Plan Dalet

Plan Dalet, or Plan D, (Hebrew: תוכנית ד' "Tokhnit dalet"; "dalet" is the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as "D" is in the Latin), was a plan that the Haganah in Palestine worked out during autumn 1947 to spring 1948. The purpose of the plan was, according to its Jewish planners, a contingency plan for defending a Jewish state from invasion. According to Yoav Gelber and most of the historians , Plan D was primarily defensive in nature. According to other sources it was a plan with the purpose of conquering as much of Palestine as possible and to expel as many Palestinians as possible (see 'Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine', by Walid Khalidi, for example).

Purpose of Plan Dalet

The introduction states:

:" a) The objective of this plan is to gain control of the areas of the Hebrew state and defend its borders. It also aims at gaining control of the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations which are located outside the borders (of the Hebrew state) against regular, semi-regular, and small forces operating from bases outside or inside the state."

This passage has been interpreted to mean that Plan Dalet was not really of defensive nature, and that the founders of the Jewish state intended to disregard the 1947 UN Partition plan and secure positions outside the partition plans borders. The controversial historian Ilan Pappé claims that he found confirmation of this in the diaries of Ben Gurion. He claims that Ben Gurion wrote to the commanders of the Haganah Brigades on 11 May 1948 that 'the cleansing of Palestine remains the prime objective of Plan Dalet'.

The Plan states :"Generally, the aim of this plan is not an operation of occupation outside the borders of the Hebrew state. However, concerning enemy bases lying directly close to the borders which may be used as springboards for infiltration into the territory of the state, these must be temporarily occupied and searched for hostiles according to the above guidelines, and they must then be incorporated into our defensive system until operations cease."

In Section 3b4 the plan proscribes offensive operations to be carried out to consolidate the defensive system::"Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:"::"Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously."::"Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search7 inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.:"The villages which are emptied in the manner described above must be included in the fixed defensive system and must be fortified as necessary.":"In the absence of resistance, garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control. The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices, and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals."Depending on the interpretation of 'near our defensive system' section 3b4 can either be interpreted as defensive or, since 90 percent of Palestine lay within 30 km of the Jewish Mandate area, as extremely offensive. Furthermore the measures to be taken in the absence of resistance could easily provoke resistance, providing an excuse for expulsion. The actual purpose of Plan Dalet depended on the interpretation of the plan by the Jewish leadership. It gave local commanders, whom it was distributed to, authorisation for expulsion anytime they encountered resistance.

Walid Khalidi (General Secretary of the Institute for Palestine Studies) offered this interpretation in an [http://www.acj.org/w_khalidi.htm address] to the American 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 Jerusalem corpus 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."

Benny Morris gives the following interpretation::"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 [Morris, 2004, 'The Birth ... Revisited', p. 164] ":" [Plan Dalet] constituted a strategic-doctrinal and carte blanche for expulsions [from villages that resisted or might threaten the Yishuv] 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. [Morris, 2004, 'The Birth ... Revisited', p. 165] "

On the other hand, Ilan Pappé, another Israeli historian, succinctly summarizes Plan Dalet in the following way::"...this fourth and last blueprint 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. [Pappe, 2006, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', p. xii] "

According to the French historian Henry 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. [Henry Laurens, "Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient", Armand Colin, 2005, p.92.]

Execution of Plan Dalet

Footnotes

References

* W. Khalidi, ‘Plan Dalet: master plan for the conquest of Palestine’, J. Palestine Studies 18 (1), 1988, p. 4-33 (published earlier in Middle East Forum, November 1961)

ee also

*1948 Palestine war
*Eilaboun massacre
*Deir Yassin massacre

External links

* [http://www.mideastweb.org/pland.htm MidEast Web Historical Documents - Plan D, March, 10 1948]
* [http://www.ajds.org.au/mendes.htm A Historical Controversy: The Causes of the Palestinian Refugee Problem]
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4706543509678082810&q=Ilan+Papp%C3%A9&total=22&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3 Video of an interview with Ilan Pappé on the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinee]