Plan Dalet: “Defense” is the Best Offense:
The Formation of the Ethno-State is a history of preemptive “Self Defense.”
Pictured: The Arab resistance to Plan Dalet.
This will be a longer post because it requires a lot of historical context:
I think we are all aware of the common saying “Offense is the best defense,” or something similar. It implies that in order to protect yourself or your people “at all costs” you should preemptively strike those who would otherwise strike you. It is one of the reasons why many warring States have create geographic buffer zones of expendable populations and lands that, if invaded by a threatening rival state, do not put the more valuable population or resource rich regions at risk. It is why the US had a base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, a thousand miles away from the mainland, and why it still holds on to territories all over the Pacific as China builds up its naval arsenal. Buffer states are defensive walls of land (and people, because people ALWAYS live on this land), that arose in the context of the European ethno-state politics, which, as we shall see, has plagued the world with imaginary border lines and centralized governments whose only task is defending their people from wars they often had a hand in instigating.
The Simplified History of the origins of the Ethno-State:
From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, European politics slowly transformed from one of city states (think Florence, Venice, various German city states etc.) and theocratic monarchies (The Holy Roman Empire, Catholic France, Catholic Spain, The Papal States, Protestant Britain) to one of Ethno states in the 1700s-1900s (France for the French, Spain for the Spanish, England for the English) sort of deal. It is interesting to note that, as European history shifted as Europe shifted from largely theocratic warfare of Catholic vs. Protestant (with Jewish and Rroma people bearing most of the burden), to one of Ethnostate warfare of German vs. French vs. English (with Jewish and Rroma people once again bearing most of the burden), the main antagonist of European history switched from being the Non Christian world to being the Non White World. The Non Christian world, represented largely by the Islamic sphere of influence, first by various Caliphates and then finally by the Ottoman Empire) was the primary “other” to the European from the Middle Ages all the way up to the end of the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire crumbled under its own Imperial weight, losing vast swaths of land to England and France (including Mandate Palestine).
As the “threat” of the Islamic world on European and Christian hegemony weakened, the game shifted, ever so slowly from Christian vs. Non-christian to White vs. Nonwhite. When you look at the history of race, if you’ve taken any course in Africana studies or related fields, you learn that the pseudo concept of race, of black and white, is only about four or five hundred years old. It emerged OUT of capitalism and slavery, and not the other way around, as a way of justifying slave ownership to a Christian population that could not enslave each other, and breaking up solidarity movements between largely white indentured servants (which we might call Labor Trafficking in a modern context) in the new world and completely non white enslaved populations (Chattel slavery) of first indigenous and then African people. Racial politics was a means of affirming European settler colonialism in the context of the Atlantic triangle of trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Instead of Christian Europeans against non Christian Middle Easterners, it was white Europeans against non White Africans and Indigenous Americans.
Competition for colonies abroad between the English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, an Enlightenment movement that broke apart religious identification from state identification (for Protestant Christians mainly), and a series of European state reorganization in the 1700s and 1800s (The Greek Revolution, The Italian Unification, the German Unification, etc.) brought the ethno-state into dominance within European politics. People stopped primarily identifying as Catholic or Protestant, Lutheran, or Calvanist, or Presbyterian etc. but rather as French, English, Spanish, Italian, German.
What Happened After:
The problem that emerged next was of course…the old boundaries of theocratic monarchy Europe did not match the boundaries of ethnicity, and also, there were a lot of people who weren’t any sort of ethnicity at all. What followed were a series of massively destructive wars (Franco Prussian, World War I, World War II) largely about the subject of the ethno state. Fascist dictators such as Franco and Mussolini attempted to homogenize their diverse populations by banning dialectical speech, destroying micro-ethnicities without an ethno-state to represent them (Basque Country in particular) and by instituting national ethnic values built on “tradition.” Hitler, the biggest ethno-nationalist of them all, sought to exterminate Rroma, Jews, Black people, and anyone else who did not fit within the confines of the pseudo-race of Aryan, itself made up of Germanic and Nordic ethnicities (which is a sort of European recopying of the “white” race that rose up in the Americas in response to the presence of Black and Brown people.)
