Latrun
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The area of Latrun (Hebrew: לטרון) (al-Latrun in Arabic) is a region of the Ayalon Valley, about 15 kilometers west of Jerusalem and 14 kilometers southeast of Ramla.
Latrun is the first of the hilly ridges that a traveller will see on his way while ascending to Jerusalem, and therefore is of significant strategic value. It was often the site of battles.
In the Bible, Ayalon Valley was the site of a battle in which Joshua defeated the Amorites; during the Crusades, Latrun was also the scene of many attacks. A crusader stronghold there, "Le toron des chevaliers" (The Tower of the Knights), may be the origin of the name "Latrun". Another theory is that the name originates from the name the Christian pilgrims gave to the town "Castellum bonu Latronis" (The Fortress of the Good Thief). Little remains of the castle, which was held by the Templars by 1187. The main tower was later surrounded with a rectangular enclosure with vaulted chambers. This in turn was enclosed by an outer court, of which one tower survives.
In the year 1890, a monastery was established at Latrun by French monks of the Trappist order. The monks established a successful vinyard and today produce a variety of good wines.
The book [All that Remains] by historian Walid Khalidi, describes the small village of Al-Latrun that grew up here from the late 19th century, with residents coming from nearby Emmaus. According to the same source, the villagers were evacuated to Emmaus in 1949 as a result of the war and Latrun's location at the armistice line.
Following the so-called "Great Arab Uprising" of 1936–1939, the British authorities built a number of police forts of similar design (named Taggarts after their constructor) in various locations; Latrun was chosen as such a site due to its strategic significance, particularly its dominant position above the old Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem highway passing immediately below the hill-line. That police fort had an enormous impact on the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. As the last British troops departed from Palestine in May 14, 1948, the fort was occupied by the Transjordanian Arab Legion.
The fort was used to shell Israeli traffic on the highway and thus effectively impose a siege upon Jerusalem. During early June, an alternative route was developed that was nicknamed the "Burma Road" after the American and British route into Japanese-controlled China during World War II.
Just 10 days after the declaration of Israel, on May 24, 1948, the fort was assaulted by combined forces of Israel's newly-created 7th Brigade, and a battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade (where Ariel Sharon served as a platoon commander; he was wounded with most of his platoon and later recalled the decision to retreat to a nearby vale as the most crucial tactical decision of his life). The attack (codenamed "Bin-Nun A") failed, with heavy casualties. A week later, on June 1st, the fort withstood yet another attack ("Bin-Nun B"), even though its outer defences were breached.
Many of the Israeli conscripts had just survived the Holocaust and were new immigrants; most were poorly trained. The equipment was also very poor, and artillery support was lacking. The results of the battle were mixed. The official combined number of casualties for both the battles was 139 (an extremely high figure for an assault conducted mainly by two battalions). As records are carefully kept for each fallen soldier, this figure seems exact. While the Tel-Aviv Jerusalem highway was not secured, the two Battles of Latrun can be seen as a limited strategic success, since they contained the Legion and allowed the opening of the bypass road, which lifted the siege from Jerusalem.
The battle, however, is often brought up as a failure of much greater proportions than it was; for instance, in 1985 Member of Knesset Doctor Uzi Landau has claimed that 2000 soldiers died in the fighting which would make up a third of all Israeli casualties of the 1948 war. When reminded about the real casualty count, Landau agreed to lower his estimate to 1000.
In the 1949 cease-fire agreement, the fort remained a bulge under Jordanian control; a bypass road was built, but Latrun was still only a few miles to the east from Israel's only international airport. In 1967, Latrun was captured by Israeli forces. The road was reopened and the fort became a museum and a memorial site for Israel's armored forces, whereas the monastery is considered a popular tourist attraction.
Today, Latrun's police station holds "Yad La-Shiryon" center, a complex which is dedicated to the Israeli Armored Corps. The complex includes a museum, a tank display (with over than 110 armored fighting vehicles, including the Merkava tanks and T-72), an amphitheatre, an auditorium, a synagogue and memorial for Israeli armored corps fallen soldiers.
On a hilltop south of the Latrun ridge is the intentional community known as Oasis of Peace, officially named Neve Shalom (נווה שלום) in Hebrew and Wāĥat as-Salām (واحة السلام) in Arabic. Neve Shalom or Wāĥat as-Salām was founded jointly by Jews and Palestinian Arabs of Israeli citizenship and engages in educational work for peace and justice. The land upon which the village was built had been in the ownership of the Monastery since 1935. In 1970 the Monastery granted a leasehold of forty hectares to Neve Shalom ~ Wāĥat as-Salām founder Fr. Bruno Hussar and a small group of people who wished to establish the peace village there. Then in 1999, when the village was well-established, the Monastery gave twenty hectares of the original leasehold into its permanent ownership, with the rest reverting back to the Monastery.
References
Further reading
- Latrun (2002, ISBN 965-7130-10-7) is a novel by Ram Oren describing the two Battles of Latrun and the events surrounding them.
External links
- Yad Lashiryon, the armored corps memorial site and museum at Latrun:
- *[Official home page]
- *[Photo gallery at davidpride.com]
- [Latrun], from the Jewish Agency for Israel
- [al-Latrun, from www.palestineremembered.com] (Palestinian site that sets out to document villages destroyed or evacuated as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars.)
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