Empire: World History - 299. Gaza: The Palestinian Revolt, The Black and Tans, & Bomber Harris (Part 9)

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

When Palestinian Arabs rose up against the British in 1936, what repressive tactics were used to quell the revolt? Who was the WW2 hero “Bomber” Harris, and why did he bomb Palestinians in the 1930s? How did Christians, Muslims and Jews who had once co-existed in the region turn against each other in a divisive civil war?  William and Anita are joined once again by Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, to discuss how unexpected characters from the web of British imperial violence appear in Palestine during the Revolt of 1936-1939. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. This episode of Empire contains detailed descriptions of violence which some listeners may find upsetting. On the evening of the 15th of April, 1936, 3. armed Palestinian Arabs rolled barrels into the road near Norshams in the hills between Nablus and Tulkaram in what is now the northern West Bank. They forced passing vehicles to stop and demanded money to buy weapons and ammunition. One truck loaded with crates of chickens,

they found Zvi Dannenberg and Israel Hazan. The gunmen shot them in cold blood. Hazan, a recent immigrant from Greece, died on the spot. The unnamed perpetrated, were followers of Al-Kasem, the revolutionary Palestinian leader we met in the last episode. Hello and welcome to Empire. Today we are discussing the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, the first significant uprising of Palestinians. And as with the last episode, we are in the company of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Harvard professor, friend of the show, Caroline Elkins is with us. Just let's start with that moment because, you know, we've talked about this. We've described a tinderbox of a situation since the British mandate.

We've talked about sparks that could have ignited the region into a full conflagration. And this is one such. Tell us a little bit about what happens after this shooting on the highway. First of all, thank you for having me back. And I think it's important to point out that what we see after this sort of April 15th, 1936 episode is a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals. And I think one thing that we have to really focus on is the growth of militant nationalism and one clear indication of the ways in which the, if you will, the notable families, the Al-Husani's and the National Shibis, that they are

unable to hold things together. And they form the Arab Hier Committee. And within that, they're inclusive of many other political actors in the landscape. And it's in this moment that they declare a general strike. And it's a response to, in some ways, the push from below, which we see happening with Al-Qasalm's followers and also really centering around the two main issues that we've talked about before, the questions about immigration and the questions about land sales. And what we see happening through the 30s, beginning in 32, we have nearly 10,000 immigrants and we see a step up every year by almost 10,000 and then even more so in 35 with 62,000 Jewish people entering the country, and of course, understandably, as we discuss fleeing persecution

from the Nazi regime, the banning of intermarriage, the creation in 35 of the Nuremberg race laws, such that between 1920, we had a little less than 10% of the total population in Palestine were Jewish, and then we see a rise of the Jewish population by 35 to nearly 30%. And I think the last important point on this is at the end of the 1929 violence that we discussed. There's something called the Shaw Report. The British undertake the Shaw Report, and the Shaw Report says we've got to get ourselves back to this dual obligation. There's a real problem around immigration and land sales. And they introduced something called the Passfield White Paper. Now, this all sounds very dull and boring and administrative things, but it's important.

And it's important because that white paper says that it's going to introduce a policy of limiting Jewish immigration. What happens? What happens is whitesmen works as magic back in London. And he goes to Leold Omory, he goes to Lloyd George, he goes to Churchill. That white paper never sees the light of day. The point is, is that the rule of Balfour is going to remain in place in immigration and land sales, despite the fact that the British government is beginning to recognize this as a problem, they're going to do nothing about it. And so therefore, by 36, we see this explosion happening in part because the British aren't going to intervene and in part because we see a rise of militant nationalism. And this again highlights

It's the double bind of this period. On one hand, if this hadn't been for the British mandate in Palestine, who knows what would have happened to those Jews fleeing Nazi Germany? They would have ended up landless and hopeless. And the fact that they could go to Palestine was incredibly important in the 1930s during the rise of Nazism. On the other hand, what we're seeing in this episode is the Arabs being pushed to the wall. A third of the Felahina and now landless and unemployed kicked off their land and the Palestinian revolt that we're going to see and discuss in this episode is the expression of that frustration and the political impassee. The British have created through the Belfare Declaration, through the immigration. And I think one thing we should say

