My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  Gutman describes the next thirty minutes as the worst half hour in his life. Decades later he is still flustered when he recounts the events into the tape recorder. The horrific noise. The shooting that won’t stop. The wrath of God. And when the shooting does stop, the silence is so sweet. But then news comes of what has happened in the small mosque. The military governor orders his men to bury the dead, get rid of the incriminating evidence.

  Gutman now knows that the die is cast, the fate of Lydda is sealed. There is no going back. But as he has not received an expulsion order, he will not give one. He returns to the Arab dignitaries assembled in the rectory of St. George’s, gets hold of himself, and does what he must do. He tells the dignitaries that there is a great war coming to Lydda because of its international airport. He says that, as they have just seen, anything might happen in a great war. The terrified dignitaries ask what will happen if they ask to leave. “That is an ominous question,” the military governor responds; “I must give it some thought.” Retiring to the next room, he rests his head and thinks how much easier it would be if this mass of Arabs were not here. Yet he also decides that no matter what, he will not order the Arabs to leave. When he returns to the dignitaries, he exercises the utmost psychological pressure, then tells them he must consult with his superiors again.

  During their third meeting, the Arab dignitaries are in a state of hysteria. They ask to leave Lydda with their one condition being the release of all prisoners detained in the Great Mosque. For the third time, the military governor leaves for consultations. This time he returns escorted by two young officers whom he has asked to witness the fateful conversation.

  DIGNITARIES: What will become of the prisoners detained in the mosque?

  GUTMAN: We shall do to the prisoners what you would do had you imprisoned us.

  DIGNITARIES: No, no, please don’t do that.

  GUTMAN: Why, what did I say? All I said is that we will do to you what you would do to us.

  DIGNITARIES: Please no, master. We beg you not to do such a thing.

  GUTMAN: No, we shall not do that. Ten minutes from now the prisoners will be free to leave the mosque and leave their homes and leave Lydda along with all of you and the entire population of Lydda.

  DIGNITARIES: Thank you, master. God bless you.

  Gutman feels he has achieved his goal. Occupation, massacre, and mental pressure have had the desired effect. At the end of the day, after forty-eight hours of hell, he does not quite order the people of Lydda to go. Under the indirect threat of slaughter, Lydda’s leaders ask to go.

  Now Gutman walks across the street from the rectory to the Great Mosque. He faces the mass of prisoners and tells them they are free to go. According to the decision made by the dignitaries of Lydda, he tells them, within an hour and a half all the inhabitants of Lydda will leave Lydda. It is forbidden to carry weapons. It is forbidden to take cars and vehicles. But any other possessions may be taken as long as they leave Lydda immediately.

  The military governor can hardly believe his eyes. Thousands of men are leaving the Great Mosque, their heads bowed. No one complains, no one curses, no one spits in his face. With complete submission, the masses march out and disperse. He climbs the tall minaret of the Great Mosque. From the top he watches chaos engulf the town. The people of Lydda grab anything they can: bread, vegetables, dates and figs; sacks of flour, sugar, wheat, and barley; silverware, copperware, jewelry; blankets, mattresses. They carry suitcases bursting at the seams, improvised packs made from sheets and pillowcases. Everything is loaded on horse wagons, donkeys, mules. All is done in a rush, in panic: within an hour and a half, an hour, half an hour.

  Gutman descends the minaret and walks to the eastern edge of town overlooking Ben Shemen. The groups of civilians leaving town gather into a procession. The procession gathers into a long, biblical-looking column of thousands. And as the military governor watches the faces of the people marching into exile, he wonders if there is a Jeremiah among them to lament their calamity and disgrace. Suddenly he feels an urge to join the marching people and to be their Jeremiah. For one long moment, he who is their Nebuchadnezzar wishes to be their Jeremiah.

  The brigade commander withdraws into himself when he finally describes the marching column. Standing by his command car, he watches the people of Lydda walking, carrying on their backs heavy sacks made of blankets and sheets. Gradually, they cast aside the sacks they cannot carry any farther. In the heavy heat, suffering from terrible thirst, old men and women collapse. Like the ancient Jews, the people of Lydda go into exile.

