While conducting research in Washington recently, I took a break and looked up an old friend. A cab brought me to his “neighborhood”—the Arlington National Cemetery—where the information center provided me with his exact address: section 12, grave number 288. This was the final resting place of Maj.-Gen. Orde Wingate, a British officer widely regarded as the father of modern guerrilla warfare. A brilliant tactician and a daring innovator, Wingate was credited by many with turning the tide against Axis forces in Ethiopia and Burma during World War II. Winston Churchill hailed him as “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny.”¹ Yet Wingate had his share of detractors, as well; if some admired him as a hero and a visionary, others denigrated him as an egotist, an eccentric, even a madman.

On one point all his observers agree: Wingate was a Zionist. An implacable advocate for Jewish statehood in the late 1930s, when the British had all but abandoned their promise to create a homeland for the Jews, he formed and led the Special Night Squads (SNS), a Jewish fighting force that saved dozens of settlements from destruction during the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) and trained military leaders such as Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, who would later form the core of the Israel Defense Forces. Wingate dreamed of one day commanding the first Jewish army in two thousand years, and of leading the fight to establish an independent Jewish state in the land of Israel.

A vivid literature has grown up around Wingate. The earliest books about him were penned by war correspondents and comrades-in-arms, mostly those who served with him during the campaigns in Burma and Ethiopia. Slender works by Charles Rolo, Bernard Fergusson, Wilfred Burchett, Leonard Mosley and many others told of Wingate’s dash and endurance, his coolness under fire and his unflagging leadership.² But for every favorable account of Wingate, another emerged assailing him. Particularly censorious were Britain’s official military historians, I.S.O. Playfair and Woodburn Kirby.³ Though bound by tradition to be dispassionate and fair, these writers went out of their way to denounce Wingate as solipsistic, unstable and impudent.

So contrasting were these portraits that additional works were later written—most notably Peter Mead’s Orde Wingate and the Historians and David Rooney’s Wingate and the Chindits—to reconcile them. A more nuanced Wingate also emerged from a number of biographies, which went beyond specific military campaigns to cover his entire life. Orde Wingate by Christopher Sykes highlighted the pivotal place that Zionism held in Wingate’s thinking. Exhaustive in its details, scrupulously balanced, the book remained ambivalent about its subject, much as Sykes was about Zionism in general. Wingate becomes more categorical and sympathetic in Trevor Royle’s biography, Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier, published in 1995. Though Royle provides few additional facts beyond those put forth by Sykes, by adopting a less academic tone he makes Wingate more accessible.⁴

These biographies continued what was essentially an internal British debate. In Israel, on the other hand, history books and school texts have always lauded Wingate as a heroic, larger-than-life figure to whom the Jewish people owed a deep and enduring debt. Israel Carmi, who had fought under Wingate in the SNS, portrayed his contribution to the Zionist effort in glowing terms in a memoir, In the Path of Fighters, while Avraham Akavia, another SNS veteran, sympathetically depicted his commander’s full career in Orde Wingate: His Life and Works.⁵

In recent years, however, as the heroes of the Zionist movement have been increasingly criticized by Israel’s “new historians,” the figure of Wingate has come under fire in the Jewish state. Taking the lead has been the journalist-historian and best-selling author Tom Segev. In March 1999, in reviewing Yigal Eyal’s The First Intifada, a study of the Arab Revolt, Segev described Wingate as “quite mad, and perhaps a sadist, too,” and reproved Eyal for “turn[ing] a blind eye to the war crimes committed by Orde Wingate and his men.”⁶ In his own book published a few months later, Days of the Anemones: Palestine During the Mandatory Period, Segev portrays Wingate as delusional and homicidal, “a madman” who “employed terror against terror.” Though he does cite praise for Wingate from David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Sharett, Segev refuses to grant him any redeeming qualities, even as a military commander.⁷

