Plan Dalet and The NAKBA
Zionist operations outside the UN designated Jewish part of Palestine
Terrorist operations were first introduced in Palestine by the Jewish underground to demoralise the British Army. These operations were carried out by those Jewish elements trained by British Army in North Africa as an adjunct to their WWII effort against the Nazis. By 1939 this Jewish auxiliary force numbered 20,000 strong.
This force, which was given the innocuous name of The Jewish Settlement Force, employed terrorist tactics (the first to be carried out in the Middle East) against British troops inside Palestine supplemented by terrorist operations carried out by their underground brethren throwing bombs in bus stops, cafes and marketplaces. These bombs were hidden in milk cans, fruit baskets and similar ordinary containers. Parallel with these operations, terrorist innovations included the kidnapping of British officers, whipping them, hanging them and booby-trapping their hanging bodies which made shocking headlines back home in the UK.
In the last year of the British Mandate, the ratio of British officers dead to Jewish terrorists killed was 4 to 1. A very high ratio even in today's standards. No wonder Britain wanted out of Palestine.
The Zionist plan to transfer Palestinians out of their land was 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 achieved. 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.
Just before the UN voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, Ben-Gurion secretly mobilised Jewish groups inside and outside Palestine and dispatched them to Europe to purchase massive quantities of arms for the next phase: a military plan to conquer as many Palestinian villages and to expel their inhabitants.
Their plan was called Plan D better known as Plan Dalet, (Dalet being the fourth letter in the Hebrew alphabet) which was launched nearly six weeks prior to the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. It is worth noting that Plan D had been preceeded by Plan A (February 1945), Plan B (May 1947) and Plan C (November 1947). There is no mistaking their intention: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
March 1948: two months before the so-called Declaration of Independence, the Zionist leadership gathered in Tel Aviv and agreed and embarked on their Plan. 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 to the Palestinians by th UN 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 even existed! The claim that Arab forces invaded Israel is hog-wash. When the Zionist leadership unilaterally declared their so-called state of Israel on 15 May 1948, they purposefully avoided declaring its boundaries to keep their options open for future expansion. That expansion has now covered the whole of historic Palestine. There can be no doubt about that.
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”.
And so it was: the Zionist dream of transfer and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine came to fruition with the Palestinian Exodus of 1948 when more than 80% of the inhabitants of what became Israel were expelled and became refugees until this day. Some 140,000-150,000 Palestinians had remained behind in what became Israel and were allowed by Israel to stay. The borders of this new state had been increased through conquest from the 55.5% of Mandatory Palestine (under the Partition Plan) to 77%, and they continue to expand.