| Plan Dalet | |
|---|---|
| Part of the1948 Palestine war and theNakba | |
 Zones controlled by Yishuv before and after the implementation of the Plan Dalet. | |
| Type | Ethnic cleansing |
| Location | |
| Planned by | Jewish Agency andHaganah |
| Commanded by | David Ben Gurion |
| Target | Palestinian Arab villages and cities |
| Date | March 10, 1948 – early 1949 |
| Executed by |  Israel |
| Outcome |
|
Plan Dalet (Hebrew:תוכנית ד',Tokhnit dalet "Plan D") was aZionistmilitary plan executed during the1948 Palestine war for theconquest of territory inMandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. The plan was the blueprint for Israel's military operations starting in March 1948 until the end of the war in early 1949, and so played a central role in the1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight known as theNakba.[1]
The plan was requested by theJewish Agency leader and later first prime minister of IsraelDavid Ben-Gurion, and developed by theHaganah and finalized on March 10, 1948. Historians describe Plan Dalet, in which Zionist forces shifted[clarification needed] to an offensive strategy, as the beginning of a new phase in the 1948 Palestine war.[2][3]
The plan was a set of guidelines to take control of Mandatory Palestine, declare a Jewish state, and defend its borders and people, including the Jewish population outside of the borders, "before, and in anticipation of" the invasion by regular Arab armies.[4][5][qt 1][6][7][8] Plan Dalet specifically included gaining control of areas whereverYishuv populations existed, including those outside the borders of the proposed Jewish state.[9]
The plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return.[10] Zionist military units possessed detailed lists of neighborhoods and villages to be destroyed and their Arab inhabitants expelled.[10]
This strategy is subject to controversy, with some historians characterizing it as defensive, while others assert that it was an integral part of a planned strategy for the expulsion, sometimes called anethnic cleansing, of the area's native inhabitants.[11]
Its name comes from the letterDalet (ד), the fourth letter of theHebrew alphabet, after plans namedAleph (א),Bet (ב), andGimel (ג) were revised.
In the summer of 1937, the commander of their forces in the Tel Aviv area, Elimelech Slikowitz (nicknamed Avnir) received an order fromBen-Gurion, according to the official history of theHaganah. Ben-Gurion, anticipating an eventual British withdrawal from the country after thePeel Report, asked Avnir to prepare a plan for the military conquest of the whole of Palestine. This Avnir Plan provided a blueprint for future plans. The blueprint was refined in subsequent adjustments (A, B, C) before emerging in its final form over a decade later as Plan Dalet.[12][13]
From 1945 onward, the Haganah designed four general military plans, the implementation of the final version of which eventually led to the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians:[14][unreliable source?][citation needed]
On November 29, 1947, theUnited Nations voted to approve thePartition Plan for Palestine for ending theBritish Mandate and recommending the establishment of an Arab state and a Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the UN's approval of the Partition plan, the Jewish community expressed joy, while the Arab community expressed discontent.[21][22][qt 2] On the day after the vote, a spate of Arab attacks left at least eight Jews dead, one in Tel Aviv by sniper fire, and seven in ambushes on civilian buses that were claimed to be retaliations for aLehi raid ten days earlier.[23]
From January onward, operations became increasingly militarized, with the intervention of a number of regiments of theArab Liberation Army (consisting of volunteers from Arab countries) inside Palestine, each active in a variety of distinct sectors around the different coastal towns. They consolidated their presence inGalilee andSamaria.[24]Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni came from Egypt with several hundred men of theArmy of the Holy War. Having recruited a few thousand volunteers, al-Husayni organised theblockade of the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem.[25] To counter this, theYishuv authorities tried to supply the Jews of the city with food by using convoys of up to 100 armoured vehicles, but the operation became more and more impractical as the number of casualties in the relief convoys surged. By March, Al-Hussayni's tactic, sometimes called "The War of the Roads",[26] had paid off. Almost all of Haganah's armoured vehicles had been destroyed, the blockade was in full operation, and the Haganah had lost more than 100 troops.[27] According toBenny Morris, the situation for those who dwelt in the Jewish settlements in the highly isolatedNegev and North ofGalilee was equally critical.[28] According to Ilan Pappé, in early March, the Yishuv's security leadership did not seem to regard the overall situation as particularly troubling, but instead was busy finalising a master plan.[29]
This situation caused the United States to withdraw their support for the Partition plan,[30] thus encouraging theArab League to believe that the Palestinians, reinforced by theArab Liberation Army, could put an end to partition. The British, meanwhile, decided on 7 February 1948, to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine byTransjordan.[31]
