Plan Dalet, the Palestine Nakba and Theatre: Decoding the Diacritics of the 1948 Nakba in Hannah Khalil’s Plan D

Abstract

This article scrutinises the disastrous impacts of Israeli occupation on Palestinians in the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil’s Plan D (2010) by decoding the diacritics of the Palestine Nakba of 1948. Plan Dalet was a Zionist master plan for the military occupation of Palestine and the plan became central to the Zionist expulsion of the Palestinians and Palestine Nakba in 1948. Khalil’s play ( Plan D) portrays a rustic family undergoing a crisis against a background of enforced mass deportation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The playwright gives a voice to the victimised Palestinians as the play represents an indictment of ecological imperialism which weighs upon Palestinians who are crammed into unlivable ghettos. Khalil’s attachment to her native environment shapes the portrayal of her characters and their environment which is exposed to demographical changes and distortion by reason of the Nakba. Psychologically, the play delves deeply into the tragedy of Palestinians who are forcibly deported from their farm houses to live in other ecological units such as the woods and outskirt camps and how they adapt to the new-found ecology as a survival mechanism aloof from the unscrupulous aggression of occupation. Put differently, it dismantles the diacritics of the plight of Palestinians and deconstructs projections of otherness in order to find an ecological outlet for them to rethink their life-threatening crisis.