Articles

Dr Brian Brivati, Executive Director, Britain Palestine Project

Britain Palestine Project

Nov 08, 2025

Palestine 36 is an excellent film and the first of its kind for the general public.

Below is some very informative background written a few days ago for the film. It is quite long but well worth reading. I obviously have my reservations on the use of the word ‘rebels’ to describe Palestinians who were fighting for their freedom and that of their land.

A new film, Palestine 36, dramatises the harsh military measures used to crush the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. Watching British soldiers blow up homes, punish entire villages, and carry out night raids inevitably evokes comparisons to tactics employed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in illegally occupied territory of the State of Palestine. Many practices that Palestinians face today under illegal Israeli military occupation have deep roots in the British colonial counter-insurgency of the 1930s as shown in the film. [See the BPP webinar with Matthew Hughes, author of Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State and the Arab Revolt, 1936-39 came out with Cambridge University Press in 2019, HERE]

British Counter-Insurgency in the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt

The Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was a mass uprising by Palestinian Arabs against British colonial rule and growing Zionist immigration – beginning as a strike it turned in phases into a full scale insurgency. As Matthew Hughes and Charles Andersons show, the revolt, particularly in its second phase, caused huge problems for the British. Much of the original literature on the revolt down played it and failed to capture the intensity of the rebellion. Evidence for the thesis that the revolt was significant comes clearly from the measures the British took to suppress it. The British waged an extensive counter-insurgency campaign marked by “a harsh repertoire of collective punishments and ‘dirty war’ tactics,” with little distinguishing rebels from the wider population and including the origins of the use of civilians as human shields. In response to the uprising, British forces dramatically escalated their presence – stationing up to 25,000 troops by late 1936 – many from the Black and Tans who had been brutally suppressing the Irish revolution. As Anderson notes, “the colonial authorities in Palestine operated according to a conception of collective guilt whereby broad segments of the population – towns, villages, urban quarters, whole cities – were held responsible” for any rebel activity nearby. This brutality began before the criminalising of the rebels, Kelly argues here:

Well before the British publicly adopted the strong criminological claim regarding the strike and rebellion, they adopted strong punitive measures against Arab villages. Their official reason for doing so was to recover illegal weapons and wanted men. In fact, as revealed in classified government reports, their intention was to frighten the rural population of the country, whom the British sought to discourage from joining the rebel bands. Unfortunately for the British, the “village search” policy failed to achieve its end. Instead, it leant credibility to the basic Arab critique of the mandate. This held that it was a superior force that paved the British path to Palestine in the first instance. The acts of violence required to sustain the British presence there only manifested what had been latent all along.

In practice, this criminalisation meant that entire communities were subjected to reprisals when insurgents struck.

British punitive tactics during the Great Revolt are recounted in detail in Matthew Hughes definitive study and some, including the use of Human Shields, are shown in Palestine 36.

Tactics included:

Home demolitions and property destruction: Blowing up houses was used to punish villages thought to harbour rebels. In one notorious incident, after a British district commissioner was assassinated in the town of Jenin in 1938, the army trucked in 4,200 kg of explosives and “blew up a large portion of the town” as collective punishment. Even though the suspected assassin had been captured (and summarily shot while allegedly trying to escape), British forces decided to make an example of Jenin’s population. Entire blocks were reduced to rubble, leaving many civilians homeless. Similarly, in October 1938, troops “blew up house after house” in the village of Miar (north of Haifa) until “little else remained of the once-busy village except a pile of mangled masonry,” as reported by The New York Times. By official estimates, between 1936 and 1940 British authorities destroyed roughly 2,000 Palestinian houses in punitive demolitions – some sources put this even higher. These demolitions often deliberately caused “collateral damage” to surrounding structures as a warning to others. British soldiers even sounded trumpets after each demolition.