In 1947,David Ben-Gurion reorganisedHaganah and made conscription obligatory. Every Jewish man and woman in the country had to receive military training.[32] Military equipment was procured from stockpiles from the Second World War and fromCzechoslovakia and was brought inOperation Balak. There is some disagreement among historians about the precise authors of Plan Dalet. According to some,[26][33] it was the result of the analysis ofYigael Yadin, at that time the temporary head of the Haganah, after Ben-Gurion invested him with the responsibility to come up with a plan in preparation for the announced intervention of the Arab states. According toIlan Pappé the plan was conceived by the "consultancy", a group of about a dozen military and security figures and specialists on Arab affairs, under the guidance of Ben-Gurion.[29] It was finalised and sent to Haganah units in early March 1948. The plan consisted of a general part and operational orders for the brigades, which specified which villages should be targeted and other specific missions.[34] The general section of the plan was also sent to theYishuv's political leaders.[35]
The Hebrew text of Plan Dalet was published in 1972 in volume 3, part 3 ofSefer Toldot Hahaganah (ספר תולדות ההגנה History of the Haganah), Appendix 48, pp. 1955-60.[36] An English translation of the text of Plan Dalet was published for the first time as an appendix to Khalidi's 1988 reprint of "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" in theJournal of Palestine Studies.[3]
In this plan, the Haganah also started the transformation from an underground organization into a regular army. The reorganization included the formation of brigades and front commands. The stated goals included in addition to the reorganization, gaining control of the areas of the planned Jewish state as well as areas of Jewish settlements outside its borders. The control would be attained by fortifying strongholds in the surrounding areas and roads, conquering Arab villages close to Jewish settlements and occupying British bases and police stations (from which the British were withdrawing).
The introduction of the plan states:[16]
Later on, the plan states:
According to the Israeli chief ofmilitary intelligenceYehoshafat Harkabi, Plan Dalet called for the conquest of Arab towns and villages inside and along the borders of the area allocated to the proposed Jewish State in theUN Partition Plan.[37]
According toDavid Tal,
Ilan Pappé distinguishes between the general section of Plan Dalet and the operational orders given to the troops. According to Pappé the general section of the plan, which was distributed to politicians, was misguiding as to the real intentions of the Haganah. The real plan was handed down to the brigade commanders "not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operational orders for action". Along with the general section, "each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighborhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled".[39]
The plan section 3, under(b) Consolidation of Defense Systems and Fortifications calls for the occupation of police stations, the control of government installations, and the protection of secondary transportation arteries. Part 4 under this heading includes the following controversial paragraphs:
The paragraph(g) Counterattacks Inside and Outside the Borders of the State inter alia states:
Plan Dalet was first implemented in the first days of April, starting withOperation Nachshon. This marked the beginning of the second stage of the war in which, according to Benny Morris, the Haganah passed from the defensive to the offensive.[2] Nachshon's objective was lifting theblockade on Jerusalem.[qt 3] Fifteen hundred men from Haganah's Givati brigade andPalmach's Harel brigade conducted sorties to free up the route to the city between April 5–20.The operation was successful, and enough foodstuffs to last 2 months were trucked into Jerusalem for distribution to the Jewish population.[40][qt 3]
The success of the operation was assisted by the death of Al-Hussayni in combat. From April 4–14, the first large-scale operation of theArab Liberation Army ended in a debacle, having been roundly defeated atMishmar HaEmek,[41] coinciding with the loss of theirDruze allies through defection.[42]
On April 9, paramilitary groupsIrgun andLehi, supported by the Haganah and Palmach,[43] perpetrated theDeir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers, including women and children. The event was widely publicized and had a deep effect on the Arab population's morale, greatly contributing to thePalestinian expulsion and flight. Israeli historianIlan Pappé wrote in his bookThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) that "The systematic nature of Plan Dalet is manifested in Deir Yassin, a pastoral and cordial village that had reached a non-aggression pact with the Hagana in Jerusalem, but was doomed to be wiped out because it was within the areas designated in Plan Dalet to be cleansed." According to historianBenny Morris,Walid Khalidi also emphasized "the connection between the Haganah's "Plan Dalet" [...] and what happened in Deir Yassin, explicitly linking the expulsion of the inhabitants to the Haganah's overall planning."[44]
As part of Plan Dalet, the Haganah, Palmach and Irgun captured the urban centers ofTiberias,Haifa (seeBattle of Haifa),Safed,Beisan,Jaffa, andAcre, violently expelling more than 250,000 Palestinian Arabs.[45][qt 4]
The British had, at that time, essentially withdrawn their troops. The situation moved the leaders of the neighboring Arab states to intervene, but their preparations had not been finalised, and they could not assemble sufficient forces to turn the tide of the war. Many Palestinian hopes lay with theArab Legion of Transjordan's monarch,King Abdullah I, but he had no intention of creating a Palestinian-run state, since he hoped to annex as much of the territory of theBritish Mandate of Palestine as he could.