One might have expected the wholesale disparagement of a man who had until now been universally revered by Israelis to spark a wave of criticism. Instead, Segev’s revisionist view has hardly been noticed by the Israeli press. One prominent exception was Gideon Levy, a columnist for the daily Ha’aretz, who wrote an article in July 1999 praising Segev’s exposure of Wingate as “an oddball with sadistic tendencies” and a “villain” who “tortured Arabs.” Segev has performed an invaluable service by exposing “the dark sides” of the Wingate myth, Levy wrote, and called for the inclusion of those “dark sides” in the public school curriculum.⁸ So successful was Segev in recasting Wingate’s image that a month later, in reviewing a new biography of Israel’s first Sephardi chief rabbi for Ha’aretz, Yehiam Padan noted regretfully that Wingate “was, until this year, considered a friend of Israel.”⁹ Though calls to change the way Israelis are taught about Wingate have not yet been heeded—most textbooks continue to portray him glowingly—the Education Ministry’s recently published history text, A World of Changes (1999), is the first government-sponsored textbook covering this period to ignore Wingate’s contributions to Zionism entirely.¹⁰

It is significant, then, that just as Wingate has come under fire in Israel, a new biography by British authors has appeared casting him in a positive light. Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion by John Bierman and Colin Smith, is the most comprehensive biography to date. Here, Wingate appears in his full complexity, his pugnaciousness and peculiarities, his brilliance and courage. It is a book that must be read by anyone who wishes to understand this influential Zionist figure.

Journalists stationed in Cyprus, Bierman and Smith have extensive experience covering the Middle East, and show no particular affection for Israel. On the contrary, their text bristles with barbs against the Jewish state (“not quite the ‘light unto nations’” that Wingate intended) and its army (a tool of “territorial expansion,” demolishing Arab houses "con brio on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip”).¹¹ But despite their feelings for Israel, and despite their failure to consult the wealth of Hebrew-language sources about Wingate—surely the book’s greatest flaw—Fire in the Night captures the nature of Wingate’s Zionism, and the impact it had on his actions in Palestine. Wingate, the authors realize, saw Jewish independence in the land of Israel as more than just a historical imperative. It was the driving force of his life.

Charles Orde Wingate was born in 1903, one of seven children in a strict Protestant family. “On Sundays,” write Bierman and Smith, “the entire family dressed in black, attended… prayer meetings… in the morning, and devoted the rest of the day to Bible studies and other ‘improving’ pastimes.”¹² Both his father and grandfather were army officers who became missionaries, and were devoted, among other pursuits, to converting the Jews. Though often poor, the Wingates came from distinguished Norman and Scottish stock, and among Orde’s prominent cousins were Sir Reginald Wingate, the governor of Sudan, and T.E. Lawrence, who gained fame for his exploits in Arabia during World War I.

As a student, Wingate proved to be unexceptional, disinterested in sports and socially inept. Though often discouraged and depressed, Wingate harbored a strong sense of his own destiny, a conviction that he was fated to do great things, lead armies, liberate nations. After graduating from military academy in 1923, he mastered Arabic at London’s School of Oriental Studies and secured a post with the Sudan Defense Force. Fighting bandits, he developed the hit-and-run and night-fighting tactics he would later use, to such devastating effect, in much larger battles. “A most successful expedition conducted with great dash and judgment,” the force’s commander commented on one long-range patrol which Wingate commanded.¹³ Yet Wingate also experienced prolonged bouts of depression—“nervous attacks,” he called them, which he was able to endure only by ceaseless repetition of the phrase “God is good”—and began exhibiting some of the eccentricity that later became his trademark: Eating raw onions, steeping tea through his socks, greeting guests in the nude.

In the Sudan in 1933 Wingate became fascinated, as were many explorers at the time, by the prospects of finding the mythic oasis of Zerzura. Planning an expedition to locate it, he corresponded with Count Laudislaus Almasy, the renowned Hungarian archaeologist who would later serve as the model for The English Patient. Though Wingate never found Zerzura, he conducted pioneering cartographic research that was hailed by the Royal Geographic Society. En route to present his findings in London, he met a beautiful, independent-minded and outspoken young woman, Lorna Patterson, whom he married soon afterward.

In September 1936, Wingate was assigned to an intelligence post with the British Mandatory forces in Palestine, and given the rank of captain. Previously, he had had no close relations with Jews and no direct knowledge of Zionism. This would change radically, as would the course of his life, over the following weeks. Though his linguistic training and military experience predisposed him to accept the pro-Arab views of most British officials, Wingate began to read intensively about the history of Palestine and the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and emerged a committed Zionist. He visited Jewish settlements around the country, taught himself Hebrew, and earned the trust and friendship of Zionist leaders Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Sharett. Critiquing British policy in Palestine in a letter to his cousin Reginald, Wingate wrote:

The Jews are loyal to the empire. The Jews are men of their word—they have always been so—in fact it is the gentile’s main complaint against them. There are fifteen million Jews in the world. Palestine will take over a million within seven years. You can have no idea of what they have already done here. You would be amazed to see the desert blossom like a rose; intensive horticulture everywhere—such energy, faith, ability and inventiveness as the world has not seen. I have seen the young Jews in the kvutzot [kibbutzim]. I tell you that the Jews will provide soldiery better than ours. We have only to train it. They will equip it.¹⁴

Wingate urged Britain to “advance the foundation of an autonomous Jewish community with all the means in its power,” adding portentously: “For pity’s sake, let us do something just and honorable before it [world war] comes. Let us redeem our promises to Jewry and shame the devil of Nazism, Fascism and our own prejudices.”¹⁵

Wingate was eager to dedicate his talents to this cause, and he did not have far to look. The grand mufti of Jerusalem had recently launched a coordinated military and economic rebellion aimed at ousting the British from Palestine and bringing the Zionist enterprise to an end. This insurrection was then at its apogee, with Jewish settlements cut off and thrown on the defensive. Wingate proposed to create units of swift-moving, hard-hitting commandos who would take the initiative and strike Arab guerrillas in the villages that hosted them. The notion of arming Jews against the Arabs appalled the British authorities, but Wingate outflanked them, taking his plan to the commander of Britain’s Middle East forces, Gen. Archibald Wavell, who would remain his mentor throughout the campaigns of Palestine, Ethiopia and Burma.

With Wavell’s approval, Wingate set up the Special Night Squads, a mixed force of British officers and Jewish supernumeraries. Headquartered at Kibbutz Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley, close to the spring where the biblical Gideon—Wingate’s hero—had his camp, the SNS succeeded in all but ending Arab attacks in the north. An entire generation of future IDF commanders would learn their tactics from Wingate, adopt his disregard for rank and protocol, and accept his demand that officers set an example by leading their men into battle—the origin of the legendary IDF battle cry aharai (“after me”). “You are the first soldiers of the Jewish army,” he would remind his men before embarking on a mission, and he would declaim to them passages from the Bible describing the country they would pass through and prophesying their victory.¹⁶ For them, Wingate was never Orde, or even “commander,” but simply hayedid—the friend.

Wingate’s comrades and subordinates, Christians and Jews alike, would remember him as a man of unlimited stamina, with an uncanny sense of direction and a total absence of fear. “A most extraordinary man,” said Lt. Rex King-Clark. Capt. John Hackett painted him as a “puritanical, fire-eating, dedicated, Round Head type Cromwellian soldier with a Bible in one hand and an alarm clock in the other.” “We were amazed,” recalled SNS veteran Tzvi Brenner, describing his first patrol with Wingate. “Only he was capable of leading us in such territory and with such confidence.”¹⁷ In a skirmish at Dabburiya in July 1938, Wingate was struck by a number of bullets early on and was bleeding profusely, but continued to give orders until his men had won the battle—an act of heroism for which the British army awarded him one of its highest honors, the Distinguished Service Order.

