Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler

Author:Oren Kessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Army of Zion

The Holy Land has lured eccentrics for centuries, but in Palestine’s modern history one stands alone. Orde Wingate would contribute more than any figure outside the Yishuv to the creation of Jewish military power, and almost single-handedly foreshadow the future phenomenon of militant Christian Zionism. Fundamentalist, individualist, Arabist, and Zionist, he was a distant cousin of T. E. Lawrence (whom he thought a charlatan) and would earn the epithet (which he loathed) of Lawrence of Judea.22

Wingate’s upbringing foretold his fate: For several generations his family had cultivated the traditions of Bible and sword. His grandfather, a shipping heir, had undergone a religious awakening after his wife’s premature death and devoted the rest of his life to converting the Jews to Christ. Wingate’s father, a colonel in India’s Northwest Frontier, joined the Plymouth Brethren, an austere non-conformist sect, and worked to bring the fervently Islamic Pashtuns to the Gospel—at forty-six he married a considerably younger woman from another Brethren family.

Orde, their first son, grew up with six siblings in a large Victorian house in a market town south of London. A sister described their father as “the most unhappy, the most lonely creature” she had ever known. He often beat his children, and as eldest, “Ordey” bore the brunt. The home was never heated; in winter they had only overcoats and visions of hellfire (“the perpetual fear of damnation,” she remembered) to keep warm. On Sundays they wore black, with mornings taken up by religious devotions and afternoons by Bible study. A “temple of gloom,” said a brother, “the most poisonous and repressive religious atmosphere that it is possible to conceive.”

At the elite Charterhouse school Wingate went mostly unnoticed. One remembered him as a “little rat-like fellow”; another, as a “small uncommunicative untidy little scalliwag with a stooping gait.” Yet even if the boy resented his father (he left no recollections this way or that), the patriarch’s sober piety had sunk in his bones. At free time, when the others rushed to soccer or cricket, Orde could reliably be found in chapel at prayer. On one occasion, when a schoolmate told him his parents were taking him to a Sunday concert, he reacted in horror: “If you go you will bring your soul into danger of hell-fire!” On another, someone pointed out a small, pale, and generally unremarkable boy whom he said was Jewish. “How extraordinary!” Wingate marveled, “There is somebody who is a descendant of David!”

He stayed true to the family’s martial tradition as well. His father’s cousin was General Reginald Wingate, formerly commander of British forces in the Hejaz and governor in Sudan and Egypt. Wingate idolized his “Cousin Rex,” and was seized by a powerful prophecy (they visited him regularly throughout his life) that a second world war was imminent. He enlisted in officer’s school, earned a commission at an artillery base near Stonehenge, and passed the time undramatically in hunting, horsemanship, and prodigious reading. Inspired by his Cousin Rex, he learned Arabic at London’s School of Oriental Studies and sought a posting in Sudan, where the family name was already famous.

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