is that before the British introduced the Balfour Declaration and opened up immigration into the land, that the Jewish communities, the Christian communities and the Muslim communities had got on very well. There's a wonderful book by a man called Tufik Canaan, who is an anthropologist, who had been in the Ottoman army, was a local Palestinian, but a very curious anthropologist looking at the sacred spaces in his country. And he describes places like in Betzahor, where there's a church, where the Christians regard it wholly to St. George, who is, of course, a Palestinian, where the Jews come and give sheep. to the holy place that they regard sacred to the prophet, Elisha, and the Muslims come because they believe the shrine is holy to Kizah, the Green Saint. And all over Palestine, you have this place of shared communities who, in their own individual lives and individual communities, have found ways to coexist and their different religions to interspers with each other. This period, 1936, is the period that this pulls apart. The Palestinian Jews who have been

living alongside their Christian and Muslim neighbours find themselves being pulled apart and things reach such a pitch of fear and hatred as the revolt grows that will never see these people reconciled again. Can I ask you, Caroline? I mean, I don't know whether I'm just sort of seeing parallels where there are none, but to me, the Nassasibi, the Al-Hassanis and Al-Qasam, this is a dynamic which seems familiar in, again, the India-Pakistan context, where you have the equivalence of feudal lords in these two very rich families who were, you know, leaders, and Al Qasam, who is bringing for the first time the language of jihad and a holy war into this region. Who can claim to represent the people? I mean, we're not talking about the sort of the leadership,

but what about the people of Palestine? Where are they gravitating towards and why? First of all, it's a wonderful historical parallel that you're drawing. We certainly see this not just in the case of India, but as we move forward, we're going to see this in Malaya, we're going to see it in Kenya, sort of the selecting, if you will, of respectable leaders that the British believe that they can rule through, who ultimately have a sort of a tenuous hold on the local populations until such time it becomes untenable, right? And we see that, Mao, we see this elsewhere. At this point in time, you know, we're looking at a moment, and I think we've discussed this a little bit before, which is we're seeing a kind of incipient state formation happening at a very,

grassroots level in the wake of Al Qasam's death and everything from a boycott of goods produced by Jewish people, from self-help committees to education committees. And this is really being formed in rivalry to what the notables are doing. And so when we see the formation of the Arab-hire Commission and we see the Declaration of the General Strike, in some ways, especially the Mufti, has no choice. I mean, they have to move forward. There is a groundswell of demand to address the suffering of the local population. So it begins, and we see attacks including crop burning, wire cutting, sniping, and grenades thrown at Jewish vehicles on the main roads.

Trees are cut down, armbands begin to form, bombs explode in Haifa and Jaffa and the railway line to Egypt is sabotage near Gaza. Tell us, Caroline, how it all unfolds and how serious a problem is this for the British? I think for the British, they finally declare in 36, that they have a direct challenge to the authority of the British government in Palestine. I mean, newsflash, right? And ultimately what we see is we certainly see, as I mentioned before, sort of reprisals and counter-reprisals.

At this point, it's somewhat amateurish, but it's real. In other words, you know, you have members of the Arab population who are armed with makeshift weaponry, but there are killings, there are murders, there are crop burnings. And the element that we have to bring in is we have this paramilitary police force. is there. And that sort of espried a core of you fight repression with greater repression. And we're beginning to see this over and over again in terms of the response. And I think the important thing on this note is the mufti negotiates a ceasefire. And during that ceasefire, the British produced something called the Peel Report. And the Peel Report comes back several months later and says

it's time for partition. And what happens is it's this that then goes to the Permanent Mandates Commission at the League of Nations that we talked about before. And interestingly, what they're saying is that Britain's problem is they've lost their will. They need to use more repression to put this down. Even before that, though, in the British circles, you know, you've got a real sense of panic and lack of control, the British High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wachar. Walk up. How do I say his name? WAC. Walk up. Okay. Good, Scott's Borders name. Oh, good Lord. Anyway, look, he describes a state of Incipient revolution, you've got another British official saying nothing happens during the day which makes the nights and shooting seem nightmarish and unreal. You have this sense that we can't be here like this for much longer because this is getting out of our control really quickly. And we may be killed in the process, Caroline. Again, it's a pattern that you see elsewhere in the world. Over and again. And you really put it so beautifully, Anita, I think this recurring pattern, of the British and in this case the Jewish population are the minority.

Despite the growth, the Jewish population is still 30%. We still have, because there are various things going on administratively in terms of cutbacks, we have a very, what we call the thin white line of colonial administration, just the bare minimum that's needed. And even though you have this paramilitary force, it's certainly not enough to deal with any kind of major revolt. And they're trying to keep a lid on this. And remember, back in London, they keep... saying these reports keep coming out, Shaw report saying, look, we've got immigration and land reform

is needed. That shot down. The PEO report comes back saying we've got a partition. This is not sustainable. And ultimately, remember, at this point, Britain is not calling the shots. The permanent mandates commission for the League of Nations comes back and says, wait a minute. You need to declare martial law. You need to use more force. You need to use more repression. You're the problem, Britain. Get your house in order, your job is to put this down and snuff it out. And that's precisely what they do when the second phase comes of the Arab Revolt in September of 1937 when we see the murder of a district officer. And so begins the next phase of the revolt. And that's when it's ultimately gloves off. And we should introduce to you now a character who's sort of charged with get control of

the situation. And that's the Charles Tegett, who's a colonial police officer. And I came across him because of his policing experience in India. I mean, he sort of, you know, wrote handbooks for police officers in India about how to control mob and mob mentality. And he's sent to Palestine to do exactly the same, get a grip, which is what, you know, so the British are being told by outside sources. How does he get a grip? And what kind of man is he?

I mean, I have an inkling of what kind of man he is from his time in India. But what kind of man is he? Yes. I mean, he's legend amongst police officers and reviled by locals. He and John Anderson, who at that point is the top dog in the colonial administration in Bengal, and all this is happening in Bengal. Anderson, of course, goes back in his famously home secretary and introduces defense of the realm act and enforces it back in the UK. Tagerid is brought along. They try to knock them off about a half a dozen or more times, the local revolutionaries.

And he is somebody who is ruling with an iron fist. He has no problem using torture. He has no problem putting people in the Atamont Island prison. he has no problem whatsoever in trying to basically assert British control and not, by the way, sort of by towing the line of rule of law. When they need to bring in a troubleshooter to Palestine, there's no question at that point who it's going to be. It's got to be Charles Tegart. And by the way, he comes with David Petrie, and David Petrie eventually becomes the head of

MI5. And the two of them come in and put a game plan in place for how they're going to introduce more oppression in Palestine. And then a little quote from Teggut, perhaps to give you an insight into how the man's brain works. over an Arab, says Teggert, is the same as a dog in England, except we do not report it. So, I mean, that gives you some insight into what he's coming to this region with. And his policemen are no different from him. There's another who says, the military court started off well. But as we expected, they're being too lenient and want too much evidence to convict on. So any Johnny Arab who is caught by us now in suspicious circumstances is shot out of hand.

There is an average of one bomb a day thrown in Haifa now, but few of them do much damage. One was thrown in a Jewish bus last night in the culprit court. We took him to his house, but there is no evidence, so we let him try to escape in the garden. Unfortunately, I will not have to attend the inquest. Tegat maybe is a name that you may not know, unless you have been toiling in the same kind of fields that we have with colonial policing. But there is a name now that we're going to discuss that you will have heard of, and that is Bomber Harry. Now, tell us why are we talking about Bomber Harris, the hero of World War II, if you ask many people here in Britain who've studied in Britain, why are we talking about him in relation to Palestine? Harris, Taggart, and I'll come to Harris a moment, but we have to think of 1930s Palestine during this period of the revolt as a convergence of some of the most important actors, whether they're in the RAF, whether they're in the police, whether they're in intelligence.

whether they're in the military, along with legal codes that converge into Palestine to create a moment of sort of unbridled British colonial violence. Now Harris cuts his teeth, of course, in at that point, what is Mesopotamia? He is one of the young hotshots in World War I. He stays on. And they use sort of what is considered air control. Air control is this idea that you can use planes to solve your problem in these vast landscapes, whether it's over the deserts or on the northwest frontier, of what they were having in London, of the cost of ruling empire. And he's introducing through sort of air control what they call forms of frightfulness, bombing. They're doing weapons testing in Mesopotamia. And by forms of frightfulness, I mean everything from, you know, the precursors

to napalm, the use of flamethrowers and darts and long-delayed action bombs. This is Harris. This is what Harris is doing in the 20s. And eventually, in the 30s, when they need to have a convergence of folks, not just Tager and Petrie, who are doing sort of of the kinds of work in the areas of interrogation and policing, air control comes in. And it's Bomber Harris who comes in and he is legendary in this area. And of course, many of them, and eventually we'll talk about others come in like Bernard Montgomery, Monty comes in. And it is all the dress rehearsal terribly for what happens in World War II. and they are absolutely gloves off doing a whole range of things. And Bomber Harris fully believes in the impact of Eric and Drill.

