Summary
Plan C (Gimel in Hebrew) is in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine the general strategy David Ben-Gurion and his aides worked out from the end of 1946 for implementation against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone: a fusion of Plan A (1937) and Plan B (1946), preparing offensive campaigns of deterrence and retaliation whose punitive repertoire drew its data from the Village Files. Within a few months it was superseded by Plan D, which called for systematic and total expulsion.
Details
- Lineage: Plan A was also named the ‘Elimelech plan’, after Elimelech Avnir, the Haganah commander in Tel-Aviv who in 1937, at Ben-Gurion’s request, had set out possible guidelines for the takeover of Palestine in the event of a British withdrawal; Plan B had been devised in 1946; both were fused into Plan C (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.52).
- Purpose: like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the military forces of the Jewish community for the offensive campaigns they would engage in against rural and urban Palestine the moment the British were gone, to ‘deter’ the Palestinian population from attacking Jewish settlements and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads and traffic (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.52).
- Its punitive repertoire, spelled out in the plan as Pappe lists it: killing the Palestinian political leadership; killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters; killing Palestinians who acted against Jews; killing senior Palestinian officers and officials in the Mandatory system; damaging Palestinian transportation; damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods — water wells, mills, etc.; attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks; attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.52-53)
- Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the Village Files: lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.53).
- Succession: “However, within a few months, yet another plan was drawn up: Plan D (Dalet). It was this plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. 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 the Preface’s numbering, Plan Dalet was “the fourth and final version of less substantial plans” that had articulated only obscurely how the leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians; the fourth blueprint “spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Dalet Plan, Village Files, David Ben-Gurion, Consultancy, Haganah, Ethnic Cleansing