Lawrence Of Judea: Orde Wingate And The Origins Of Zionist Terrorism

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INTRODUCTION

If there is one figure ingrained in Western consciousness as the quintessential foreign messiah, it is T. E. Lawrence, widely known as Lawrence of Arabia. Through embellished memoirs and the 1962 film that immortalized his sobriquet, Lawrence’s legend was vaulted far beyond his actual historical role as an ‘architect’ of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire—a distortion characteristic of the foreign messiah archetype. Nevertheless, Lawrence was indeed devoted to Arab self-determination against the British and French empires, having famously dressed in Arab thobes at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference where he unsuccessfully lobbied for a unified, independent Arab state. Far less known, yet far more consequential in sculpting Southwest Asia as it exists today, is Lawrence’s cousin, Orde Wingate.

Major-General Orde Wingate was a British military officer who insisted on the inclusion of Jewish soldiers in British counter-insurgency operations in Mandatory Palestine where he was stationed from September 1936 to 1939. Wingate established the Special Night Squads (SNS), training the upper echelons of Jewish military personnel in methods of terror that have since been familiar to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and undergrids its ethos in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Zionist terrorism as an institutional policy was not inevitable, with dominant Jewish voices agitating against any offensive or retaliatory measures late into the 1930s. Instead, in the precedential case of the SNS, Zionist terrorism was a product of Christian fundamentalism, British imperial doctrine, and the ambivalence of British leadership to the SNS’ operations.^[1]

In this article, I aim to bridge biographical accounts, imperial military history, strategic studies and historical contextualisation informed by theology. Through this interdisciplinary approach, I argue that it is possible to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the beliefs and values that shaped Wingate, and the impact these had on Zionist paramilitary organization in the 1930s and 1940s. Above all, this is an exploration of institutional continuity, a study that aims to unfold the foundational years of Zionist terrorism.

FIRE AND BRIMSTONE

Upon Wingate’s first visit to a Jewish collective settlement, David Hacohen, a prominent leader of the Jewish community, asked him what exactly he knew of Zionism. Wingate responded, ‘There is only one important book on this subject, which I know practically by heart, front to back and back to front: the Old Testament of the Bible’ (Ghivelder, 2011). Given the impact of Wingate’s religious convictions on his strategic alignments, it becomes imperative to reconstruct the lens through which he saw the world.

Wingate was born to a military family in Uttarakhand, India, though he spent most of his childhood and schooling years in England. His father, Colonel George Wingate, had joined the Plymouth Brethren, a puritanical sect based on the teachings of 19th century minister John Nelson Darby. Darby argued against Replacement Theology, the dominant doctrine at the time, according to which God’s promises to Israel featured in the Old Testament were inherited by the Church rather than the Jewish nation.

Instead, Darby taught that while salvation through Christ and eternal life were promised to the Church, the land of Israel remained the eternal prerogative of the Jewish people. Through a literal reading of the Bible, Darby advocated for the physical reunification of the Jewish nation and their ancestral homeland. The restoration of the Jewish state and the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem were prerequisites to the Rapture, when all Christians, living and dead, would rise to the clouds to meet the Lord, followed by the 1000-year reign of Jesus Christ on Earth: The Millennial Kingdom.

Darby’s teachings inserted Zionism firmly within the Christian theological framework, making salvation, the nucleus of Christian belief, impossible without the creation of a Jewish state. While the Church of England mitigated the Plymouth Brethren’s success in England, the United States’ open religious marketplace was conducive to its proliferation and the enduring success of Christian Zionism across the Atlantic.

George Wingate spent sufficient time and energy proselytizing to Muslim Pashtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier, where he was posted. He was far more successful in instilling in his children ‘the perpetual fear of damnation’, as recalled by one of his daughters (Kessler, 2023). He beat his children regularly, but particularly Orde, who was the eldest. His children remembered him as ‘the most unhappy, the most lonely creature’ who created a ‘temple of gloom’, ‘the most poisonous and repressive religious atmosphere that it is possible to conceive’ (Kessler, 2023).