Buffer zones were integral to the ethno-state model. Think of Liebensraum (Living Space) the Nazi Ideology of conquering next door neighbors to serve as geographic walls to protect the Aryan race. Buffer zones provided a sphere of influence outside of the ethno state to ensure the continued protection of the ethnic group within it. I hesitate to compare anything to cancer, because that’s very dangerous language, but there is a form of cancer that literally builds buffer zones around it so the T cells don’t know what to attack. They have to destroy those they wish to protect (the buffer zone of co-opted yet healthy cells) in order to get at the tumor inside.
What you see, however, in Europe and elsewhere in the world now that Europe has exported its Ethno-state model, are that the buffer zones of people expendable
Marginalized ethnicities, with no where else to go, resorted to seeking independence by establishing their own ethno-states (Ireland being among them). This is important because these ethno-states were better off as ethno-states compared to being buffer zones. But just like cancer (again being very careful language) they tend to develop the same characteristics of the ethno-state they just gained independence from. Ireland, a country everyone seems to hold up as a bastion of progressivism these days, was not too long ago a theocratic ethno-state controlled by the Catholic Church in the wake of its independence from England. It had served as a buffer, primarily from the French, for hundreds of years. Given its own independence from the ethno-state, the new country itself often becomes an ethno-state. The model is exported by means of separation, and we are left with more ethno-states than which we started with.
As the UK and France were carving up the imperial corpse, they turned a multi-ethnic, religiously diverse, although theocratic monarchy (the Ottoman Empire) into a series of attempted ethno-states based around some sort of wishy washy geography that they largely just made up. What they wanted to do was avoid creating another Ottoman Empire out of their ally at the time, Saudi Arabia. At all costs, they needed to contain their own friend, so they drew out Syria for the Syrians, Lebanon for the Lebanese, Egypt for the Egyptians etc. Of course the outcome was the same as it was in Europe. These new Ethno-states had to vie with the fact that they were not in fact made up of one single ethnicity. In the case of Lebanon, the religious diversity of the region became a serious issue that culminated in a civil war.
As a side note: One of the reasons why a lot of people believe the Israel Palestine “Conflict” (I’m sure we’re all a little weary of this word so I’ll put it in quotes) is a centuries old religious conflict, is because they see it as a return to the conflict between theocratic spheres of Christianity and Islam. It’s the reason why fundamentalist Christians side with Israel even though they actively oppress Palestinian christians. They cannot see that the ethnicity of Palestinian is not itself the religion of Islam, and so they choose to side with the representative of their sphere of influence. Tension between the era of the theocratic state and the ethno state still plagues much of the world, and many ethnicities have been collapsed into religious identities (Hindu India, once home to millions of Muslims now in Pakistan). Just because one subsumed the other doesn’t mean the original disappeared entirely.
The lifespan of the Ethno-state has, however, proven very short lived. Ethnic based boundaries inevitably crumble, and the Ethno state has largely been succeeded by the massive, (and I mean massive) multi-ethnic nation states of the US, Russia, China, and Brazil. Sure, each of these nations has a primary ethnicity (“American”, Russian, Han Chinese, Brazilian), but they also contain literally dozens to hundreds of smaller ethnicities within them, and manage them for better or for worse accordingly. They are “melting pots.”
Why does any of this matter:
Well, because Zionism is an ideology born in the context of the European ethno-state, which Britain conveniently placed in the crux point of their old imperial rival the Ottoman Empire, the levant, strategically close to the Suez Canal, which they still owned. The placement of Israel was not accidental. It is very literally the crossing point between the Arabic world of Northern Africa and the Arabic world of the Middle East, and its existence has proven very effective at weakening any sort of pan Arab or pan Muslim movement to develop a larger sphere of influence.
Zionists firmly believed that the only way the Jews were to thrive in a world then dominated by ethno-states, was to form their own. Of course, Jewish people did not have one singular land, and Jewish people, contrary to modern Zionist thinking, were not one ethnicity. There was as much ethnically and genetically in common between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Mizhrahim, Ethiopian Jewish, and others, as there is between English, French, Italian, Spanish, etc. Zionism needed “one” Jewish ethnicity to form “one” Jewish Ethno-state, a fact which has plagued Israel for its entire history, a history full of stealing Mizhrahi children, sterilizing Ethiopian jewish women, and creating an unspoken caste system within its borders that places Ashkenazi jewish people at the top.
I want to stress that I don’t necessarily see this as “illogical.” The formation of an ethno-state is absolutely wrong. But given that ethno-states were being created left and right in Europe, and that my own country of ancestry (Ireland) has had its own complicated history of ethno-nationalism, I don’t see it as really all that out of the ordinary for twentieth century European political strategy.
