Plan Dalet and The NAKBA
For a concept such as the Zionist plan to transfer Palestinians out of their land, and for an ethnic cleansing project to be properly executed, the Zionist leadership archives show that the perpetrators of these schemes are real people headed by no lesser character than David Ben-Gurion himself. He plotted these schemes in his own home aided by a small ad hoc group of people referred to as The Consultancy. Its aim was to plot and design the disposession of the Palestinian people. As early as February 1947, when the British Cabinet voted to pull out of Mandatory Palestine, the Zionist leadership knew that the road ahead was clear for their aims to be materialised. The Consultancy first met (according to Ben-Gurion's diary) on 18 June 1947 and continued to meet regularly during the months leading to October 1947 when it transpired that the UN will now issue its Resolution 181 to partition the land of Palestine.
The Zionist leadership and its Consultancy group knew that the Palestinians and the Arab leadership in general would reject the Partition Resolution. They also knew that this is the time not only to forge forward their plan to clear the Palestinian population from the UN-designated future Jewish state, but also from the areas accorded to the Palestinian state.
Prior to 1947, the Zionist agenda concentrated on building a political, ideological, cultural and economic enclave within historic Palestine. Now, during these crucial months leading to the UN Resolution 181, it was decided that the time has come to translate these ideologies into realities on the ground. The Zionist leadership openly declared that it intended to take over the land of Palestine and to expel its indigenous population. Their plan was called Plan Dalet.
On 10 March 1948, two months before the so-called Declaration of Independence, the Zionist leadership gathered in Tel Aviv and agreed on Plan Dalet calling for a military campaign against the Palestinians. Over 13 military underground operations were carried out (according to The History of the Palmach archives released in full in 1972) before the Arab forces entered the areas allotted by the UN to the Palestinians in their Partition Plan. Both Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion wrote extensively about their underground military campaigns to cleanse Palestinian villages of their indigenous inhabitants.
All this was taking place BEFORE Israel existed! The claim that Arab forces invaded Israel is hog-wash. When the Zionist leaders established Israel on 15 May 1948, they purposefully avoided declaring its boundaries in order to open the doors for future expansion, as has been happening since then.
At the end of the implementation of Plan Dalet, the Haganah set up "The Committee for Abandoned Arab Property" – The CFAAP – which was entrusted with the disposal of all Arab possessions into Yishuv hands. The intention was to obliterate any sign of ‘life’ in the abandoned Palestinian homes and villages.
By June 1948, approximately 370,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. By the end of that year the number totalled 780,000. Josef Weitz declared, at a cabinet meeting chaired by Ben-Gurion on 18 August 1948, that 286 villages had been cleared or evacuated and about 3 million dunums had been left behind by their Palestinian owners as they fled the Zionist terror. The last of the villages to be cleared was Al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon by Israel).
Within 6 months, Zionist terrorist organizations went on a rampage expelling and murdering Palestinians and destroying their homes and villages. They expelled 452,780 Palestinians men, women and children from the areas allocated to the Jews in the Partition Plan, and a further 347,220 were uprooted from areas beyond the allocated boundaries. All in all, a total of 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, 530 of their villages destroyed and 11 of their urban neighbourhoods were emptied. Massacres, like that at Deir Yaseen, spread fear and terror in the hearts of Palestinian families and forced them to take flight.
The reasons for this mass Exodus were given by the IDF intelligence as follows: Haganah operations (55%), operations by Irgun (15%) and whispering campaigns of psychological warfare (14%).
Chaim Weizmann later commented that this Palestinian Exodus had been “a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task”.
