Plan Dalet

By March 1948 the civil war that followed the partition vote was going badly for the Zionist forces on the roads, where Palestinian irregulars had cut the route to Jerusalem. On 10 March the Haganah General Staff finalised Plan Dalet, the fourth in a sequence of contingency plans. Its stated objective was to gain control of the area allotted to the Jewish state and to defend its borders, and to secure the blocs of Jewish settlement lying outside those borders against regular, semi-regular and small forces.

The operational sections set out what was to be done with the Arab villages inside and adjacent to that area. Villages could be garrisoned, or — in the language of the plan — destroyed, with their populations expelled beyond the boundaries of the state, if they resisted, could not be permanently controlled, or lay in positions of tactical importance. The plan did not order a general expulsion in so many words. It authorised commanders in the field to carry one out, village by village, at their discretion, and it was written when the Zionist leadership knew perfectly well that the territory it was to secure contained an Arab population of several hundred thousand.

Implementation began before the British left. Operation Nachshon, decided on the night of 31 March–1 April to open the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road, was the first large operation conducted under Plan Dalet’s guidelines; Deir Yassin was destroyed on 9 April in the same campaign. Operation Yiftach cleared eastern Galilee, Operation Barak the southern coastal plain, Operation Ben Ami the western Galilee, Operation Dani Lydda and Ramle. By the time the state was declared on 14 May, some three hundred thousand Palestinians had already been displaced.

Historians differ over whether Plan Dalet constituted a master plan for expulsion or a military doctrine whose logic made expulsion the predictable outcome. What is not in dispute is the result: by the end of the fighting more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians — the majority of the Arab population of the territory Israel came to hold — were refugees, more than four hundred villages had been depopulated, and return was refused.

Sources

• Text of Plan Dalet (Plan D): General Section, 10 March 1948 — PalQuest
• The Nakba — PalQuest
• Operation Nachshon — PalQuest