could buy refugees' furniture from the Custodian for Absentees' Property.<ref name=MorrisYacobi>Morris 2008, p. 308, for a general discussion of the issue.
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA45 Yacobi 2009, p. 45], for specific mention of this in relation to Lydda.</ref> Jewish families were occasionally placed in houses belonging to Palestinians who still lived in Israel, the so-called "[[present absentees]]," regarded as physically present but legally absent, with no legal standing to reclaim their property.<ref name=Yacobi2009p42/> By March 1950 there were 8,600 Jews and 1,300 Palestinian Arabs living in Ramla, and 8,400 Jews and 1,000 Palestinians in Lod. Most of the Jews who settled in the towns were from Asia or North Africa.<ref>For the figures, and that most were from Asia and North Africa, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA427 Golan 2003].
*Also see [http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA39 Yacobi 2009, p. 39].</ref>

The Palestinian workers allowed to remain in the cities were confined to ghettos. The military administrator split the region into three zones—Ramla, Lod, and Rakevet, a neighborhood in Lod established by the British for rail workers—and declared the Arab areas within them "closed," with each closed zone run by a committee of three to five members.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA33 Yacobi 2009, p. 33.]</ref> Many of the town's essential workers were Palestinians. The military administrators did satisfy some of their needs, such as building a school, supplying medical aid, allocating them 50 dunams for growing vegetables, and renovating the interior of the Dahmash mosque, but it appears the refugees felt like prisoners; Palestinian train workers, for example, were subject to a curfew from evening until morning, with periodic searches to make sure they had no guns.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA34 Yacobi 2009, p. 34.]</ref> One wrote an open letter in March 1949 to the ''Al Youm'' newspaper on behalf of 460 Muslim and Christian train workers: "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.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=CE0EFVnpuAMC&pg=PA35 Yacobi 2009, pp. 35–36].</ref>

===Artistic reception===
[[File:Ismail Shammout's Where to ....JPG|right|thumb|150px|alt=photograph|[[Ismail Shammout]]'s<br/>''Where to ..?'' (1953)]]
The [[Palestinian art]]ist [[Ismail Shammout]] (1930–2006) was 19 years old when he was expelled from Lydda. He created a series of oil paintings about the march, the best known of which is ''Where to ..?'' (1953), which enjoys iconic status among Palestinians. A life-size image of a man dressed in rags holds a walking stick in one hand, the wrist of a child in the other, a toddler on his shoulder, with a third child behind him, crying and alone. There is a withered tree behind him, and in the distance the skyline of an Arab town with a [[minaret]]. [[Gannit Ankori]] writes that the absent mother is the lost homeland, the children its orphans.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=X_Q6FX0YFVwC&pg=PA48 Ankori 2006, pp. 48–50].
*For the image on Shammout's website: [http://www.shammout.com/oilbig13.htm "Where to ..?"], shammout.com. Retrieved 26 November 2010.</ref>

By November 1948 the IDF had been accused of atrocities in a number of towns and villages, to the point where David Ben-Gurion had to appoint an investigator. Israeli poet [[Natan Alterman]] (1910–1970) wrote about the allegations in his poem ''Al Zot'' ("On This"), published in ''[[Davar]]'' on 19 November 1948, about a soldier on a jeep machine-gunning an Arab, referring to the events in Lydda, according to Morris. Two days later Ben-Gurion sought Alterman's permission for the Defence Ministry to distribute the poem throughout the IDF:<ref>For the atrocities in general, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA486 Morris 2004, p. 486ff]; for reference to the poem and Ben-Gurion writing to Alterman, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA489 p. 489].
*Morris writes that the poem is about Lydda in [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA426 Morris 2004, pp. 426], [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA489 489] (on p. 489 he writes it was "apparently" about Lydda), and Morris 2008, p. 473, footnote 85.</ref>

{{Quote box |quoted= |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |qalign=left |width=370px |align=center
| quote =<poem>Let us sing then also about "delicate incidents"
For which the true name, incidentally, is murder
Let songs be composed about conversations with sympathetic interlocutors
who with collusive chuckles make concessions and grant forgiveness.<ref name=Cohenp140>[http://books.google.com/books?id=mVV4i-KbzoAC&pg=PA140 Cohen 2008, p. 140]</ref>
*[http://www.education.gov.il/tochniyot_Limudim/shira/sh_42.htm ''Al Zot'' in Hebrew], www.education.gov.il, accessed 1 December 2010.</poem>}}

