Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
14 September
BRITAIN'S DIRTY WAR AGAINST PALESTINIANS
On this day in 1936, British army officer Orde Wingate was assigned to a staff officer position in Palestine. He later organised special British-Zionist joint Night Squads for operations against Palestinian villages. British soldiers trained Jewish troops in British counterinsurgency methods that targeted civilians and villages close to rebel attacks. The Night Squads fought a ‘dirty war' against Palestinians, and the brutal methods were taken up and normalised by Jewish soldiers serving under British command.
حرب بريطانيا القذرة ضد الفلسطينيين
سبتمبر14
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1936، تم تعيين ضابط الجيش البريطاني أوردي وينجيت في منصب ضابط أركان في فلسطين. وقام فيما بعد بتنظيم فرق ليلية مشتركة بين البريطانيين والصهاينة للقيام بعمليات ضد القرى الفلسطينية. قام الجنود البريطانيون بتدريب القوات اليهودية على أساليب مكافحة التمرد البريطانية التي استهدفت المدنيين والقرى القريبة من هجمات المتمردين. خاضت فرق الليل "حربا قذرة" ضد الفلسطينيين، وهي أساليب وحشية تم اتباعها وتطبيعها من قبل الجنود اليهود العاملين تحت القيادة البريطانية.
Why Orde Wingate remains a hero in Israel - mainstream Israeli view
Bible-toting, raw-onion-eating British officer killed in a plane crash in Burma on March 24, 1944, has been called the father of the IDF (Israel "Defence" Forces)...David Ben-Gurion thought Wingate might have become the Israel Defense Forces’ first chief of staff – an extraordinary possibility for a Christian steeped in a religiously inspired Zionism...A son of missionaries, Wingate carried a Bible wherever he went in pre-state Israel and trumpeted Jewish claims to the land...his troops often were subjected to long religious sermons.
Wingate formed the Special Night Squads in which British infantry soldiers and Jewish paramilitary retaliated, often ruthlessly, against Arab insurgents.
According to Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, it was Wingate who
made the Zionist leaders realise more fully that the idea of Jewish statehood had to be closely associated with militarism and an army, first of all to protect the growing number of Jewish enclaves and colonies inside Palestine but also – more crucially – because acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against the possible resistance of the local Palestinians. From there, the road to contemplating the enforced transfer of the entire indigenous population would prove to be very short indeed.15
Orde Wingate was born in India in the early twentieth century to a military family and received a very religious upbringing. He began an Arabophile career in the Sudan, where he gained prestige with a particularly effective ambush policy against slave traders. In 1936, he was assigned to Palestine where he quickly became enchanted by the Zionist dream. He decided actively to encourage the Jewish settlers and started teaching their troops more effective combat tactics and retaliation methods against the local population. It is no wonder that his Zionist associates greatly admired him.
Wingate transformed the principal paramilitary organisation of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Hagana. Established in 1920, its name literally means ‘defence’ in Hebrew, ostensibly to indicate that its main purpose was protecting the Jewish colonies. Under the influence of Wingate, and the militant mood he inspired among its commanders, the Hagana quickly became the military arm of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist governing body in Palestine that in the end developed and then implemented plans for the Zionist military takeover of Palestine as a whole, and the ethnic cleansing of its native population.
The Arab revolt gave the Hagana members a chance to practise the military tactics Wingate had taught them in the Palestinian rural areas, mostly in the form of retaliatory operations against such targets as roadside snipers or thieves taking goods from a kibbutz. The main objective, however, seems to have been to intimidate Palestinian communities who happened to live in proximity to Jewish settlements.
Wingate succeeded in attaching Hagana troops to the British forces during the Arab revolt so that they could learn even better what a ‘punitive mission’ to an Arab village ought to entail. For example, in June 1938 Jewish troops got their first taste of what it meant to occupy a Palestinian village: a Hagana unit and a British company jointly attacked a village on the border between Israel and Lebanon, and held it for a few hours.
Amatziya Cohen, who took part in the operation, remembered the British sergeant who showed them how to use bayonets in attacking defenseless villagers: ‘I think you are all totally ignorant in your Ramat Yochanan [the training base for the Hagana] since you do not even know the elementary use of bayonets when attacking dirty Arabs: how can you put your left foot in front!’ he shouted at Amatziya and his friends after they had returned to base. Had this sergeant been around in 1948, he would have been proud to see how quickly Jewish troops were mastering the art of attacking villages
Thomas Hodgkin, a British official working for the mandate authorities, described the great Palestinian revolt of 1936:
The strike is a spontaneous movement which has the support of almost all sections of the Arab people, the natural response to the [British] government's continued frustration of peaceful efforts of the Arabs towards independence. Its character is plain from its origin. It started as a movement from below, not from above, and it has been kept alive by pressure from below. The British response included demolishing a large section of Jaffa, imposing collective punishments and detaining large numbers of Arabs without trial. Hundreds of men now flocked to join guerrilla bands that had moved into the mountains and begun hit-and-run attacks on the British. The British High Commissioner described the country as being In a state of incipient revolution' with little security or control of lawless elements outside principal towns, main roads and railways'.
The British response was ultra-violence with a legal veneer. According to British military historian Matthew Hughes, in Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, this meant the UK authorities
pacified the country through quotidian application of a crafted, all-encompassing legal system that restrained, detained, and impoverished Palestinians, hanged and killed them, and demolished their homes. It banned newspapers, interned people, fined and exiled them, censored their mail and telephone calls, took away livestock and crops, whipped them, imposed curfews and police posts, exacted corvée, and restricted travel. It made singing, shouting, and waving flags illegal, alongside processing the wrong way down a street, buying a toy children’s gun, or meeting in a cafe. People paid financial bonds to ensure their good behaviour. If they had a nice house, the authorities marked it for destruction if a stranger in the neighbourhood broke the law. Photographs in regimental archives show soldiers painting big numbers on buildings for future destruction. (p.35)