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The Lydda Death March took place during Operation Danny in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Beginning on 12 July 1948, some 70,000 Palestinian Arabs from Lydda and Al-Ramla were expelled by Israeli forces following orders issued by Yitzhak Rabin. It is estimated that as many as 350 people died over the three-day journey that followed, primarily from exhaustion and dehydration.

Accounts from survivors describe how they were evicted at gunpoint by Israeli forces who repeatedly shot over their heads along the way to keep them moving, as well as a few incidents in which people were shot and killed, or became casualties as a result of the general panic. In addition to losing their residential properties, many of those expelled were also stripped of their portable possessions by Israeli soldiers. The majority of the survivors ended up in a refugee camp in Ramallah where many of them or their descendants continue to reside today.

Brief background

After World War I and until the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Lydda and Ramla were towns in the District of Ramla in British Mandate Palestine. Before the 1948 war, both Lydda and Al-Ramla were exclusively Palestinian towns and according to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which proposed dividing Palestine into two states (one Jewish and one Arab) both were to form part of the proposed Arab state.

Expulsion orders

Yitzhak Rabin was the Head of Operations for Israeli forces in the area in July 1948 and he sent the order for the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda which read: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age ... Yiftah (Brigade HQ) must determine the method." A similar expulsion order was issued for the city of Ramla. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Israeli historians differentiated between the cases of Lydda and Ramla, insisting that the inhabitants of Ramla had violated the terms of surrender, with Benny Morris writing that they "were happy at the possibility given them of evacuating." However, Rabin himself admitted that "expulsions" had taken place in both Ramla and Lydda, and though this admission was excised from his text on the subject by Israeli censors, the censored excerpt was reprinted in the New York Times on 23 October 1979.

Eyewitness accounts

Father Oudeh Rantisi, a survivor, describes his recollections of the death march, recorded in detail in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees (2007). Besides those who died of dehydration and exhaustion, Rantisi recounts seeing people killed along the way in the general panic, as in this excerpt:

There was in front of us, a woman holding her small baby and a cart with large wheels pulled by a horse. From the greatness of crowding and anxiety and fear, the child fell from his mother's arms to the ground and the wheel went over his neck. It was the first of this type of scene which passed before my eyes.

In another excerpt, he recounts episodes of looting by Israeli soldiers and having witnessed the shooting and killing of a few people by Israeli soldiers:

When we entered this gate, we saw Jewish soldiers spreading sheets on the ground and each who passed there had to place whatever they had on the ground or be killed. I remember that there was a man I knew from the Hanhan family from Lod who had just been married barely six weeks and there was with him a basket which contained money. When they asked him to place the basket on the sheet he refused - so they shot him dead before my eyes. Others were killed in front of me too, but I remember this person well because I use to know him.

The looting conducted by Israeli soldiers is also mentioned by Benny Morris who writes that many were "stripped of their possessions." Of the third day of the march, Rantisi says:

the things I saw on the third day had a big effect on my life. Hundreds lost their lives due to fatigue and thirst. It was very hot during the day and there was no water. I remember that when we reached an abandoned house, they tied a rope around my cousin's child and sent him down into the water. They were so thirsty they started to suck the water from his clothes ... The road to Ramallah had become an open cemetery.

Another survivor, Raja e-Basailah, describes how after making it to the Arab village of Ni'ilin, he pushed himself through the crowds to procure some water to take back to his mother and a close friend. He hid the water from others who were begging for it and describes being haunted for years afterward by his "hard-hearted" denial of their needs. Because he was blind, Basailah did not see those who perished on the way, but he recalls hearing the exclamations of others describing " that some of those who lay dead had their tongues sticking out covered with dust and down," and how someone recounted to him, " having seen a baby still alive on the bosom of a dead woman, apparently the mother ..."

United Nations official Count Bernadotte who visited the refugee camp in Ramallah which housed the majority of the survivors in July 1948 said: "I have made the acquaintance of a great many refugee camps in my life but never have I seen a more ghastly site."

Aftermath

After the war's end, Lydda and Al-Ramla became predominantly Jewish mixed towns and were renamed Lod and Ramla respectively by the newly declared Israeli state. Residual Palestinian populations that had managed to remain in both towns were concentrated in bounded compounds and were vastly outnumbered by the influx of Jewish immigrants that followed. The residential property rights of the former Palestinian communities of Lydda and Ramla were officially transferred to the Israel's Custodian of Absentee Properties in March 1950. The majority of the survivors and their descendants reside in Ramallah in the West Bank where most of them ended up in a refugee camp after the forced march of 1948.