And let's remind ourselves, there are certain laws about what you could and could not bomb. You can only bomb X number of feet from a village. This is all out the window. These folks are bombing everything. There's a particularly shocking passage in Legacy of Violence, your extraordinary book on colonial uprisings and policing. And you say heavy drinking was another pastime, sometimes followed with a good, up in a local suit called cafe, where Arabs were beaten and killed for sport. What do you mean by that?

The normative, William, at this time, was, you know, if they weren't killing Arabs for sport, and by the way, I meant exactly what the words say. They would go up for good dust up. And in order to sort of wrap up the night, they would beat up on, shoot, whatever the case may be. As you were just pointing out in some of the quotes you used, the notion that the Arabs were less than human, that you could do this. And if they weren't doing that, then they were having sort of tarantula versus scorpion fights. I mean, the idea that in some ways, when you read and listen to some of the accounts that are going on in the Imperial War Museum, the degree to which these kinds of killings are discussed

like it was yesterday's news, without even a shred of concern that these were human beings. There is some terrible quotes in your book. You have Bomah Harris quoted as saying, the only thing the Arab understands is a heavy hand, and he goes on about the value of bombing. We must, and understux circumstances, can make up for lack of numbers by using rougher methods with the rebels than we dare do in peace. One 250-pound or 500-pound bomb in each village, that speaks out of turn within a few minutes or hours of having so spoken, or completely blocking out a few selected haunts, for encranger les others. That phrase, I mean, for encourage les others, is a really,

interesting thing. It's a Voltaire quote from Candide where a naval captain has asked, why did you hang that man? He didn't do anything. He said, well, he didn't, but for encourage les others, just to warn the others who might be guilty that this could happen to them. And just to explicitly say what we mean by air action, Caroline, you say that the RAF dropped a hundred and twelve pound delayed action bombs, dive bombed with regularity, front guns blazing, shook villages to the core with a series of 20-pound bombs. So they're actually using full air power to bomb Palestinian villages from the air at a time when there is a revolt, but it's not at wartime. Absolutely. And I think the one other point we want to add to this is that there's this

idea, it's not just of sort of the use of tactics as a full-scale war, but there's the notion that violence against colonized populations has what's called a quote-unquote moral effect. Now, this term moral effect, which is introduced by Calwell in his book Small Wars. is a through line when we think about the nature of violence in the empire, and particularly here. So the idea is somehow or another, it has a civilizing effect, this kind of violence, not just to subdue through repression, but somehow or another it's going to bring them to heal, almost like Spare the Rod spoil the child, right? This idea of sort of a developmentalist element to it.

And make no mistake, when you look at the writings of Chaim Weitzman, and he talks about the violence being unleashed in Palestine. He talks about the moral effect with the Arabs. It's a chilling kind of notion about what this violence is doing. And there are severe casualties. You write that one reconnaissance alone wiped out nearly 130 Arab rebels. And you quote a local doctor, H.D. Foster, who records in his diary that he watched airplanes rise and dive as they machine gunned the ground beneath them, an unpleasant sight.

Among them, he writes, was a shepherd who'd been tending his flock. When he'd been hit from the air, his abdomen had been severely, wounded and despite surgery, he died from internal injuries. So it's shepherds, it's people in olive groves, it's villages which have been declared under curfew. And these guys send airplanes against them. They bombed the villages. They use machine guns. And of course, there are massive civilian casualties in all these incidents. Absolutely. And also make no mistake by this point, certainly by 38, there's 25,000 members of the security forces, soldiers and policemen. This is the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. This is a

Massive operation. Can I also, again, and well, I make no apology, actually, I think it's quite interesting because this is not the first time that strafing from the air has been used in this way, because in 1919, in Amritsa, after the Jellumala Bagh massacre, this Madcarbury is down in the record as strafing people from the sky, not just people who are on the road or running away, but the villages that they might live in or the villages they may have gone into. So this sort of, you know, high collateral damage is a price for keeping the peace or keeping control. It's a recurring motif in different places where the British are running. I think if we think about Palestine in the 30s, as this, as I said, convergence of all these different tactics, of all these different legal codes

in the form of emergency regulations or statutory martial law, by the way, statutory martial law or emergency regulations, are more permissive than martial law. When martial law is in place and it's lifted, troops can in theory be brought up on charges based upon common civil law. But in emergency regulations, no such thing can happen. So it's the most permissive form of rule of law, and I use that in quotes, so that by the time we get to the 1930s, we have the strafing, we have a whole range of different tactics and individuals moving them around the empire.

