Ramle

Ramle was founded in the early eighth century by Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, Umayyad governor of Jund Filastin and later caliph, as the seat of his administration — the one major city in the country established by Muslim rulers rather than inherited. He built it beside Lydda rather than in it, and moved much of Lydda’s population into the new capital; al-Jahshiyari’s verdict was that Sulayman “founded the town of al-Ramla and its mosque and thus caused the ruin of Lod.” The name is the singular of raml, sand.

It prospered where the road from Egypt to Damascus crossed the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, as a market for the surrounding countryside and a centre of dyeing, weaving and pottery, and as the home of a great many Muslim scholars. An aqueduct brought its water from Tel Gezer, ten kilometres away, and rainwater was stored in cisterns under the houses and under the congregational mosque — the White Mosque, begun by Sulayman and finished under Umar II. The Persian traveller Nasir-i Khusraw, who saw the city in the eleventh century, described marble everywhere, sawn on the spot with a toothless blade and Mecca sand, and noted the inscription recording the earthquake of December 1033 that levelled much of the town. Ramle stayed the capital of Jund Filastin until shortly before the Crusaders arrived in 1099. What survives above ground is the White Mosque’s remains, the cisterns, and the thirteenth-century White Tower that was its minaret and still dominates the skyline.

By the Mandate period Ramle was a market and administrative town — 15,160 people in the 1945/46 survey, 11,900 Muslims and 3,260 Christians — three kilometres from Lydda and effectively its twin. The UN partition plan of November 1947 placed both inside the proposed Arab state. An Irgun bomb in the Ramle market on 18 February 1948 killed several residents and injured dozens.

Ramle was attacked and occupied on 12 July 1948, and the population of both cities was expelled the next day; that operation is covered in this archive’s entry on the expulsion of Lydda and Ramle. A few thousand Palestinians were permitted or compelled to remain in the two cities. They were concentrated in single quarters — in Ramle’s case a fenced ghetto — placed under military government, and their vacated houses were handed to new Jewish immigrants, first Holocaust survivors from Europe and then immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries, under the Absentees’ Property Law. By February 1949 the Jewish population was over 6,000. Ramle today is one of Israel’s mixed cities, roughly three-quarters Jewish and a quarter Arab, in which the Arabic street names, the mosques and the cemeteries record a history the municipality’s official account largely omits.

Sources

• Lydda, 9–13 July 1948 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Operation Dani — PalQuest
• Ramla — Wikipedia