The Rape of Lydda I
Part One: Orde Wingate
An airport at Lydda was built in 1934. Lydda was an important town which the UN had earmarked to be part of Palestine, after partition, but Ben Gurion who knew how much influence he wielded over the UN, the British and the West had decided that this was not to be. The intention to make it Arab-free by expelling its population was clear from the beginning. It was to be the largest component of the Nakba, whereby 800,000 Palestinians were driven out of their lands to become the new errant Jews.
The new nation of Israel owe a great debt of gratitude to four men in particular: Orde Wingate, Siegfried Lehmann, Mula Cohen and Shmaryahu Gutman. Interestingly Orde Wingate was from a Plymouth Brethren family, but considered himself an Arab-hating Zionist Christian. No wonder Israel rewarded him with a public garden in Jerusalem, the Orde Wingate Square.
In typical British tradition, they were running Wingate to foster the cause of Zionism, and ultimately the creation of Israel, which had been a British ambition since before the days of Lawrence of Arabia, espoused by many in the British establishment, including Lloyd-George who thought that the mosquito swamps of Palestine would be transformed beyond recognition once the civilised Jews from Europe took possession of them, to become an indirect arm of the British Empire, and John Bagot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha to command the so-called Arab Legion. The sole contribution of the latter was to send two tanks into Lydda after it had been all but overpowered by Jewish forces, which would result in a massacre of outnumbered and outgunned Arabs.
Wingate, whom Montgomery described as “completely unbalanced”, would later gain fame in the Burma campaign with his Chindits, beating the Japanese at their own games. Sent to British Mandate Palestine by Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, with the latter’s tacit approval he linked up with Jewish agencies like the terrorist Haganah to form the so-called Special Night Squads, with British and Jewish volunteers, to fight Arabs, who, guessing zionist land-stealing intent were planning an insurgency and beginning to form groups to stop the inevitable. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? An attack by one group led to retaliation by the other, but the disorganised Arabs were no match against the combined strategy of the British army and highly armed, motivated and sophisticated Jews from Europe. He gave men like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon their first lessons in how to inflict collective punishment of the defenceless Arabs. Dayan would later say that he learnt all he knew from Wingate, whose motto was, weapons and war cannot be pure, was known to line up rows of Arab prisoners and personally shoot them one by one in the head. His notion of total war was ingrained into the IDF which owe its creation to the Englishman. Wingate is considered to be the spiritual father of the IDF.
The Ben-Gurion airport in Lod is now the pride of Israel’s airline industry.
