This is the first in a series of InsideGMT articles for the new Enemy of My Enemy expansion for the first COIN multipack, The British Way. Joe and I are extremely pleased with the positive reception of the first printing of The British Way which sold out from GMT last November. After seeing a ton of reviews, after action reports, and game award nominations for The British Way, we wanted to offer even more content for those enjoying the game or those looking forward to the reprint. The Enemy of My Enemy expansion offers three new ways of expanding the base game’s content: a new Arab Revolt (1936-1939) game using the Palestine map, a new Japanese Occupation (1942-1945) game using the Malaya map, and new rules and components for an advanced variant for each of the conflicts depicted in the base game: Palestine (1945-1947), Malaya (1948-1960), Kenya (1952-1956), and Cyprus (1955-1959). We’ll cover each of the parts of the expansion in a separate InsideGMT article. Today’s article is focused on the new Arab Revolt game.

The British Way: Arab Revolt addresses a major issue with the base game’s depiction of Palestine. In the original British Way: Palestine, which covers the 1945-1947 struggle between Jewish terrorist groups and British counterinsurgency forces, the Palestinian Arab community is not directly referenced in the game. As the introduction to the rulebook notes, the game “does not directly model the wider political struggles between the British, Jewish Agency, and Arab political groups, or the civil war that began in November 1947”. By focusing on a narrow period of time and British counterinsurgency tactics against the major armed opposition of that time, armed Jewish groups, the game could not adequately depict the Palestinian Arab community’s less confrontational stance against British rule during that period. However, that raises the question, why was the larger Arab community not more focused on resisting British rule between 1945-1947?

The answer is that members of the Palestinian Arab community launched a massive revolt against British rule between 1936-1939 that ended with equally massive British repression and major concessions, including a new limitation on Jewish immigration introduced by the 1939 White Paper. That same limitation motivated the Jewish armed groups to violently resist British rule during the 1945-1947 period. In other words, one cannot understand the Palestinian Arab community’s exhaustion in the 1940s without exploring the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), nor why Jewish groups such as Haganah cooperated with the British during that revolt but then opposed them in 1945. Therefore, rather than simply tossing in a few token events into the base game, I knew from the start I wanted to design an entire game on the preceding conflict to help provide more nuanced context to the “absence” of Palestinians from the narrowly focused 1945-1947 Palestine game.