But there was also a less heroic side to Wingate: An irascible, moody, mercurial side. He was known to strike soldiers who disappointed him, and to employ collective punishment against Arab villagers suspected of aiding guerrillas. Bierman and Smith describe how, after learning of the murder of his close friend, Ein Harod leader Haim Sturmann (“A great Jew,” Wingate eulogized him, “a friend of the Arabs, who was killed by the Arabs”¹⁸), the commander of the SNS led his men in a rampage in the Arab section of Beit Shean, the rebels’ suspected base. During the raid, Wingate’s forces damaged property and wounded several people—a number of them mortally, according to some accounts.¹⁹

For the British army, though, it was not Wingate’s excesses that proved insufferable but his advocacy of, and success with, the Jews. Thus, when Wingate requested home leave to London a few weeks after he was wounded at Dabburiya (and in the wake of narrowly escaping assassination at the hands of Arab assailants), his superiors were only too happy to comply. It was October 1938, the time of the Munich Conference and Britain’s sellout of Czechoslovakia, and of the beginning of Britain’s final retreat from the promises of the Balfour Declaration. Wingate took advantage of his time in London to lobby tirelessly for the Zionist cause. He urged the Zionist leadership to present Britain with an ultimatum—either honor its pledges or forfeit the Jews’ loyalty—and argued the Zionist case in the press and before Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald. Returning to Palestine in December, he found himself barred from further contact with the SNS, which was disbanded soon thereafter, and transferred back to Britain.

In May 1939, the notorious White Paper was issued, imposing crippling restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine. Wingate, however, remained undeterred. With the outbreak of World War II, he campaigned for the immediate creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and a Jewish army, which he saw as “a necessity of the moral strategy of this war… for human justice and freedom.”²⁰ He nearly fell out with the Zionist leadership, which he found insufficiently aggressive in pressing these demands. Further friction was averted when Wavell ordered Wingate to Ethiopia, there to apply his guerrilla tactics to defeating the Italian fascists.

Wingate’s efforts in Ethiopia were crowned with success. With a meager assemblage of British officers and mountain tribesmen—Gideon Force, he called it—Wingate, now a lieutenant colonel, succeeded in tricking an enemy column fourteen thousand strong into surrendering, and then rode a white horse into newly liberated Addis Ababa.

Willing though he was to die for it, Ethiopia was for Wingate merely a means of returning to Palestine with a higher rank and greater influence in the army. Throughout the campaign, he insisted on keeping an SNS veteran, Avraham Akavia, as his aide-de-camp, and on using doctors from Jewish Palestine to treat his wounded. On Passover, Wingate held a field seder for his Jewish troops, delivering what Akavia called “a moving Zionist speech.”²¹

As in Palestine, Wingate alienated his superiors in Ethiopia with his arrogance, his disdain for hierarchy and his support for the country’s independence from all empires, whether Italian or British. “To give the black races of Africa a chance to realize a free civilization,” he wrote at the height of the battles there, “is a worthy cause for which to die and more worthy than a mere defense of one’s own midden.”²² And while Wingate was again commended for bravery for his efforts in Ethiopia, the army leadership never forgave him for his insolence and his support for native independence. Posted to Cairo to await reassignment, Wingate languished there for months while the battle for North Africa raged. Idle, depressed and suffering from severe malaria, he took a knife to his own throat one night in July 1941. He survived the attempt, and during his long and painful convalescence, shunned by fellow officers, he received a long line of visitors from Palestine, including David Ben-Gurion.

Wingate’s saga might have ended there had Wavell not again intervened. Now commander of the Far East Theater, the general accepted Wingate’s plan for a “long-range penetration unit” to work behind enemy lines in Burma. The Japanese, whom the British believed to be invincible in the jungle, were at the time poised to invade India. Wingate’s raiders—“Chindits,” he later called them, after the mythic Burmese lion—were something of a last hope. Though the army continued to resist his efforts, Wingate managed to construct his force and, in January 1943, march it across the Chinese Himalayas into Burma.