but we also have what is now an airtight legal system that permits this to happen without any fear of consequences by the security forces who are enacting them. Now, we have one other crucial episode before we go to the break. On September the 26th, 1937, Palestinian insurgents, murder an Australian colonel officer L.Y. Andrews, who was the district commissioner in Galilee. Now, what happens in response to that is crucially important because the British decide to tighten the screws and at the top level. This is the crucial thing. And so they arrest the 200 leading Palestinian nationalist leaders. And they are deported to the Seychelles and to Cyprus. And they declare the Arab higher command illegal. What this means is that as we approach the end of the British mandate, those Palestinians,

Palestinian leaders are still in exile or still in prison. And so while on the side of the yeshuv, the leaders are out and organizing, getting ready to declare a state. People like Ben Gurin and Jabotinsky are working hard and working very efficiently with the authorities. But the Palestinian leadership is in exile and in prison, unable to do anything. We'll see you back after the break. Welcome back. Caroline, so just before we took the break, William and you were talking about the arrest or sort of the decapitation, if you like, of leadership for the Palestinian people, but it's not an entire decapitation. It's a partial one. And I mean partial in that one side is favoured. We were talking about those two feudal families, if you like, the two wealthy families who were

the leaders at one time. Only one set is put in prison. Talk us through that a bit. Yeah, what we see happening is this exile of many of those who are, if you will, associated with the Al-Husani family. The Mufti himself and one of his cousins, Jamal Al-Husani, is sort of in a cat-and-mouse game, eventually make their way to Damascus, where they set up an information office and are working to sort of supply rebel forces in Palestine. But most importantly, the National Shoebe family remains in Palestine and is now favored by the British government.

And so in other words, the British play into this rivalry that's going on. Now the rival family to the Al Hussein's is being used by the British government to form what are called peace bands and locally sometimes called peace gangs. And these really become sort of a force within the countryside that demands loyalty to the British government while the Arab revolt is going on and is known as dastardly and as brutal as some of the British forces. themselves. In fact, there's one leader of the peace gang who's nicknamed the butcher. And so what we see happening is sort of internal rivalries playing out and the British sort of bringing people in who they think are going to help them win this war while at the same time fueling a civil war. And in many ways, this is a classic sort of story, if we will, that we've seen so many of these empire wars where they are anti-colonial in one dimension, but they're also

civil wars that are fueled by the British policies that are going on during these revolts. And it becomes quite complicated, but what we certainly see happening is that there's this division that's going on at the top, whilst at the same time, a classic British theory is that if you get rid of the so-called leadership, these revolts will descend into a kind of terminal frenzy. They never do, by the way. They're supposed to be three-month wars. They're never three-month wars. And this picks up. And in fact, the second phase of the Arab Revolt becomes much more organized on the Arab side, and ultimately, as we're going to discuss, we see incredible levels of brutality being used to suppress it. Caroline, one thing that happens at a lower level,

you've got the leadership being exiled or elements of it being co-opted, but at the lower level, at the village level, you have appearing in Palestine now a word which is going to have very ominous echoes throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and that is the concentration camp. Give us some little history of the concentration camp. It begins in the Boer War, doesn't it? It's a British invention, and it's originally used there by Kitchener, but it's brought to Palestine and used now during the Palestinian revolt. Yes, and so the British are synonymous with the introduction of concentration camps

within sort of the Western Hemisphere for sure, and in general, first it's introduced in South Africa. They then experiment with this in different ways or with refugee camps in India. We see this going on. We see experts being brought in as people are dying in mass in South Africa, from disease, largely. And ultimately, the use of concentration camps, which eventually become called detention camps, to sort of distinguish them in British parlance from the concentration camps that we'll see tragically emerging in Europe. And in the case of Palestine, what we see is by 38, 39, nearly 10,000 Palestinians are being held, subjected to horrific interrogations, which are being done by a combination of local security forces, as well as MI5 is being brought in.

They're humiliated. They're tortured. Many of the offenders are quite young. Some are under the ages of 16. We see summary executions going on, and that becomes actually a very big element of the empire. Arabs are executed without due process. That's going on.

And so ultimately what we're seeing going on again is the importation of different forms of violence that have been honed and sort of experimented with in different parts of the empire. A who's who of the empire's dark arts of colonial policing, military repression, aerial bombing, and interrogation and violence quickly descended upon Palestine. This is what we're seeing now in 1937 to 38. And make no mistake on this by the second phase of the Arab Revolt, with 25,000 members of the security forces, with all these different elements that we see being brought in, The only objective in this war was to decimate the Arab population, full stop.