TheHaganah launchedOperation Yiftah[46] andOperation Ben-Ami[47] to secure the Jewish settlements ofGalilee, andOperation Kilshon, which created a united front around Jerusalem.
| Operation | Start date | Objective | Location | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| *Operation Nachshon[16] | 1 April | Carve out a corridor connecting Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; divide the main part of the UN-proposed Arab state in two[16] | Territories allocated to future Arab State | Defeated |
| *Operation Harel[16] | 15 April | Continuation of Nachshon, focused on Arab villages nearLatrun[16] | Territories allocated to future Arab State | Defeated |
| Operation Bi'ur Hametz or Operation Misparayim[16] | 21 April | Capture Haifa and defeat its Arab population[16] | Territories allocated to future Jewish State | Successful |
| *Operation Yevusi or Operation Jevussi[16] | 27 April | Destroy ring of Arab villages surrounding Jerusalem; control the roads from Jerusalem northto Ramallah, eastto Jericho, and southto Bethlehem[16] | Corpus separatum | Defeated |
| *Operation Hametz[16] | 27 April | Destroy Arab villages surrounding Jaffa[16] | Territories allocated to future Arab State | Successful |
| Operation Yiftach[16] | 28 April | Remove Arabs and consolidate control of all the easternGalilee[16] | Territories allocated to future Jewish State | Successful |
| Operation Matateh[16] | 3 May | Destroy Arab villages and clear out Arab forces betweenTiberias and easternGalilee[16] | Territories allocated to future Jewish State | Successful |
| *Operation Maccabi[16] | 7 May | Destroy Arab villages and clear out Arab forces nearLatrun, penetrateRamallah[16] | Territories allocated to future Arab State | Defeated |
| Operation Gideon[16] | 11 May | Drive out Arab forces and semi-sedentaryBedouin communities and occupy theBeisan valley area[16] | Territories allocated to future Jewish State | Successful |
| Operation Barak[16] | 12 May | Destroy Arab villages inBurayr on the way to theNegev[16] | Territories allocated to future Jewish State | Partially successful |
| *Operation Ben'Ami[16] | 14 May | OccupyAcre and remove Arabs from westernGalilee[16] | Territories allocated to future Arab State | Successful |
| *Operation Kilshon or Operation Pitchfork[16] | 14 May | Clear out Arab forces and occupy Arab residential quarters in theNew City of Jerusalem[16][48] | Corpus separatum | Successful |
| *Operation Shfifon[16] | 14 May | Break the siege on the Jewish Quarter and occupy theOld City of Jerusalem[16] | Corpus separatum | Defeated |
The 8 of 13 operations marked with an asterisk (*) were executed outside territories allocated for a Jewish state according to the demarcations of theUnited Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and before the entry of Arabregular armies into areas allotted for an Arab state.[16]
By the end of the war, approximately 800,000 Palestinians were displaced in total, andhundreds of villages were destroyed.[49]
In his article "The Fall of Haifa" in the December 1959 issue of theMiddle East Forum, the Palestinian historianWalid Khalidi placed theBattle of Haifa within a new Zionist offensive and discernible shift in strategy, without naming the offensive.[3] The scholarship of Khalidi and his colleagues at this time responded to the Israeli narrative that thePalestinian exodus was a result of evacuation orders from Arab leaders, then espoused in English most prominently byJon Kimche and his younger brotherDavid Kimche.[50]
On May 21, 1961, the Irish journalistErskine Childers published his article "The Other Exodus" inThe Spectator, to which Jon Kimche responded immediately, accusing Childers of being influenced by Khalidi. Childers, Kimche, and Khalidi then argued publicly in a triangular debate in the pages ofThe Spectator until August 4, 1961.[50] In November 1961, Khalidi published "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" with details about the plan in the journal of the Middle East Forum.[3] Khalidi wrote in 1988 that as of then the exchanges inThe Spectator had never published in full in the US, and that there had not been a detailed account of Plan Dalet or previous plans in Israeli and non-Israeli writings on 1948.[50]
The intent of Plan Dalet is subject to much controversy, with historians on the one extreme asserting that it was defensive, and historians on the other extreme asserting that the plan aimed at maximum conquest and expulsion.
