The Rape of Lydda IV
Part IV: Mula Cohen aka Bulldozer
He was called Bulldozer for a reason. Born in 1923 in Kovna (Kaunas), Lithuania, his father had worked for Dr Lehman, who became a father figure to the young hot-blooded youth. He was a stalwart of Dr Lehman’s Ben Shemen model village. The fatherly Lehman inculcated a love of culture and classical music in his young disciple, but at night, the idealist Lehman looking the other way, he learnt how to assemble and dismantle English guns and handle lethal grenades. He was a shoe-in for the newly formed platoon of the Palmach Strike Force, a leading unit in the Jewish military, who had clear and hostile intentions vis à vis the Arab population. He did the political pilgrimage to Masada with Shmaryahu Gutman, and in no time at all he had become a battalion commander. They were the architects of the Nakba which saw 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and become the new Jews.
Ben Gurion had given the orders to start Operation Larlar, the forcible expulsion of the local residents from Lydda and Ramle. Although the UN had decided that these two key twin towns should be part of the Arab Palestine, Ben Gurion had decided he was not going to respect that. The UN was powerless or unenthusiastic about stopping him. After the holocaust, the Jews could do no wrong, so intense were the feelings of the rest of the world for letting it happen. The 8th Brigade of the Israel Defence Forces, consisting of, among others Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were poised to make an assault and expel the inhabitants. In a show of strength, meant to encourage their mass exodus, dozens of Arab residents were killed, many of them women and children. Over a thousand sought refuge in the Great Mosque. At first Mula ordered his men to throw hand grenades in the windows of Arab houses, killing many more. Was it blood lust? Not satisfied with over a hundred dead, he personally took a PIAT, a lethal anti-tank weapon and went on a rampage at the walls of a smaller mosque where hundreds of terrified Arabs were sheltering. A conservative estimate was eighty instant dead. He was himself wounded as a result, and ended up in hospital. When he was released from hospital, his men, young graduates of Lehman’s Ben Shemen, those cultured creatures steeped in Mozart and Mendehlson, greeted their leader with a great show of admiration, and told him about his eighty dead Arabs. Give them a decent burial, he ordered. The men then picked eight frightened Arabs and ordered them to dig a mass grave, and to bury the dead_ the world must not know. When they had finished, Cohen ordered his men to shoot the Arabs and bury them in the grave they had themselves dug.
