Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses British human rights abuses committed against civilians during the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. The author reflects on British military practice and law in relation to colonial rebellions and the allowance of collective punishments and reprisals by the British army. The article also explores torture carried out on Palestinian civilians and rebels by British forces. Other topics include the lack of official records and conflicting accounts of abuse during British counterinsurgency efforts.

The article presents an exploration into the actions of the British military in suppressing Arab revolts in Palestine during the region's occupation in the later 1930s. Contextual information is given regarding the extent of British political and social engagement with the region during the Mandate tenure. Statistics and conflicting accounts are offered citing the levels of violence and death-tolls which resulted from clashes between British and Arab forces, noting several which suggest brutal actions by the British military. Questions are raised evaluating the extent of British military abuse in the period.