‘Northern Plan’
The ‘Northern Plan’ was also called the ‘Carmel Plan’, the ‘Massada Plan’ or the ‘Mussa Dag Plan’. The aim was to concentrate all the Jewish fighting forces and the one hundred thousand Jews living in the Carmel region into a fortified site to include the town of Haifa, Mount Carmel up to the Beit-Oren stream and the Bay of Haifa and part of the Zvulun Valley.
In June 1942 the German army was ready to enter Egypt and threatened to overpower the British force on the El Alamein line. Yochanan Ratner, one of the most senior ‘Hagana’ men, and Yitzhak Sadeh, Commander in Chief of the Palmach, had started to put together a defence plan as early as March 1942 in the event that Palestine would be occupied by the German and Axis armies. The plan was to withdraw all the army units from the Middle East sector in order to re-group in the Iran/Iraq region. The ‘Palestine Post-Occupation Scam’ (P.P.O.S.), for partisan activities under German occupation, was part of the British retreat plan. The Jewish Yishuv’s ‘Northern Plan’ was intended to provide a solution to the fate of some of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine if the danger of the German occupation came about.
The ‘Northern Plan’ was also called the ‘Carmel Plan’, the ‘Massada Plan’ or the ‘Mussa Dag Plan’. The aim was to concentrate all the Jewish fighting forces and the one hundred thousand Jews living in the Carmel region into a fortified site to include the town of Haifa, Mount Carmel up to the Beit-Oren stream and the Bay of Haifa and part of the Zvulun Valley. In the opinion of the planners the concentration of a Jewish force in an area protected by a mountainous region and dense housing and reinforced by supplies via the Kishon Port and the Zvulun Valley air field would have a similar function to the British enclave in Tobruk: it would have to withstand enemy attacks for a few months, during which the British would have time to recover and re-occupy Palestine.
The ‘Northern Plan’ was also called the ‘Carmel Plan’, the ‘Massada Plan’ or the ‘Mussa Dag Plan’. The aim was to concentrate all the Jewish fighting forces and the one hundred thousand Jews living in the Carmel region into a fortified site to include the town of Haifa, Mount Carmel up to the Beit-Oren stream and the Bay of Haifa and part of the Zvulun Valley. In the opinion of the planners the concentration of a Jewish force in an area protected by a mountainous region and dense housing and reinforced by supplies via the Kishon Port and the Zvulun Valley air field would have a similar function to the British enclave in Tobruk: it would have to withstand enemy attacks for a few months, during which the British would have time to recover and re-occupy Palestine.