Israel’s willfully hidden history—Plan Dalet A tale for Yom Kippur

As I finished this piece, I suddenly realized how fitting it was to write it on the eve of Yom Kippur, the most solemn Jewish holiday. It’s the Day of Atonement, when Jews are told to forgive the sins of others and seek forgiveness for their own sins to achieve reconciliation with God.

 But how can you seek forgiveness if you don’t know—and don’t want to know—some of the most egregious sins you should be repentant for?

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Chen Goldstein-Amog, 48, was one of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Her account of what happened to her family that day is horrific—her eldest daughter and husband were shot dead before her eyes. Then, she and her three terrified younger children were kidnapped to Gaza.

They were among the few lucky hostages to be freed after seven terrifying weeks of captivity. Interviewed back in Israel, she recounted how, at one point in conversation with her captors, the young Palestinians attempted to justify Hamas’ barbaric acts by comparing them to what the Jews did to the Palestinians in 1947 and 48.  At the time, Chen said, she had no idea what her captors were talking about. She had never really learned about what happened back then, she said.

The great majority of Israelis today probably have little knowledge of the bloody process –known by the Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe--that led to the founding of the Zionist State.  In fact, as I wrote in an earlier substack, the founding of Israel was not the heroic process of a courageous Jewish David defeating a mighty Arab Goliath

From their beginning, Zionists understood they faced a serious problem in establishing a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine: there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs already living there.

On October 15, 1937, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first Prime Minister, wrote to his 16-year-old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force—not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places—then we have force at our disposal.”

By 1947, on the eve of Partition, the Zionists’ problem was still stark. The 630,000 Jews living in Palestine represented only one-third of the population, compared to 1,300,000 Arabs.

The only solution, mmost of the Zionist leaders agreed, was a concerted policy of ethnic cleansing.

Ilan Pappé, an Israeli professor of history, researched that process in all its granular horror. He was one of the so-called “new historians” given access to formerly secret Israeli government and military files in the 1980s. He supplemented those documents by interviewing hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians who participated in the process—as observers, perpetrators, or victims. His book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006, One World Publications), makes painful reading for a Jew like myself brought up with the story that the traitorous Palestinians fled Palestine voluntarily, planning to return with conquering Arab armies. Thus, they deserved what they got—permanent exile.

As Pappé demonstrated, that version of history was a lie.

The strategy for the ethnic cleansing was directed by a small, secretive group known as “The Consultancy.” Its leader was Ben Gurion. Joining him were a few senior military commanders, such as Yigael Yadin and Moshe Dayan, and some “Orientalist” experts on the Arab world in general and Palestinians in particular. Regional commanders like Yitzhak Rabin assisted them. They met, wrote Pappé, for “the purpose of plotting and designing the dispossession of the Palestinians.”

The Consultancy established a special unit to prepare a list of all the hundreds of Arab villages. Then, using spies and informers, they made an exhaustive list of “who were the leaders in those villages, the ones most militant, the mosques, their imams, what the living rooms of the village dignitaries looked like,  the number of guards (most villages had none) quantity and quality of arms, (generally antiquated or even non-existent) the wealthiest, the infrastructure, the best way to attack it.”

The Jewish troops used those lists for the search and arrest operations they carried out as soon as they had occupied a village. “The men in the village would be lined up, and those appearing on the lists would then be identified, often by the same person who had informed on them in the first place but who now would be wearing a cloth sack over his head….The men who were picked up were often shot on the spot. Criteria for including in those lists were involvement in the Palestinian national movement, having close ties to the leader of the movement,….having participated in actions against the British and the Zionists….The first category, “involved in the Palestinian national movement, was very liberally defined and could include whole villages.”  

Once they had separated all men of ‘military age,’ namely between ten and fifty, from the rest of the villagers, the rest were then ‘just’expelled or imprisoned for long periods in `POW camps.`’

According to Pappé, the “process commenced in the fall of 1947, several months before the official declaration of the State in May, 14,1948. It began with attacks by Jewish forces on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods in the cities.  At first, those attacks were in retaliation for violent actions against Jewish targets by Palestinians infuriated by the UN resolutions creating the new State.

Afer the first few Jewish raids in reprisal, the policies to be followed by the Jewish fighters became more harsh. In December, 1947 for instance, The Consultancy decided that separating Palestinian men from women during the raids was “an unnecessary complication for future operations.” In January, 1948 Ben Gurion stressed that “There is no need “to distinguish anymore between the ‘innocent’ and the guilty.`’ The time had come for inflicting collateral damage….Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction, and expulsion.`’

“More radical coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. One of the first major raids came around midnight on February 14 in the village of Sa’sa.  Although the troops encountered no resistance, they “systematically blew up one house after another while families were sleeping inside....A third of the village was blasted into the air. According to the official after-action report, `’we left behind 35 demolished houses and 60-80 dead bodies’(quite a few of them were children).”

The Consultancy was pleasantly surprised by the success of those first raids —how effectively they terrified large numbers of Palestinians, convincing entire villages to pack up and flee.

The Zionist leadership openly declared it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force.

But there was a problem justifying the brutal raids. Many Palestinians seemed resigned to the new Jewish state. They had become relatively subdued. It was increasingly difficult to portray the Jewish attacks as retaliation for hostile Palestinian and Arab actions.

Compared with the Jewish military forces, the local Palestinian fighters were disorganized, poorly armed, and poorly led.  At no time did they—or the surrounding Arab states when they finally and ineffectively attacked—constitute a mortal menace to the fledgling Jewish State.

Thus, it wasn’t to defend the state but to make sure it would be controlled by a Jewish majority that on March 10^th, 1948, The Consultancy issued what was known as Plan Dalet. The instructions in effect codified a blueprint for ethnic cleansing that had already begun. According to the plan:

“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 debris) and especially of those population centers were are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting, combing and control operations according the following guidelines; encircling of the villages, conducting a search inside them. `in the case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the populations expelled outside the borders of the state.’

The villages to be expelled and destroyed in their entirety were either located in strategic spots or were expected to put up some resistance to the new state. The fact is, says Pappé, that since few if any, villages or city neighborhoods would allow themselves to be taken over peacefully, the order effectively targeted all villages and Palestinian neighborhoods.  

“Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to to be occupied, destroyed and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates.” To encourage the soldiers to action, “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.”

The most infamous victim of Plan Dalet was Deir Yassin, a pastoral village on a hill west of Jerusalem. It was deemed a strategically important area and targeted to be cleansed. There was a problem, though. The village leaders had reached a non-aggression pact with the main Jewish military force, the Haganah. So “as to absolve themselves from any official accountability,” the Haganah turned over the assignment to the more brutal ranks of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

On 9 April 1948, those forces attacked. “As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.  

“Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes: ‘They took us out one after the other; shot an old man, and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him–carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her–they shot her too.’

“ Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.

“Recent research has brought down the accepted number of people massacred at Deir Yassin from 170 to ninety-three. Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting and hence were not included in the official list of victims. However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them ‘in battle’ was slight.”

According to Pappé, “thirty babies were also among the slaughtered.”

“….At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin…a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight.”

Though particularly horrific, Deir Yassin was not the regrettable exception that Israel’s supporters have always claimed. “Altogether 531 villages and eleven urban neighborhoods and towns were destroyed and their inhabitants expelled.”

Plan Dalet was a stunning success: Some 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians ---85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured--were expelled or fled from their homes. Most left for the West Bank or Gaza Strip, while the remainder largely settled in Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon.

At the same time, the new State of Israel opened its doors to a huge wave of new migrants – about half of them survivors of Nazi regimes and the other half from parts of the Middle East or North Africa. When the dust began to settle in 1950, there were 1.2 million Jews and 910,000 Muslims living in the territory to the West of the River Jordan.

When Israel seized the West Bank and its population in 1967, they were once again faced with the problem of too many Palestinians to Jews.

But the lessons of Plan Dalet were well learned.

 As the opportunity arose during future wars and crises, Israel’s leaders resorted repeatedly to the tried and true methods of 1947 and 1948.

The process continues to this day.

The Israeli government, however, has never acknowledged the uncomfortable truths uncovered by the ‘New Historians” like Ilan Pappé. They are certainly not taught in the schools.

This is probably why the former hostage, Chen Goldstein-Amog, was so

perplexed by her captors’ claims.