Orde Wingate, The Pious Heretic
By Talia Dror and Jordan Hirsch
is a deployment strategist at Palantir. Jordan Hirsch is a Senior Counselor at Palantir.
I.
In July 1938, in an Arab settlement just east of Nazareth, British captain Orde Wingate stood with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Armed and ready to take on Arabs revolting against British rule and Jewish immigration, his men charged, taking their Arab adversaries by surprise. Early in the battle, Wingate began bleeding profusely from enemy bullets, but he did not stop commanding operations until his forces won.
The battle of Dabburiya embodied Wingate’s heady brew of eccentricity and genius. Wingate struck many as odd in his mannerisms — he enjoyed stringing raw onions around his neck for snacking and drinking tea through his socks — and in his deep Christian faith, which included relying on the Bible as an accurate battlefield guide. Yet he was a brilliant strategist willing to buck his superiors both in his unconventional tactics and in his willingness to support Zionism as much of the British establishment drifted toward appeasing Arab interests. Wingate’s apostasies won him many foes and many admirers, among them Winston Churchill, who called him a “man of the highest quality.”
Wingate imparted his blend of unyielding principle and healthy heresy to a vanguard of Jewish fighters — including future Israeli leaders Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon — laying the groundwork for what would become the Israeli Defense Forces. The resilience and ingenuity that enabled the IDF to recover from the shocks of October 7th, 2023, and reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East, are, in many ways, a legacy of Wingate's iconoclasm.
II.
On paper, Wingate was a quintessential British imperial soldier. Born in India, the son of Christian missionaries and distant cousin of Lawrence of Arabia (whom he considered a charlatan), he graduated from the Royal Military Academy and served everywhere from Libya to Burma. Yet despite his sterling resume, Wingate was a renegade — a tendency which emerged early in his career. When subjected to the humiliating ritual of "running" by fellow cadets — a hazing ritual where cadets were forced to run gauntlets while being hit — Wingate defied convention by standing before his tormentors, looking each in the eye, slowly removing his clothing, and then diving into the water tank. Not a single cadet dared to hit him.
Following a five-year posting in Sudan, in 1936, Wingate was dispatched to British Mandatory Palestine as an intelligence officer. He arrived at the outset of the Arab Revolt, the most serious uprising against British colonial rule and increasing Jewish immigration. Beginning with a general strike, the rebellion escalated into widespread guerrilla warfare, with Arab fighters sabotaging infrastructure and targeting common British soldiers and high-ranking officials alike.
As the war progressed, British officialdom turned against the Zionist cause, fearful that events in Palestine could alienate the broader Arab world as the Nazi menace grew. Even so, Britain was determined to show resolve by suppressing the revolt. Stretched thin across its vast empire and cognizant of the increasing danger in Europe, London needed help. Reluctantly, it turned to Palestine’s Jewish community, which had not received prior British approval to establish an offensive fighting force of any kind. Wingate would play a crucial role in training this force and establishing it as the nucleus of the future Jewish army.
Unlike many of his peers and superiors, Wingate became a staunch Zionist. Upon his arrival to Mandatory Palestine, Wingate began reading about the history of the land and its continuous Jewish presence and taught himself Hebrew. Inspired by his missionary parents, he saw the words of the Bible coming to fruition as the children of Abraham attempted to resettle their ancestral homeland. Wingate felt it was his duty to defy the British military establishment and support the Jewish cause.
Wingate proposed creating a commando force, relying on flexibility and mobility, that could pressure Arab insurgents that theretofore dominated smaller villages and the countryside. Many British officials blanched at the idea of arming Jews to fight Arabs — still more so at the thought of the unorthodox Wingate in command — but Wingate bypassed the chain of command, obtaining permission directly from the commander of Britain’s forces in the region, General Archibald Wavell.
Wingate established what he called the Special Night Squads (SNS) base at Kibbutz Ein Harod in northern Israel — a decision with operational and religious implications. The Kibbutz (a communal agricultural settlement) is located on a hill opposite Mount Gilboa in the Galilee, providing a full view of the surrounding valley. It was no coincidence that according to the Bible, Wingate’s biblical hero, Gideon, led the Israelites to victory in a battle against the Midianites nearly 3,000 years prior from the same location.
Wingate trained his squad in tactics far different to those employed by British regulars. He taught them offensive maneuvers, such as how to preemptively target villages to achieve complete surprise or how to make two raids in quick succession in disparate parts of the country. It took little time before the rebels began to fear the SNS. The SNS’s ambushes preempted saboteurs targeting the oil pipeline from Iraq to Haifa, a critical source of British fuel, with single squads defeating larger opponents. Wingate’s forces gathered detailed intelligence that enabled them to raid insurgent bases, an unprecedented approach for the British at the time.
Critics said that Wingate’s tactics were particularly severe, in some cases crossing a moral line. Wingate did undertake harsh measures against enemy fighters and civilians. In that regard, he did not significantly depart from wider British practices during the Revolt, in a conflict that featured excesses and brutalities on both sides. Within two years, the SNS ended Arab attacks on the oil pipeline and significantly dampened the insurgency in the north. For his success, Wingate received the Distinguished Service Order.
After his injury in the battle of Daburriya in 1938, Wingate requested home leave. During his absence, British policy toward the Mandate shifted rapidly. As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acceded Czechoslovakia to Germany, his government simultaneously sent reinforcements to Palestine to end the rebellion and prepared to end support for a Jewish national home. When Wingate returned to Palestine, he was removed from command of the SNS, and due to his continued advocacy for the Zionist cause — at times more vigorous than that of the Zionist leadership itself — Wavell transferred him to Ethiopia to wage a counterinsurgency against occupying Italian forces.
Wingate never again saw Palestine. Although Wingate succeeded in Ethiopia, his support for Ethiopian independence and disdain for authority irritated his commanders, who exiled him to Cairo. Driven to attempt suicide, Wingate recovered, and Wavell recruited him to command a guerrilla operation behind enemy lines in Burma. Wingate’s forces helped to halt Japan’s advance and demonstrate that Tokyo’s forces could be beaten. Ever on the hunt for mavericks, Winston Churchill called Wingate to London to meet in person, insisting that seniority must not “obstruct the advance of real personalities to their proper stations in war.” Wingate returned to Burma a Major General and launched an ambitious second campaign against Japan that drew on his innovations in the SNS. Three weeks in, however, he died in a plane crash, and without his leadership, the offensive faltered.
III.
Wingate was a polarizing figure, remembered either as “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny,” in the words of Churchill, or as a vainglorious knight errant by his detractors. Wingate’s eccentricities fueled such suspicions; his religiosity alienated cosmopolitan elements of British leadership. But there is little doubt that his disregard for rank and protocol fueled his creativity.
Moreover, Wingate’s commitment to the Zionist cause — borne from his iconoclasm — proved crucial to its success. Wingate prized experimentation and merit, empowering junior leaders to act independently and seize the initiative. His risk-taking, adaptability, and innovation, which he imparted to key figures like Dayan, defined the ethos of the IDF, enabling its victories against numerically superior opponents in later wars. That same ethos later permeated Israel’s technology sector, helping to seed a technology sector arguably topped only by Silicon Valley in its dynamism. In some way, the Startup Nation can trace its spiritual DNA back to a Christian Zionist borne from missionaries stationed in India, whose biblical faith and tactical heterodoxy made him the consummate heretic and hero.