Zionist Military Planning in 1948

A small group of Zionist leaders and military commanders met

regularly on a weekly basis from February nineteen

forty-seven to February nineteen forty-eight, for a whole year, uh,

planning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

They didn't decide about it in a day.

They had weekly meetings, and in each week they became more and more

convinced that this was the right way forward.

In the first week of nineteen forty-eight, hostilities picked

up. There were two bomb attacks against

Palestinian

targets.

The first, a car bomb, destroyed the old Ottoman government house

in Jaffa.

It killed twenty-six people.

The second, the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel in

Jerusalem,

killed over twenty.

On February the 15th, 1948, fighters from the Haganah

and Palmach organizations attacked the village of Qasria near

Haifa.

A young man called Yitzhak Rabin is believed to have been one of the

field commanders in the assault.

Over one thousand Palestinians were expelled from Qasria

as the village was torched to the ground.

Uh, what the, uh, Zionist forces did,

they, uh, targeted five villages

on the coast and w- and experimented with them

to see whether it works, and they expelled the inhabitants of

five villages under the eyes of the British soldiers

who were there or still there until May forty-eight.

And they found out that it was quite easy, that it, it didn't

take much. There wasn't much resistance.

Uh, the British did not interfere.

March

the 10th proved to be a fateful day.

The final meeting was on the 10th of March, 1948, when they

plan... when they drafted a plan known as Plan D

or Plan Dalet,

uh, which, uh, finalized the last details about the,

how to expel the Palestinians and dispossess them.

A

diary

entry from Ben-Gurion exposes the extent of the Zionist

agenda.

He writes, "In each attack, a decisive blow should be

struck, resulting in the destruction of homes

and the

expulsion of the population."