The guns blazing into villages, you know, to discourage the others from what they're going to do. You know, it's interesting in the recordings at the Imperial War Museum is the degree to which the ordinary young, and when I mean young, 17, 18 years old, British soldier who was there, they had to be taught how to grind villages down to the ground. They would literally grind the tents down. they would mix the olive oil with sand with pots and shatter everything. There would be nothing left. And the idea was utter decimation within this. And in part because, as I've saying before, the convergence of all these different ideas

and practices and legal systems was the notion that repression does good of a sort, that it's part of what we do. It's part of the civilizing mission. And in this instance, they're going to be nothing short of utter decimation by the time they were done. If I could just read a passage from Caroline's brilliant book, Legacy of Violence, Palestinians were made to act as human shields by sitting on inspection trolleys, which drove on the rails ahead of trains,

or they were forced to ride on lorries with army convoys to prevent mine attacks. On the lorries, British shoulders would break hard at the end of a journey and then casually drive over the Arab, quotes, the poor Wogg, who had tumbled from the bonnet, killing or maiming him. If there was any landmines, it was them, the Arab prisoners, that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it, said another soldier. Caroline, what else do we see at this period? Hooded Arab informers who would nod when a suspect was found? What other techniques are being used? Well, that's very reminiscent of Ireland,

the hooded, you know, nod, though we covered that in Ireland. Absolutely. And, you know, on this point, we can loop it back into the peace bands. You know, the peace bands would go around and they would demand information. And you had to literally sign something, a kind of loyalty certificate that you were sort of loyal to the British government. And if you didn't provide it, then they would be tortured and brutalized by the peace bands. If you did sign it, they knew. The peace bands knew and the British government knew.

And there's a quote in the book to say, those who signed it signed their death warrant. Because at night, those who are fighting in the Arab Revolt are going to come and enforce their own form of discipline. And so those who are in the countryside are literally getting it from all sides. And they have nowhere to turn. And we see this happening, this kind of,

you're either with us or against us approach to counterinsurgency, we see throughout the empire, and they're particularly pernicious with it here in the context of the Arab Revolt. Now, it's at this point that we meet one of the key actors on the British side. It's also one of the most colorful, but darkly so. Tell us about Ord Wingate. On the one hand, he's straight out of central casting, right? I mean, he's got this bushy black beard and steely eyes and a Panama hat, and he wears two six shooters on his hips. And an alarm clock on his wrist. Oh, he's got an alarm clock on his wrist. Forget about the alarm clock.

He wears onions and garlic around his neck, which he keeps taking bites out of. Why does he do that? And words off mosquitoes. Oh, that's why. His breath was so bad, it would scare away mosquitoes. And then he would give orders to the troops, like, you know, stark naked while combing his pubic hairs with a with a combed with a toothbrush. Because it was, you know, a form of de-lousing. This guy was really, I mean, but he was really.

renowned for many things, one of which was his fire-breathing Zionism. He was raised in a very conservative evangelical home in colonial India. He could quote lengthy, obscure verses from the Bible. He was renowned for his tactics. He begins with almost hit squads, if you will, part of the Sudan Defense Force. He speaks fluent Arabic. He learns Hebrew when he comes to Palestine. very rapidly, and he forms something called the special night squads. And these special night squads are extraordinarily important, and they really, really take the war to the Arab population and to those identified to the villages as being rebels, as a brutal form of counterinsurgency.

He is known as Ayyid by the Jewish population, and he does something that had really been verbatten for a very long period of time, which is he brings in Jewish supernumerary forces into the special night squads. And that becomes a crucial moment as a training ground for the Jewish population and Jewish soldiers, part of the Haganah, would then become part of the special night forces. And they learn Wingate's tactics, which are obviously utterly brutal, everywhere from laying in wait and sort of hit squads to torturing populations to summary executions. They are the group that goes out, as you can imagine. At night, to hunt these. folks down. And ultimately, you know, if we sort of take ourselves forward, you know, he ends up dying

as part of the Chindits and, again, sort of in martyrdom, it is also acknowledged that he is considered the father of the IDF and that you have those who consider today the tactics that are used as very Wingatean. There are squares and streets named after Ord Wingate. He's an extraordinary, influential person in the 1930s, in the Arabian. In the Arabian, revolt in introducing this, but his legacy is extensive and reaches down all the way into the present day, into the kinds of influences he had on the training of those within what becomes the Israeli Defence Force. So what would Wingate and what would those who are being trained by him in the special

line force, what would be their justification? Are there still pockets of violence? What's happening? What would they say at the time? Why are they doing this? At the time, the justification is that. This is a few things. One, that this is Zionist territory.

