"The Nakba in al-Ramla" -- Sandy Tolan

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/60yearsofdivision/2008/07/20087199114777437.html

Rabin, the future prime minister, would recall in his memoirs that Ben-Gurion, when asked what they should do with the civilian population of al-Ramla and Lydda, "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"
 
Shitrit also could not have known that Allon had already considered the military advantages of expulsion.

Driving out the citizens of al-Ramla and Lydda, Allon believed, would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population. It would clog the roads towards the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. And the sudden arrival of thousands of destitute refugees in the West Bank and Transjordan would place a great financial burden on King Abdullah of Transjordan.

Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1.30pm by Rabin.

Marched towards exile

The Lydda residents, prodded forward by soldiers who fired into the air behind them, received the harshest treatment.

Numerous eyewitness accounts, corroborated by Israeli official Aharon Cohen in a July 1948 cabinet meeting, describe Lydda residents being forced to surrender their gold jewellery and other valuable possessions before being marched towards exile.
   
"Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later. "The finest of us have given a bad example to the masses."

When the bus carrying Firdaws and her family arrived at the front lines at Latrun, they were ordered off and told to march north, towards Salbit. It was only four kilometres – people from Lydda had to walk much further – but by now it was 100C. There was no shade and no road, just a steep rise across cactus and Christ's thorn.

Firdaws looked up across the hard-baked earth as knots of people moved slowly along in the waves of heat.

Today, from her exile in Ramallah, she remembers watching a pregnant woman stumbling through the hills. There, her water broke, and she gave birth on the hot ground.

Thirst gripped everyone's mind as white crusts formed around their mouths. They were always looking for shade and water. They crossed fields of corn, where they plucked ripe ears and sucked the moisture out of the kernels. Firdaws saw a boy peeing into a can and then watched his grandmother drink from it.