Artistic representations

The Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout was 19 years old when he was among those forced to leave Lydda in the long march to exile. He portrayed his experience and those of tens of thousands of other Palestinian refugees in the piece Whereto? (1953). The oil painting on canvass is considered his best known work and enjoys iconic status among Palestinians. In the foreground, it depicts a life-size image of an eldery man dressed in rags carrying a walking stick in his left hand while his right hand grasps the wrist of a crying child. A sleeping toddler on his shoulder is resting his cheek upon the old man's head. Just behind them is a third child crying and walking alone. In the background there is a skyline of an Arab town with a minaret, while in the middle ground there is a withered tree. A visual of the painting and a discussion of its symbolic dimensions and iconic status are included in the work Palestinian Art (2006) by Gannit Ankori, an Israeli art historian.

See also

• 1948 Palestinian exodus

References

1. Holmes et al., 2001, p. 64.
2. ^ Prior, 1999, p. 205.
3. Finkelstein, 2003, p. 55.
4. Nur Masalha. "Towards the Palestinian Refugees" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-29.
5. Father Audeh Rantisi (May 1998). "Would I ever see my home again?" (Special edition commemorating 50 Years of Arab Dispossession since the creation of the State of Israel ed.). Al-Ahram.
6. Sandy Tolan (21 July 2008). "Focus: 60 Years of Division: The Nakba in al-Ramla". Al Jazeera English. Retrieved 2009-04-29.
7. Salman Abu Sitta (26 January – 1 February 2006). "The Origins of Sharon's Legacy". Original in Al-Ahram Weekly (Republished by Palestine Lands Society). Retrieved 2009-04-29.
8. ^ Benvenisti et al., 2007, p. 101.
9. ^ Ron, 2003, p. 145.
10. ^ Audeh G. Rantisi and Charles Amash (July–August 2000). "Death March". Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU). Retrieved 2009-04-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
11. ^ Sa'di and Abu-Lughod, 2007, pp. 91-92.
12. ^ Monterescu and Rabinowitz, 2007, pp. 16-17.
13. ^ Prior, 1999, p. 206.
14. Benny Morris does not deny that there was a forced exodus in the case of Lydda in which hundreds died. He writes that, "All the Israelis who witnessed the events agreed that the exodus, under a hot July sun, was an extended episode of suffering for the refugees..." (Ron, 2003, p. 145.)
15. Benvenisti et al., 2007, p. 102.
16. Thomas, 1999, p. 288.
17. Ankori, 2006, pp. 48-50.

Bibliography

• Ankori, Gannit (2006), Palestinian art (Illustrated ed.), Reaktion Books, ISBN 1861892594, 9781861892591 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Benvenisti, Eyal; Gans, Chaim; Ḥanafi, Sārī (2007), Israel and the Palestinian refugees (Illustrated ed.), Springer, ISBN 3540681604, 9783540681601 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Finkelstein, Norman G. (2003), Image and reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict (2nd, revised ed.), Verso, ISBN 1859844421, 9781859844427 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Holmes, Richard; Strachan, Hew; Bellamy, Chris; Bicheno, Hugh (2001), The Oxford companion to military history (Illustrated ed.), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198662092, 9780198662099 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Monterescu, Daniel; Rabinowitz, Dan (2007), Mixed towns, trapped communities: historical narratives, spatial dynamics, gender relations and cultural encounters in Palestinian-Israeli towns (Illustrated ed.), Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., ISBN 0754647323, 9780754647324 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Prior, Michael P. (1999), Zionism and the state of Israel: a moral inquiry (Illustrated ed.), Routledge, ISBN 0415204623, 9780415204620 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Ron, James (2003), Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel (Illustrated ed.), University of California Press, ISBN 0520236572, 9780520236578 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Sa'di, Ahmad H.; Abu-Lughod, Lila (2007), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory (Illustrated ed.), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0231135793, 9780231135795 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Thomas, Baylis (1999), How Israel was won: a concise history of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Illustrated ed.), Lexington Books, ISBN 0739100645, 9780739100646 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)

• 1948 Palestinian exodus
• 1948 Arab-Israeli War