This is our national home. That the Arabs are an unsimilized population who do not belong here, that they are now unleashing untolds amounts of violence on the Zionist population and upon the British Empire. Make no mistake. Or the Windgate is extremely, I mean, he is as pro-Zionist as he is pro-British empire. He's also leaking intelligence, isn't he? He's accused of taking it to the Hagan.

and to Bangurian's forces and to people like Jabotinsky. And by the way, if you go to Whiteman's letters and you sort of, there's volumes of them, he will talk about his many meetings with Ord Wingate. And it's in the context of his meetings with Ord Wingate that he is talking about the moral effect, quote unquote, of violence. But looking at Wingate's own justifications. I mean, he would, I guess, point to events like the 2nd of October 1938 when 19 Jewish people, including 11 children, are killed in Tiberius,

Palestinian fighters and say, look, this is what we're facing. I mean, is there that moral justification? Or is he talking in terms of this is the Holy Land and this is where it belongs? I think it's a combination of both in you. He's talking about both of them. He is an ardent Zionist. And by the way, getting back to sort of cousins, which we talked about in our previous episode, I mean, his cousin is Lawrence of Arabia. He hates him. He hates his cousin, T.A. Lawrence, for being too Arabist. And his brother is an Arabist as well, isn't he? There's another Odwin gate here. And this one takes the opposite side to his brother. And he says somewhere, many British soldiers were for the Arabs, the romantic idea of the

Arabs, so I supported the Jews. He sees himself as a contrarian. So Wingate is talking about, you know, fighting the Holy War, if you like, in sort of more modern terms. I mean, are there the stats to suggest that actually, you know, there are a lot of Jewish killings going on at this time as well? And if so, who's doing it? And is that what is being presented as a justification? Disproportionately, there are many, many more Arabs that are being killed than those members of the Jewish population. At the same time, and we see this happening recurringly in other colonial wars, where the killings of the, in this case, the Jewish population, if we looked in Kenya, in the European population that is there, there tends to be sort of an overstatement, not just in terms of the killings, but in how it's being done. Right. And so often there's these word tales of people being roused from their bed and killed in the middle of the night. We hear this before when we talked about the high commissioner talking about during the day, everything is relatively peaceful. At night, we have all this violence. I mean, if we put ourselves in that moment, you are a minority population in the context of a group that is in revolt that wants to drive you out of a land that you believe is rightfully your own, that is the Jewish population. And you have every reason. to be terrified. Every reason to be terrified. And so in this sense, Wingate comes in, he wants

to call this Gideon forces, right? He really wants a biblical name to his forces, that there is something about this, that they are enforcing the biblical terms of Christian Zionism in his mind. And I think that we have this combination, which makes it so terribly lethal of the ideology around that with what is ruthless, brutal tactics by the special night squads. His special contribution is that he sees these isolated Jewish communities, these new kibbutzim, but also some of the more sort of fortress-like outposts which are built, isolated from the main centres of Jewish immigration as almost frontier posts. And Wingate goes into those fortresses and he encourages them to come out of their defensive stockades and take the insurgency back to the Arab villages at night, to fight at night against them, not just lurk behind the stockade. That's his contribution,

really, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's a combination of, to your point, William, what he's bringing by tactics, by ideology, but this galvanizing force, you know, and I say in the book that there's a sense of pride, and I'm using this absolutely in quotes, where members of the Jewish population who are part of the special night forces are saying, we are no longer seen as, quote, unquote, sort of grubby shopkeepers. We are truly a fighting force. And they talk about this in the context of fighting in brigades in the First World War, and they talk about this in the context of these special night forces. Now, in front of enough, it's in Gaza that you see some of the first reactions against the Palestinian revolt. Farmers seeing their harvest of barley

and citrus fruit rotting because they can't be gathered in, ask for the strikes to be suspended. And you see this throughout Palestine. People have had enough of this revolt by 1939. And in response, partly to these brutal anti-insurgency techniques and concentration camps and torture, but also just from exhaustion and from economic attrition. Many of the local Palestinians and some of the Palestinian leaders basically ask for a truce that they want the revolt to calm down and they want to pursue peaceful methods rather than continue this insurgency. Twenty-five thousand members of the security forces, members of the Jewish population and sort of seconded are brought into things like the Special Night Squads.