For the younger Wingate, this meant that he spent much of his childhood surrounded by images of hellfire and damnation and the belief that God’s wrath pressed down upon him. Even from a young age, he reportedly experienced prophetic visions, was consumed by existentialist questions about life and death, and believed he would die violently. Fellow cadets recalled that he was ‘odd, anti-social and out of line with the rest of us’, overall having ‘a very unattractive character’ (Kessler, 2023).

Nevertheless, Wingate’s professional mobility was facilitated by his superiors, who found him competent, and his family’s vast military connections. Sir Reginald Wingate, his father’s cousin, for example, had commanded British forces in the Hijaz, Sudan and Egypt, and had a profound impact on Wingate learning Arabic at the School of Oriental Studies in London. A brilliant student, he passed the course having scored 85/100 (Rooney, 2000). Arabic was not merely a professional language for Wingate, who signed off letters to his mother with ‘Allah yibarik fiki (May Allah bless you)’ (Kessler, 2023).

IN THE IMAGE OF GIDEON

Wingate’s religious convictions pervaded his military perspective. In September 1936, he was assigned as an intelligence officer in the British Mandate of Palestine, tracking and reporting on the activities of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini. Around this period, the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine had erupted. Palestinian Arabs, finding themselves landless, socially marginalised, and increasingly poor after the uncontrolled influx of Jewish immigrants, mobilised across all sectors of society. An organised armed rebellion was led by the rural fellahin, who targeted their attacks on the crown jewel of British assets in the country, the Iraq Petroleum Company’s oil pipeline. The fellahin also attacked Jewish settlements and civilians, whom they held responsible for the systemic dispossession and deprivation of Palestinians and to deter further immigration.

Though only a staff officer, Wingate took the personal initiative of touring the sites of these attacks. For two months, he ventured through the Upper Galilee and the Jezreel Valley, scrutinising the methods of the fellahin and the inability of established British counterinsurgency practices to mitigate them. However, for Wingate, this was more than just a private mission–it was a pilgrimage. In a letter to his father, he described the holiness by which he felt seized: ‘I climbed Mounts Hermon and Tabor, I walked through valleys that were already familiar to me from reading the Bible, I had the impression of hearing behind me the footsteps of the prophets of the people of Israel; I felt enveloped by a transcendent spiritual atmosphere’ (Ghivelder, 2011).

Wingate was walking through the pages of the Old Testament, from memorising it in a cold and bitter home as a youth to now living its epics and prophecies. Even during his missions, he analysed biblical history against the terrain of its setting, explaining to his companions that the Sea of Galilee caused the Prophet Saul to mishandle his army. This devotion to mythical grandeur was not new for Wingate–he had previously journeyed through the Libyan desert in search of the lost oasis of Zerzura and to study the lost army of Cambyses, featured in the histories of Herodotus.

Most of all, Wingate was inspired by the biblical warrior-prophet Gideon, a young man chosen by God to free Israelites from the severe oppression of the Ishmaelite Midianites. Gideon carefully selected his soldiers and used Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley as his base. Using the element of surprise, Gideon and his three-hundred men, divided into three companies of a hundred soldiers surrounding the camp, launched a successful night attack on the Midianite camp.

Thus, following Wingate’s study of the Jezreel Valley, he pioneered the joint British-Jewish militia called the Special Night Squads, though Wingate’s bid to name them the ‘Gideonites’ was turned down by British command (notably, the unit he created in Abyssinia was called the Gideon Force). Comprising 40 British and 80 Jewish combatants, the SNS launched nightly attacks on Palestinian Arab villages and on the fellahin. Like Gideon’s army, the SNS was divided into three platoons of handpicked soldiers, and like Gideon’s army, its headquarters were stationed at Ein Harod.

