On This Day — July 12, 1948
When Israeli forces entered Lydda and Ramle during Operation Dani, they discovered the grim reality behind the Arab battle cry that had echoed across the war: “Itbah al Yahoud!” — “Slaughter the Jews!”
Bodies of Jewish civilians and captured soldiers — men, women, and children — were found executed. There were almost no survivors among those taken prisoner by Arab forces in the area. Prisoners were routinely murdered on the spot, regardless of age or gender. This was the consistent pattern of Arab irregulars and local militias: no mercy to Jewish prisoners throughout the fighting.
The same reality had played out earlier in the war. In Safed, after attacking the Jewish quarter, the Arab regional commander cabled his superiors: “Our morale is very high, the young people are enthusiastic, we’re going to massacre them.”
By July 1948, the Jewish Yishuv had seen enough. They were fighting for survival against an enemy whose leadership — from the Mufti Amin al-Husseini to the Arab Higher Committee and Arab League — had rejected any Jewish state in any part of the Land from the moment the UN voted to partition Palestine in November 1947. Arab forces answered the partition vote with immediate terror: ambushes on roads and convoys, attacks on Jewish civilians, and a deliberate strategy of taking no prisoners.
Lydda and Ramle had served as key Arab strongpoints, blocking vital supply lines to Jerusalem and launching attacks on Jewish traffic and settlements. The Jewish population in parts of the country was on the verge of strangulation and starvation.
Operation Dani (part of the broader Plan Dalet) was the Haganah’s military response: a series of operations to break deadly encirclements, reopen supply routes, and prevent annihilation in the face of invading Arab armies. As historian Henry Laurens has noted, it was fundamentally a military operational plan — not a political blueprint for mass expulsion. The real ethnic cleansing intent came from the Arab side, whose war cry was literally “Slaughter the Jews!”
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, five Arab armies invaded with the explicit goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map before it could even breathe. They failed.
That failure is what Arabs originally called the “Nakba” — the catastrophe of their humiliating inability to destroy the wildly outnumbered and outgunned Jews. There would never have been a single refugee had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan or chosen not to launch a war of annihilation.
Some histories record only one side’s suffering. The full record shows a war in which the Arabs fought to eliminate the Jews entirely — and the Jews fought simply to survive.
@CptAllenHistory