  Watching the column, does the brigade commander feel guilt? Not guilt, but compassion, he says on tape. Then he immediately turns from the human experience to the overall strategic context. “Yitzhak Tabenkin supported the expulsion of the Arabs,” he tells me. “Tabenkin was perfectly clear. He was not in a position to give specific orders, but his general instruction to Palmach headquarters was that war presented a one-time opportunity to solve the Arab problem. Yigal Allon, too, said that this was the moment. He said they must not be. Allon was a humanist, but he said that the Arabs must not remain or else there would not be a state.” When Allon appointed the brigade commander, he told him explicitly: wherever you fight, Arabs should not remain. So it was in Tiberias and Safed, so it was in the villages of the Galilee, so it was in the villages of the Valley of Lydda—Iraba, Daniyal, Gimzu, Dahariya, and Haditha. “Only in the city of Lydda was there a mess, because the city was large and the troops closed in on it from the east, so the Arabs could not flee during the battle itself.”

  Was the column the outcome of an early expulsion plan or an explicit expulsion order? “No, no,” replies the alarmed brigade commander. “Operation Larlar was conducted by the State of Israel. In July 1948, David Ben Gurion was already the prime minister of a sovereign nation. The troops attacking Lydda were the troops of the just-born Israel Defense Forces. The Holocaust was in the background. Prime Minister Ben Gurion could not instruct the IDF to get rid of the Arabs. Yigal Allon, too, was a farsighted Jew. He understood that Ben Gurion could not give an expulsion order. As a state we do not expel. On the other hand, both Ben Gurion and Allon knew it was impossible to allow an Arab Lydda to remain by the international airport, not far from Tel Aviv. If we did so there would be no victory and there would be no state. Some things were said between Ben Gurion and Allon, but there were no written orders.”

  There are also no explicit orders between Allon and the brigade commander. But the training the brigade commander received in the Palmach makes any order redundant. He knows what he must do even when he’s not told. And when the Jordanian armored vehicles break into Lydda, there is even an excuse. The Jordanian Arab Legion, heading toward central Israel, does attack from the east. The 3rd Regiment is indeed under pressure from within and without. There is a large Palestinian population in Lydda, and there are considerable Jordanian forces massing east of Lydda. So when the Arabs of Lydda ask the military governor if they may leave, it makes strategic sense for them to be told to walk toward the Legion. “It was a favorable outcome,” says the brigade commander. “It worked one hundred percent. The column leaving Lydda pushed the Arab Legion eastward, clearing a vast territory without any combat.”

  And yet when I ask the brigade commander to go back to the place, the moment, the personal experience, he is taken aback. Allon and Rabin have left for another front, so the responsibility for the exodus of Lydda falls to him, and to his deputy, the regiment commander, and the military governor. These four officers have to contend with the dangers of renewed fighting in the east and the chaos caused by the soldiers’ wild looting in town. They have to see to the burial of ours and theirs. And the march. The terrible column of tens of thousands leaving Lydda.

  “Officers are human beings, too,” says the brigade commander. “And as a human being you suddenly face a chasm. On the one hand is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village, Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of
Lydda. You are surprised by your own surprise. For years you’ve trained for this day. You’ve prepared the village files. You’ve been told there is an inevitable war coming. You’ve been told that the Arabs will have to go. And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well-trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy, and deeply sad. You feel like you’re facing something so immense you cannot deal with, you cannot even grasp.”

  Bulldozer doesn’t remember the column because he was injured when shooting the antitank PIAT shell at the small mosque; he lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital. But when he awoke several days later, his comrades came to visit and told him that he’d done good, he’d killed seventy Arabs. They told him that because of the rage they felt at seeing him bleed, they had walked into the small mosque and sprayed the surviving wounded with automatic fire. Then they walked into the nearby houses and gunned down anyone they found. At night, when they were ordered to clean the small mosque and carry out the seventy corpses and bury them, they took eight other Arabs to do the digging of the burial site and afterward shot them, too, and buried the eight with the seventy. Because after the shooting by the small mosque, they were not hesitant anymore but tough as nails. “The guys stopped being noble-minded,” says Bulldozer. “They knew what had to be done and did it. And what they did was in accord with the decision made high up to take the people of Lydda and walk them beyond the border of the Jewish state.”

