Lydda

Lydda stood south-east of Jaffa at the junction where the Qantara–Haifa railway met the line to Jerusalem; its station was reckoned second in importance only to Haifa’s, and Lydda airport, built by the Mandate government, was the country’s international gateway. In 1946 its population was about 18,250, with no Jewish residents. It pressed olives and sesame for oil, and its Monday market was the hub of commercial activity for the city and the towns and villages around it. Lydda and Ramle, three kilometres apart, were treated as twin cities, and the 1947 partition plan placed both inside the proposed Arab state.

The city was old before Ramle existed. When the Umayyad governor Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik founded Ramle early in the eighth century he moved much of Lydda’s population into the new capital, and Lydda spent centuries in its neighbour’s shadow before the railway and the airfield made it again the more important of the two.

The war reached the twin cities by stages. Between late April and mid-May 1948 Jaffa and its villages fell and thousands of their people took refuge in Lydda. Hassan Salameh, commander of the Army of the Holy War in the district, was killed at Ras al-Ayn in late April, and with the loss of that position the twin cities were cut off from the Triangle and from their supply lines. The city organised its own national, military, health and commercial committees, and its defence was left to volunteer residents under a retired Arab Legion sergeant, Hamza Subh; the Jordanian company stationed between Lydda and Ramle had already judged that the towns could not hold. On the eve of the assault Israeli aircraft bombed Lydda and Ramle in the early evening, while people were breaking the Ramadan fast, and the hospital filled with the wounded while the men built barricades.

What happened next — the fighting of 10–12 July, the killings in and around the Dahmash mosque, and the expulsion of the population on 13 July — is set out in this archive’s entry on the expulsion of Lydda and Ramle. Three of the testimonies that carried it out of the city were given by people who went on to shape Palestinian political and cultural life: the painter Ismail Shammout, who lost a brother to thirst on the march; Reja-e Busailah, blind and a teenager at the time, who followed the exodus by ear; and George Habash, who watched a neighbour, Amin Hanhan, shot dead at a search post in front of his family and dated his politics from that day.

The town that remained was resettled and renamed Lod. A small remnant of its Palestinian population, confined at first to a fenced quarter under military government, stayed on as citizens of the state that had emptied their city.

Sources

• Lydda, 9–13 July 1948 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Operation Dani — PalQuest
• Special Document: The Fall of Lydda, by Spiro Munayyer, with an introduction by Walid Khalidi (PDF) — PalQuest / Journal of Palestine Studies
• Ramla — Wikipedia (on the eighth-century transfer of Lydda’s population to the new city)