The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (17 page)

We have no record of what Ben-Gurion said about ethnic cleansing to the team that made up the Consultancy on their regular Wednesday afternoon meeting on 10 March 1948, but we do have the plan they authored and which, after they had put the final touches to it, was approved by the Hagana High Command and then sent out as military orders to the troops in the field.

The official name of Plan Dalet was the Yehoshua plan. Born in Bellarus in 1905, Yehoshua Globerman had been sent to prison in the 1920s for anticommunist activity, but was released after three years in a Soviet jail after Maxim Gorki, a friend of his parents, had intervened on his behalf. Globerman was the commander of the Hagana in various parts of Palestine and was killed by unknown assailants in December 1947, who had fired at him while he was driving his car. He had been destined to become one of the future chiefs of staff of the Israeli army, but his untimely death meant that his name would be associated not with military prowess but rather with the Zionist master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was so revered by his peers that he was posthumously given the rank of general after the Jewish state was established.

A few days after Globerman was killed, the intelligence unit of the Hagana drafted the blueprint for the coming months. Codenamed Plan D, it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the
future Jewish state (the seventy-eight per cent coveted by Ben-Gurion) and to the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space:

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.
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Villages were to be expelled in their entirety either because they were located in strategic spots or because they were expected to put up some sort of resistance. These orders were issued when it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied. This was the master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine. Similar instructions were given, with much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centres.

The orders coming through to the units in the field were more specific. The country was divided into zones according to the number of brigades, whereby the four original brigades of the Hagana were turned into twelve so as to facilitate the implementation of the plan. Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates. Some of the commanders were over-ambitious in executing their orders, and added additional locations in the momentum their zeal had created. Some of the orders, on the other hand, proved too far-fetched and could not be implemented within the expected timeframe. This meant that several villages on the coast that had been scheduled to be occupied in May were not destroyed until July. And the villages in the Wadi Ara area – a valley connecting the coast near Hadera with Marj Ibn Amir (Emeq Izrael) and Afula (today’s Route 65) – managed to survive repeated Jewish attacks throughout the war. But they were the exception: the rule was the 531 villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods and towns that were destroyed and their inhabitants expelled under the direct orders the Consultancy put out in March 1948. By then, thirty villages were already gone.

A few days after Plan D was typed up, it was distributed among the commanders of the dozen brigades the Hagana now incorporated. With the list each commander received came a detailed description of the villages in his realm of operation, and their imminent fate: occupation, destruction and expulsion. The Israeli documents released from the IDF archives in the late 1990s show clearly that, contrary to claims historians such as Benny Morris have made, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operational orders for action.
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Unlike the general draft that was sent to the political leaders, the list of villages the military commanders received did not detail how the action of destruction or expulsion should be carried out. There was no specification here for how villages could save themselves, for instance by surrendering unconditionally as promised in the general document. There was another difference between the draft handed to the politicians and the one the military commanders were given: the official draft stated that the plan would only be activated after the end of the Mandate; the officers on the ground were ordered to start executing it within a few days after its adoption. This dichotomy is typical of the relationship that exists in Israel between the army and politicians up to the present day – the army quite often misinforms the politicians as to its real intentions: Moshe Dayan did so in 1956, Ariel Sharon in 1982, and Shaul Mofaz in 2000.

What the political version of Plan Dalet and the military directives had in common was the overall purpose of the scheme. In other words, even before the direct orders had reached the field, the troops already knew exactly what was expected of them. That venerable and courageous Israeli campaigner for civil rights, Shulamit Aloni, who was a woman officer in those days, recalled how special political officers would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead, quite often the day after the indoctrinating event had taken place.
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After the Consultancy had approved Plan Dalet, the Acting Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin, summoned all the intelligence officers of the Hagana to a building that housed the headquarters of the Jewish public health service, Kupat Holim, in Tel-Aviv’s Zamenhof Street (still functioning as such opposite a popular Indian restaurant). Hundreds of officers filled what was normally a reception hall for patients.

Yadin did not tell them about Plan Dalet: the orders had gone out that week to their brigade commanders, but he provided them with a general idea that was meant to leave no doubt in their minds as to the troops’ ability to carry out the plan. Intelligence officers were also Politruk (political commissars) of a kind, and Yadin realised he needed to account for the gap between the public declarations the leadership was making of an imminent ‘second Holocaust’ and the reality that the Jewish forces clearly faced no real challenge in the scheduled depopulation of the territory they wished to turn into their Jewish state. Yadin, dramatic as ever, set out to impress upon his listeners that since they were going to be issued with orders to occupy, conquer and dispossess a population, they deserved an explanation of how they could afford to do so when, as they read in their newspapers and heard from their politicians, they themselves were facing the ‘danger of annihilation’. The officer, whose tall and lean figure would soon become familiar to all Israelis, then proudly told his audience: ‘Today we have all the arms we need; they are already aboard ships, and the British are leaving and then we bring in the weapons, and the whole situation at the fronts will change.’
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In other words, when we find Yigael Yadin’s narrative depicting the last weeks of March 1948 as the toughest period of the war as a whole, we might instead conclude that the Jewish community in Palestine was not in any danger of annihilation: it was facing some obstacles on the way to completing its ethnic cleansing plan. These difficulties were the relative lack of arms and the isolated Jewish colonies within the designated Arab state. Especially vulnerable seemed to be the few settlements inside the West Bank and those on the north-western parts of the Negev (Negba, Yad Mordechai, Nizanim and Gat). These four would still be left isolated even during the Egyptian forces’ entry into Palestine that overtook them for a short while. Similarly, some settlements in the upper Galilee were not easily reached or defended as they were surrounded by scores of Palestinian villages that were lucky enough to have the protection of several hundreds of volunteers from the ALA. Finally, the road to Jerusalem was subjected to Palestinian sniper attacks, serious enough for a sense of siege to descend over the Jewish parts of the city that month.

