Nakba in Ramle

"Nakba in Ramle" is a film in which Palestinians give their account of the fall of an Arab town in July 1948 and the expulsion of its residents. Director: Uri Davis - Davis is an academic and activist who works on civil rights in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Middle East. Davis has served as Vice-Chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and as lecturer in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Davis describes himself as "a Palestinian Hebrew national of Jewish origin, anti-Zionist, registered as Muslim and a citizen of an apartheid state - the State of Israel." A member of Fatah since 1984, he was elected to the Revolutionary Council for the Palestinian party in 2009. ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Davis ) Producer, Editor and Camera: Rona Even Second Cameras: Eran Vered and Yossi Ya'acov Sound: Fil Keller Run time: 54:36 In Hebrew and Arabic with Hebrew, Arabic and English Subtitles Background: She will always remember the voices of Israeli soldiers shouting through loudspeakers outside her home in al-Ramla, as the Nakba unfolded right before her. "Yallah Abdullah!" they cried as they pounded on people's doors with the butts of their rifles. "Go to King Abdullah! Go to Ramallah!" It was a scorching day on the coastal plain of Palestine in mid-July 1948. A couple of days earlier, the town had surrendered to Israeli forces after they stormed the nearby city of Lydda. Word had arrived in the al-Ramla shelters: After a lightning blitz on Lydda, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, which left dozens of Palestinians dead, Israeli troops had gunned down dozens more in Lydda's Dahmash mosque. Hoping to avoid a similar catastrophe, al-Ramla's "notables" had signed the surrender, believing they would be allowed to stay in their homes in the city, now occupied by the Jewish army. Instead what came next was the soldiers announcing the arrival of buses to take residents of al-Ramla to the front lines of the Arab Legion. No matter what the terms of surrender, or what Sheikh Mustafa Khairi, the town patriarch, had tried to negotiate, tens of thousands of residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were being forced to leave their homes.