Dalet Plan

Summary

The Zionist military plan of 1948 as described by the Zionist historians Jon and David Kimche and quoted in The Question of Palestine: to capture strategic heights and fill the vacuum left by the departing British so as to create a contiguous Jewish-held area.

Details

• The Dalet Plan, as it has been described by the Zionist historians Jon and David Kimche, quoted by Said: “to capture strategic heights dominating the most likely lines of advance of the invading Arab armies, and to fill in the vacuum left by the departing British forces in such a way as to create a contiguous Jewish-held area extending from the north to the south” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.122 / printed p.101).

• Said adds that in Galilee, the coastal area from Jaffa to Acre, parts of Jerusalem, the towns of Lydda and Ramla, and the Arab parts of Haifa, the Zionists were also filling in space lived in by Arab residents who were, in Joseph Weitz’s word, being “transferred” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.122 / printed p.101).

• In Pappe, Plan D (Dalet) was the fourth and final version of the less substantial earlier plans (Plans A, B and Plan C), the first to spell out clearly and unambiguously that the Palestinians had to go; its final touches were put by eleven men at the Red House on 10 March 1948, and military orders dispatched that evening listed the methods — large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and planting mines among the rubble to prevent any return — with each unit issued its own list of target villages and neighbourhoods (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15).

• Pappe quotes Simcha Flapan on the campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas” being set forth in the Hagana’s Plan Dalet — adding that the aim was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15-16).

• Pappe’s outcome figures for its implementation: taken in March 1948 and implemented over six months, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied — “a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.16).

• On succession from Plan C: “Indifferent as to whether these Palestinians might decide to collaborate with or oppose their Jewish State, Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.53)

• In Pappe’s Chapter 4, Plan Dalet was finalised at the 10 March 1948 Consultancy meeting as the revision of Plans B and C, officially the Yehoshua plan, and was distributed within days to twelve brigade commanders — expanded from four brigades — each with a list of the villages or neighbourhoods he had to occupy, destroy and expel, with exact dates; Pappe, citing IDF-archive documents released in the late 1990s, says it was handed down not as vague guidelines but as clear-cut operational orders (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.109-111).

• The plan’s own operations passage, quoted by Pappe: destroying villages “by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris”, or combing and control operations — encirclement and search, and “In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.66, p.110).

• Pappe notes two differences between the political draft and the military directives: the commanders’ lists gave no way a village could save itself by unconditional surrender, and the official draft’s activation only after the end of the Mandate became, for the officers, a start within a few days of adoption; by 10 March thirty villages were already gone (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.111).

• Manna, in the part of Nakba and Survival read in part 2, states his study will not contest Plan Dalet as clear proof for some historians of an Israeli policy to occupy the country and expel the population, i.e. ethnic cleansing; killing Palestinians in their homes and spreading terror to push emigration began at the end of 1947, before the plan crystallized in March 1948, and expulsion continued after hostilities ceased in early 1949 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.59).

• Its field implementation from early April 1948 was a new phase: in Tiberias and Haifa districts, and later Jaffa and elsewhere, it was operationalized to break the back of Palestinian society, render it incapable of resisting occupation, and expel the population (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.59-62).

Where sources disagree

• Said, quoting the Kimches, describes a plan to capture strategic heights and create a contiguous Jewish-held area; Pappe describes a master plan for systematic and total expulsion, distributed as operational orders. Both accounts are kept above with attribution.

• In Pappe’s Chapter Five, the plan in execution: the operational orders to the brigades exempted no village for any reason, although the official plan gave villages the option to surrender (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.117); between 30 March and 15 May 1948, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled under it, and another ninety between 15 May and 11 June (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.134).

• On 11 May 1948 Ben-Gurion’s letter to the brigade commanders insisted, in Pappe’s summary, that “the cleansing of Palestine remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.159).

• Manna treats Plan Dalet as important during a certain phase of the war, but argues the Zionists employed the same policies and instruments both before that plan and after it; from the beginning of its implementation up to May 1948, a very small number of Palestinians managed to stay in the cities or villages it occupied (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.27, 31).

Related pages

The Question of Palestine, Joseph Weitz, Haganah, Deir Yassin