Official Israeli historiography describes the next month, April 1948, as a turning point. According to this version, an isolated and threatened Jewish community in Palestine was moving from defence to offence, after its near defeat. The reality of the situation could not have been more
different: the overall military, political and economic balance between the two communities was such that not only were the majority of Jews in no danger at all, but in addition, between the beginning of December 1947 and the end of March 1948, their army had been able to complete the first stage of the cleansing of Palestine, even before the master plan had been put into effect. If there were a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed.

The Serbs were interested in creating an ethnically pure Republika Srpska for the Serbs, but large Muslim minorities, especially in the cities, made it difficult for the Serbs to carve out homogenous ethnic entities. As a result, the army of the Republika Srpska under the leadership of General Ratko Mladic began a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Muslims in what they considered to be Serb lands.

GlobalSecurity.org, 2000–2005

T
he editors of Ben-Gurion’s diary were surprised to discover that between 1 April and 15 May 1948, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine seemed rather oblivious to the military side of events.
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Instead, he appeared much more preoccupied with domestic Zionist politics and was dealing intensively with organisational topics such as transforming the Diasporic bodies into organs of the new state of Israel. His diary certainly does not betray any sense of a looming catastrophe or a ‘second Holocaust’, as he proclaimed with pathos in his public appearances.

To his inner circles he spoke a different language. To members of his party Mapai, early in April, he proudly listed the names of the Arab villages Jewish troops had recently occupied. On another occasion, on 6 April, we find him rebuking socialist-leaning members of the Histadrut’s executive who questioned the wisdom of attacking peasants instead of confronting their landlords,
the effendis, telling one of its central figures: ‘I do not agree with you that we are facing effendis and not peasants: our enemies are the Arab peasants!’
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His diary does indeed offer a stark contrast to the fear he planted in his audiences during public gatherings and, consequently, the Israeli collective memory. It suggests that by then he had realised Palestine was already in his hands. He was not, however, over-confident and did not join in the celebrations on 15 May 1948, aware of the enormity of the task ahead of him: cleansing Palestine and making sure Arab attempts would not stop the Jewish takeover. Like the Consultancy, he feared the outcome of developments in places where there was an obvious imbalance between isolated Jewish settlements and a potential Arab army – as was the case in remote parts of the Galilee and the Negev, as well as in some parts of Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion and his close associates nonetheless understood perfectly well that these local disadvantages could not change the overall picture: the ability of the Jewish forces to seize, even before the British had left, many of the areas the UN Partition Resolution had allocated to the Jewish state. ‘Seizing’ meaning only one thing: the massive expulsion of the Palestinians living there from their homes, businesses and land in both the cities and the rural areas.

Ben-Gurion may not have publicly rejoiced with the Jewish masses who danced in the streets on the day the British Mandate officially ended, but he was well aware that the power of the Jewish military forces had already begun to show on the ground. When Plan Dalet was put into effect, the Hagana had more than 50,000 troops at its disposal, half of which had been trained by the British army during the Second World War. The time had come to put the plan into effect.

The Zionist strategy of building isolated settlements in the midst of densely populated Arab areas, approved retroactively by the British Mandatory authorities, proved a liability at times of tension. Attempts to bring supplies and troops to these faraway posts could not always be guaranteed, and once the country was in flames, the western approach road to Jerusalem, which passed through numerous Palestinian villages, was particularly difficult to safeguard, creating a sense of siege amongst the small Jewish population in
the city. The Zionist leaders were also worried about the Jews in Jerusalem, for a different reason: they were made up mainly of Orthodox and Mizrahi communities whose commitment to Zionism and its aspirations was quite tenuous or even questionable. Thus, the first area chosen for putting Plan Dalet into action was the rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, half way along the road to Tel-Aviv. This was Operation
Nachshon
, which would serve as a model for future campaigns: the sudden massive expulsions it employed were to prove the most effective means for maintaining isolated Jewish settlements or unblocking routes that were under enemy threat, such as the one leading to Jerusalem.