Plan Gimel (Plan C)
Commentary and Translation by Prof. Ilan Pappé
The Hagana, the main paramilitary Zionist group during the mandatory times, began strategizing towards the future of Palestine after the end of the second world war. The strategies were translated into plans – from plan A to plan D.
Plans A and B were quite vague about the future. Plan C was very precise and indicated the mindset of the Zionist leadership on the eve of the Nakba. It was issued in 1946 and it was meant to prepare the Zionist community’s military forces for an assault on the rural and urban spaces of Palestine. It was meant to be implemented after the British left, but in practice it was already operational in 1947.
The main goal of plan C was to eliminate the cultural and political elite of the Palestinian society and what was left from the military elite (which was hit hard by the British during the Arab revolt of 1936). The idea what that such a spree of assassinations would deter the Palestinian community from any resistance to the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
It is now impossible to get the authentic document of the plan, but historians of the department of history within the Israeli published it in full in some of their Hebrew publications.
The plan ordered the following actions to be take:
“Hitting the political leadership by attacking their properties, captivate them or remove them or strike them bodily in any other way [namely, killing or wounding them]. This action should be executed by individual and selected MISTARVIM [Jews infiltrating Arab communities as undercover agents].
Other clauses included:
- Hitting Arab transport; essential economic installations (water, mills etc.)
- Attaching villages, neighbourhoods and farms that serve hostile Arab forces.
- Hitting clubs, coffee houses, meeting houses, conventions and conferences etc.”
In many ways, Plan Gimel that was prepared in 1946 became operational in December 1947 under an operation code-named Zarzir (Sparrow). The active Chief of Staff of the Hagana, Yigal Yadin, was influenced by a strategy book by Liddlehard, which suggested the killing of the “enemy” leadership as an important means of defeating it. With the authorization of the chief of state, general Yacov Dori, Yadin ordered Moshe Dayan to prepare such a plan of assassinations.
On 27 December 1947, the 4th Battalion of the Palmach (the commando units of the Hagana) was ordered to assassinate a list of names provided to it. The list was expanded in a meeting of Ben Gurion and his consultancy in the beginning of January. The list included military leaders such as Hasan Salameh and many political leaders of the community. “You do not need an authorization for killing the following people” was the order sent to Dani Agmon, the commander of a new assassination unit established for this purpose from among the troops of the Palmach. [This is from a document I was unable to scan, but which is in the Ben Gurion Archives in Sdeh Boker. It is a letter written by Israel Gailli, second in command of the Hagana forces to the consultancy – an ad hoc group of leaders and experts that together with Ben Gurion planned the ethnic cleaning in Palestine. The letter was written on 5 January 1948.]
There were 22 names on the list. There were known military commanders and their deputies, such as Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, Hassan Salame and Hasan Sublakq. Leaders of national committee such as Subhi al-Khadra from Safad.
Some of the names deserve our attention given the Israeli policy of assassination of Palestinian intellectuals and leaders in later years. Among them was Rafiq al-Tamimi, a leading educationalist, with a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris and who served as the principal of an important school in Beirut during the late Ottoman period. He was active in the important pan-Arabist movements and wrote a seminal work on the history of Palestine on the eve of the Frist World War. He was a member of the Arab Higher Committee and one of the founders of the Palestinian scout movement and his “crime” was his close relationship with the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni.
Another one was Emil al-Ghuri, of the Orthodox community. He had a MA from the university of Cincinnati and was a leading journalist and member of the political elite. Another was Isa Bandaq, also of the Orthodox community a leading personality in Bethlehem and at times its mayor. He was a member of the Reform party, affiliated with the Khalidi family (Palestinian politics at the time was influenced both by ideological affiliations and clannish loyalties). Other important figures were Shaykh Nimr al-Khatib of Haifa and the elder brother of the famous Salman Abu Sitta, who was leading the revolt in 1936 in the Bir Saba area.
Unlike assassination in the post 1948 era, these one were not fully implemented or were in any way successful. The only real attempt was made in Haifa. There Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib and Hasan Shublaq were targeted. They wounded Khatib and kidnapped Shublak’s son. They invited to a restaurant, abducted him. But they made a mistake Shubalk was a close friend of a Haifa Lawyer very close to the Hagana, and under orders from above the son was released.
Unauthorized recruit to the assassination operation was a British intelligence officer , by the name of John Liknclayton who murdered by his own initiative several Arab passengers and provided the Hagana with their cars and petrol but his activity was stopped from above. There is also a reference to an important figure in Bisan, who was targeted for political assassination but whose entourage managed to scare off the assassins.