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The Bloody Legacy of "Plan Dalet": From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide

38 6
17.08.2025

Gaza is now a vast hell on earth, where Israel and the U.S. are exterminating the Palestinian people.

Back in 1948, Israeli leaders, led by David Ben-Gurion, conceived and implemented a monstrous plan — “Plan Dalet.” Developed in March 1948 by the leadership of the Haganah (the precursor to the IDF), this plan was officially framed as a defensive strategy against anticipated Arab attacks. However, as historians like Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris have convincingly proven, its true purpose was the systematic expulsion of the Palestinian population to create a monoethnic Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was the key ideologue and executor of this plan. In his diaries and correspondence, he repeatedly emphasized the need to “cleanse” the territories of Arab presence. Under “Plan Dalet,” mass operations were carried out: the destruction of Palestinian villages (over 530 were wiped off the map), the massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura, psychological terror to provoke mass flight, and laws prohibiting refugees from returning while confiscating their property. This was a calculated ethnic cleansing, resulting in the expulsion of 750,000–900,000 Palestinians at the time.

Netanyahu, as Ben-Gurion’s devoted disciple, zealously implements his mentor’s legacy, taking the logic of extermination to monstrous new heights. If Ben-Gurion laid the foundations of ethnic cleansing through “Plan Dalet,” today’s Israeli prime minister has turned it into outright genocide. Under his leadership, Israel is not merely continuing the policy of displacement—it is systematically erasing entire families, neighborhoods, and refugee camps, justifying it as “self-defense.” Netanyahu, cynically using the rhetoric of “fighting terrorism,” has turned Gaza into a giant concentration camp where hundreds die daily, and survivors are condemned to starvation and disease. His government openly encourages settler terror in the West Bank, while military operations in Gaza are carried out with the same ruthlessness as the Haganah’s destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948.

For Netanyahu, Palestinians are not people but obstacles to a “Greater Israel,” and he fulfills Ben-Gurion’s commandments with near-religious fanaticism. In his speeches, he repeats the same........

© New Eastern Outlook