Thread by @HammadSGill

Plan Dalet: Blueprint for Ethenic Cleansing of Palestine

Thread :

From d earliest days of modern political Zionism,its advocates grappled w/the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of d world where #Palestinian Arabs were d overwhelming majority of d population

For many, the solution became known as "transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

The father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in 1895:
"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,

while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

By August 1937, "transfer" was a major subject of discussion at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland.

Alluding to the systematic dispossession of Palestinian peasants (fellahin) that Zionist organizations had been engaged in for years, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister in 1948, stated:

In June 1938, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency:

"I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."

In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department, wrote in his diary:

"There is no way besides transferring

the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb ....

.... millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

On March 10, 1948, Zionist political and military leaders, including Ben-Gurion, met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet (or Plan D).

The operational military orders specified which Palestinian population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail a blueprint for their forcible depopulation and destruction. It called for :

The Haganah (soon to be Israeli army) launched military operations under Plan Dalet at the beginning of April 1948. Although attacks by Zionist forces against Palestinian population centers actually began a few days after the UN Partition Plan was passed on November 29, 1947,

with the adoption of Plan Dalet expulsions accelerated and became systematic, marking a new phase in the conflict in which Zionist and then Israeli forces went on "the offensive," in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris.

Following Israel's establishment on May 14, 1948, the new Israeli govt set up an unofficial body, the "Transfer Committee," 2 oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns & villages or their repopulation with Jews, & to prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes

In a report presented to Ben-Gurion in June 1948, the three-man committee, which included the JNF's Weitz, called for the "destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations."

By the time the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, more than....

....than 200 Palestinian villages had already been emptied as people fled in fear or were forcibly expelled by Zionist forces, and approximately 175,000 Palestinians had been made refugees.

By 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians had been made refugees, losing their land, homes

& other belongings in what became known as the "Nakba" (" the catastrophe").Their flight was accelerated by massacres such as the one that took place on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, where approx 100 Palestinian including children were murdered by Zionist forces.

Today, refugees displaced during Israel's creation and their descendants number approximately 7.1 million people.

Some 400 Palestinian towns & villages, including vibrant urban centers, were systematically destroyed or taken over by Zionists to prevent the return of Palestinians

Only about 150,000 Palestinians remained inside what became Israel, many of them internally displaced ppl.Although they were granted Israeli citizenship, they were governed by Israeli military rule until 1966, had most of their land taken frm them & continue 2 face discrimination

Benny Morris, one of d leading so-called "new historians" of Israel, wrote in his landmark work "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949", that Plan Dalet was "a strategic-ideological anchor & basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade & battalion commanders

providing "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions".

In his memoirs, which were censored by the Israeli military but leaked to @nytimes in 1979, the late Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin recalled a conversation he had in July 1948 with Ben-Gurion, when ...

..... when Rabin was an officer in the Israeli army, regarding the fate of more than 50,000 Palestinian residents of the cities of Lydda and Ramleh. Rabin wrote:

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] Allon repeated his question, 'What is to be done with.....

....... with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Rabin added, "I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out."

References :

1) All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, by Walid Khalidi

2) The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris.

3) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by @pappe54.

Ethnic*