===Four figures after the exodus===
[[File:Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat at the White House 1993-09-13.jpg|thumb|230px|alt=photograph|[[Yitzhak Rabin]]'s historic handshake with [[Yasser Arafat]] at the White House, 1993]]
Yigal Allon, who led Operation Dani and may have ordered the expulsions, became Israel's deputy prime minister in 1967. He was a member of the war cabinet during the 1967 Arab Israeli [[Six-Day War]], and the architect of the post-war [[Allon Plan]], a proposal to end Israel's occupation of the [[West Bank]]. He died in 1980.<ref>Jewish Agency for Israel.[http://web.archive.org/web/20041210194811/http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/BIOS/allon.html "Allon, Yigal (1918–1980)"]. Retrieved 25 September 2009.</ref>

Yitzhak Rabin, Allon's operations officer, who signed the Lydda expulsion order, became Chief of Staff of the IDF during the Six-Day War, and Israel's prime minister in 1974 and again in 1992. He was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli radical opposed to making peace with the PLO.<ref name=Morris2004p429>For his having signed the order, see [http://books.google.com/books?id=uM_kFX6edX8C&pg=PA429 Morris 2004, p. 429].</ref>

Khalil al-Wazir, the grocer's son expelled from Ramle, became one of the founders of Yasser Arafat's ''[[Fatah]]'' faction within the PLO, and specifically of its armed wing, ''[[Al-Assifa]]''. He organized the PLO's guerrilla warfare and the ''Fatah'' youth movements that helped spark the [[First Intifada]] in 1987. He was assassinated by Israeli commandos in Tunis in 1988.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=GkbzYoZtaJMC&pg=PA529 As'ad Abu Khalil 2005, p. 529ff].</ref>

George Habash, the medical student expelled from Lydda, went on to lead one of the best-known of the Palestinian militant groups, the [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]]. In September 1970 he masterminded the [[Dawson's Field hijackings|hijacking of four passenger jets]] bound for New York, an attack that put the Palestinian cause on the map. The PFLP was also behind the 1972 [[Lod Airport massacre]], in which 27 people died, and the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight to Entebbe, which famously led to the IDF's [[Operation Entebbe|rescue of the hostages]]. Habash died of a heart attack in Amman in 2008.<ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/world/middleeast/27habash.html?bl&ex=1201582800&en=a0d7bd56323e1b26&ei=5087%0A Andrews and Kifner, ''The New York Times'', January 27, 2008].
*Habash spoke to [[Robert Fisk]] in 1993 about Lydda: "I will never rest until I can go back. The house is still there and a Jewish family lives in it now. Some of my friends tried to find it and some relatives actually went there and sent me a message that the trees are still standing in the garden, just as they were in 1948. ... It's my right to go directly to my house and live there." See [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/still-dreaming-of-his-homeland-robert-fisk-in-damascus-hears-george-habash-orator-fighter-and-refugee-spell-out-his-terms-for-a-settlement-with-israel-1509518.html Fisk 1993].</ref>

==Historiography==
[[File:Anita Shapira.jpg|left|thumb|150px|alt=photograph|Israeli historian [[Anita Shapira]] argues that the scholars who wrote the early history of 1948 censored themselves, because they saw the 1948 war as the tragic climax of the [[Holocaust]] and the Second World War.<ref name=Shapira1995p12/>]]
Benny Morris argues that Israeli historians from the 1950s throughout the 1970s—who wrote what he calls the "Old History"—were "less than honest" about what had happened in Lydda and Ramle.<ref name=Morris1988>[http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472115419-ch1.pdf Morris 1988].</ref> [[Anita Shapira]] calls them the Palmach generation: historians who had fought in the [[1948 Arab-Israeli War]], and who thereafter went to work for the IDF's history branch, where they censored material other scholars had no access to. For them, Shapira writes, the Holocaust and the Second World War—including the experience of Jewish weakness in the face of persecution—made the fight for land between the Arabs and Jews a matter of life and death, the 1948 war the "tragic and heroic climax of all that had preceded it," and Israeli victory an "act of historical justice."<ref name=Shapira1995p12>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/25618678 Shapira 1995], pp. 12–13.</ref>

