The battles were such a decisive Jordanian victory that the Israelis decided to construct a bypass surrounding Latrun so as to allow vehicular movement between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thus avoiding the main road.

[8] With the departure of the British on 14 May, the Haganah launched several operations to take control of the city and the local Arab leadership requested King Abdullah of Jordan to deploy his army to come to their aid.

During the civil war, after the death of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the forces of the Arab Liberation Army positioned themselves around the police fort and the surrounding villages, to the indifference of the British.

[17] This decision to leave the area, and the fact of not planning for its strategic importance, would later be a source of controversy between Haganah chief of operations Yigael Yadin and Yitzhak Rabin, commander of the Harel brigade.

[26] "We have surrounded the town": on 22 and 23 May, the second Egyptian brigade, composed mainly of several battalions of irregulars and several units of the regular army, reached the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and continued to attack at Ramat Rachel.

This decision seemed strategically necessary but was politically delicate, because Latrun was in the area allocated to the Arab State according to the terms of the Partition Plan and this attack was contrary to the non-aggression agreements, concluded with King Abdullah[26][Note 6] This decision was also opposed by the Chief of Operations, Yigael Yadin who considered that there were other military priorities at that moment, in particular on the southern front, where the Egyptian army was threatening Tel Aviv if Yad Mordechai fell.

[27] Ariel Sharon, the future Prime Minister of Israel, a lieutenant at the time, headed a platoon of the 32nd Battalion[31] and suffered serious injury to his stomach during the battle.

Moreover, after the fighting, the situation there deteriorated: the Jewish community had very small reserves of fuel, bread, sugar and tea, which would last for only 10 days, and water for 3 months.

[35] The central front was reorganized and its command given to an American volunteer fighting on the Israeli side, Colonel David Marcus, who was subsequently appointed Aluf (Major General).

Chaim Laskov, the chief of operations on that front, ordered company D of the 71st Battalion (that had been kept in reserve) to intervene, but one of the soldiers accidentally exploded a landmine, killing three men and injuring several others.

They were used to fighting small, violent battles and taking heavy losses of people and arms, and the United Nations renewed its call for a truce on 11 June.

[10] He had at his disposal an artillery support composed of four 65-millimetre (2.6 in) mortars and four 120 millimetres (4.7 in) guns[46] that were part of the heavy weapons recently delivered to Israel by Operation Balak.

The High Command decided to launch "Operation Larlar" with the objective of taking Lydda, Ramle, Latrun and Ramallah and relieving the threat on Tel Aviv on a side and West Jerusalem on the other.

At 6 pm two Cromwell tanks driven by British deserters, seconded by a mechanised battalion of the Yiftach and supported by artillery launched the attack of the police fort.

[59] According to Benny Morris, the arguments that were advanced not to launch the attack were: the negative international repercussions for Israel already accentuated by the recent assassination of Count Bernadotte; the consequences of an attack on an agreement with Abdallah; the fact that defeating the Arab Legion could provoke a British military intervention because of Britain and Jordan's common defense pact and lastly because conquering this area would add hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens to Israel.

[65] Shapira contrasts the early post-war mainstream official narrative that cited the battle as playing a crucial role in tying up Jordanian forces and relieving pressure on Jerusalem.

[67] From 14 June, the press shifted its focus to the 'opening of the Burma route' and, in the context of a conflict between the military's senior command and Ben-Gurion, Yigael Yadin called the operation a 'great catastrophe' while the latter replied that, in his view, it had been "a great, although costly, victory".

[67] The "official version" entered in the historiography in 1955 following the work of lieutenant colonel Israel Beer, whereas adviser and support of Yadin at the time of the events, who published 'The battles of Latrun'.

[67] Beer put the responsibility of the tactical defeats on the failures of the intelligence services and on the "absence de commandement séparé sur les différents fronts."

He also points out the badly trained immigrants, the defective equipment, and the difficulty for a new army to succeed a first operation targeting to capture a defended area that was organised by advance.

[69] The main reason is that Latrun had still been the mainstay for the road to Jerusalem until the Six-Day War, keeping the Israelis at the margins and having to go round and maintain the town, but struggling to bypass it, which played each day on their minds.

According to Anita Shapira, the primary reason was nothing but people's grievous memories, of David Ben-Gurion and the veterans of the British Armies on one side and former Palmah and Haganah soldiers on the other.

[69] In this sphere of influence during the 1970s and in the controversies that continued until the 1980s, the "Strategic Necessity" was said, if it were not done, it would be "Criminal negligence", with a heavy toll on bring in immigrants to the battle, and forging a new founding myth.

[69] Many contemporary books about the 1948 War were published at this time: John and David Kimche, The two sides of the hill (1960) (the more reliable); Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, O Jerusalem (1972) (the best known internationally) and Dan Kurzman, Genesis, 1948 (1970) (the only one that got reviews in the Israeli press).

It gives the exact number of victims, but contrary to Israel Beer (meanwhile caught as spying for USSR),[71] it depicts the battle as "The hardest in the history of Tsahal", and it puts the responsibility of the defeat on Ben-Gurion, who panicked about Jerusalem, and tactical errors on the brigade commanders and not on the immigrants who received (from his point of view[Note 10]) a sufficient training.

[73] In the 1980s, a schism arose within the post-Zionism movement, and the history of the battle of Latrun came to represent the culpability of the Israeli state and a way of pointing out that it was born in the context of massacres and the exodus of the Palestinian population.

Themes in the poem include dehumanisation and how Ben-Gurion got Shoah into his pocket, by the work of the other "innocent young Jews of the Superior Race, who, without name or vision, found themselves the saviours of Israel".

On 18 July, a company from the 1st Battalion of Yiftach Brigade received the order to capture Qirbet Quriqur, an outpost protecting the only way for the Legion to get to Latrun located several kilometres to the north of the place.

He states that these "non-critical" works are largely loyal to the Jordanian regime and quotes My memoirs by Habes al-Majali, commander of the 4th Regiment; The battles of Bad al-Oued by Mahmoud al-Ghussan, one of the High Command officers; On the road to Jerusalem by Ma'n Abu Nuwar, an officer of the Arab Legion, Jordanian soldier and Soldier with the Arabs with John Bagot Glubb.

[84] By his version of events, he would even have caught Ariel Sharon in the course of the battle and it is Colonel Ashton (his British superior from 3rd Brigade) would have forbidden him to use the artillery against the Burma Road by which he could have prevented its construction.