It was his utterly sincere belief in the Old Testament and the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren that differentiated his loyalties from those of other British officers, who despite their colonial positioning were generally more sympathetic towards Arabs than Jews. ‘I am a Zionist with my whole heart,’ Wingate would say to David Hacohen in an effort to win the trust of the Jewish community. ‘I count it a privilege to help you in your struggle, and I shall devote the best years of my life to this.’ He would further elaborate on his belief that the Holy Lands had to be recreated as the Old Testament, ‘the sublime creation of the Jewish people’, had designed: ‘Mankind’s right to continued existence is dependent upon its living in accord with the moral principles of this Book. Whoever raises his hand against you and the rebuilding of your land and nation must be fought…But the fight is yours, and mine is only the privilege of helping you. Please, open the hearts of the Jews living in this country to me’ (Kessler, 2023).

Certainly, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine learned to trust Wingate, titling him ‘the friend’, which is how he is known in Israel to date (Kuttler, 2019). Wingate may have been a Christian by faith, but he considered himself a part of the Jewish nation. He lived in Jewish collectives, studied Hebrew, and regarded himself as part of the Haganah in both speech and practice. He reportedly rallied his men by saying, ‘the Arabs think the night is theirs. The British lock themselves up in their barracks at night. But we, the Jews, will teach them to fear the night more than the day’ (Rubinson, 2026).

Alongside biblical precedent, historian Simon Anglim has also identified that there were numerous colonial precedents for special counter-insurgency units that Wingate drew upon, in particular the Sikh Gurkha Unit used by the British for nightly ambushes against resisting Muslim Pashtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier of British India, where Wingate’s father was a Colonel. Moreover, the Auxiliaries of the Royal Irish Constabulary acted as a semi-independent, mobile raiding unit that carried out night-time counterinsurgency attacks against Irish constituents during the Irish War of Independence 1919-1921 (Anglim, 2015).

AN EDUCATION IN TERROR

Wingate’s efforts were approved and supported by British Commander Archibald Wavell and his successor. While the SNS was completely absorbed into the 16th Brigade’s counter-insurgency operations, Wingate’s activities were rarely recorded by the Force Headquarters in Jerusalem for they were acknowledged as deviating from regular military practice (Hughes, 2015). Even still, Wingate went beyond the liberties British command officially accorded to him, and colluded illegally with the Haganah, the primary Zionist paramilitary organisation that would evolve into the IDF. Wingate worked closely with Yitzhak Sadeh, an elite commander of the Haganah, who sent Wingate twenty-five of his best troops to train. The SNS was therefore far more formidable and extensive than official military documents can indicate.

Wingate trained Jewish soldiers in methods of violence that were extrajudicial, unnecessary, imprecise and exceptionally inventive in the nature of their brutality. For example, following pipeline attacks, the SNS would raid nearby villages, using mere geography as a barometer for guilt. Male inhabitants were then lined up and whipped (Bustos, 2024). Wingate pressed into his soldiers the necessity of ‘reprisal’ attacks as a form of intimidation, yet who this reprisal attack was carried out against hardly seemed relevant. If Arab fighters simply ran into a village, the entire village was deemed guilty and grenades thrown into random homes, as was indeed the case on 11 June 1938 (Hughes, 2015).

Collective punishment of this kind was not accidental, but an end in itself. As identified by Hughes (2015), other methods used to terrorise villagers included:

Indiscriminate fire into Bedouin tents.
Shooting or beating people who looked ‘suspect’ without charge or trial.
Lining up male villagers and shooting every 15th, 10th, or 8th man (the number depended on the whims of the particular official leading the operation).
If villagers failed to put forward weapons (regardless of whether they were known to possess them), methods included:
- Forcing sand into the mouths of villagers until they vomited.
- Making men run 10-15 kilometres in front of moving army vehicles and abandoning them in the desert if they were too exhausted to continue.
- Throwing male villagers into a pool of crude oil.
- Forcing villagers to wash their faces with burning oil mixed with dirt.

Torture against civilians became routine, and was always justified by the their proximity to crimes rather than any provable responsibility. For example, in September 1939, when a rebel mine killed the leader of Wingate’s beloved Ein Harod collective, he raided the nearest Arab quarter called Beisan and ordered ‘the killing of every Arab discovered in the vicinity of the raid’ (Hughes, 2015). According to a participating soldier, ‘Without any plan of action or preparation, with Wingate at our head, we entered the Arab part of Beit Shean, which swarmed with gang members, and began to beat and trample anyone in our path.’ (Hughes, 2015).

Justice was merely ceremonial – an impediment that had to quickly be cast out of the way to facilitate what soldiers had already decided to do. For example, when three prisoners were brought before a SNS Lieutenant, he proclaimed, ‘In the name of the King of England, I ﬁnd you guilty of murder and sentence you to death’ (Hughes, 2015). The prisoners were shot immediately. In another instance, when SNS soldiers found two Arabs wounded and dying in a field, they held ‘a ﬁeld trial right there and killed them both’ (Hughes, 2015).

As a result of the widespread atrocities detailed above, the British establishment became wary of Wingate and how his policies alienated the Arab population. He was incrementally removed from power until he was removed from the territory altogether for his political devotion to Zionism, and his passport was stamped ‘NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER PALESTINE’ (Goodspeed, 2001). Soon after, in September 1939, the SNS was abolished.

Modern assessments of Wingate have begun challenging the long-standing tendency to romanticize his eccentricity. Military historian Hew Strachan qualifies Wingate’s methods in Palestine as a form of state terrorism (Anglim, 2015), while a wave of Israeli historians have begun questioning his legacy, with Tom Segev calling Wingate a madman, a sadist and a war criminal (Oren, 2001).

However, we do not need to look to modern critics to validate the exceptional quality of Wingate’s methods. Even at the time, Wingate’s colleagues did not believe he was sound of mind. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery would reveal in 1966 that he considered Wingate to have ‘been mentally unbalanced and that the best thing he ever did was to get killed in a plane crash in 1944’ (van Crevald, 2004). Lieutenant Bala Bredin, who succeeded Wingate as the leader of the SNS, saw in him the ‘fervour of a fanatic’, while another official saw him as a ‘dangerous madman’ (Hughes, 2015). District Commissioner Hugh Foot blamed him for countering ‘opposition gangs by killing them all’ and of facilitating ‘a dirty war of assassination and counter-assassination’ (Hughes, 2015). The SNS were widely regarded as unprincipled killing machines. According to Lieutenant Colonel King-Clark, who led one of the SNS’ three platoons, ‘the deeper Wingate’s policy took us into the Jewish camp, the more outside the law we became’ (Hughes, 2015).

Even at a more personal level, Wingate was considered unsound. He is known to strike Jewish soldiers (though not British ones, as this was illegal). He would sometimes eat only grapes and onions, have a string of garlic around his neck to snack on, refuse to bathe, and meet visitors naked. He would even move around the military camp naked while giving orders. Winston Churchill’s personal physician wrote that Wingate ‘seemed to me hardly sane – in medical jargon a borderline case’ who Churchill realised was ‘too mad for high command’ (Hastings, 2009).

Despite these widespread acknowledgements of Wingate’s unfitness for leadership, the reason that the SNS survived for so long was that Wingate was not simply tolerated, but actively endorsed by the British leadership in Palestine. Policies of repression against Palestinians were not unique to Wingate. For example, the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Arthur Wauchope, would excuse the violence of a village raid in 1936 by simply saying, ‘human beings were not perfect and some human beings are less perfect than others’ (Cronin, 2017). Military commander Wavell and his successor Robert Haining both praised Wingate for his daring and enterprise. In fact, Wingate was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) by the British government in 1938 for his leadership of the SNS.

Most of all, Wingate was strategically effective. In the short-term, his leadership of the SNS produced colossal effects for such a small unit. They had eliminated three rebel leaders, forced one rebel leader to flee the country, and accounted for 20% of all rebels killed and weapons seized in the latter half of 1938 (Kessler, 2023). The SNS contributed significantly to the violence of the Arab Revolt, which overall saw 10% of the male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled (Bustos, 2024).

CARVING ISRAEL IN BURIED POSSIBILITIES

Nevertheless, it is not short-term impacts, staggering as they are, that make Wingate the study of this article. Rather, Wingate’s figure must be scrutinised for changing the course of history and for its longstanding effects on Israeli military doctrine. He would say to his Jewish recruits, ‘We are establishing here the foundation for the army of Zion’ (Kessler, 2023).

Wingate laid the doctrinal foundation for the Haganah, and later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Having selected his men personally, two of the soldiers Wingate directly trained were Moshe Dayan, commander of Jewish-controlled Jerusalem during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Chief of the General Staff of the IDF 1953-1958 (during the Sinai War), and Defence Minister during the Sixty-Day War 1967, and Yigal Allon, Commander of the Palmach 1945-1948, Lieutenant-General in the IDF in 1948, and Minister of Foreign Affairs 1974-1977, and Deputy Prime Minister 1967-1977. His colleague Yitzak Sadeh whom Wingate worked closely with in SNS operations founded the Israel Defense Forces. The experience that Jewish military leadership and soldiers gained under Wingate was instrumental in the creation of Israel, particularly in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that led to the ethnic-cleansing of two-thirds of the Palestinian population.

Dayan, whose leadership ensured the survival of the Israeli project into the latter half of the 20th Century, would say that Wingate ‘taught us everything we know.’ Elsewhere, he added that his affection for Wingate ‘knew no bounds’. Wingate had a ‘positiveness, a stubborn lack of compromise. A dominating personality he infected us all with his fanaticism and faith.’ Dayan was impressed by his ‘utter ruthlessness’, his willingness to shoot Arabs ‘on the spot and make an example to others’ (Hughes, 2015). In the late 1990s, Wingate’s son would testify regarding his mother’s belief that Wingate, if not for his untimely death, ‘would have resigned from the (British) Army and joined the Israelis’ and that ‘they would have made him their Commander-in-Chief’ (Bloom, 2014). According to him, multiple senior Israeli leaders have corroborated that they would have indeed made Wingate their commander (Bloom, 2014).

According to Israeli military historian Ze’ev Schiff, Wingate ‘left his mark as the single most important influence on the military thinking of the Haganah’ (Bustos, 2024). In fact, the IDF itself acknowledges in a lexicon, ‘The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force’s combat doctrine.’ Wingate brutalised Jewish soldiers, explicitly setting Jewish practices towards Palestinian civilians within a colonial framework where power over civilians rather than just combatants is a military objective. Training Jewish soldiers in British counter-insurgency methods, but also going well beyond the legal limits of counterinsurgency, Wingate normalised for Jewish soldiers levels of brutality that even the British were uneasy with.

At the same time, British support for Wingate and his troops helped Jewish soldiers develop the confidence to challenge Palestinians across the territory. According to A. T. O. Lees, a British official who witnessed Jewish police trucks enter a village near Jaffa, ‘’They met the ﬁrst year little boys from the village school who were just proceeding from school on their way home. A member of the police hurled a bomb at the little boys which exploded and killed three of them, two being aged six years each and one aged seven. The Jews continued their drive, and when passing near the Mosque one of them ﬁred his riﬂe at a person who was praying and killed him. Another Jew ﬁred one shot at a woman carrying her grandchild (aged under two years). The shot killed the grandmother, while the child was injured and taken to hospital.’ (Hughes, 2015). Likewise, District Commissioner James Pollock affirmed, ‘Wingate taught the Jews blood-letting and they’ve never looked back’ (Hughes, 2015).