The IDF's official history of the 1948 war, ''Toldot Milhemet HaKomemiyut'' ("History of the War of Independence"), published in 1959, said that residents of Lydda had violated the terms of their surrender, and left because they were afraid of Israeli retribution. The head of the IDF history branch, Lt. Col Netanel Lorch, wrote in ''The Edge of the Sword'' (1961) that they had requested safe conduct from the IDF; American political scientist [[Ian Lustick]] writes that Lorch admitted in 1997 that he left his post because the censorship made it impossible to write good history.<ref>For Lorch's book, see [http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472115419-ch1.pdf Morris 1988].
*For Lustick, see [http://www.polisci.upenn.edu/faculty/bios/Pubs/survivalreview.pdf Lustick 1997].</ref> Another employee of the history branch, Lt. Col. Elhannan Orren, wrote a detailed history of Operation Dani in 1976 that made no mention of expulsions.<ref name=Morris1988/>

Arab historians published accounts, including [[Aref al-Aref]]'s ''Al Nakba, 1947–1952'' (1956–1960), [[Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib]]'s ''Min Athar al-Nakba'' (1951), and several papers by Walid Khalidi, but Morris writes that they suffered from a lack of archival material; Arab governments have been reluctant to open their archives, and the Israeli archives were at that point still closed.<ref>Morris 2004, pp. 1–2.</ref> The first person in Israel to acknowledge the Lydda and Ramle expulsions, writes Morris, was Yitzhak Rabin in his 1979 memoirs, though that part of his manuscript was removed by government censors.<ref name=Morris1988/> The 30-year rule of [[Israel State Archive|Israel's Archives Law]], passed in 1955, meant that hundreds of thousands of government documents were released throughout the 1980s, and a group calling itself the "New Historians" emerged, most of them born around 1948. They interpreted the history of the war, not in terms of European politics, the Holocaust, and Jewish history, but solely within the context of the Middle East. Shapira writes that they focused on the 700,000 Arabs who were uprooted by the war, not on the 6,000 Jews who died during it, and assessed the behavior of the Jewish state as they would that of any other.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/25618678 Shapira 1995], pp. 9, 16–17.</ref> Between 1987 and 1993, four of these historians in particular—Morris himself, [[Simha Flapan]], [[Ilan Pappé]], and [[Avi Shlaim]]—three of them Oxbridge-trained, published a series of books that changed the historiography of the Palestinian exodus. According to Lustick, although it was known in academic circles that the Palestinians had left because of expulsions and intimidation, it was largely unknown to Israeli Jews until Morris's ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949'' appeared in 1987.<ref>
[http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472115419-ch1.pdf Morris 1988], and [http://www.polisci.upenn.edu/faculty/bios/Pubs/survivalreview.pdf Lustick 1997], pp. 157–158.
*Simha Flapan (1911–1987) is the exception to the rule that the New Historians were born around 1948.
*The key texts are:
*[[Simha Flapan]]'s ''The Birth of Israel'' (1987)
*[[Benny Morris]]'s ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949'' (1987), ''[[1948 and After|1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians]]'' (1990), and ''[[Israel's Border Wars 1949–1956|Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956]]'' (1993)
*[[Ilan Pappé]]'s ''Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1948–1951'' (1988) and ''The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951'' (1992)
*[[Avi Shlaim]]'s ''Collusion across the Jordan'' (1988) and ''The Politics of Partition'' (1990)
*Other writers engaged in the "New History," according to Lustick (p. 157), include Uri Bar-Joseph, [[Mordechai Bar-On]], [[Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi]], Motti Golani, [[Uri Milstein]], and [[Tom Segev]].
*That the New Historians focus on the 700,000 uprooted, see [http://www.jstor.org/pss/25618678 Shapira 1995], p. 13.</ref>