The fighting was brutal. A third of Wingate’s men were lost, and most of the remainder rendered unfit for service. Yet the Chindits succeeded in thwarting Japan’s invasion plans, and in shattering the myth of Japanese supremacy. Wingate returned to find himself a celebrity and a favorite of Prime Minister Churchill, who took him and Lorna to meet President Roosevelt at the Allied summit in Quebec. There, before the leaders of the free world, he presented his plan for using light, mobile forces to defeat the Japanese in Burma, and it was accepted. After years of vilification by his superiors in the army, Wingate was at last vindicated. But for him, the impact of his success was to be measured not in Burma but in Palestine. His dream remained to return to “Eretz Israel,” as he referred to it, and to farm the soil until called upon to lead the Jewish army to victory and independence. In one of his last letters to Lorna, who was no less ardent a Zionist, Wingate wrote a transliteration of the Hebrew verse “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its strength,” adding his prayer that “our lot takes us there together, to the place and the work we love.”²³

By early 1944, Wingate, now a major general, commanded a Chindit force four times as large as the first. He led his men back into Burma, but on March 24, while flying to a forward position, the Mitchell bomber carrying him crashed in the jungle. No identifiable remains of Wingate were ever found, save for his trademark pith helmet. Charges of foul play were later raised and never conclusively settled. Since five out of the nine men aboard the Mitchell bomber were Americans, their common remains-several pounds of bones-were interred at ArlingtonNationalCemetery, far from the places in which Wingate was revered as a hero.

Orde Wingate, who had just turned forty-one when he was killed, never saw his son Jonathan who was born two months later, nor did he see the birth of the Jewish state he so longed for. That state would memorialize him, though, in the Wingate sports village near Netanya and the Yemin Orde immigrants’ school near Haifa, and in the names of dozens of streets and squares throughout the country.

 

The Wingate of Fire in the Night is an astounding, quirky and poignantly human figure, who stands in utter contrast to the cold and one-dimensional killer depicted by Tom Segev in Days of the Anemones. It is tempting to explain the difference on the grounds that Segev had access to material from Hebrew-speaking soldiers and politicians who presumably observed Wingate’s defects up close. Yet the Hebrew sources are overwhelmingly flattering to Wingate. The answer lies, rather, in the perspective that Segev brought to his writing, and in the way he used these sources.

For example, one of Segev’s principal aims is to demonstrate that opposition to Wingate came not only from British higher-ups, but also from the Jewish leadership in Palestine. To this end, he quotes a senior yishuv leader, Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), telling the Jewish Agency Executive that Wingate’s SNS efforts had encountered “serious obstacles from some of our best people,” who claimed that operations of this sort “are not appropriate for us.” Segev then paraphrases Shertok, writing: “They feared that it would spoil forever any chance of coexistence with the Arabs.”²⁴ But what Shertok really said was:

They [the operations] will invariably spoil relations with the neighboring Arab villages. These operations, they believe, can only be carried out by an army, and not by our settlements. The reason is that in many cases these operations do not receive the necessary support, not in their initial pioneering phases and not even later, when the operations are approved by the authorities.²⁵

In other words, the reason “some of our best people” opposed the SNS was not, as Segev claims, because they threatened Arab-Jewish harmony, but because the British were unwilling to back up the operations with sufficient firepower, leaving the settlements exposed. The problem was not that the SNS were too strong, but that they were not strong enough. Segev also chooses to omit Shertok’s call, made in the same speech, for “expanding the range of operation and enhancing the offensive element in our defense power,” as well as his depiction of Wingate as “that officer so committed to us in heart and soul.”²⁶

Similarly, Segev claims that Wingate’s Jewish soldiers in the SNS accused him of being insane: “Behind his back, they said he was crazy,” Segev writes.²⁷ A footnote to that assertion leads the reader to the testimony in the Central Zionist Archives of Haim Levkov, a member of the SNS who reported that another SNS fighter, Israel Carmi, had on one occasion referred to Wingate as “crazy” after an argument.²⁸ As it turns out, “They” did not call Wingate crazy behind his back. Only a single man did so, once, and that man, Israel Carmi, later became one of Wingate’s most devoted followers, even writing a book filled with praise for his former commander.

