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Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle

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The Lydda Death March took place during Operation Danny in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Beginning on 12 July 1948, on the orders of Yitzhak Rabin, some 70,000 Palestinian Arabs from the Lydda and Al-Ramla were expelled by Israeli forces. It is estimated that as many as 350 people died over the three-day journey that followed, primarily from exhaustion and dehydration. Survivors have described how they were evicted at gunpoint, how Israeli forces 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 of the general panic. The majority of the survivors ended up in a refugee camp in Ramallah where many of them and their descendants reside today.

Brief background

After World War I and until the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Lydda and Ramla were cities in the District of Ramla in British Mandate Palestine. According to the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which proposed dividing Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, both cities were to form part of the Arab state.

Expulsion orders

Yitzhak Rabin was the Head of Operations for Israeli forces in the area and sent the order for the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda: "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. Israeli historians in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, insisted that the inhabitants of Ramla violated the terms of surrender, and Benny Morris writes that they "were happy at the possibility given them of evacuating." 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

A Palestinian refugee camp in 1948. While the location is not indicated, the tent structures are typical of the type of temporary housing that was available to Palestinian refugees, like those from Lydda and Ramla, in the immediate wake of their displacement during the 1948 war.

Father Oudeh Rantisi, a survivor, described his recollections of the death march which are recorded in detail in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees (2007). Besides those who died of dehydration and exhaustion, he 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.

United Nations official Count Bernadotte who visited the refugee camp in Ramallah 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."

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. 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)
  10. Sa'di and Abu-Lughod, 2007, pp. 91-92.
  11. ^ Prior, 1999, p. 206.
  12. It should be noted Benny Morris does not deny that there was a forced exodus in the case of Lydda in which hundreds died, and 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.)
  13. Ron, 2003, p. 145.
  14. Benvenisti et al., 2007, p. 102.
  15. Thomas, 1999, p. 288.

Bibliography

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