Think about these numbers, the use of RAF planes coming down, guns blazing into villages, and the reports that are coming out of absolute horror from archbishops to colonial welfare officers to observers and journalists. And then there's Jamal al-Husani, who is the Mufti's cousin, who is really recognized and quite respected by the international population as being sort of a peripatetic statesman who, again, he writes to the PMC, and he writes to the PMC in 1939, and details, in gruesome detail, the scorching of body parts, and he's not the first to write to them. And in some ways, you have to think, as all of us, as historians, that he had to, and then maybe this is just my imagination,

in the moment, think that he was writing this for the right. record, right? That he's putting this down towards and he's asking and he lays out horrific tortures that are going on. And he says, if the British are innocent of these horrible crimes, surely they would want an independent investigation to clear their good name. And of course, the British say, why should we do this at all? We're not going to sully the name of Britain or pay any attention this because this is even beyond reproach. British soldiers don't do this. And of course, He sends this off, and then, as we know, he never gets a response. And he never gets a response because in September of 1939, Germany invades Poland, they're all onto something else. And of course,

at that moment, the Permanent Mandates Commission and the League of Nations really ceases to exist as we know it. And Britain takes a much different stand in how to address all of this. Even before, you know, the Declaration of War and the entry of Britain into the war, it's May 1939. So the revolt has been put down with, as you've described, some of the heaviest, harshest tactics known in empire. But the British issue, something called a new white paper on Palestine, because they realise that whatever they've done is going to leave such rage and anger among the local population, which outnumbers, as you've already pointed out, the Jewish population's there. So, I mean, they introduced this new white paper, and just to explain what a white paper is,

It's a formal government document that lays out proposals, blueprints, arguments for a certain strategy in policy. Some people call it a draft bill. So even before a bill is presented to the House, a white paper is produced. And this white paper, Caroline, is supposed to win over Arab opinion because, you know, the Second World War is on the horizon. As you say, months away. So this white paper is introduced in May of 1939. War will begin in September 1939 for Britain. What is this sort of magical trick that the white paper is supposed to do

to erase what has gone on in the last 18 months? The British introduced this 1939 white paper. And remember, this happens because the Permanent Mandates Commission, getting back to Balfour is the rule of the land. Once the League of Nations begins to no longer exist and the Permanent Mandits Commission is disbanded, the British finally come in and are able to change, policy. And they come in with the 1939. And what they decide is that they're going to cap

Jewish immigration numbers, 15,000 each year for five years, for a total 75,000. And this would raise the population of the ishuv to about 35% of the total population. And that ultimately, if there were going to be any more immigrants allowed into Palestine, it would need the approval of the local Arab population. To think about for a moment, just contemplate the degree to which they held the line, the British, on immigration and land purchases throughout the 1930s, then when given the opportunity, because they're doing this, because they feel as though the Jewish population has no choice but to support them because of what's going on in Europe with the Nazis, and that at this point they need to shore up Arab support for World War II.

And not just in Palestine, of course. They want Arab support in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt. So they are more than willing at this point to sacrifice on the altar of British interests, and expediency, the members of the Jewish population who at this point need the immigration exit more than ever. And there are many reasons for this, right? The Americans are horrendous. This is probably for another episode. The Americans are not letting in the Jewish immigrants in any meaningful way. And so at this point, though, for our purposes, they introduce a quota with the White Paper of 1939 and Ben Gurian and Whiteman, and they are outraged. They have never been so betrayed than they have by the British with their white paper of 1939 and they make no bones about

it. With the coming of the war, they're going to support Britain and the empire, but they're going to fight the white paper of 1939 with every ounce of their being. So the stage is set. The world is at war and some of the worst violence has been unleashed in an area that Britain now needs. If you want extra content alongside the series, we have a brilliant bonus coming out next week. about the history of the Palestinian black and white scarf, the Kaffir, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and resistance. It is actually a really ancient garment. It's something that was worn by rural workers in the Ottoman period, guerrilla fighters in 1936 during the Arab Revolt. And now you see it on your news screens every night, every time you watch the news and there's a pro-Palestinian protest.

But if you want to listen to this, as well as our bonus on Palestinian literature with the wonderful Selma Dabag, join Empire Club now at Emanuel. Empirepod UK.com. That's Empirepoduk.com. That's it for this episode. Our huge thanks to Caroline Elkins, thank you so much for leading us through this. Join us next time when we discuss the creation of Israel. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And from me, William Dhrumple.