Wingate’s militant Zionism pushed British support for the creation of Israel to its utmost limits. More significantly, it helped alter the course of Jewish political objectives in Palestine. Prior to Wingate’s intervention, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the operative branch of the World Zionist Organisation, practiced a policy of self-restraint called ‘havlaga’. Havlaga was a moral and political policy of peaceful coexistence with Palestinian Arabs, envisioned by some as a zionism independent of the nation-state of Israel. Indeed, many Palestinian Arabs had hosted Jewish refugees as antisemitism intensified in Europe, and havlaga envisioned the continuation of a sustainable, symbiotic coexistence. The Jewish National Council announced, ‘Not with pouring innocent blood our holies’ blood would be forgiven, but with new methods to promote our project and a never-ending aiming at new actions for our freedom. For our deep sorrow, Jerusalem had seen revenge actions at Arabs, which had stained the honor of the Jewish settlement and put in danger the peace of Jerusalem’ (Attias, 1963).

Whether havlaga was a sincere, moral philosophy or an instrumentalised political cover that disguised systematic dispossession of Palestinians as ‘coexistence’ is debatable. What is more immediately relevant is the policy of abstention it concretely produced: Haganah was barred from any offensive or retaliatory action against Palestinian Arabs, even as the 1936-1939 revolt intensified. In contrast, other Zionist paramilitaries that chose to engage in violence became designated terrorist organisations and international pariahs.

When Wingate originally proposed the SNS and received approval from Wavell, the Jewish Agency blocked his proposal, prioritizing sustaining havlaga. At this point, Wingate personally pursued senior Zionist leadership and won their trust, most crucially, that of Moshe Sharett, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, and Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organisation and Jewish Agency who would later become the first president of Israel. Wingate convinced these figures that an offence was the best defence. Afterwards, the Jewish Agency approved the SNS and substantially funded its operations.

That Wingate was solely responsible for the Haganah’s militant turn is perhaps an overstatement, as many Jews increasingly believed that passive defence was not conducive to the longevity of their settlements. However, Wingate’s sense of initiative and his active training of Haganah’s troops provided an immediate opportunity for Jewish militarism to become not only strategically effective and a mainstream rather than marginalized position amongst Jewish leadership, but also internationally legitimate in a way that the Irgun and Lehi had never become.

CONCLUSION

Orde Wingate is insufficiently recognised for his influence on the political landscape of Southwest Asia. Celebrated in Britain as an eccentric military innovator and revered in Israel as the spiritual father of the IDF, he has been detached from the religious convictions and colonial structures that made his influence possible. Through the SNS, biblical fundamentalism converged with British imperial counterinsurgency to produce a model of warfare that normalised collective punishment, extrajudicial violence, reprisals against civilians, and the subordination of legal restraint to strategic expediency. It is this model of warfare that we see manifesting in Gaza today.

Zionist terrorism was not an inevitable response to the conditions of Mandatory Palestine. Wingate did not create Jewish nationalism, nor was he solely responsible for its militarisation, but he accelerated, legitimised, and professionalised a militant turn that many within the Zionist movement had previously resisted. The doctrines forged in the hills and villages of Mandatory Palestine did not disappear with the dissolution of the Special Night Squads or with Wingate’s death in 1944. They survived through the men he trained, the organisations he transformed, and the strategic culture he helped cultivate.

To understand the enduring patterns of violence that have shaped Israel’s encroachment of Palestinian territory and ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians, it is necessary to look beyond Israel itself and examine the colonial, Judeo-Christian landscape in which its military assumptions were first conceived. In this respect, the origins of Zionist terrorism are inseparable from the imperial and theological forces that found their most zealous advocate in Orde Wingate.

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^[1]The many references to Zionist institutions in this text should not be read as a normative acceptance of the settler-colonial project that calls itself ‘Israel’.

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