Their work is not without its critics, most notably Israeli historian [[Efraim Karsh]], who writes that there was more voluntary Palestinian flight than Morris and the others concede. He acknowledges that there were expulsions, particularly in Lydda, though he argues—as does Morris—that they resulted from decisions made in the heat of battle, and account for a small percentage of the overall exodus.<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=6RRr_bf1ZhAC&pg=PA160 Karsh 2003, pp. 160–161].
*[http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11881944_ITM Kadish and Sela 2005].</ref> Karsh argues that the New Historians have turned the story of the birth of Israel upside down, making victims of the Arab aggressors, though he acknowledges that the New History is now widely accepted.<ref>[http://www.meforum.org/466/benny-morris-and-the-reign-of-error Karsh 1999].</ref> Ari Shavit devotes a chapter of his book ''My Promised Land'' (2013) to the expulsion, and calls the events “our black box, . . In it lies the dark secret of Zionism.”<ref>Dwight Garner
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/books/ari-shavits-my-promised-land.html?src=dayp 'Son of Israel, Caught in the Middle,'] [[New York Times]] 20 November 2013.</ref> The positions of Karsh and Morris, though they disagree, contrast in turn with those of Ilan Pappé and Walid Khalidi, who argue not only that there were widespread expulsions, but also that they were not the result of ''ad hoc'' decisions. Rather, they argue, the expulsions were part of a deliberate strategy, known as [[Plan Dalet]] and conceived before Israel's declaration of independence, to transfer the Arab population and seize their land.<ref>*[http://www.scribd.com/doc/19199199/Plan-Dalet-Master-Plan-for-the-Conquest-of-Palestine-by-Walid-Khalidi Khalidi 1961], and [http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/Khalidi,%20Plan%20Dalet%20Revisited.pdf Khalidi 1988].</ref>

==Lod and Ramla today==
[[File:RamleviewS.jpg|left|thumb|180px|alt=photograph|Ramla in 2006]]
{{as of|2009}} around 66,000 people were living in Ramla, which became briefly known around the world in 1962, when former SS officer [[Adolf Eichmann]] was hanged in Ramla prison in May that year.<ref>For the population, see [http://www.cbs.gov.il/population/new_2010/table3.pdf Population figures], Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved 26 November 2010.
*For Eichmann, see [http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/we-have-to-carry-out-the-sentence-1.226299 Weitz 2007].</ref> The population in Lod {{as of|2010|lc=y}} was officially around 45,000 Jews and 20,000 Arabs; its main industry is its airport, renamed Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973.<ref name=Economist>[http://www.economist.com/node/17254422 "Pulled apart"], ''The Economist'', 14 October 2010.</ref> [[Aliyah from Ethiopia|Beth Israel immigrants from Ethiopia]] were housed there in the 1990s, increasing the ethnic tension in the city which, together with the economic deprivation, make the town "the most likely place to explode," according to Arnon Golan, Israeli's foremost expert on ethnically-mixed cities.<ref>Nathan Jeffay, [http://forward.com/articles/14435/ 'Israel’s Mixed Cities on Edge After Riots,'] at [[The Forward]] 23 October 2008.</ref> In 2010 a three-meter-high wall was built to separate the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.<ref name=Economist/>

[[File:Zochrot at the former Lydda ghetto.JPG|thumb|200px|alt=photograph|Eitan Bronstein of [[Zochrot]] places a sign on the former Lydda ghetto.]]
The Arab community has complained that, when Arabs became a majority in Lod's Ramat Eshkol suburb, 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 acknowledges that it wants Lod to become a more Jewish city. In addition to the Arabs officially registered, a fifth of the overall population are [[Bedouin]], who arrived in Lod in the 1980s when they were moved off land in the Negev, according to Nathan Jeffay.They live in dwellings deemed illegal by Israeli authorities on agricultural land, unregistered and with no municipal services.<ref name=Jeffay>[http://www.forward.com/articles/14435/ Jeffay 2008].</ref>

The refugees are occasionally able to visit their former homes. [[Zochrot]], an Israeli group that researches former Palestinian towns, visited Lod in 2003 and 2005, erecting signs in Hebrew and Arabic depicting its history, including a sign on the wall of the former Arab ghetto. The visits are met with a mixture of interest and hostility.<ref>[http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=221 "Remembering Al-Lydd 2005"], [http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=364 "Tour and signposting in Al-Lydd (Lod), 2003"].
*Also see [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=365 "Testimonies on the Nakba of Lod"].
*[http://www.zochrot.org/images/lydda.pdf Booklet about Lydda] in Arabic and Hebrew, Zochrot.
*[http://www.zochrot.org/images/al-Ramle.pdf Booklet about Ramla], also in Arabic and Hebrew, Zochrot, all accessed 28 November 2010.</ref> Father Oudeh Rantisi, a former mayor of Ramallah who was expelled from Lydda in 1948, visited his family's former home for the first time in 1967:

<blockquote>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 ...<ref>[http://www.ameu.org/printer.asp?iid=64&aid=95 Rantisi and Amash 2000].</ref></blockquote>

==Notes==
{{Reflist|30em}}

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*''[[Zochrot]]'' (2003). [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=365 Testimonies on the Nakba of Lod], 11 January 2003. Also see [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=364] [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=221] [http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=349], all accessed 14 December 2010.
{{Refend}}

==Further reading==
{{Refbegin|2}}
*[[Nathan Alterman|Alterman, Nathan]] (1948). [http://www.education.gov.il/tochniyot_Limudim/shira/sh_42.htm "Al Zot"], www.education.gov.il, accessed 23 November 2010. {{he icon}}
*Abdel Jawad, Saleh (2007). ''Israel and the Palestinian refugees.'' Eyāl Benveniśtî, Chaim Gans, Sārī Ḥanafī, ed. Springer.
*[[Aref al-Aref|Aref al-'Aref]] (1959). ''Al-Nakba: Nakbat Filsatin wal-Firdaws al-Mafqud 1947–1952'' [''The Catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Palestine and the Lost Paradise 1947–1952'']. Sidon and Beirut, A1-Maktab al-'Sariyya lil-Tiba'a wal-Nashr.
*[[Moshe Dayan|Dayan, Moshe]] (1976). ''Moshe Dayan: story of my life.'' New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-03076-9.
*El-Asmar, Fouzi (1975). ''To be an Arab in Israel''. Institute for Palestine Studies.
*Guttman, Shmarya ("Avi-Yiftah") (November 1948). "Lydda," ''Mibifnim''.
*Kadish, Alon; [[Avraham Sela|Sela, Avraham]]; and Golan, Arnon (2000). ''The Occupation of Lydda, July 1948''. Tel Aviv: Israel Ministry of Defense and Hagana Historical Archive. {{he icon}}
*[[Efraim Karsh|Karsh, Efraim]] (1997). ''Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians'''. Routledge.
*Karsh, Efraim (2002). ''The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948'', Osprey Publishing, 2002.
*Kelman, Moshe (1972). "Ha-Hevdel bein Deir Yasin le-Lod" ["The Difference between Deir Yasin and Lydda"], ''Yedi'ot Aharonot'', 2 May 1972. {{he icon}}
*Khalidi, Walid (1992). "All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948". Institute for Palestine Studies.
*[[Ghassan Kanafani|Kanafani, Ghassan]] (1956). "Paper from Ramleh". "Palestine's Children. Short stories by Ghassan Kanafani". Three Continents Press. ISBN 0-89410-431-4.
*Lorch, Netanel (1997). "A Word from an Old Historian," ''Haaretz'', 23 June 1997.
*Monterescu, Daniel and Rabinowitz, Dan (2007). ''Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities''. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
*Morris, Benny (1986b). [http://books.google.com/books?id=OjuKhNEmFvoC&pg=PA169 "The Causes and Character of the Exodus from Palestine"] in Pappé, Ilan. ''The Israel/Palestine Question''. Routledge, 1999.
*Morris, Benny (1987). ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949''. Cambridge University Press.
*Munayyer, Spiro (1997). ''Lydda During the Mandate and Occupation Periods''. Institute for Palestine Studies.
*[[Nur-eldeen Masalha|Masalha, Nur]] (2003). ''The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem''. Pluto Press.
*Rantisi, Audeh G. [http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/362_rnts.htm Would I ever see my home again?], ''Al-Ahram'', accessed 14 December 2010.
*Rantisi, Audeh G. and Beebe, Ralph K. (1990). ''Blessed are the peacemakers: the story of a Palestinian Christian''. Eagle.
{{Refend}}
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{{Palestinian Arab villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestine War}}
{{Arab-Israeli Conflict}}
{{Israeli-Palestinian Conflict}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Exodus From Lydda And Ramle}}
[[Category:1948 Palestinian exodus]]
[[Category:1948 Arab–Israeli War]]
[[Category:Forced marches]]
[[Category:Lod]]
[[Category:Ramla]]

Wikipedia - Benutzerbeiträge [de]

Palästinensische Vertreibung aus Lydda und Ramle 1948