T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) and Orde Wingate (1903-1944) and were idiosyncratic Englishmen who left their marks on both the Middle East and its relationship to the West. Distant cousins with an age difference of fifteen years, they shared an outsider’s disposition, a disdain for military hierarchy, and the ability to inspire local fighters. Yet they championed different causes: Lawrence supported the Arab Revolt, while Wingate fought for the Zionist movement. For both men, their actions blurred the line between imperial allegiance and personal mission. Lawrence would go on to be remembered broadly as one of the most famous Englishmen of the 20th century, and Wingate, whose legacy is very much alive in Israel, has nevertheless faded into obscurity in the rest of the world.{1}
Thomas Edward (“T.E.”). Lawrence was born in Wales and raised in Oxford. He showed an early interest in academia, and remained in Oxford for university. By the time he graduated in 1910, he had travelled extensively on foot in Ottoman Syria and had been a member of the Officer’s Training Corps for the British Army. Lawrence jumped at the opportunity to join an archaeological expedition that year, and he soon found himself in Beirut learning Arabic before joining the archaeological dig in northern Syria. When World War I broke out in 1914, Lawrence’s fluency in Arabic and his archaeological work attracted the attention of British intelligence, who recruited him to the newly-formed Arab Bureau in 1915.
Lawrence earned his fame with the 1916 Arab Revolt, in which he played a key role in mobilizing Arab tribes in what is today Jordan against Ottoman rule.{2} World War I dealt the already decrepit Ottoman Empire its death blow, and the Arab Revolt played a small role, though it would take years before independent Arab states would emerge. Instead, the territories would be divided into mandates between France, who would control Syria and Lebanon, and the United Kingdom, who ruled Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine.
While Lawrence expressed plenty of antisemitic tropes typical for his time, he was not entirely unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and eventually came to see Zionism as a force that would not only improve the lives of Jewish people, but one that would result in “the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level […] and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power.” {3} To Lawrence, the contrast between the slowly evolving West and the shock of modernization to people in the East would be bridged by the Jewish people in Palestine, or the “least European people in Europe,” who would “return once more to the Orient from which they came.” The Jewish people would return to “the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe”, modernizing the Levant, enabling it to catch up to Europe. Lawrence wrote those words in 1920, shortly after returning to England following the end of WWI. Fifteen years later, he was killed in a motorbike accident in 1935. He was 46 years old.
Just as his distant cousin, T.E. Lawrence, had made his appearance in the Middle East as the world was engulfed in the First World War, Orde Wingate entered the scene as the world was plunged into the Second.{4} Born in India in 1903 to a military family, Wingate was raised in England and joined the Royal Military Academy, receiving his officer’s commission in 1923. He served in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia before returning to England in the mid-1930s.
In 1936, Wingate, who had been promoted to Captain, was assigned to British intelligence in Palestine. Wingate had met very few Jewish people before he came to Palestine, and, as he would write, “In 1938 in spite of my natural sympathy with the Arabs and my understanding of their position I became during my official studies convinced that the Imperial, Jewish, and Arab interests all lay in in [sic] one direction.”{5} Wingate, who had always felt outside and “not wanted in the world” very quickly found not only inspiration in the Jews of Palestine, who, like him, were shunned, but persevered, becoming a “great power in the world, building their country anew,” but felt that he belonged to the Jewish people. Shortly thereafter, in 1938, he developed the Special Night Squads, a forerunner to the Israel Defense Force’s special forces. Like his distant cousin, Wingate seemed more comfortable with his local troops than his British colleagues, whom they both tended to alienate with their disregard for military hierarchy and conventional warfare. Indeed, Wingate’s time in Palestine was cut short due to his disregard for the rules: while on leave in England, Wingate’s full-throated support for a Jewish state caused his superiors to relieve him of his duties in Palestine. Though he had spent just under a year training Jewish forces from June of 1938 to May of 1939, Wingate’s impact on the future defense force of the State of Israel was indelible. Like Lawrence, Wingate’s life was also cut short. At the time of his death in a plane crash in 1944, Wingate was a 41-year-old Major-General.
When it came to waging war, on the surface, the cousins were similar. In keeping with their outsider status, both men preferred irregular warfare. However, those similarities are superficial. Lawrence was barely trained and favored guerilla warfare. Wingate, on the other hand, was a career soldier whose preferred tactic was penetration behind enemy lines. Whereas Lawrence resorted to bribery in order to motivate Bedouin chiefs to continue raids on the Turkish powers, Wingate managed to earn his troops’ undying loyalty, with some of his Jewish soldiers even accompanying him on his campaigns in Ethiopia. Whereas Lawrence’s Arab forces had a difficult time managing Damascus after they had occupied it, Wingate’s troops executed disciplined night operations that curtailed sabotage against British interests such as the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline and protected isolated Jewish settlements.
Despite their differences, Lawrence cast a long shadow, causing people to constantly compare the two cousins. For his part, Wingate chafed at the thought and was unambiguously critical of Lawrence. He referred to Lawrence’s autobiographical The Seven Pillars of Wisdom as “that unfortunate masterpiece,” and astutely noted the “great amount of romantic dust” that “has been allowed so far to obscure what really did happen” as far as Lawrence’s involvement with the Arab Revolt was concerned. To Wingate, writing his report on Iimperial strategy in Palestine in 1939, not only was his distant cousin’s role in the Arab Revolt overblown, but the whole undertaking was ludicrous. Rather than the derring-do that would later immortalize both Lawrence and his Bedouin tribesman in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, Wingate saw the Arab Revolt not only as a strategic blunder on the part of the British, but an expensive one:
“A ragged horde of at most a few thousand and often only a few hundred Bedouin, paid in gold for approximately two days’ fighting per month… In return for the highly paid assistance of this small rabble of Hejazi Bedouin, we have handed over to the ‘Arabs’ the whole of Saudi Arabia, and the Yemen, Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Syria. A more absurd transaction has seldom been seen.”{6}
If Lawrence became “of Arabia,” Wingate might be called “of Zion.”{7} Both men were outsiders who bonded deeply with the local people they were sent to advise. Lawrence wore Arab dress, spoke fluent Arabic, and described his time with the Bedouin as the most meaningful of his life. He became a symbol of Arab nationalism, even as he wrestled with the contradictions of British promises, which included the McMahon Correspondence (allocating Palestine to the Arabs) and the Balfour Declaration (supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine). Wingate, who arrived in Palestine with little knowledge of Jews or Judaism, quickly adopted the Zionist cause with passionate conviction. His support was so public and zealous that British authorities removed him from his post. Lawrence has been enshrined in the collective Western conscience as a Romantic Orientalist; Wingate is remembered as a soldier by soldiers whose ethos he helped to create, and continues to be cited by students of tactical warfare today.{8} Despite the differences in philosophy and warfare, and even in reception, the two shared a rare quality for imperial officers: they did not simply advise local fighters – they deeply identified with them.