On the afternoon of July 11, 1948, regiments of the newly
formed state of Israel advanced toward the village of Lydda. They would conduct
an operation there that, by many accounts, became formative to their new state
and to the conflict that has continued ever since, and that echoes in the
violence raging this week in that very same town, now known as Lod.
اضافة اعلان
The year before, United Nations investigators had visited
what was then British-controlled Palestine and declared that Jews and native
Palestinians could not peacefully coexist. Sectarian conflict had been
worsening since the 1920s. The UN passed a plan to partition the territory
between an independent Palestine and a newly formed Israel. Civil war broke
out. Six months later, in May 1948, neighboring Arab states rejected the UN
plan as colonial theft and launched an attack to prevent its execution.
Two months later, Israeli forces arrived at Lydda with the
town posing a dilemma for their newly formed state. Its residents were
Palestinian. But, geographically, it was to be Israeli, located midway between
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Could towns like this be integrated into a democratic,
multicultural Israel? Or were they a barrier to a definitively Jewish state?
Even a threat within?
Historians still debate the degree to which what happened
next was planned, spontaneous, or a mix of both. But they agree that the events
in Lydda have echoed ever since.
Israeli forces, breaching the town, exchanged fire with the
locals. The assault left nine Israeli soldiers dead and killed more than 100
residents, some of them children and old people, according to one estimate.
The next day, two Jordanian armored vehicles, separated from
their unit, wandered into Lydda. Residents and Israeli troops, mistaking it for
the start of a wider assault, resumed fighting. The soldiers threw hand
grenades into homes and fired an anti-tank shell at a mosque crowded with
civilians. Official Israeli accounts say that they killed over 200 civilians,
though some historians put the number higher.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, ordered his
forces to expel the remaining residents. Though about 1,000 stayed behind, tens
of thousands were marched to the Jordanian lines 18km away. Lydda was, in
subsequent years, repopulated mostly by Jewish immigrants.
Today, it is known by its Biblical name, Lod. It is also one
of several Israeli cities referred to as “mixed” for its one-third or so Arab
minority. This week, Lod and other mixed cities erupted in a kind of conflict
that has been rare since 1948: communal violence between Jews and Arabs.
It began, by most accounts, with Arab protests in solidarity
with Palestinians in Gaza and in occupied East Jerusalem. Though the details of
what happened next are disputed, it escalated to outright fighting between
protesters, Israeli forces and Jewish ultranationalists.
Neighbor against neighbor
By Wednesday night, Arab and Jewish mobs were roaming the
streets of mixed cities, setting fires and attacking locals. Neighbor turned on
neighbor. Israeli leaders have described “lynchings” on both sides. Lod’s mayor
put the town under police lockdown, calling violence there “civil war” and “a
complete loss of control.”
For all that has happened between 1948 and 2021, Lod still
represents much of what has remained consistent about the conflict in Israel
and the occupied territories, and an issue at its core.
Since early Zionist leaders decided on the location for
their new nation, it was to be three things: democratic, demographically
Jewish, and located in the stretch of land that locals and Zionists alike
called Palestine. Lydda was perceived, at the time, as both an obstacle to
securing those aims and symbolic of the ways in which they were in tension.
“If a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda
could not exist at its center,” Ari Shavit, an Israeli writer, wrote in a 2013
history.
Some Israeli historians, like Ilan Pappé of the University
of Exeter, argue that the mass expulsion was a premeditated policy of ethnic
cleansing aimed at removing Palestinians from what was to be the new Jewish
state. Others hold that Lydda’s purge was done in the heat of battle. Benny
Morris, in his history of the 1948 war, concluded that “although an atmosphere
of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed during critical
months,” it never became formal policy, which explains why some Arab towns’
inhabitants were expelled and others were not.
Contradictory visions
There have been, from the earliest Zionist arrivals in
Ottoman Palestine, differing visions of the enterprise. Some called for
multiethnic coexistence, others for an explicitly Jewish state. Some urged
privileging equality, others special rights for Jews. Some treated the Holocaust
as a lesson that ethnic cleansing was never acceptable, others as a mandate to
secure a Jewish state whatever the cost. Each implied its own answer to a
dilemma like Lydda.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is many things. But, in
some ways, it is a cycle, from 1948 through today, of Israeli efforts to impose
the vision chosen for Lydda, and many times since, followed by Palestinian
resistance that is sometimes nonviolent and sometimes violent.
That has been the pattern in Jerusalem, which Israel
considers its capital but was divided in 1948. Israel occupied the
predominantly Palestinian eastern part of the city in 1967, asserted
sovereignty over it in 1980, and since then has allowed or encouraged Jewish
settlers to move in. This month’s crisis was triggered by an order to evict six
Palestinian families from their East Jerusalem homes to make room for settlers.
It has also been the pattern in the West Bank, which Israel
has occupied since 1967, putting its Palestinian residents effectively under
Israeli control without representation in that government and without rights
equal to those of Israeli settlers. And also in
Gaza, which Israel, along with
Egypt, keeps under a crippling blockade. Israel and Gaza’s ruling party, Hamas,
endlessly toggle between conflict and uneasy truce.
And history is coming full circle: this pattern increasingly
applies within Israel itself, whose population remains about one-fifth Arab. In
2018, Israel formally declared the right of national self-determination to be
“unique to the Jewish people.” The next year, its prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, wrote on social media, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens”
but only of its Jews. Arab citizens have unequal rights, according to rights
groups.
Much as with the expulsions of 1948, there is a blurry line
between matters of top-down policy and bottom-up actions by Israel’s citizens.
Settlers flow into parts of the West Bank that are considered crucial for the
establishment of a Palestinian state, making that less viable. In recent years,
according to Israeli media reports, Israeli nationalists have begun moving to
mixed cities like Lod in large numbers, making them more Jewish.
Even in Gaza, Israel exercises significant control,
dictating which goods and people can enter or leave and, with drones circling
overhead, which buildings can stand and which will crumble.
A painful cycle
The violence in Lod this week is a continuation of that
cycle. It is a reaction, by both Arabs and Jews, to the violence playing out
yet again in occupied East Jerusalem and
Gaza, heightening a sense of
existential sectarian conflict. Residents say it is also a reaction, more
specifically, to the escalating demographic contest for control of mixed
cities, and growing hostility to the Arab minority.
Perhaps most significantly, Lod, both in 1948 and today,
represents what may be one of the biggest hurdles to lasting peace: the status
of millions of Palestinians considered by the United Nations to be refugees
from their homes in what is now Israel — from towns like Lod. Many demand the
right to return, which Israel opposes because it could reduce, or even imperil,
Jews’ numerical supremacy.
The mob violence this week is a demonstration of how a
decision made about Lod in 1948 — to treat a Palestinian community as a threat
to the existence of Israel — still resonates in powerful ways today.
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