page_title: 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle
section_title: Historiography
hierarchical_section_title: 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle / Historiography
caption_attribution_description: Anita Shapira
context_page_description: The 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle, also known as the Lydda Death March, was the expulsion of 50,000–70,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israeli troops captured the towns in July that year. The military action occurred within the context of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine, subsequently were transformed into predominantly Jewish areas in the new State of Israel, known as Lod and Ramla.
  The exodus, constituting 'the biggest expulsion of the war', took place at the end of a truce period, when fighting resumed, prompting Israel to try to improve its control over the Jerusalem road and its coastal route which were under pressure from the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian and Palestinian forces.
context_section_description: Benny Morris argues that Israeli historians from the 1950s throughout the 1970s—who wrote what he calls the "Old History"—were "less than honest" about what had happened in Lydda and Ramle. Anita Shapira calls them the Palmach generation: historians who had fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and who thereafter went to work for the IDF's history branch, where they censored material other scholars had no access to. For them, Shapira writes, the Holocaust and the Second World War—including the experience of Jewish weakness in the face of persecution—made the fight for land between the Arabs and Jews a matter of life and death, the 1948 war the "tragic and heroic climax of all that had preceded it," and Israeli victory an "act of historical justice."
  The IDF's official history of the 1948 war, Toldot Milhemet HaKomemiyut ("History of the War of Independence"), published in 1959, said that residents of Lydda had violated the terms of their surrender, and left because they were afraid of Israeli retribution. The head of the IDF history branch, Lt. Col Netanel Lorch, wrote in The Edge of the Sword (1961) that they had requested safe conduct from the IDF; American political scientist Ian Lustick writes that Lorch admitted in 1997 that he left his post because the censorship made it impossible to write good history. Another employee of the history branch, Lt. Col. Elhannan Orren, wrote a detailed history of Operation Dani in 1976 that made no mention of expulsions.
  Arab historians published accounts, including Aref al-Aref's Al Nakba, 1947–1952 (1956–1960), Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib's Min Athar al-Nakba (1951), and several papers by Walid Khalidi, but Morris writes that they suffered from a lack of archival material; Arab governments have been reluctant to open their archives, and the Israeli archives were at that point still closed. The first person in Israel to acknowledge the Lydda and Ramle expulsions, writes Morris, was Yitzhak Rabin in his 1979 memoirs, though that part of his manuscript was removed by government censors. The 30-year rule of Israel's Archives Law, passed in 1955, meant that hundreds of thousands of government documents were released throughout the 1980s, and a group calling itself the "New Historians" emerged, most of them born around 1948. They interpreted the history of the war, not in terms of European politics, the Holocaust, and Jewish history, but solely within the context of the Middle East. Shapira writes that they focused on the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who were uprooted by the war, not on the 6,000 Jews who died during it, and assessed the behavior of the Jewish state as they would that of any other.  Between 1987 and 1993, four of these historians in particular—Morris himself, Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim—three of them Oxbridge-trained, published a series of books that changed the historiography of the Palestinian exodus. According to Lustick, although it was known in academic circles that the Palestinians had left because of expulsions and intimidation, it was largely unknown to Israeli Jews until Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 appeared in 1987.
  Their work is not without its critics, most notably Israeli historian Efraim Karsh, who writes that there was more voluntary Palestinian flight than Morris and the others concede. He acknowledges that there were expulsions, particularly in Lydda, though he argues—as does Morris—that they resulted from decisions made in the heat of battle, and account for a small percentage of the overall exodus. Karsh argues that the New Historians have turned the story of the birth of Israel upside down, making victims of the Arab aggressors, though he acknowledges that the New History is now widely accepted. Ari Shavit devotes a chapter of his book My Promised Land (2013) to the expulsion, and calls the events "our black box, . . In it lies the dark secret of Zionism." The positions of Karsh and Morris, though they disagree, contrast in turn with those of Ilan Pappé and Walid Khalidi, who argue not only that there were wid
caption: Israeli historian Anita Shapira argues that the scholars who wrote the early history of 1948 censored themselves, because they saw the 1948 war as the tragic climax of the Holocaust and the Second World War.[112]
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