The Document
Plan Dalet — Tochnit Dalet, the fourth in a series of strategic plans developed by the Haganah’s general staff under Yigael Yadin and approved on 10 March 1948 — is the operational document the Israeli new historians, beginning with Walid Khalidi’s 1961 essay and culminating in Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev in the late 1980s and 1990s, used to anchor the historiographic shift away from the founding myth that the 1948 displacement of the Palestinian Arab population was the unintended consequence of war.
The document’s significance is not that it proves any particular interpretation of intent. Its significance is that it exists, that it is in the Haganah archives, that it was signed and distributed before the events it describes occurred, and that the events that followed conformed to its specifications closely enough that the historiographic question shifts from what happened to how the standard account ever survived the document’s discovery.
What It Says
The full text was translated into English by Walid Khalidi and published in the Journal of Palestine Studies in autumn 1988, where it has been available for nearly forty years. The plan’s stated objective is the consolidation of Jewish control over the territory allocated to the Jewish state under the November 1947 UN partition resolution, plus a strategic buffer zone whose extent is left to operational discretion. The methods are specified in language that requires no decoding.
Section IV(b) — “Operations Against Enemy Population Centres” — instructs the field commanders to mount actions against Arab population centres located inside or near the Jewish defensive system, classified into two categories: settlements that can be conquered and held, in which case the residents are to be searched and the settlement either occupied or destroyed depending on its strategic value; and settlements that cannot be conquered or whose occupation would require excessive forces, in which case the operation is the destruction of the village — setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris — and the expulsion of its inhabitants. The operative phrases in the Hebrew original — tihur (cleansing) and girush (expulsion) — were translated by Khalidi without softening, and the translations have not been seriously contested by Israeli historians who read the original.
The plan’s preamble describes the operation in defensive terms: the elimination of hostile or potentially hostile Arab presence in zones of Jewish settlement during the transition from Mandate to independence. The defensive framing was the cover the document provided for the purposes the document also explicitly described. The historian’s task, when reading documents of this kind, is to attend to both layers — the cover framing and the operational specifications — and to read the relationship between them as the document itself read it.
What Was Done
The execution ran from early April 1948 through the cessation of major operations in late 1948 and into 1949. The Haganah and its successor IDF, in coordination with the Irgun and Lehi paramilitary forces under varying degrees of formal coordination, carried out the operations the plan specified, with the operational discretion the plan permitted, against the village list the plan implied. By the end of the operations the documented numbers were these: more than 530 Palestinian villages depopulated, more than 720,000 Palestinians displaced, and the demographic character of the territory of the Jewish state inside its 1949 armistice borders permanently transformed from a roughly 60-40 Arab-Jewish ratio to an overwhelmingly Jewish ratio. The figures are not the contested ones. The contested ones are the questions of intent, command responsibility, and the relationship between Plan Dalet’s specifications and the field-level decisions made by particular commanders in particular operations.
The Deir Yassin massacre on 9 April 1948, in which Irgun and Lehi forces killed approximately 110 villagers in a coordinated attack documented by the International Red Cross representative on the scene, became the most globally known of the operations because the news of it reached neighbouring villages and contributed to the panic-driven flight that the plan was structurally designed to encourage. Whether Deir Yassin was a planned massacre or an operation that exceeded its authorization is a question the documentary record permits multiple readings on. The structural point is that the news of Deir Yassin produced exactly the panic-flight effect that Plan Dalet’s psychological framing required, and the operation was used by Haganah leadership in the days following — in radio broadcasts and loudspeaker announcements at the perimeters of Arab villages — as a deliberate threat instrument designed to accelerate flight.
The operations between April and June 1948 — Operation Nachshon, Operation Harel, Operation Yiftach, Operation Ben-Ami, Operation Maccabi, Operation Yevussi, Operation Bin-Nun — produced the bulk of the displacement that occurred before the formal declaration of independence on 14 May, which means that the Nakba in its primary documented form was largely complete before the Arab armies had crossed any border in support of the Palestinian population. The standard founding narrative — in which the displacement is attributed to the Arab invasion that followed the declaration of independence and to broadcast instructions from Arab leaders for the Arab population to evacuate temporarily and return after the Jewish state was destroyed — does not survive the operational chronology that the Israeli archives themselves contain. The “broadcast instructions” claim was investigated in detail by Erskine Childers in 1961, who reviewed the BBC Monitoring Service and CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service transcripts of all Arab radio broadcasts of the period and found no instructions of the kind the founding narrative described. No subsequent investigator has located the broadcasts. They do not appear to have existed.
The Historiographic Battle
The publication of Plan Dalet’s full text and the contemporaneous opening of the Israeli state archives in the 1980s produced the first generation of Israeli historians whose work relied on the primary documentary record rather than on the founding myth. Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, published in 1988 and revised significantly in 2004, is the most extensively documented English-language treatment, with footnotes that walk the reader through the specific archival sources for each phase of the operations. Morris’s interpretation of the documents — that the displacement was the byproduct of military operations rather than the operations’ primary objective — is more conservative than the documents themselves arguably support, and Morris later shifted his political position toward an explicit endorsement of what the documents described, which produced the unusual situation of a historian whose factual reconstruction was used by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli readers depending on which paragraph of his interpretation they emphasized.
Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006, took the opposite interpretive position: that Plan Dalet was the operational expression of a long-developing Zionist consensus that the establishment of the Jewish state required the systematic removal of the Arab population from the territory the state was to control, and that the operations of 1948 were the implementation of that consensus rather than its accidental byproduct. Pappé’s argument relied on the same archival material Morris had used, plus some additional sources including the meeting minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive’s “Consultation” — the informal advisory body around Ben-Gurion that discussed transfer concepts during the Mandate period and into the 1948 operational planning. Pappé’s interpretation has been more controversial inside Israeli academia and more widely accepted in the Anglophone scholarship outside the Israeli context.
The interpretive disagreement between Morris and Pappé is not a disagreement about the underlying facts. They agree about which villages were depopulated, on what dates, by which units, with what casualty figures. They disagree about the relationship between the explicit policy documents and the events. The disagreement is recoverable in the way ordinary historiographic disagreements are recoverable, and the disagreement does not affect the structural reading the document permits, which is that the operation was planned in writing in advance and the execution conformed to the plan.
Significance
The structural significance of Plan Dalet for the account of the Israeli state as designed apparatus is that it removes one of the load-bearing supports for the founding-myth framing without requiring any speculative reconstruction. The standard founding narrative depends on the population transfer being either the unforeseeable consequence of war or the result of voluntary Arab evacuation in expectation of imminent Arab victory. Plan Dalet, as an operational document, in writing, preceding the operations, naming the targets and the methods, makes both readings of the founding narrative impossible to defend on the documentary record. What replaces them is not necessarily Pappé’s strong intentional reading, but at minimum the reading that the Haganah general staff anticipated, planned for, and operationally facilitated the displacement that occurred, which is sufficient to shift the moral and historical analysis of the founding event into the same category that the analyses of the partitions of British India, the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, or the post-1945 expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe occupy — events whose violent demographic transformations are part of the historical record and are analyzed as such, rather than mythologized as inevitable.
The operational scale of the action — over half a million people displaced in approximately six months by a paramilitary force of some 35,000 fighters — is also the reason the foreign-support component of the 1948 events is not separable from the planning record. A force of that size, executing operations on that scale, with the equipment that was used (the Czech-supplied Avia S-199 fighters, the small arms shipments through the Aliyah Bet network, the field artillery acquired from international sources), required external supply and coordination at a level that the spontaneous national-liberation framing cannot account for. The plan was an operational document of an apparatus that had been constructed over the preceding three decades for the purpose its execution served, and the construction is the part of the story that connects the document to the broader account of how the state was made.
References
- Khalidi, Walid. “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 4-33. Includes the full English translation of the plan text.
- Khalidi, Walid. “Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited.” Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 42-54.
- Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press, 2004. The expanded second edition.
- Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press, 2008.
- Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.
- Childers, Erskine. “The Other Exodus.” The Spectator, 12 May 1961. The original investigation of the alleged Arab radio broadcasts.
- Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. Pantheon, 1987.
- Segev, Tom. 1949: The First Israelis. Henry Holt, 1986.
- Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. W. W. Norton, 2000.
- Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.