On This Day

Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.

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10 March

the ethnic cleansing of PalestinePLAN FOR DESTRUCTION OF PALESTINE BY FIRE AND SWORD
On this day in 1948, Israeli Plan Dalet was finalised. It called for “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously. Mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encircling the village and conducting a search — in the event of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the border of the state.”

 

خطة لتدمير فلسطين بالنار والسيف

10 مارس

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1948 ، تم الانتهاء من خطة دالت الإسرائيلية. وتدعو الخطة إلى "تدمير القرى (إشعال النار فيها وتفجيرها وزرع ألغام في الأنقاض) خاصة تلك التجمعات السكانية التي يصعب السيطرة عليها باستمرار. وتضمنت الخطة عمليات تمشيط وسيطرة وفق التوجيهات التالية: تطويق القرية وتفتيشها - في حالة المقاومة ، يجب القضاء على القوة المسلحة وطرد السكان خارج حدود الدولة ".

 

See Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine, Walid Khalidi, Journal of Palestine Studies,Vol. 18, No. 1, (Autumn, 1988),pp. 4-33

The main mission to drive out as many Palestinians as possible was formally approved by Jewish Zionist leaders on March 10, 1948. When it ended six months later, he [Ilan Pappe] says, some 800,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed, and eleven urban neighborhoods in cities emptied of their inhabitants. Pappe concludes that the plan and its systematic implementation "was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity."

"Transfer" in Zionist Thinking
From the earliest days of modern political Zionism, its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population. For many, the solution became known as "transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

As far back as 1895, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
By August 1937, "transfer" was a major subject of discussion at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. Alluding to the systematic dispossession of Palestinian peasants (fellahin) that Zionist organizations had been engaged in for years, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister in 1948, stated:

"You are no doubt aware of the [Jewish National Fund's] activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin." He concluded: "Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale."

In June 1938, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency: "I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department, which was tasked with acquiring land for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, wrote in his diary:

"There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

 

 

8-minute video on Israeli Plan Dalet: