Qualla: Battles of Latrun (1948)

Battles of Latrun (1948): Introduction

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceedjee, CC BY-SA 3.0. David Ben-Gurion called the decision not to launch a sixth assault on Latrun 'bechiya ledorot' -- a cause for lamentation for generations. The prime minister's anguish was not merely strategic. Between May 25 and July 18, 1948, Israeli forces attacked the fortified police station at Latrun five separate times and failed five separate times, losing 168 soldiers while the Jordanian Arab Legion held the position that controlled the only road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The defeat forced a desperate improvisation: a bypass road carved through the hills in darkness, named the 'Burma Road' after the World War II supply route between Burma and China. That improvised track saved the 100,000 Jewish residents of besieged West Jerusalem from starvation. Latrun itself remained under Jordanian control for nineteen more years, until the Six-Day War of 1967.

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Image: Ceedjee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battles of Latrun (1948): The Road to Jerusalem

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceedjee, CC BY-SA 3.0. Latrun sat at the crossroads of two critical highways -- the road from Tel Aviv and Jaffa to Jerusalem, and the route from Gaza to Ramallah -- in territory allocated to the Arab state by the UN Partition Plan. A Trappist monastery stood near a fortified British police station bui...

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Image: Ceedjee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battles of Latrun (1948): Five Assaults, Five Failures

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Chief Signal Officer., Public domain. The first attack, Operation Bin Nun Alef on May 24-25, was led by Shlomo Shamir, a former British army officer, with raw troops and antiquated weapons -- two French 65mm mortars dating from 1906 and a single Davidka improvised mortar. Many of the soldiers were Holocaust survivors...

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Image: Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. | Public domain

Battles of Latrun (1948): The Burma Road

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceedjee, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the Israeli army could not take by force, it circumvented with engineering. Even as the assaults continued, work began on a bypass road through the hills south of Latrun. On the night of June 6-7, with Jerusalem's supplies critically low, three hundred conscripted Tel Aviv c...

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Image: Ceedjee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battles of Latrun (1948): Whose Defeat, Whose Memory

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit israel zeller, CC BY 2.5. The battles left their deepest mark not on the ground but on Israeli collective memory. As historian Anita Shapira documented, two competing narratives emerged. The first, crafted by Ben-Gurion and his allies, cast Latrun as a heroic sacrifice that tied down Jordanian forces and ...

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Image: israel zeller | CC BY 2.5