Indeed, an inspection of the sources on which Segev draws to show that Wingate’s men disapproved of their commander reveals repeated expressions of admiration for Wingate from those who served under him. Thus, Segev quotes from Zion Cohen’s From Teheran and Back to buttress his allegations about Wingate’s cruelty,²⁹ but he sidesteps Cohen’s praise of Wingate as “a great and loyal friend of the Jewish people and of the Jewish yishuv… [who] laid the foundations of the Israel Defence Forces…."³⁰ Nor is Segev interested in Haim Levkov’s testimony when he speaks in admiration of Wingate: “Everything about his demeanor—his ability to advance without scouts, without fear—instilled in me a sense of confidence, that we were marching with a man who knew what lay ahead.”³¹ Segev cites the testimony of another SNS member, identified only as “Efraim,” to show that Wingate occasionally concocted harebrained battle plans that he never carried out,³² yet ignored Efraim’s observations about Wingate when they were positive, including the following:

It is difficult to gauge the impact of his [i.e., Wingate’s] deeds and operations for the sake of our security, for the benefits he brought to our enterprise were great in such a short life. There is no real expression that can convey our feelings and respect for the man and his actions. All we can say, in our humble way, is that his example and his faith will stand before us forever, and that by their light we will continue to build and defend this land.³³

Segev likewise goes to extreme lengths to prove that Wingate was ruthless and cruel. One passage has Wingate storming into the Arab village of Danna, ordering the adult males to strip, and then whipping them. “It was a horrifying sight,” recalls an SNS veteran in a testimony cited by Segev and filed in the Central Zionist Archives.³⁴ Yet a look at the file reveals that the SNS veteran never attributes these actions to Wingate, but rather to an unnamed “British officer.” He describes the cold and rainy conditions in Danna that day, which would hardly accord with the two operations Wingate did conduct in the village, both in the summer. Finally, the testimony places the whipping incident at a time after October 1938, when Wingate was no longer in command of the SNS.³⁵

This is not to say that Wingate was incapable of committing excesses. The Arab Revolt was a particularly brutal conflict in which it was rarely possible to distinguish combatants from civilians, and atrocities were commonplace on both sides. Indeed, one of the rampages Segev attributes to Wingate occurred immediately after the slaughter of nineteen Jews in Tiberias, eleven of whom were children burned to death in their beds. Moreover, as depicted in Fire in the Night, Wingate himself was continually tormented by the moral implications of his military actions, and sought to prevent innocent people from being harmed whenever possible. “Wingate had always stressed that the squads must not mistreat Arab prisoners or civilians,” Bierman and Smith write, even if he “did not always practice what he preached.”³⁶ The authors quote Tzvi Brenner, who worked closely under Wingate in the SNS, as observing:

The problem of punishment and… the morality of battle was something which concerned Wingate greatly. On the one hand, he demanded that the innocent not be harmed. On the other hand, he knew that he faced a dilemma: Can one observe this rule in battle against gangs which receive assistance from the residents of the villages?³⁷

This, of course, has been a central moral question facing military officers around the world, including in Israel, from Wingate’s time until today: How is one to fight an enemy bent on blurring the lines between the military and civilian, and using that ambiguity to its advantage? To dismiss all operations on what appear to be “civilian” targets as morally indefensible, as Segev appears to do, is as unfair as it is simplistic in the context of a vicious guerrilla war such as the one in which Wingate was engaged.

 

Yet even if one grants that Wingate’s behavior occasionally crossed the line of what was morally appropriate, there is still something misguided about placing these errors, as Segev and others do, at the heart of an overall assessment of the man’s life and work. A clear example is a letter to the editor written by Tel Aviv University historian and geographer Dan Yahav, in reaction to a balanced and judicious review of Fire in the Night in February of this year by Benny Landau of Ha’aretz.³⁸ Yahav accused Landau of underemphasizing Wingate’s negative features, and denounced Wingate as a man who “viewed reality through the sight of a gun,” who “dealt in collective punishments, in harming innocent people, in looting, in arbitrary killing… and in unrestrained degradation.”³⁹

Such critics of Wingate ignore the fact that the British commander devoted himself to bringing independence to the Jews at a time when the use of force was an indispensable part of achieving this goal—and when virtually no one else was willing or able to give Palestinian Jewry the assistance they needed to achieve it. It is not as if there were dozens of brilliant British military men who, after the rise of Hitler, extended a hand to the Jews to help them. In fact, there was only one.