According to the French historianHenry Laurens, the importance of the military dimension of plan Dalet becomes clear by comparing the operations of the Jordanian and the Egyptian armies. The ethnical homogeneity of the coastal area, obtained by the expulsions of the Palestinians eased the halt of the Egyptian advance, while Jewish Jerusalem, located in an Arab population area, was encircled by Jordanian forces.[51]
According toThe Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, whilst there may be controversy whether Plan Dalet was a centralized plan of ethnic cleansing, it could as well be a case of Haganah forces discovering that they could carry out ethnic cleansing at the local and regional level, as their offensive drove out large numbers of Arabs.[52]
The plan was neither understood nor used by the senior field officers as a blanket instruction for the expulsion of the Palestinians. But, in providing for the expulsion or destruction of villages that had resisted or might threaten the Yishuv, it constituted a strategic-doctrinal andcarte blanche for expulsions by front, brigade, district and battalion commanders (who in each case argued military necessity) and it gave commanders, post facto, formal, persuasive cover for their actions. However, during April–June, relatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually left their homes before or during battle, and Haganah rarely had to decide about, or issue, expulsion orders....".[qt 4][53]
In his book on the birth of thePalestinian refugee problem Israeli historianBenny Morris discusses the relevance of the idea of "population transfer" in Zionist thinking. Morris concludes that there was Zionist support for transfer "in the 1930s and early 1940s", and that while this "transfer thinking" had conditioned the Yishuv's hearts and minds to accept it as natural and inevitable when it happened, it "was not tantamount to pre-planning, and did not issue in the production of a policy or master plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion".[54]
On the intent of Plan Dalet Morris writes:
"The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the territory of the prospective Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the future State's borders before, and in anticipation of, the invasion [by Arab states]. The Haganah regarded almost all the villages as actively or potentially hostile."[qt 4][55]
Benny Morris also wrote that "Nahshon heralded a shift from the defensive to the offensive and marked the beginning of the implementation oftochnit dalet (Plan D)"[56] Morris also stated that:
"The Haganah shift of strategy was decided on incrementally during the first half of April: each decision appeared to be, and in large measure was, a response to a particular, local challenge. But by the end of the period it was clear that a dramatic conceptual change had taken place and that the Yishuv had gone over to the offensive and was now engaged in a war of conquest. That war of conquest was prefigured in Plan D."[56]
Ilan Pappé writes that although "official Israeli historiography" considers the implementation of Plan Dalet to have been a shift from defence to offence, in reality Zionist forces had already been on the offense and conducting ethnic cleansing since December 1947. Pappé writes that "If there were a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed."[49]
Military historian David Tal writes, "the plan did provide the conditions for the destruction of Palestinian villages and the deportation of the dwellers; this was not the reason for the plan's composition", and that "its aim was to ensure full control over the territory assigned to the Jews by the partition resolution, thus placing the Haganah in the best possible strategic position to face an Arab invasion".[57]
Walid Khalidi, General Secretary of theInstitute for Palestine Studies, offered this interpretation in anaddress to theAmerican Committee on Jerusalem:
"As is witnessed by the Haganah's Plan Dalet, the Jewish leadership was determined to link the envisaged Jewish state with the Jerusalemcorpus separatum. But the corpus separatum lay deep in Arab territory, in the middle of the envisaged Palestinian state, so this linking up could only be done militarily."
Khalidi calls Plan Dalet a "master plan for the conquest of Palestine". He points to the Zionist ideas of transfer and of a Jewish state in all of Palestine, and to the offensive character of the military operations of the Zionists as the main proof of his interpretation.[34]
Israeli historianIlan Pappé asserts that Plan Dalet was a "blueprint for ethnic cleansing" which "spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go ... The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both rural and urban areas of Palestine."[58]
Israeli historianYoav Gelber considers that although it provided for counter-attacks, Plan Dalet was a defensive operation with the goals of (1) protection of the borders of the upcoming Jewish state according to the partition line; (2) securing its territorial continuity in the face of invasion attempts; (3) safeguarding freedom of movement on the roads and (4) enabling continuation of essential daily routines. Gelber rejects what he calls the "Palestinian-invented" version of Plan Dalet.[59] Gelber says: "The text clarified unequivocally that expulsion concerned only those villages that would fight against the Hagana and resist occupation, and not all Arab hamlets".[qt 1]
"The Arab reaction was just as predictable: "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East," promised Jamal Husseini."
Burning Jewish shops sent smoke billowing over the Holy City shortly after the start of the Arab strike which was billed as a peaceful demonstration against the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Azzam urged demonstrators to organize and work quietly and refrain from violence against Christians. He said they should prepare for a long struggle to achieve Arab aims.