The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people. Large scale intimidation, laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers, setting fire to homes, properties and goods, expulsion, demolition, and finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighborhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D, Dalet in Hebrew. This was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. The fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously. The Palestinians had to go. In the words of one of the first historians to note the significance of that plan, Simcha Flapan, the military campaign against the Arabs, including the conquest and destruction of the rural areas, was set forth in the Haganah's Plan Dalet. The aim of the plan was in fact, the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine. As the first chapters of this book will attempt to show, this plan was both the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to have an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine and a response to developments on the ground once the British cabinet had decided to end the mandate. Clashes with local Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February, 1947 and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March, 1948. Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed and 11 urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on the 10th of March, 1948 and above all, its systematic implementation in the following months was a clear cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity. After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media no longer allows human made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory, the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine has ever since been systematically denied and is still today not recognized as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity and the people who perpetrated today are considered criminals to be brought before special tribunals. It may be difficult to decide how one ought to refer to or deal with in the legal sphere, those who initiated and perpetrated ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948, but it is possible to reconstruct their crimes and to arrive at both an historiographical account that will prove more accurate than the ones achieved so far and a moral position of greater integrity. We know the names of the people who sat in that room on the top floor of the red house beneath Marxist style posters that carried such slogans as brothers in arms and the fist of steel and showed new Jews, muscular, healthy and tanned, aiming their rifles from behind protective barriers in the brave fight against hostile Arabs.