Collective punishment of villages: The British explicitly codified collective reprisals in law. Emergency Regulation 19B (later renumbered 119) empowered the administration to demolish any house in a village where “rebels” were active, even if that specific house had no direct connection to rebel activity. Sir Hugh Foot, admitted how this worked: “When we thought a village was harbouring rebels, we’d go mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we’d blow up the house we’d marked.” Villages might be encircled with barbed wire and put under days-long collective punishments like curfews and food blockades to force compliance.

Violent search-and-clear operations: British soldiers routinely raided towns and villages searching for weapons or suspects, often in the middle of the night. According to reports and troops’ own diaries, these searches were brutal. Troops “ransacked houses and destroyed furniture until nothing was left”, “ruined years’ worth of food and fuel stores,” and looted valuables and life savings if they failed to find arms.

Torture and extra-judicial killings: The counter-insurgency was also a dirty war. Over 100 Palestinians were hanged during the revolt and many more were executed without trial in “field justice.” Contemporary accounts – including some by disgusted British witnesses, represented in Palestine 36 by a pro-Arab civil servant. “A soldier named Arthur Lane also recalled how prisoners were struck with “rifle buts, bayonets, fists, boots, whatever” and confirmed that officers witnessed such brutality; it was “definitely done with their approval”, often simply as catharsis.” Some prisoners were reportedly shot while handcuffed or killed “trying to escape” as a cover for execution. There were credible allegations (circulated by Arab sources and even picked up by British consular officials as in the film) of torture methods such as ripping out fingernails, burning prisoners with hot irons, force-feeding them gallons of water and even an early form of waterboarding using a coffee pot. Though British authorities publicly denied the worst accusations as propaganda, internal discussions show that some officials defended harsh methods by dehumanising the enemy. In the words of Sir John Shuckburgh the British were confronted “not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers.” and front-line officers should not be judged too “squeamishly” by those safe in Whitehall. This attitude gave cover to almost any abuse. In one macabre practice, British troops used Palestinian detainees as “mine-sweepers” – forcing them to drive vehicles in front of military convoys to detonate hidden mines so that British lives would be spared. Prisoners were also tied to the fronts of trains or trucks as human shields against rebel ambushes – again as shown in the film.

Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads: A Colonial Template

One of the most infamous episodes of British involvement in 1930s Palestine – and one with a direct legacy for Israeli tactics – is the saga of Orde Wingate and his Special Night Squads (SNS). Captain Orde Charles Wingate was a radical Christian Zionist British officer who arrived in Palestine in 1936. There is a good summary of the contrasting views of Wingate HERE. In Palestine he formed small, mobile counter-insurgency units composed of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers from the Haganah. With high-level patronage (General Archibald Wavell approved the plan), Wingate established the SNS in mid-1938. The Jewish Agency eagerly cooperated, even paying the Haganah recruits in these units. British-led Jewish commandos conducted offensive operations against Palestinian insurgents – a significant shift from the Haganah’s prior mainly defensive posture.

Wingate’s SNS quickly gained a fearsome reputation. Operating mainly in the Galilee and Jezreel Valley to protect a strategic oil pipeline, they would lie in ambush at night and retaliate ferociously against villages suspected of sheltering guerrillas. Wingate drilled the men in an ethos of ruthless reprisal. According to historical accounts (and as portrayed in Palestine 36), Wingate’s unit often meted out “severe collective punishments” on villages – including killing random inhabitants who had no involvement in rebel attacks. In one documented case, the SNS rounded up all the men of Kufur Masr (or Kafr Misr) and shot every eighth man as a warning. Torture was routine: Wingate’s men would force-feed Arab detainees sand until they vomited, or dunk villagers in cold pools of crude oil as punishment. Wingate himself was known to pistol-whip prisoners and worse. He unabashedly preached that terror must be fought with terror – believing in “the principle of surprise in punishment” to cow the population. His contempt for Arabs was blunt and racist. After one raid, he berated his Jewish trainees for not using their bayonets viciously enough, shouting: “you do not even know the elementary use of bayonets when attacking dirty Arabs!”.

