The Palestinian village of Isdud, about 50 km south of Tel Aviv on the Israeli coast, was taken over by Israeli forces during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The town’s 4,000 Palestinian inhabitants became refugees.
They were among the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced to flee their homes in what is now Israel in 1948, becoming refugees in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring countries as the Jewish state was formed.
In 1956, the remains of Isdud village became the base on which the Israeli city, "Ashdod" (a Hebrew-ization of the Arabic name Isdud) was built. The first Jewish immigrants talk of building a city out of nothing……but Palestinians who were pushed out of Isdud tell a very different story.
The ‘creation’ of the city of Ashdod on the emptied town of Isdud began with a letter that the Israeli finance minister, Levi Eshkol, sent on May 15, 1956, to "Mr. Oved Ben Ami, Netanya," and to "Mr. Philip Klutznik, Park Forest, Illinois, U.S.A.", two Jewish businessmen who were looked to as possible funders for the new Jewish city. In the section entitled "Basic Assumptions," Eshkol wrote: "As part of the government’s population dispersal plan [a plan of the early Israeli government to spread the Jewish population throughout Palestine], an urban center must be built in the south of the country; the most appropriate area for this purpose is the area which extends between the ancient city of Ashdod and the seashore (including the place known as ‘Wadi Sukari’) and as far as the dunes of Yavneh in the north."
The story of the first Mayor of Ashdod:
"When we came here, there was only sand and sea, a few huts and a few ‘Californias’ – structures with cardboard walls," says Haim, Ashdod’s first mayor, from 1958 to 1964.
Haim says, "I got here altogether by chance. When we decided to leave Egypt, in 1956, I wanted to go to France. The ship we sailed on anchored at Piraeus and I went to look for a French ship. On the way I ran into someone from the Jewish Agency, who came over to me and asked whether we could talk about Israel. I asked him to explain to me what was there. He said there is a city, right next to Tel Aviv. I told him that I had a profession, that I was a glass engineer. He gave me a look and said, ‘What a coincidence – that’s exactly what we are looking for there.’ Twenty-four hours later he returned and said, ‘You are sailing for Israel.’ I asked him just to write down where to go, and he wrote: Ashdod Yam."
Haim recalls the ordeals of the first day, the truck they were put on, arriving in the dead of night to the sound of jackals howling, the hut in which his wife broke into bitter tears, the first night, on which he promised her that they would leave immediately, only to get up at dawn and find himself on the beach, with "the water and the sky attached to each other." That was the moment at which he also knew that he would break his promise to his wife and stay there.
And stay he did, watching new immigrants arrive day after day, at first Moroccans and Egyptians, then the Poles, who "at first did not want to get off the buses that brought them, and afterward refused to get on the buses, unless they were promised that they would be taken to Ashdod." Between one thing and another, Haim helped with the immigrant absorption process, and in 1958 the immigrants elected him their mayor. When he took over as mayor, the city had a population of 5,000; when he left, the population stood at 25,000. He also changed the city’s name from Ashdod Yam to Ashdod. Why? Well, that, too, is a story in itself.
One day Haim decided that what the town lacked was a library, but he had no money for the project. Just then he received an invitation to attend a reception hosted by Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Haim devised a plan to make use of his fluency in French in order to extract a donation from the baron. The first part of the plan went well. The foreign minister at the time, Yigal Allon, introduced him to the guest as the mayor of Ashdod Yam. But then the baron was surrounded by people and Haim found it difficult to approa