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Through the month of July, the newly-constituted Israeli Defense Forces captured the towns of Lydda and Ramle, then herded 50,000 to 70,000 of their inhabitants along a road to Arab-controlled territory during a summer heat wave.

Nasr Saba, who lives in Laguna Hills but was born in 1938 in Lydda — now part of Israel and called Lod — says he is “older than Israel.”

Known in Arabic as Lydda or Lydd, Lod’s recent tensions exacerbate longstanding Palestinian trauma.

During the 2014 Gaza war, he read more about the history of the conflict, in particular about an incident in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 — known to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Catastrophe — in which Zionist forces deported tens of thousands of Palestinians from Lydda, a city that is now the site of Israel’s main airport.

Musa Hassouna’s family lived in Lod long before the creation of Israel, when it was an overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab town known as Lydda.