The Expulsion of Lydda and Ramle

Lydda and Ramle sat three kilometres apart in the centre of the country, on the railway and the road to Jerusalem, and the 1947 partition plan had placed both inside the proposed Arab state. The archive keeps separate entries on each city — Lydda and Ramle. This entry is about the ten days in July 1948 that emptied them.

The Israeli objective when the first UN truce expired on 9 July was to secure the corridor to Jerusalem. Several plans had been drawn for it; the one adopted, Operation Dani, was launched on the night of 9–10 July from the settlement of Ben Shemen with a composite force of Palmach, armoured and infantry brigades — around eight thousand men, by Walid Khalidi’s account. Against them the only regular Arab troops in the sector were a single Arab Legion company of some 125 men; the rest of the defence was volunteer residents under a retired sergeant. General Glubb had told King Abdullah before the Mandate ended that the Legion could not hold the two cities. The company withdrew when the attack came.

Fighting broke out around Lydda in the early hours of 10 July, and in the afternoon Moshe Dayan’s commando battalion drove through the city in a raid lasting under an hour, shooting as it went. The exact moment the city fell is not agreed between the sources this archive cites: PalQuest’s account of Operation Dani, following Khalidi, puts it on the evening of 10 July, while PalQuest’s dedicated account of Lydda has Israeli aircraft dropping surrender leaflets on the morning of 11 July, the assault opening from the east at noon, and Israeli troops entering the city that evening. What both describe is the same short sequence: a raid on the 10th, an entry into the city, and organised resistance broken by the 12th. On the morning of 11 July three Arab Legion armoured cars entered Lydda to extract the beleaguered company; their appearance was taken by the defenders for a counter-attack, and the Israeli army put down what it later called an uprising by shooting through the streets. Men who had taken shelter in the Dahmash mosque were shot there — estimates of the dead at the mosque range from 80 to 176 — and the total killed inside the city is put at over 400. Ramle was attacked and occupied on 12 July.

That same day the decision was taken to empty both cities. Yigal Alon asked Ben-Gurion what was to be done with the inhabitants and was answered, with a gesture, “Expel them.” Yitzhak Rabin, in command of Operation Dani, signed the order: the inhabitants of Lydda were to be expelled quickly, without regard to age. On 13 July the residents of Lydda and Ramle — approximately 70,000 people, including refugees who had already fled to Lydda from Jaffa and its villages — were given half an hour to leave and sent east on foot toward Bayt Nabala and the Arab lines, searched and robbed of valuables at checkpoints on the way. Khalidi counts the populations of some twenty-five villages taken during the operation among the expelled, putting the total nearer 80,000. Hundreds died of thirst and exhaustion on the road to Ramallah, among them a brother of the painter Ismail Shammout, then eighteen, who walked the route and painted it for the rest of his life. Taken together, the dead in the cities and the dead on the march are estimated at close to a thousand. Hundreds more died after reaching the overcrowded camps at Ramallah; Count Bernadotte, visiting on 2 August, wrote that he had seen nothing like it in the camps of wartime Europe.

It was among the largest and least ambiguous of the transfer operations of 1948, ordered at the highest level and carried out in daylight. A few thousand Palestinians were kept behind in each city, confined at first to a single fenced quarter under military government; their houses and their neighbours’ were handed to new immigrants under the Absentees’ Property Law. Lydda was renamed Lod.

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