This report was first published in EIR's December 2000 Special Report, Who Is Sparking a Religious War in the Mideast?—And How To Stop It, and was re-released in May 2002 as part of a special dossier, Ariel Sharon: Profile of an Unrepentant War Criminal.

Darbyism in Israel:
Ariel Sharon

In addition to the hordes of U.S. fundamentalists who are cheering for Israel to be annihilated so that Christ will return, Darbyism left a deep impact on Israel and its institutions, through the legendary British military intelligence figure Orde Wingate, who established the anti-Ben Gurion "terror against terror" tradition of Israel's military and intelligence forces.

Whereas, in the 1930s and 1940s, labor Zionists typified by David Ben Gurion wanted peaceful collaboration with the Arabs in Palestine, the British were playing their usual "divide and conquer" games. While the bulk of British military and intelligence circles in the Middle East were ostensibly "pro-Arab" (such as the famous Maj. Gen. John Glubb Pasha of Transjordan) the devout Darbyite, Col. Orde Wingate, was sent to Palestine to train Jewish leaders in terror tactics against the Arabs, a tradition which directly produced Ariel Sharon.

Wingate's father, Col. Charles Wingate, was a leader in the Plymouth Brethren, and headed a number of the sect's "missionary committees," particularly for Africa and Central Asia. He raised his children in the customary, abusive Darby fashion, as recounted even by Wingate's biographer Christopher Sykes, of the infamous Sykes-Picot Treaty of the 1920s, which divided the Middle East between Britain and France: "The extraordinary Puritanism of the household in which Orde Wingate grew up is easily condemned as calculated to deform and fetter its members." And deform it did. Aside from the pleasure he took in teaching Jews to kill and torture Arabs in Palestine in the 1930s, Sykes reported of Wingate, "Throughout his life he often embarrassed other people by wearing no clothes at unlikely moments, but never himself."

The ostensibly pro-Zionist Wingate was repeatedly suspected by early Zionist leaders of being a "British plant," as even Sykes had to admit: "He was so very much of a Zionist, so extremist even among extremists, even at this time, that many people, including some Jews, found his enthusiasm hard to account for." Many asked, Sykes noted, "Might this not be some well-planted spy, some more than ordinarily ingenious agent provocateur?" And, as Sykes further recorded the observations of one of Wingate's Jewish associates, "In those days no one was allowed to leave the settlement without the express permission of the commander, but Wingate used to disappear and reappear after a couple of hours. We had meanwhile searched for him in vain, whilst he had thoroughly explored the vicinity. The fact that Wingate moved so far away from our settlement and always returned safely, made many of our people sceptical as to his real intentions, and they suspected him of having some connection with the armed Arab gangs" (emphasis added).

Wingate was a "Zionist" because he served the Crown, as he explained in a letter to his cousin, Sir Reginald Wingate, a leading official of Britain's Colonial Office: "The Jews are loyal to the Empire.... Palestine is essential to our Empire—our Empire is essential to England—England is essential to world peace. We have the chance to plant here in Palestine and Transjordan a loyal, rich and intelligent nation, with which we can hold for us the key to world dominion without expense or effort on our part." And, while Wingate played the "pro-Zionist," two of his cousins were legendary "Arab handlers" for British Intelligence: The "anti-imperialist" Orientologist E.G. Browne, a sponsor of Al-Afghansi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia."

The British military chief in Palestine in the 1930s, Sir Archibald Wavell, authorized Wingate to form the "Special Night Squads," who would torture and kill Arabs in violation of Ben Gurion's policy of "self-restraint." As even Wingate's admirer Sykes reported, "Many allegations were made against him, sometimes by shocked Jewish followers who came from the decency of civilian surroundings." Those terrorist units gave rise to the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and to a philosophical tradition among his trainees—like Sharon longtime sidekick "Dirty Rafi" Eytan, the former head of the infamous "Terror Against Terror" unit, who, according to EIR investigations, gave the initial impetus to Rabbi Kook's followers to found the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva.

Another Wingate pupil was Sharon's early patron, Gen. Avraham Yoffee. Yoffee trained under Wingate in 1936-39, and later helped sponsor Sharon's rise in the Israeli Defense Forces after the 1948 war. As head of Israel's three major commands, the Northern Command, Yoffee appointed Sharon as his chief of intelligence. Using Wingate's methods, Sharon founded and headed the infamous "101 Paratroop Unit," an elite group of 40-50 British SAS-type terrorists, which repeatedly stoked the terror-counterterror cycle between Arabs and Jews throughout the 1950s and to the present day. Particularly in the early days, the use of such terror tactics was bitterly debated within Israel, as being "anti-Jewish" as well as clearly counterproductive to peaceful coexistence with Israel's Arab neighbors.

The British ties to leading Israeli military and defense figures established through Wingate, were manifested in other ways as well, in addition to Sharon's training at the Military Staff College in Britain in the 1950s. Yoffee, who used to take Sharon for lengthy hunting trips in Africa, was an intimate of Sir Peter Scott, Prince Philip's closest collaborator (along with the old Nazi Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands) in founding the World Wildlife Fund. Reflecting these intimate WWF connections, Yoffee became the founding head of Israel's Nature Preserves Authority, while his protégé Sharon went on to become the chief "secular" protagonist in another British scheme, the plot to rebuild Solomon's Temple.