The portrayal of Wingate in Palestine 36 aligns with historical records: actor Robert Aramayo depicts him as “the brutal Captain Orde Wingate, who personifies the arrogance and cruelty of the coloniser, shooting civilians in cold blood and ordering the collective punishment of entire villages.” In the film, Wingate’s character also pointedly espouses a Christian Zionist vision for the future – an echo of the real Wingate’s passionate belief that a Jewish state must be established and his conviction that he was helping to achieve that goal. This unusual affinity earned Wingate the nickname “Hajanah’s friend” or simply “the friend” among Jewish communities at the time, even as Palestinians came to view him as an odious war criminal.

Wingate’s superiors eventually grew alarmed at his rogue methods and overt political zeal. He was too effective – and too unrestrained. By late 1938, complaints about SNS brutality were coming from multiple quarters: Palestinian leaders protested his night-terror tactics, and even some Zionist officials were uneasy with the wanton bloodshed. The British high command, for its part, feared Wingate had compromised his impartiality by becoming “so deeply associated with political causes” (Zionism). In early 1939 Wingate was removed from Palestine at the behest of British authorities, effectively ending the SNS experiment. [There is a full account of SNS HERE]

Adapting the Empire’s Methods: From Haganah to IDF

When the State of Israel was established in 1948, it inherited not only many soldiers trained by the British, but also elements of the British legal and strategic framework of counter insurgency. The Haganah, which became the backbone of the new Israel Defence Forces, had been “British-trained” in significant part. During World War II, thousands of Jews served in or alongside the British Army against the Axis, gaining professional military experience that Palestinians (largely kept out of British forces) lacked. This disparity would prove consequential: in the 1947–49 war, Jewish fighters-turned-soldiers applied superior training and organisation to prevail over Arab forces.

Cronin and other historians argue that British training “helped lay the groundwork for the Nakba”: the Haganah’s Plan to conquer Palestinian villages was executed by officers, many of whom had learned soldiering from the British. Among Wingate’s Jewish protégés were young fighters who would later become leading figures in the Haganah, Palmach, and IDF. Notably, a 23-year-old Moshe Dayan participated in SNS operations under Wingate’s command in 1938. Dayan (who would go on to be IDF Chief of Staff and Israel’s Defense Minister) later credited Wingate as a formative mentor, admitting that Wingate “taught us everything we know.” Similarly, Yigal Allon – another future general and politician – gained valuable training from British-led counterinsurgency missions in the late 1930s. The knowledge and experience that dozens of Haganah volunteers accrued in Wingate’s night squads “had a formative influence on [our] night-time movement and combat”, recalled in the Haganah archives. In effect, Wingate taught the Haganah how to fight: how to mount surprise raids, coordinate small-unit attacks, gather intelligence, and employ pre-emptive strikes and use collective reprisals as tools of war. Palestinian scholar Ahmad Samih Khalidi notes that Wingate schooled the Jewish fighters in “the very basics of counterinsurgency and how to deal with the natives in a very brutal and repressive manner”.

It is telling that Wingate remains a respected, even revered figure in some Israeli military circles to this day – his portrait hung in certain IDF units, and Israel’s main military academy of physical training is named the Wingate Institute.

Another direct legacy of British rule was the set of emergency laws that Israel quickly readopted to govern Palestinians. The British had passed draconian Defence (Emergency) Regulations in 1945, originally to quell Jewish paramilitary revolts (Irgun, Lehi) at the end of the Mandate. Rather than discard these repressive laws, the new State of Israel kept many of them in force – especially once it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. To this day, Article 119 of the 1945 Emergency Regulations – enacted by Britain in response to the 1936–39 revolt – remains the legal basis for Israel’s policy of punitive house demolitions. This regulation empowers a military commander to “order the forfeiture and destruction” of any house if an inhabitant is deemed to have committed violence, with no trial required. In other words, a colonial law expressly designed for collective punishment was lifted wholesale into Israeli military rule, giving IDF commanders carte blanche to blow up or seal family homes of suspected militants. Israeli authorities have used this power extensively: since 1967, roughly 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished under Regulation 119 as punishment or deterrence. The rationale – identical to that voiced by the British in the 1930s – is that “would-be terrorists” might be dissuaded if they know their actions will bring harm to their family’s home.

Other British-introduced measures also became staples of Israeli rule. Administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial – was used by the British against Palestinian rebels and is regularly used by Israel against Palestinians deemed security risks. Military courts, curfew orders, and press censorship similarly passed from Mandate to Israeli practice. Even the concept of “villagization” or enclosing restive communities with barbed wire (employed by Britain in both Palestine and later Malaya) reappeared in various forms, such as Israel’s cordon-and-search operations in West Bank towns or the “encirclement” of villages during the intifadas.

Tactically, the influence of British counterinsurgency on Israeli forces can be seen in the IDF’s emphasis on mobility, night maneuvers, and aggressive reprisals. [See the case study of Israel HERE. In the 1950s, for example, Ariel Sharon led Unit 101 and paratrooper raids against Palestinian guerrilla infiltrators, often staging night-time surprise attacks on villages in reprisal for guerrilla strikes – a page straight from Wingate’s playbook. The infamous 1953 Qibya raid, in which Israeli commandos blew up dozens of homes in a West Bank village, killing civilian inhabitants, was essentially a harsher echo of British punitive expeditions (even if Israel at the time denied targeting civilians). During the First Intifada (1987–93) and Second Intifada (2000–05), the IDF repeatedly responded to Palestinian unrest with area closures, extended curfews, and blockades that amounted to mass punishment of cities and refugee camps – much as British forces would “pacify” rebellious districts by sealing them off. In April 2002, when the IDF re-invaded West Bank cities during Operation Defensive Shield, it notably used armoured bulldozers to clear wide paths through the Jenin refugee camp and Nablus old city, flattening houses and buildings to create tank routes. This tactic was a mirror image of the British blowing gaps in Jaffa’s Old City in 1936 (when they demolished 240 homes and displaced 6,000 residents ostensibly for “urban renewal” cum riot control. |See The Revolt of 1936: A Chronicle of Events Barbara Kalkas]

Even psychological and rhetorical parallels persist. British officers in the 1930s contended that “the Arabs…respect strength and regard forbearance as weakness,” justifying an iron-fist policy. Likewise, Israeli hardliners have often argued that only uncompromising force will deter Palestinian violence. The British habit of labelling rebels as “bandits” or terrorists (criminalising political resistance) has its analogue in Israeli discourse as well. The continuity is sometimes literal – in the language of military orders and bureaucratic terms that Israel carried over from the Mandate. A stark example: the IDF’s use of “Administrative Detention Orders” and “Closed Military Zones” in the West Bank today is enabled by regulations originally drafted by British colonial officers. As one comparative study put it, “important elements of the systems of military law” used by Israel to rule Palestinians “stem from the British counterinsurgency state built in the 1930s.” British counterinsurgency established precedents – legally and operationally – that Israel later followed, whether by choice or by the structural inertia of inherited law.

Seven decades after the British left Palestine, the “notorious remnants of its legacy are still felt by Palestinians on a daily basis” under illegal Israeli occupation. Palestine 36 compels us to remember that legacy. It confronts viewers with the uncomfortable fact that some tactics in the IDF’s repertoire were first practiced on Palestinians by the British army.

A new film, Palestine 36, dramatises the harsh military measures used to crush the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. Watching British soldiers blow up homes, punish entire villages, and carry out night raids inevitably evokes comparisons to tactics employed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in illegally occupied territory of the State of Palestine. Many practices that Palestinians face today under illegal Israeli military occupation have deep roots in the British colonial counter-insurgency of the 1930s as shown in the film. [See the BPP webinar with Matthew Hughes, author of Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State and the Arab Revolt, 1936-39 came out with Cambridge University Press in 2019, HERE]

British Counter-Insurgency in the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt The Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was a mass uprising