  One of the boys from the training group remembers the column well. He remembers that in the morning after the small mosque massacre, his company’s assignment was to cleanse the quarter east of the small mosque. He remembers an explicit order to expel, to throw them out. All of them. The idealistic soldiers of the 3rd Regiment went from house to house along the ruler-straight streets of Lydda’s modern quarter, shouting in Arabic, “Yallah, yallah.” (Go on, go on.) And they shot in the air to frighten and to hurry the Muslim and Christian families of Lydda’s new middle class. The affluent Arabs collected their children in a panic, along with their donkeys, horses, and belongings, and they walked in the scorching heat to the edge of town and then onto the road to Ben Shemen.

  Other boys remember less. Their memory is not quite sharp when it comes to Lydda. They cannot recall what they were doing during those decisive hours. All they carry with them from those three days of July are scattered pictures: an occupied city, shuttered windows, white flags. The thousands crammed into the Great Mosque. The shooting by the small mosque. Half an hour of inferno, followed by a deathly silence. And in the silence, the quiet procession of defeated Arabs, their hands in the air. So now the young soldiers can ride looted bicycles all over town and break into Lydda’s luxury stores to take cameras, gramophones, radios, carpets, hookahs, and fine copperware. They confiscate trucks, tractors, combines, and orange grove pumps for their future kibbutz. They fill the buses of the future kibbutz with all the goods of Lydda. Then, after an unexplained pause, the men I am interviewing mention the column. They sound shocked even all these years later as they describe the procession of elderly, women, and children who leave behind a long trail of household goods they cannot carry anymore. Sacks of flour, of sugar, of wheat. Bicycles. Mattresses. Children’s toys, clothes, shoes.

  The training group leader remembers the column exceptionally well. Before he is wounded he breaks into a barber shop to use the clean towels and alcohol to bandage Lydda’s children who were wounded during combat. But after being wounded in the ditch near the small mosque and losing the palm of his right hand, he is treated in an improvised military clinic in the town center. While the medics bandage him up and ease his pain with morphine, he hears the stern commands given to put down the Lydda revolt. And the boom of the PIAT, and the infernal rat-a-tat-tat of the machine gun. The next day, when a military ambulance evacuates him to the field hospital in Ben Shemen, it runs into the column leaving Lydda. Through the ambulance windows, the training group leader sees the surreal scene of old men and women and children walking among the donkeys and mules and horse wagons and baby carriages, expressions of calamity on their faces. The training group leader doesn’t know whom he pities more: his dead friends, himself, his generation, or the tens of thousands marching through the Lydda Valley.

  Gutman remembers, too. After he descends the minaret and marches among the marchers, the military governor is overtaken by emotion. He asks himself if he was right to encourage the regiment commander to shoot into Lydda’s houses, if there was a way to avoid all that has happened. Then he silences himself by answering that if it weren’t for what happened in Lydda, Zionism would be done for. As he watches the men and women marching, he is shocked to see the imperviousness on their faces, the loss of sovereignty, the loss of dignity. He finds it incomprehensible that a city, a civilization, can break down just like that. Outside town, the military governor sees hundreds, perhaps thousands of people gathered around a well to draw water to quench their July thirst. One person falls into the well; another is trampled to death in the panic. He sees a young woman kneeling to give birth amid the commotion. He sees a boy lost, and a mother shouting for a lost boy. He sees soldiers forcing those marching to hand over cash and wrist-watches and jewelry. And he stops the soldiers. He sees how between two lines of armed Jewish boys the great throngs of Palestinians leave the city and become a column. And the column grows longer and longer. The column exits the city of Lydda and crosses the Lydda Valley, passing by the endearing Zionist youth village of Ben Shemen.