Viewed in this context, it is clear that Wingate’s contribution to the cause of the Jewish state was decisive and enduring. Indeed, in spite of the criticism now being leveled against him, supporters of Zionism the world over continue to view Wingate much as he is portrayed in Fire in the Night: A complex figure, but one deserving of respect and gratitude.

That esteem was evident during my visit to the Arlington National Cemetery. Locating a particular grave among the endless and indistinguishable rows can prove daunting, but I was able to find Wingate’s easily. His tomb, alone, was adorned with a number of the small stones that Jews traditionally leave after visiting a gravesite. And under one of those stones, I found a handwritten note. Crumpled, washed out by rain, only a single word of it was still legible. Layedid, it said in Hebrew. To the Friend.

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Michael B. Oren is ’s Ambassador to the . He was formerly a Distinguished Fellow at the in Jerusalem, an academic and research institute, and a contributing editor of AZURE.

 

 

Notes

1.­ John Bierman and Colin Smith, Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion (New York: Random House, 1999).

2.­ Charles Rolo, Wingate’s Raiders (London: Harrap, 1944); Bernard Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin (London: Collins, 1945); Bernard Fergusson, The Wild Green Earth (London: Collins, 1946); Wilfred G. Burchett, Wingate’s Phantom Army (Bombay: Thacker, 1944); Leonard Mosley, Gideon Goes to War (London: Barker, 1955).

3.­ I.S.O. Playfair, ed., The Mediterranean and the Middle East (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1954), vol. i; S. Woodburn Kirby, ed., The War Against Japan (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1957).

4.­ Peter Mead, Orde Wingate and the Historians (Braunton: Merlin, 1987); David Rooney, Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance (London: Arms and Armour, 1994); Christopher Sykes, Orde Wingate (London: Collins, 1959); Trevor Royle, Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).

5.­ Israel Carmi, In the Path of Fighters (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1960) [Hebrew]; Avraham Akavia, Orde Wingate: His Life and Works (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1993). [Hebrew]

6.­ Tom Segev, “When the High Commissioner Had a Toothache,” Ha’aretz, March 13, 1999.

7.­ Tom Segev, Days of the Anemones: Palestine During the Mandatory Period (Jerusalem: Keter, 1999), pp. 348-349, 387. [Hebrew]

8.­ Gideon Levy, “When Will They Teach It in School?” Ha’aretz, June 27, 1999.

9.^­ Yehiam Padan, “The Rabbi, the Grandson and the Angel,” Ha’aretz, August 18, 1999.

10.­ A World of Changes (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and Ma’alot Publishers, 1999). [Hebrew]

11.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, pp. 379, 388, 76.

12.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 11.

13.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 41.

14.­ Royle, Irregular Soldier, p. 105.

15.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 66.

16.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 113.

17.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, pp. 102, 109, 93.

18.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 115.

19.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, pp. 115-116.

20.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 138.

21.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 208.

22.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 190.

23.­ Akavia, Wingate, p. 240.

24.­ Segev, Days of the Anemones, p. 350.  

25.­ Moshe Sharett, Political Diary: 1938 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1972), vol. iii, p. 202. [Hebrew]

26.­ Sharett, Political Diary, p. 202.

27.­ Segev, Days of the Anemones, p. 348.

28.­ Central Zionist Archives (hereafter “CZA”), S25/10685, Haim Levkov’s testimony, p. 2.

29.­ Segev, Days of the Anemones, p. 349.

30.­ Zion Cohen, From Teheran and Back (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1995), p. 56. [Hebrew]

31.­ CZA, S25/10685, Haim Levkov’s testimony, p. 2.

32.­ Segev, Days of the Anemones, p. 349.

33.­ CZA, S25/10685, Efraim’s testimony, p. 4.

34.­ Segev, Days of the Anemones, p. 349.

35.­ CZA, S25/10685, Jonathan’s testimony, p. 3.

36.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 115.

37.­ Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night, p. 115.

38.­ Benny Landau, “Regards from a Friend,” Ha’aretz, February 25, 2000.

39.­ Ha’aretz, March 10, 2000.