That David Ben Gurion (The Primary Israeli founding father) should simultaneously lead a militia offensive that would displace 700,000 indigenous Palestinians, murder around 15,000 of them, force around half of them into a concentration camp the size of Chicago (Gaza), and send many of them into diasporic exile, while simultaneously calling his military action a revolution to give the Jewish people “independence” from the British, seems utterly absurd in today’s mode of thinking. But if you consider that the British formed the Jewish ethno-state as a Buffer zone to defend their own ethno-state, and the larger sphere of western influence, and that Zionists believed they were achieving independence from Britain and not from Palestine, the delusion of independence sort of makes sense.
Without giving too much benefit of the doubt, or resorting to “he was a man of his time” sort of claims which I find utterly annoying, I’ll return to the original part of this post: offense is the best defense, and we’ll take a look at a few sections from the wikipedia article about Plan Dalet, David Ben Gurion’s offensive for securing the ethnostate of Israel during the 1948 Palestine war:
Reading this section from the Plan Dalet Wikipedia page points out the various “purposes” of the plan. “To gain control of the areas of the Hebrew state and defend its borders.” This refers to the UN Partition plan to divide historic Palestine into two states, a plan which Palestinians, along with the Arab League (formed in 1945 and quickly growing in power), rejected.
It also states: “it also aims at gaining control of the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations which are located outside the borders (of the Hebrew State)…
And “the aim of this plan is not an operation of occupation outside the borders of the Hebrew state. However, concerning enemy bases lying directly close to the borders which may be used as springboards for infiltration into the territory of the state, these must be temporarily occupied…”
This is, as we’ve talked about, the buffer zone for the ethno-state to protect the ethno-state itself. Plan Dalet laid the groundwork for not just establishing the first border of Israel, but also establishing the tradition of creating the buffer zone through illegal Jewish settlement of Palestinian land planned for the Palestinian state.
Later on in the article, you will read that the plan has garnered an incredible amount of controversy about whether it was “offensive” or “defensive” with Illan Pappé, well known Israeli expat historian of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine arguing that it was “offensive” and Benny Morris, another Israeli historian, arguing it was “defensive.”
This begins a long and violent history of obfuscating ethnic cleansing as defense. Within an Israeli context, it has its origins in Plan Dalet, which reframed the Nakba, the violent conquest of Palestinian villages, as defending the Jewish homeland from potential invaders (the other Arab states of Egypt and Transjordan primarily.)
Ultimately, offensive or defensive, the argument really surrounds the question of whether or not this was an ethnic cleansing. In my mind, this is just a distraction. It really doesn’t matter if it was offensive or defensive if the people are no longer there, if the land has been “cleansed” of a certain ethnicity. It is, no matter the method, ethnically cleansed.
“Offensive defense” has its origins in a deep European history of ethno-national politics, one that has to buffer borders with expendable people who inevitably want their own ethno-state. We see this today with Catalonia and Basque Country, with Flanders in Belgium, with Southern Italy, with Cypus, with Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Sami country in Scandinavia, which are all the result of putting a European ethno-state model onto a regionally diverse area, breaking into smaller ethno-states that will inevitably discover they aren’t as ethnically homogenous as they once thought. Zionism formed in this mindset, and it became a very convenient way for the UK to establish a European buffer zone within the newly powerful and oil rich Arab world that emerged after World War II.
Ultimately, however, defense through offense meets its reversal, offense by claiming self defense. “We had to invade Gaza to rid it of Hamas,” type mentality. The defense is no longer preemptive when you are instigating the offense from the other side. You are being offensive, and when the other side uses the same mentality as you, you claim defense.
Bomb the borderlands is the culmination of “defense” is the best offense thinking. Many Israelis fundamentally believe they are defending themselves by committing genocide. “We will never be safe until they are gone.” They have to expand the borders of Israel, push out the borderlands, as their ethno-state project grows in size, not realizing that once they conquer their borderlands (Gaza and the West Bank) they will have run out of the buffer zone. They can no longer claim self defense, as there no longer exists a fictional offender. This is why a path to justice requires a single unified multi-ethnic state (although states always result in violence, a topic for another time).
A single ethnostate is fiction. With no buffer zone to torture, it will quickly discover that it has made a borderlands of a segment of its own population, who will demand justice, this time within its own walls.