The Campaigner

The revolt quickly degenerated into aimless killing
and anarchical civil war. Isolated in this atmosphere of
panic and insanity, the Christians quietly slipped out of
Jerusalem to a village east of the Jordan.
Josephus, the Roman intelligence agent who was active
at this time among the Zealot bands, was among the
chief provocateurs of the crisis. He described the beginning
of the Rebellion in the following terms:
Now a quarrel arose between the High Priests and
the leaders of the people of Jerusalem. Each of
them made for himself a band of the boldest
revolutionaries, of which he was the leader . . . . This
was done with license as though in a city without a
government. The violence of the factions conquered
all justice.
The Christian historian Eusebius then describes the
emergence of political terrorism:
A certain kind of bandits arose in Jerusalem who
murdered daily those whom they met, even in the
midst of the city. In particular, at the feasts they
used to mingle with the crowd and, concealing
short daggers in their clothes, used to stab distinguished
people with them; then, when they had
fallen, the murderers themselves shared in the
indignation . . . . Jonathan the High Priest was the
first to be slain by them, but after him many were
murdered daily, and fear was worse than the disasters,
for as if in war every man was hourly expecting
death.
Such terrorism, like today's Red Brigades of Italy, is a
highly sophisticated political intelligence deployment.
By this method, Jerusalem was completely destabilized.
The murderers were from the assassin cult called the
Sicarii, named after the daggers they used. With no
political leadership, the cult unleashed a new weapon,
the Jewish death cult itself, which began to gain
momentum among the Palestinian Jews. According to
the account of Eusebius, there is little doubt that the cult
originated in Egypt among the Isis worshippers that
Philo, during his lifetime, fought so bitterly:
The Egyptian false prophet afflicted the Jews with
a worse scourge than this, for this man appeared in
the country as a sorcerer and secured for himself
the faith due to a prophet. He assembled about
Dayan and another Haganah soldier had killed five
Arabs and captured four.
Wingate came back, carrying a Turkish rifle
over his shoulder. He looked calm and serene.
"Good work. You are fine boys and will make
good soldiers,'' he said.
He went up to the four Arab prisoners. He
said in Arabic: "You have arms in this village.
Where have you hidden them?''
The Arabs shook their heads, and protested
ignorance. Wingate reached down and took
sand and grit from the ground; he thrust it
down (one Arab's) throat until he choked and
puked.
"Now,'' he said, "where have you hidden
the arms?''
Still they shook their heads.
Wingate turned to one of the Jews and,
pointing to the coughing and spluttering
Arab, said, "Shoot this man."
The Jew looked at him questioningly and
hesitated.
Wingate said, in a tense voice, "Did you
hear? Shoot him."
The Jew shot the Arab. The others stared
for a moment, in stupefaction, at the dead
body at their feet ....
"Now speak," said Wingate. They spoke.
Ben-Gurion later declared that "the Haganah's
best officers were trained in the special Night
Squads" by Wingate. Trained terrorist Dayan added,
"In some sense, every leader of the Israeli
Army even today is a disciple of Wingate. He gave
us our technique, he was the inspiration of our tactics,
he was our dynamic."
And their ideological controller. Wingate would
often begin special training courses for the
Haganah elite by expounding, "We are establishing
here the foundations for the army of Zion." His
contribution extended to programming every
minute detail of military strategy for the Haganah,
thereby providing the entirety of Israeli military
orientations from the 1948 declaration of statehood
through to the present. According to Mosley,
Wingate in 1938 authored "The Jewish State —
Security and Defence, Transition Period," which is
to this day "one of the most treasured Israeli documents."
Mosley labels it a "brilliant forecast" of
the needs of the state, how much these needs
would cost, which "strategy and tactics the Arab
states would use to upset the new state," how these
could be defeated, and "what measures should be
taken to mobilize and inspirit the civilian population
and grid industry and agriculture to the task of
keeping the international machine in motion."
So successful was this strategy outline, Mosley
reported, that Wingate's advice has been
followed, almost to the phrase, by the State of
Israel. ... It is still a practical paper which they constantly
consult."