Newly revealed papers reopen debate over Orde Wingate’s role in the Arab Revolt

Members of the special night squad, formed under the command of Major-General Orde Wingate, consisitng of 75 Haganah members

Ofer Aderet reports in Haaaretz on 26 February 2026:

Cruelty, gratuitous violence and war crimes aren’t the first things Israelis think of when they hear the name Orde Wingate, the officer who set up British-Jewish counterinsurgency squads against Arab fighters in the late 1930s.

But according to his contemporaries, Wingate’s efforts during the British Mandate period were marred by crimes like “indiscriminate killing,” “firing at residents who fled the village” and “placing uninvolved residents in front of a firing squad and murdering them.” Such testimonies have been collected by historian Israel Gal.

“Destruction of property and humiliation, including the humiliation of people being interrogated,” Gal wrote about Wingate, who became a legend of the Zionist movement as his dark sides were pushed from the collective memory.

Friday marks the 123rd anniversary of Wingate’s birth; he was born in 1903 and died in a plane crash in India in 1944 while fighting the Japanese during World War II. In 1936 he had arrived in Palestine as a British intelligence officer and was dubbed “the friend,” but also “the crazy captain.” He is one of the main characters in “Palestine 36,” Palestine’s official submission for 2026 Academy Awards, where he is portrayed as a particularly brutal officer.

At the annual conference discussing Wingate’s legacy, which will take place Friday at Kibbutz Ein Harod in the north, his personal archive will be revealed to the public. Several of the documents in the archive, which has been donated to the National Library in Jerusalem, shed light on this controversial figure in Zionist history.

Among the papers is a 1937 letter to a cousin abroad in which Wingate marveled about the desert blooming like a rose. He lauded the Jews’ energy, faith and innovation, saying they would make better soldiers than the British. They merely needed to be trained.  In a document from the collection, Wingate discussed one of his goals: to restore security and attain government control in rural areas. In a 1938 paper, he spelled out his plan to defeat the Great Arab Revolt in British Mandatory Palestine. British and Jewish fighters would battle in Wingate’s Special Night Squads.

Wingate argued that the rebels had to be convinced that in every attack against a Jewish community, as isolated as it may be, his forces would surprise them and rout them. There would be no exchange of fire from a distance but rather a strategy of “bayonet and bomb.”

But despite their innovative strategy, Wingate and his men behaved brutally toward uninvolved Arabs, says Gal, a colonel in the reserves who wrote a doctoral thesis at Bar-Ilan University about Yitzhak Sadeh, a founder of the Israel Defense Forces.

“Wingate’s troops fought battles against Arab terrorists with methods that were innovative for their time, which he introduced. Most of these operations ended in victory and caused the enemy heavy losses,” but civilians were also killed, Gal says.

In his new study, not yet published, Gal quotes people like Zion Cohen, one of Wingate’s soldiers. “That was one of the most terrible sights I’ve ever seen. … Wingate gathered all the men and took 19 Arabs and told them – step forward … and fired,” Cohen said.

Shlomi Shitrit, a historian at the police. “Wingate is responsible for a revolution. What he achieved in six months of operations was insane.” Credit: Courtesy of Shlomi Shitrit

Gal also describes the testimony of artist Nissan Rilov, who was a member of the Haganah pre-state militia and Wingate’s Special Night Squads.  “He said Wingate and his soldiers entered one of the villages near the oil pipeline, after Arab terrorists bombed the pipe. Wingate suspected that they were hiding in the village,” Gal says. “With the barrel of his rifle he hit a farmer who was standing next to him in the head until he killed him. Then he ordered his soldiers to dip rags into the oil and shove them into the farmers’ mouths.”

‘If there’s one thing we should learn it’s that you have to have patience for crazy people. By today’s standards, nothing the British did would be accepted, especially if we were the ones doing it.’
Shlomi Shitrit, a historian at the Israel Police

Gal interviewed one of the last people alive to see Wingate, Zir Luz, who is now 98. Luz said that in 1938 he witnessed a “terrifying sight,” as he recently told Gal. He said Wingate led two beaten and bleeding Arabs, “with their heads open,” and sat them next to the dining room and showers of the children at Kibbutz Ein Harod.

“He didn’t stop beating them, in a violent effort to get intelligence he needed,” Luz said, adding that the children’s caretakers approached him and tried to offer help to the bleeding men, but Wingate “didn’t let them do anything.” His summary of Wingate’s character: “crazy and a genius.”

Gal also collected testimony about Wingate’s severe violence toward his Jewish subordinates. “The moment he became incensed, he would dish out all kinds of beatings, including fists to the face and a pistol barrel to the head,” Gal says. “His Jewish subordinates were really afraid of him.”

Similar accounts can be found in the Tom Segev book “One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate.” Segev was one of the first to explore Wingate’s dualism, writing how his men described him with a mixture of veneration and horror. Behind his back they said he was crazy, using terror to fight terror.

But the negative revelations about Wingate haven’t taken root in Israel yet, and he remains admired among historians and the general public, as he’s commemorated throughout the country.

“Wingate is responsible for a revolution. What he achieved in six months of operations was insane,” says Shlomi Shitrit, chief historian of the Israel Police’s history department. He wrote his doctorate on the British struggle against the Arab revolt during the Mandate period.

“He realized that we had to operate at night based on small forces and precise intelligence,” Shitrit says. “I read about every operation and discovered that his fighters were responsible for the elimination of one-sixth of the rebels and one-fifth of the combat equipment in the entire Land of Israel.”

Shitrit is very familiar with both sides of Wingate’s personality but doesn’t judge him harshly. “If there’s one thing we should learn from his story it’s not ‘Be crazy and dare’ but that you have to have patience for crazy people,” Shitrit says. “I’m not trying to defend his image, but by today’s standards, nothing the British did at the time would be accepted, especially if we were the ones doing it.

“The worst thing that happened that I can tell you with certainty was his order to beat men as a punishment. There were also cases where they threw people into a puddle of oil and torched their land, but he made sure not to harm uninvolved people. I haven’t collected a single bit of proof that he killed anybody outside of the fighting.”

Shitrit admits that Wingate wasn’t like other British officers, but he focuses on other aspects of his image. “He would walk around with dirty clothes and socks that didn’t match; he wasn’t strict about discipline during routine times and he was direct and caustic even toward people who outranked him.

“There was something different, obsessive, a bit autistic about him. This included very violent behavior toward his Jewish subordinates as well; anybody who didn’t understand what he wanted could get a pistol to his face in the middle of the operation.”

Moshe Har-Zion, the son of the celebrated commando Meir Har-Zion, stresses the positive aspects of Wingate’s legacy. “For me, his legacy isn’t to wait until they attack you but to attack first,” Har-Zion says. “He took the guys out to try to prevent attacks against them.”  Har-Tzion adds: “Wingate’s teaching is relevant to this day, certainly after October 7. In the end you return to the basics.”

Gal, meanwhile, found an article by historian Zakaria Sinwar, the brother of Hamas leaders Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar. Their historian brother wrote: “In the War of Independence the Zionists implemented Wingate’s military principles, and after the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces these principles became one of the strategic cornerstones of the Zionist army.”

The 2007 article “Wingate and his role in the development of Zionist military capabilities” was published in the periodical of the Islamic University of Gaza. All three Sinwar brothers were killed in the recent war.

A prized item in the Wingate archive is his notebook for learning Hebrew, which includes the words for “rebels,” “conquest/occupation,” “armed,” “crime,” “front,” “clash,” “loyalty” and “liberation.” There’s also a sentence on the rebels’ flags being raised from every rooftop.  “This notebook is moving,” Shitrit says. “It enables us to know exactly which words he knew, what interested him and what he was able to talk about.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety