“Plan Dalet was a defensive contingency plan, not a blueprint for expulsion”

The document exists and its text is published. Tokhnit Dalet — Plan D — was issued by the Haganah general staff on 10 March 1948 and translated into English by Walid Khalidi in the Journal of Palestine Studies (vol. 18, no. 1, Autumn 1988, pp. 4–33) from Appendix 48 of the Haganah’s own official history, Sefer Toldot Ha-Haganah. Its stated objective was “to gain control of the areas of the Hebrew state and defend its borders,” together with “the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations which are located outside the borders.” That framing is what is usually quoted in defence of the plan. What follows in the operational sections is what is usually left out.

On Arab population centres, the plan set out two options. The first was “destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.” The second was “encirclement of the village and conducting a search 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.” A plan that instructs commanders to raze villages and expel their inhabitants is not made defensive by its preamble; it defines “control” as the removal of the people who live there.

The chronology matters more than the label. The regular armies of the Arab states crossed into Palestine on 15 May 1948, the day after the Mandate ended. Plan Dalet predates that by two months. So does most of the displacement: the Intelligence Service of the Israel Defence Forces completed a report on 30 June 1948, “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948,” which counted roughly 391,000 Palestinians already displaced by 1 June and attributed about 70 per cent of that movement to operations by Jewish forces — the Haganah and, separately, the Irgun and Lehi — and only some 5 per cent to orders or directives from Arab institutions. The report also recorded that Arab institutions had tried to restrain the flight. Haifa fell on 22 April, Jaffa in late April, Tiberias on 18 April, Safad on 10 May; the cities of the coastal plain and the eastern Galilee were emptied before a single Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian or Iraqi soldier entered the country.

That report was known to scholarship only because Benny Morris found it in the mid-1980s and published from it in 1986. It was subsequently removed from public access; the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research recovered another copy from the Yad Ya’ari archive and published the full document. This is the pattern documented by Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz on 5 July 2019: Malmab, the Israeli Defence Ministry’s security department, has for years withdrawn from Israeli archives documents relating to 1948, including material that had already been cleared by the military censor and in some cases already published. The historian’s difficulty in establishing what Plan Dalet produced on the ground is partly an artefact of that policy.

Historians differ on how to characterise the plan’s intent — Morris resists calling it a master plan for expulsion while documenting the expulsions it authorised; Ilan Pappé treats it as the operational instrument of an ethnic-cleansing design; Nur Masalha traces the “transfer” thinking that preceded it through the Jewish Agency’s own committees. The disagreement is about the word. The text of the orders, the date they were issued, and the number of people already gone before the Arab armies arrived are not in dispute.

Sources

• Plan Dalet (10 March 1948) — text of the general section and operational orders, in Walid Khalidi’s translation, Journal of Palestine Studies 18:1 (1988)
• IDF Intelligence Service report, 30 June 1948, “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948” — published in full by the Akevot Institute
• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)
• Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” — Haaretz, 5 July 2019 (PDF via the Akevot Institute)