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Journal of Palestine Studies
issue 141, published in Fall 2006
The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
by Ilan Pappé
This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the
systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians
from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and political
developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year “Village Files” project
(1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village
and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner “caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by
David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which
the 1948 war was fought. The article ends with a statement of one of the author’s underlying
goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the
paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.
ILAN PAPPÉ, an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Haifa University, is the
author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (I.
B. Tauris, 1994) and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge
University Press, 2004). The current article is extracted from early chapters of his latest book,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming in
October 2006).
THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE ILAN PAPPÉ
This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the
systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000
Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic
and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year
“Village Files” project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and
intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner
“caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans
culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. The article ends
with a statement of one of the author’s underlying goals in writing the book: to make the
case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the
scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.
ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran
Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan
for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine1. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to
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units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas
of the country2. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to
forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages
and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents;
demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled
inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods
to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was
the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native
population of Palestine3. The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the
Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land
the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out
clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.
The plan, which covered both the rural and urban areas of Palestine, was the inevitable
result both of Zionism’s ideological drive for an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine and
a response to developments on the ground following the British decision in February 1947
to end its Mandate over the country and turn the problem over to the United Nations.
Clashes with local Palestinian militias, especially after the UN partition resolution of
November 1947, provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological
vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.
Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over,
more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted,
531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their
inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic
implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an
ethnic cleansing operation.
DEFINING ETHNIC CLEANSING
Ethnic cleansing today is designated by international law as a crime against humanity, and
those who perpetrate it are subject to adjudication: a special international tribunal has been
set up in The Hague to prosecute those accused of ethnic cleansing in the former
Yugoslavia, and a similar court was established in Arusha, Tanzania, to deal with the Rwanda
case. The roots of ethnic cleansing are ancient, to be sure, and it has been practiced from
biblical times to the modern age, including at the height of colonialism and in World War II
by the Nazis and their allies. But it was especially the events in the former Yugoslavia that
gave rise to efforts to define the concept and that continue to serve as the prototype of
ethnic cleansing. For example, in its special report on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the U.S.
State Department defines the term as “the systematic and forced removal of the members
of an ethnic group from communities in order to change the ethnic composition of a given
region.” The report goes on to document numerous cases, including the depopulation
within twenty-four hours of the western Kosovar town of Pec in spring 1999, which could
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only have been achieved through advanced planning followed by systematic execution.4
Earlier, a congressional report prepared in August 1992 for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations
Committee had described the “process of population transfers aimed at removing the non
Serbian population from large areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” noting that the campaign had
“substantially achieved its goals: an exclusively Serb-inhabited region . . . created by forcibly
expelling the Muslim populations that had been the overwhelming majority.” According to
this report, the two main elements of ethnic cleansing are, first, “the deliberate use of
artillery and snipers against the civilian populations of the big cities,” and second, “the
forced movement of civilian populations [entailing] the systematic destruction of homes,
the looting of personal property, beatings, selective and random killings, and massacres.”5
Similar descriptions are found in the UN Council for Human Rights (UNCHR) report of 1993,
which was prepared in follow-up to a UN Security Council Resolution of April 1993 that
reaffirmed “its condemnation of all violations of international humanitarian law, in particular
the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing.’” Showing how a state’s desire to impose a single ethnic
rule on a mixed area links up to acts of expulsion and violence, the report describes the
unfolding ethnic cleansing process where men are separated from women and detained,
where resistance leads to massacres, and where villages are blown up, with the remaining
houses subsequently repopulated with another ethnic group.6
In addition to the United States and the UN, academics, too, have used the former
Yugoslavia as the starting point for their studies of the phenomenon. Drazen Petrovic has
published one of the most comprehensive studies of ethnic cleansing, which he describes as
“a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another
group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin. Such a policy
involves violence and is very often connected with military operations.”7 Petrovic associates
ethnic cleansing with nationalism, the creation of new nation-states, and national struggle,
noting the close connection between politicians and the army in the perpetration of the
crime: the political leadership delegates the implementation of the ethnic cleansing to the
military level, and although it does not furnish systematic plans or provide explicit
instructions, there is no doubt as to the overall objective.
These descriptions almost exactly mirror what happened in Palestine in 1948: Plan D
constitutes a veritable repertoire of the cleansing methods described in the various reports
on Yugoslavia, setting the background for the massacres that accompanied the expulsions.
Indeed, it seems to me that had we never heard about the events in the former Yugoslavia
of the 1990s and were aware only of the Palestine case, we would be forgiven for thinking
that the Nakba had been the inspiration for the descriptions and definitions above, almost
to the last detail.
Yet when it comes to the dispossession by Israel of the Palestinians in 1948, there is a deep
chasm between the reality and the representation. This is most bewildering, and it is difficult
to understand how events perpetrated in modern times and witnessed by foreign reporters
and UN observers could be systematically denied, not even recognized as historical fact, let
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alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted, politically as well as morally.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the most formative event
in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has been almost entirely eradicated from the
collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.
SETTING THE STAGE
When even a measure of Israeli responsibility for the disappearance of half the Arab
population of Palestine is acknowledged (the official government version continues to
reject any responsibility whatsoever, insisting that the local population left “voluntarily”),
the standard explanation is that their flight was an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product
of war. But what happened in Palestine was by no means an unintended consequence, a
fortuitous occurrence, or even a “miracle,” as Israel’s first president Chaim Weitzmann later
proclaimed. Rather, it was the result of long and meticulous planning.
The potential for a future Jewish takeover of the country and the expulsion of the
indigenous Palestinian people had been present in the writings of the founding fathers of
Zionism, as scholars later discovered. But it was not until the late 1930s, two decades after
Britain’s 1917 promise to turn Palestine into a national home for the Jews (a pledge that
became enshrined in Britain’s Mandate over Palestine in 1923), that Zionist leaders began to
translate their abstract vision of Jewish exclusivity into more concrete plans. New vistas
were opened in 1937 when the British Royal Peel Commission8 recommended partitioning
Palestine into two states. Though the territory earmarked for the Jewish state fell far short of
Zionist ambitions, the leadership responded favorably, aware of the signal importance of
official recognition of the principle of Jewish statehood on even part of Palestine. Several
years later, in 1942, a more maximalist strategy was adopted when the Zionist leader David
Ben-Gurion, in a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, put demands on the table for a
Jewish commonwealth over the whole of Mandatory Palestine.9 Thus, the geographical
space coveted by the movement changed according to circumstances and opportunities,
but the principal objective remained the same: the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish
state, both as a safe haven for Jews and as the cradle of a new Jewish nationalism. And this
state had to be exclusively Jewish not only in its sociopolitical structure but also in its ethnic
composition.
That the top leaders were well aware of the implications of this exclusivity was clear in their
internal debates, diaries, and private correspondence. Ben-Gurion, for example, wrote in a
letter to his son in 1937, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment
for making it happen, such as a war.”10 Unlike most of his colleagues in the Zionist
leadership, who still hoped that by purchasing a piece of land here and a few houses there
they would be able to realize their objective on the ground, Ben-Gurion had long
understood that this would never be enough. He recognized early on that the Jewish state
could be won only by force but that it was necessary to bide one’s time until the opportune
moment arrived for dealing militarily with the demographic reality on the ground: the
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presence of a non-Jewish native majority.
The Zionist movement, led by Ben-Gurion, wasted no time in preparing for the eventuality
of taking the land by force if it were not granted through diplomacy. These preparations
included the building of an efficient military organization and the search for more ample
financial resources (for which they tapped into the Jewish Diaspora). In many ways, the
creation of an embryonic diplomatic corps was also an integral part of the same general
preparations aimed at creating by force a state in Palestine.
The principal paramilitary organization of the Jewish community in Palestine had been
established in 1920 primarily to defend the Jewish colonies being implanted among
Palestinian villages. Sympathetic British officers, however, helped transform it into the
military force that eventually was able to implement plans for the Zionist military takeover
of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its native population. One officer in particular, Orde
Wingate, was responsible for this transformation. It was he who made the Zionist leaders
realize more fully that the idea of Jewish statehood had to be closely associated with
militarism and an army, not only to protect the growing number of Jewish colonies inside
Palestine but also—more crucially—because acts of armed aggression were an effective
deterrent against possible resistance by local Palestinians. Assigned to Palestine in 1936,
Wingate also succeeded in attaching Haganah troops to the British forces during the Arab
Revolt (1936–39), enabling the Jews to practice the attack tactics he had taught them in
rural areas and to learn even more effectively what a “punitive mission” to an Arab village
ought to entail. The Haganah also gained valuable military experience in World War II, when
quite a few of its members volunteered for the British war effort. Others who remained
behind in Palestine, meanwhile, continued to monitor and infiltrate the 1,200 or so
Palestinian villages that had dotted the countryside for hundreds of years.
THE VILLAGE FILES
Attacking Arab villages and carrying out punitive raids gave Zionists experience, but it was
not enough; systematic planning was called for. In 1940, a young bespectacled Hebrew
University historian named Ben-Zion Luria, then employed by the educational department
of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist governing body in Palestine, made an important
suggestion. He pointed out how useful it would be to have a detailed registry of all Arab
villages and proposed that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) conduct such an inventory. “This
would greatly help the redemption of the land,” he wrote to the JNF.11 He could not have
chosen a better address: the way his initiative involved the JNF in the prospective ethnic
cleansing was to generate added impetus and zeal to the expulsion plans that followed.
Founded in 1901 at the fifth Zionist Congress, the JNF was the Zionists’ principal tool for the
colonization of Palestine. This was the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian
land on which it then settled Jewish immigrants and that spearheaded the Zionization of
Palestine throughout the Mandatory years. From the outset, it was designed to become the
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“custodian” on behalf of the Jewish people of the land acquired by the Zionists in Palestine.
The JNF maintained this role after Israel’s creation, with other missions being added to this
primordial task over time.12
Despite the JNF’s best efforts, its success in land acquisition fell far short of its goals.
Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British
policies had become restrictive. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948 the
Zionist movement had been able to purchase no more than 5.8 percent of the land in
Palestine.13 This is why Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department and the
quintessential Zionist colonialist, waxed lyrical when he heard about Luria’s village files,
immediately suggesting that they be turned into a “national project.”14
All involved became fervent supporters of the idea. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a historian and
prominent member of the Zionist leadership (later to become Israel’s second president),
wrote to Moshe Shertock (Sharett), the head of the political department of the Jewish
Agency (and later Israel’s prime minister), that apart from topographically recording the
layout of the villages, the project should also include exposing the “Hebraic origins” of each
village. Furthermore, it was important for the Haganah to know which of the villages were
relatively new, as some of them had been built “only” during the Egyptian occupation of
Palestine in the 1830s.15
But the main endeavor was mapping the villages, and to that end a Hebrew University
topographer working in the Mandatory government’s cartography department was
recruited to the enterprise. He suggested preparing focal aerial maps and proudly showed
Ben-Gurion two such maps for the villages of Sindyana and Sabarin. (These maps, now in the
Israeli State Archives, are all that remains of these villages after 1948.) The best professional
photographers in the country were also invited to join the initiative. Yitzhak Shefer, from Tel
Aviv, and Margot Sadeh, the wife of Yitzhak Sadeh, the chief of the Palmah (the commando
units of the Haganah), were recruited as well. The film laboratory operated in Margot’s
house with an irrigation company serving as a front: the lab had to be hidden from the
British authorities who could have regarded it as an illegal intelligence effort directed
against them. Though the British were aware of the project, they never succeeded in
locating the secret hideout. In 1947, this whole cartographic department was moved to the
Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv.16
The end result of the combined topographic and Orientalist efforts was a large body of
detailed files gradually built up for each of Palestine’s villages. By the late 1940s, the
“archive” was almost complete. Precise details were recorded about the topographic
location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of
income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its mukhtars, its
relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (16–50), and much more. An
important category was an index of “hostility” (toward the Zionist project, that is) as
determined by the level of the village’s participation in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. The
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material included lists of everyone involved in the revolt and the families of those who had
lost someone in the fight against the British. Particular attention was given to people
alleged to have killed Jews. That this was no mere academic exercise in geography was
immediately obvious to the regular members of the Haganah who were entrusted with
collecting the data on “reconnaissance” missions into the villages. One of those who joined
a data collection operation in 1940 was Moshe Pasternak, who recalled many years later:
We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how
best to attack it. In the military schools, I had been taught how to attack a modern European
city, not a primitive village in the Near East. We could not compare it [an Arab village] to a
Polish, or an Austrian one. The Arab village, unlike the European ones, was built
topographically on hills. That meant we had to find out how best to approach the village
from above or enter it from below. We had to train our “Arabists” [the Orientalists who
operated a network of collaborators] how best to work with informants.17
Indeed, the difficulties of “working with informants” and creating a collaborationist system
with the “primitive” people “who like to drink coffee and eat rice with their hands” were
noted in many of the village files. Nonetheless, by 1943, Pasternak remembered, there was a
growing sense that finally a proper network of informants was in place. That same year, the
village files were rearranged to become even more systematic. This was mainly the work of
one man, Ezra Danin,18 who was to play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In many ways, it was the recruitment of Ezra Danin, who had been taken out of his
successful citrus grove business for the purpose, that injected the intelligence work and the
organization of the village files with a new level of efficiency. Files in the post-1943 era
included for each village detailed descriptions of the husbandry, cultivation, the number of
trees in plantations, the quality of each fruit grove (even of individual trees!), the average
land holding per family, the number of cars, the names of shop owners, members of
workshops, and the names of the artisans and their skills.19 Later, meticulous details were
added about each clan and its political affiliation, the social stratification between notables
and common peasants, and the names of the civil servants in the Mandatory government.
The antlike labor of the data collection created its own momentum, and around 1945
additional details began to appear such as descriptions of village mosques, the names of
their imams (together with such characterizations as “he is an ordinary man”), and even
precise accounts of the interiors of the homes of dignitaries. Not surprisingly, as the end of
the Mandate approached, the information became more explicitly military orientated: the
number of guards in each village (most had none) and the quantity and quality of arms at
the villagers’ disposal (generally antiquated or even nonexistent).20
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Danin recruited a German Jew named Yaacov Shimoni, later to become one of Israel’s
leading Orientalists, and put him in charge of “special projects” in the villages, in particular
supervising the work of the informants.21 (One of these informants, nicknamed the
“treasurer” (ha-gizbar) by Danin and Shimoni, proved a fountain of information for the data
collectors and supervised the collaborators’ network on their behalf until 1945, when he was
exposed and killed by Palestinian militants.22) Other colleagues working with Danin and
Shimoni were Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski, who also took an active part in
preparing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Lishanski had already been busy in the 1940s
orchestrating campaigns to forcibly evict tenants living on lands purchased by the JNF from
present or absentee landlords.
Not far from the village of Furiedis and the “veteran” Jewish settlement, Zikhron Yaacov,
where today a road connects the coastal highway with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) through
Wadi Milk, lies a youth village called Shefeya. It was here that in 1944 special units employed
by the village files project received their training, and it was from here that they went out on
their reconnaissance missions. Shefeya looked very much like a spy village in the cold war:
Jews walking around speaking Arabic and trying to emulate what they believed were the
customs and behavior of rural Palestinians.23 Many years later, in 2002, one of the first
recruits to this special training base recalled his first reconnaissance mission to the nearby
village of Umm al-Zaynat in 1944. The aim had been to survey the village and bring back
details of where the mukhtar lived, where the mosque was located, where the rich villagers
lived, who had been active in the 1936–39 revolt, and so on. These were not dangerous
missions, as the infiltrators knew they could exploit the traditional Arab hospitality code and
were even guests at the home of the mukhtar himself. As they failed to collect in one day all
the data they were seeking, they asked to be invited back. For their second visit they had
been instructed to make sure to get a good idea of the fertility of the land, whose quality
seemed to have highly impressed them: in 1948, Umm al-Zaynat was destroyed and all its
inhabitants expelled without any provocation on their part whatsoever.24
The final update of the village files took place in 1947. It focused on creating lists of
“wanted” persons in each village. In 1948, Jewish troops used these lists for the search-and
arrest operations they carried out as soon as they had occupied a village. That is, the men in
the village would be lined up and those whose names appeared on the lists would be
identified, often by the same person who had informed on them in the first place, but now
wearing a cloth sack over his head with two holes cut out for his eyes so as not to be
recognized. The men who were picked out were often shot on the spot. Among the criteria
for inclusion in these lists, besides having participated in actions against the British and the
Zionists, were involvement in the Palestinian national movement (which could apply to
entire villages) and having close ties to the leader of the movement, the Mufti Haj Amin al
Husayni, or being affiliated with his political party.25 Given the Mufti’s dominance of
Palestinian politics since the establishment of the Mandate in 1923, and the prominent
positions held by members of his party in the Arab Higher Committee that became the
embryo government of the Palestinians, this offense too was very common. Other reasons
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for being included in the list were such allegations as “known to have traveled to Lebanon”
or “arrested by the British authorities for being a member of a national committee in the
village.”26 An examination of the 1947 files shows that villages with about 1,500 inhabitants
usually had 20–30 such suspects (for instance, around the southern Carmel mountains,
south of Haifa, Umm al-Zaynat had 30 such suspects and the nearby village of Damun had
25).27
Yigael Yadin recalled that it was this minute and detailed knowledge of each and every
Palestinian village that enabled the Zionist military command in November 1947 to
conclude with confidence “that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organize them properly.”
The only serious problem was the British: “If not for the British, we could have quelled the
Arab riot [the opposition to the UN Partition Resolution in 1947] in one month.”28
GEARING UP FOR WAR
As World War II drew to a close, the Zionist movement had obtained a much clearer general
sense of how best to go about getting its state off the ground. By that time, it was clear that
the Palestinians did not constitute a real obstacle to Zionist plans. True, they still formed the
overwhelming majority in the land, and as such they were a demographic problem, but they
were no longer feared as a military threat. A crucial factor was that the British had already
completely destroyed the Palestinian leadership and defense capabilities in 1939 when they
suppressed the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, allowing the Zionist leadership ample time to set out
their next moves. The Zionist leadership was also aware of the hesitant position that the
Arab states as a whole were taking on the Palestine question. Thus, once the danger of Nazi
invasion into Palestine had been removed, the Zionist leaders were keenly aware that the
sole obstacle that stood in the way of their seizing the country was the British presence.
As long as Britain had been holding the fort against Nazi Germany, it was impossible, of
course, to pressure them. But with the end of the war, and especially with the postwar Labor
government looking for a democratic solution in Palestine (which would have spelled doom
for the Zionist project given the 75-percent Arab majority), it was clear that Britain had to
go. Some 100,000 British troops remained in Palestine after the war and, in a country with a
population under two million, this definitely served as a deterrent, even after Britain cut
back its forces somewhat following the Jewish terrorist attack on it headquarters in the King
David Hotel. It was these considerations that prompted Ben-Gurion to conclude that it was
better to settle for less than the 100 percent demanded under the 1942 Biltmore program
and that a slightly smaller state would be enough to allow the Zionist movement to fulfill its
dreams and ambitions.29
This was the issue that was debated by the movement in the final days of August 1946,
when Ben-Gurion assembled the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Royal Monsue
hotel in Paris. Holding back the more extremist members, Ben-Gurion told the gathering
that 80 to 90 percent of Mandatory Palestine was plenty for creating a viable state, provided
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they were able to ensure Jewish predominance. “We will demand a large chunk of Palestine”
he told those present. A few months later the Jewish Agency translated Ben-Gurion’s “large
chunk of Palestine” into a map which it distributed to the parties relevant to deciding the
future of Palestine. Interestingly, the Jewish Agency map, which was larger than the map
proposed by the UN in November 1947, turned out to be, almost to the last dot, the map
that emerged from the fighting in 1948–49: pre-1967 Israel, that is, Palestine without the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip.30
The major topic on the Zionist agenda in 1946, the struggle against the British, resolved
itself with Britain’s decision in February 1947 to quit Palestine and to transfer the Palestine
question to the UN. In fact, the British had little choice: after the Holocaust they would never
be able to deal with the looming Jewish rebellion as they had with the Arab one in the
1930s. Moreover, as the Labor party had made up its mind to leave India, Palestine lost
much of its attraction. Fuel shortages during a particularly cold winter in 1947 drove the
message home to London that the empire was soon to be a second-rate power, its global
influence dwarfed by the two new superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union)
and its postwar economy crippled. Rather than hold onto remote places such as Palestine,
the Labor party saw as its priority the building of a welfare state at home. In the end, Britain
pulled out in a hurry, and with no regrets.31
By the end of 1946, even before Britain’s decision, Ben-Gurion had already realized that the
British were on their way out and, with his aides, began working on a general strategy that
could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were
gone. This strategy became Plan C, or Gimel in Hebrew. Plan C was a revised version of two
earlier plans. Plan A was also named the “Elimelech Plan,” after Elimelech Avnir, the Haganah
commander in Tel Aviv who in 1937, at Ben-Gurion’s request, had set out possible
guidelines for the takeover of Palestine in the event of a British withdrawal. Plan B had been
devised in 1946. Shortly thereafter, the two plans were fused to form Plan C.
Like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the Jewish community’s military forces for the
offensive campaigns they would be waging against rural and urban Palestine after the
departure of the British. The purpose of such actions would be to “deter” the Palestinian
population from attacking Jewish settlements and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses,
roads, and traffic. Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:
Striking at the political leadership.
Striking at inciters and their financial supporters.
Striking at Arabs who acted against Jews.
Striking at senior Arab officers and officials [in the Mandatory system].
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Hitting Palestinian transportation.
Damaging the sources of livelihood and vital economic targets (water wells, mills, etc.).
Attacking villages, neighborhoods, likely to assist in future attacks.
Attacking clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.
Plan C added that the data necessary for the successful performance of these actions could
be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, “potential human targets,” the precise
layout of villages, and so on.32
The plan lacked operational specifics, however, and within a few months, a new plan was
drawn up, Plan D (Dalet). This was the plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the
territory the Zionist leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Unlike Plan C,
it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the future Jewish
state (the 78 percent provided for in the 1946 Jewish Agency map) 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 centers 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.33
No village within the planned area of operations was exempted from these orders, either
because of its location or because it was expected to put up some resistance. This was the
master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine. Similar instructions were
given, in much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centers.
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 Haganah were turned into twelve so as to facilitate implementing the plan. Each
brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighborhoods in his zone that had to
be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates. Some
commanders were overly zealous in executing their orders, adding other locations as the
momentum of their operation carried them forward. Some of the orders, on the other hand,
proved too ambitious and could not be implemented within the expected timetable. This
meant that several villages on the coast that had been scheduled to be occupied in May
were destroyed only in July. And the villages in the Wadi Ara area—a valley connecting the
coast near Hadera with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) and Afula (today’s Route 65)—somehow
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succeeded in surviving all the Jewish attacks until the end of the war. But they were the
exception. For the most part, the destruction of the villages and urban neighborhoods, and
the removal of their inhabitants, took place as planned. And by the time the direct order had
been issued in March, thirty villages were already obliterated.
A few days after Plan D was typed out, it was distributed among the commanders of the
dozen brigades that now comprised the Haganah. With the list each commander received
came a detailed description of the villages in his field 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 made by historians such as
Benny Morris, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague
guidelines, but as clear-cut operative orders for action.34
Unlike the general draft that was sent to the political leaders, the instructions and lists of
villages received by the military commanders did not place any restrictions on how the
action of destruction or expulsion was to be carried out. There were no provisions as to how
villages could avoid their fate, for example through unconditional surrender, as promised in
the general document. There was another difference between the draft handed to the
politicians and the one given to the military commanders: the official draft stated that the
plan would not be activated until after the Mandate ended, whereas the officers on the
ground were ordered to start executing it within a few days of its adoption. This dichotomy
is typical of the relationship that exists in Israel between the army and politicians until today
—the army quite often misinforms the politicians of their real intentions, as Moshe Dayan
did in 1956, Ariel Sharon did in 1982, and Shaul Mofaz did 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, troops already knew exactly what was expected of them. The venerable and
courageous Israeli fighter for civil rights, Shulamit Aloni, who was an officer at the time,
recalls 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
operation ahead, often planned for the day after the indoctrination had taken place.35
THE PARADIGM OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
In my forthcoming book, I want to explore the mechanism of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as
well as the cognitive system that has allowed the world to forget and the perpetrators to
deny the crime committed by the Zionist movement against the Palestinian people.
In other words, I want to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the
paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about,
- I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is one
reason why the denial of the catastrophe has gone on for so long. It is not that the Zionist
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movement, in creating its nation-state, waged a war that “tragically but inevitably” led to
the expulsion of “parts of the indigenous population.” Rather, it is the other way round: the
objective was the ethnic cleansing of the country the movement coveted for its new state,
and the war was the consequence, the means to carry it out. On 15 May 1948, the day after
the official end of the Mandate and the day the State of Israel was proclaimed, the
neighboring Arab states sent a small army—small in comparison to their overall military
capability—to try to stop the ethnic cleansing operations that had already been in full swing
for over a month. The war with the regular Arab armies did nothing to prevent the ongoing
ethnic cleansing, which continued to its successful completion in the autumn of 1948.