  Ottman Abu Hammed of Lydda remembers the column best. His grandfather used to work with the Jews in the Atid factory and had helped the Jews with the planting of the olive forest. His father, who used to supply the youth village with vegetables, had befriended Dr. Lehmann and would escort him when he gave anticholera vaccinations in Lydda. He himself had visited the Ben Shemen youth village quite often as a child. He loved the modern cowshed and the swimming pool, and the girls in khaki shorts, with their tanned legs.

  Ottman is almost as old as the boys from the training group, but when war breaks out in 1948 he is far more innocent. Lacking a good education and any political awareness, he does not really comprehend what is going on. All he remembers is his father trying to prevent an attack on Ben Shemen; his father meeting the men of Ben Shemen in the fields; his father being charged with treason and escaping the firing squad at the very last minute. For Ottman, Lydda in the summer of 1948 is a booming city. The many thousands of refugees who have fled Jaffa and Sarafand and Na’aneh and settled there have brought money to the town. As food and vegetable prices soar, the locals’ profits double and triple. Cafés are open late into the night and belly dancers are everywhere. There is music and fun in town, and girls who are easy to get.

  Ottman remembers violence, too. A convoy of Jews on its way to Ben Shemen is attacked and its passengers murdered. The driver of a Jewish jeep is murdered on the main road. One day the corpses of two Jewish young men and one Jewish young woman are brought to town after they have been captured, raped, and murdered in one of the nearby villages. When the violated bodies are paraded in Lydda’s high street, Ottman is aghast. But neither the eighteen-year-old nor his family can imagine what is to come. They are totally shocked when Lydda is bombed by a Jewish air force on the night of July 10 and bombarded by Jewish artillery on July 11. They are flabbergasted when a Jewish armored column sweeps the streets of Lydda with fire on the afternoon of the eleventh, leaving behind dozens of corpses. The shock, the horror, the dismay.

  Ottman remembers that on the night of July 11, Jewish soldiers suddenly appear in the neighborhood. Loudspeakers mounted on jeeps call for all men to go to the Great Mosque. Ottman walks there with his father, joining thousands of others in the streets. Inside the m
osque it is hot and crowded, with no room to sit or lie down. Ottman is terrified. He cries. He wets himself. When news comes of some sort of massacre in the small mosque, fear intensifies. No one knows what to expect. No one knows what else the Jews are capable of. His father shuts his eyes in prayer. Ottman fears the worst. But the next day, after thirty-six nightmarish hours, the Jews come to some sort of understanding with the dignitaries. At last the men are allowed out of the mosque. Although Ottman’s father notices the loose soil where the small mosque’s victims are buried, he believes life will now go back to normal.

  When they arrive home, his mother greets them as if they have returned from the dead. Minutes later, there is a knock on the door. Two soldiers stand there, shouting loudly, “Yallah, yallah. Pack your belongings and leave. Go to King Abdullah, to Jordan.” One of the soldiers is sensitive and shy. It’s clear he doesn’t like what he is doing. But the other one, with a thin mustache, enjoys every moment. Father takes a letter written in Hebrew out of his pocket saying that Dr. Lehmann vouches for this decent Arab and asks that no harm will come to this friend of Ben Shemen. But the mustachioed soldier couldn’t care less. He discards the letter, presses the barrel of his gun into the father’s chest, and says, “If you don’t go right now, I will shoot. Yallah to Abdullah.”

  Mother screams. She believes that Father is about to be shot. But Father remains speechless. He is in shock. Bowing his head, he asks Mother to pack quickly all that can be packed. Then he calls for Grandmother, the three aunts, his two sons. Under the barrels of the two Jewish soldiers’ guns, the Abu Hamda family hastily collects its belongings: flour, rice, sugar, jewelry, mattresses. They load their belongings onto a horse-drawn wagon and help Grandmother, who is half blind, to mount the donkey.

  What hurts Ottman most is the humiliating way the soldiers search the women’s bodies at the checkpoint on the outskirts of Lydda. One soldier takes Ottman’s cash, another takes his wristwatch. The jute sacks of the Jewish soldiers are now filling up quickly with necklaces and earrings, silver and gold. But it is the humiliation of the women—young and old—that proves how disgraced they all are now.