2015/08/08 by Matthew Hughes · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy #Military History and Strategy #Officer #Judaism #Law #Colonialism #Mandatory Palestine #Torture #Jewish history #Hebrew #Ancient history #History #Sociology #Political science #Classics #Jewish studies #Archaeology #Human rights
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03086534.2015.1083220
openalex publication_date 2015/08/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In 1938 in British Mandate Palestine, British army officer Orde Wingate organised and led a joint British-Jewish military unit, the Special Night Squads (SNSs), to defeat Palestinian rebels fighting against British rule and Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Arab revolt, 1936–39. The SNSs operated in Galilee in northern Palestine. While biographies of Wingate cover his service in Palestine with the squads, this article extends the existing literature with an empirical examination of the operations of the SNSs based on a deep mining of British and Hebrew-language archival sources. This study argues that joint intelligence gathering operations introduced the British army to Jewish agents and the possibilities of collaboration—Wingate was an intelligence officer—before detailing combined military operations in the field with the irregular SNSs. The originality of this article comes from its dissection of how British soldiers brutalised Jewish troops by training them in well-established British counterinsurgency methods that targeted civilians and villages close to rebel attacks. Away from the control of established British military chains of command, the SNSs were especially tough in their war with Palestinians and they fought a ‘dirty war', an operational method absorbed and normalised by Jewish soldiers serving under British command. This article is a military and imperial history that details the quotidian brutality of pacification, opens up wider debates on how imperial powers collaborated with loyalist colonial minorities, shows how regular armies used irregular forces in pacification campaigns and suggests that post-colonial regimes such as Israel carried over such methods of control.