To many, the idea of adopting the paradigm of ethnic cleansing as the a priori basis for the
narrative of 1948 may appear no more than an indictment. And in many ways, it is indeed
my own J’Accuse against the politicians who devised the ethnic cleansing and the generals
who carried it out. These men are not obscure. They are the heroes of the Jewish war of
independence, and their names will be quite familiar to most readers. The list begins with
the indisputable leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, in whose private home
all the chapters in the ethnic cleansing scheme were discussed and finalized. He was aided
by a small group of people I refer to as the “Consultancy,” an ad-hoc cabal assembled solely
for the purpose of planning the dispossession of the Palestinians.36 In one of the rare
documents that records the meeting of this body, it is referred to as the Consultant
Committee—Haveadah Hamyeazet; in another document the eleven names of the
committee appear.37 Though these names were all erased by the censor, it has been
possible to reconstruct them.
This caucus prepared the plans for the ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution until
the job of uprooting half of Palestine’s native population had been completed. It included
first and foremost the top-ranking officers of the future state’s army, such as the legendary
Yigael Yadin and Moshe Dayan. They were joined by figures little known outside Israel but
well grounded in the local ethos, such as Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Sadeh, followed by regional
commanders, such as Moshe Kalman, who cleansed the Safad area, and Moshe Carmel, who
uprooted most of the Galilee. Yitzhak Rabin operated both in al-Lyyd and Ramleh, as well as
in the Greater Jerusalem area. Shimon Avidan cleansed the south; many years later Rehavam
Ze’evi, who fought with him, said admiringly that he “cleansed his front from tens of villages
and towns.”38 Also on the southern front was Yitzhak Pundak, who told Ha’Aretz in 2004,
“There were two hundred villages [in the front] and they are gone. We had to destroy them,
otherwise we would have had Arabs here [namely in the southern part of Palestine] as we
have in Galilee. We would have had another million Palestinians.”39
These military men commingled with what nowadays we would call the “Orientalists”:
experts on the Arab world at large, and the Palestinians in particular, either because they
themselves came from Arab lands or because they were scholars in the field of Middle
Eastern studies. Some of these were intelligence officers on the ground during this crucial
period. Far from being mere collectors of data on the “enemy,” intelligence officers not only
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played a major role in preparing for the cleansing, but some also personally took part in
some of the worst atrocities that accompanied the systematic dispossession of the
Palestinians. It was they who were given the final authority to decide which villages would
be ground to dust and which villagers would be executed.40 In the memories of Palestinian
survivors, they were the ones who, after a village or neighborhood had been occupied,
decided the fate of its peasants or town dwellers, which could mean imprisonment or
freedom or spell the difference between life and death. Their operations in 1948 were
supervised by Issar Harel, who later became the first head of Mossad and the Shin Bet,
Israel’s secret services.
I mention their names, but my purpose in doing so is not that I want to see them
posthumously brought to trial. Rather, my aim here and in my book is to humanize the
victimizers as well as the victims: I want to prevent the crimes Israel committed from being
attributed to such elusive factors as “the circumstances,” “the army,” or, as Benny Morris has
it, “la guerre comme la guerre,” and similar vague references that let sovereign states off the
hook and give individuals a clear conscience. I accuse, but I am also part of the society that
stands condemned. I feel both responsible for, and part of, the story. But like others in my
own society, I am also convinced that a painful journey into the past is the only way forward
if we want to create a better future for us all, Palestinians and Israelis alike.
NOTES - The composition of the group that met is the product of a mosaic reconstruction of
several documents, as will be demonstrated in my book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). The document summarizing the meeting is found in
the Israel Defense Force Archives [IDFA], GHQ/Operations branch, 10 March 1948, File no.
922/75/595, and in the Haganah Archives [HA], File no. 73/94. The description of the
meeting is repeated by Israel Galili in the Mapai center meeting, 4 April 1948, found in the
HA, File no. 80/50/18. Chapter 4 of my book also documents the messages that went out on
10 March as well as the eleven meetings prior to finalizing of the plan, of which full minutes
were recorded only for the January meeting. - The historian Meir Pail claims, in From Haganah to the IDF [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zemora
Bitan Modan, n.d.), p. 307, that the orders were sent a week later. For the dispatch of the
orders, see also Gershon Rivlin and Elhanan Oren, The War of Independence: Ben-Gurion’s
Diary, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1982), p. 147. The orders dispatched to the
Haganah brigades to move to State D—Mazav Dalet—and from the brigades to the
battalions can be found in HA, File no. 73/94, 16 April 1948. - On Plan Dalet, which was approved in its broad lines several weeks before that meeting,
see Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Emergence of Israeli Militarism, 1936–1956 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1995), p.
253: “Plan Dalet aimed at cleansing of villages, expulsion of Arabs from mixed towns.”
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Institute for Palestine Studies | Journals - State Department Special Report, “Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo,” 10 May
- “The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign
Relations,” U.S. Senate, August 1992, S.PRT. 102–103.
- “The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign
- United Nations, “Report Following Security Council Resolution 819,” 16 April 1993.
- Drazen Petrovic, “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of
International Law 5, no. 3 (1994), pp. 342–60. - On Peel, see Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New
York: Beford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), pp. 135–37. - Smith, Palestine, pp. 167–68.
- Ben-Gurion Archives [BGA], Ben-Gurion Diary, 12 July 1937.
- “The Inelegance Service and the Village Files, 1940–1948” (prepared by Shimri Salomon),
Bulletin of the Haganah Archives, issues 9–10 (2005). - For a critical survey of the JNF, see Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the
Struggle Within (London: Zed Books, 2004). - Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985). - Teveth, Ben-Gurion.
- HA, File no. 66.8
- Testimony of Yoeli Optikman, HA, Village Files, File 24/9, 16 January 2003.
- HA, File no. 1/080/451, 1 December 1939
- HA, File no. 194/7, pp. 1–3, given on 19 December 2002.
- John Bierman and Colin Smith, Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion
(New York: Random House, 1999). - HA, Files no. S25/4131, no. 105/224, and no. 105/227, and many others in this series, each
dealing with a different village.
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Institute for Palestine Studies | Journals - Hillel Cohen, The Shadow Army: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism [in
Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hozata Ivrit, 2004). - Interview with Palti Sela, HA, File no. 205.9, 10 January 1988.
- Interview, HA, File no. 194.7, pp. 1–3, 19 December 2002.
- HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255 files from January 1947.
- IDFA, File no. 114/49/5943, orders from 13 April 1948.
- IDFA, File no. 105.178.
- HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255, from January 1947.
- Quoted in Harry Sacher, Israel: The Establishment of a State (London: Wiedenfels and
Nicloson, 1952), p. 217. - On British policy, see Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951
(London: St. Antony’s/Macmillan Press, 1984). - Moshe Sluzki interview with Moshe Sneh in Gershon Rivlin, ed., Olive Leaves and Sword:
Documents and Studies of the Haganah [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications, 1990), pp. 9- See Pappé, Britain.
- Yehuda Sluzki, The Haganah Book, vol. 3, part 3 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications,
1964), p. 1942. - The English translation is in Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of
Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–20. - See discussion of State D (Mazav Dalet)—that is, the transition from Plan D to its actual
implementation—in chapter 5 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing. - The plan distributed to the soldiers and the first direct commands are in IDFA, File no.
1950/2315 File 47, 11 May 1948. - The most important meetings are described in chapter 3 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing.
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Institute for Palestine Studies | Journals - “From Ben-Gurion to Galili and the Members of the Committee,” BGA, Correspondence
Section, 1.01.1948–07.01.48, documents 79–81. The document also provides a list of forty
Palestinians leaders that are target for assassination by the Haganah forces. - Yedi’ot Aharonot, 2 February 1992.
- Ha’Aretz, 21 May 2004.
- For details, see Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing. The authority to destroy can be found in the
orders sent on 10 March to the troops and specific orders authorizing executions are in
IDFA, File no. 5943/49 doc. 114, 13 April 1948.
Source : Institute for Palestine Studies
URL : http://www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/abstract.php?
id=7175
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