Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947

Motti Golani

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611683882
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

British General Sir Allan Cunningham was appointed in 1945 as high commissioner of Palestine, and served in this capacity until the end of the British mandate on May 15, 1948. The three years of Cunningham's tenure were tremendously complex politically: players included the British government in London, the British army, the British administration in Jerusalem, and diverse military forces within the Zionist establishment, both Jew and Arab. Golani revisits this period from the perspective of the high commissioner, examining understudied official documents as well as Cunningham's letters, notes, and cables. He emphasizes especially the challenges of navigating Jewish and Arab terrorists, on the one hand, and the multiple layers of British institutional bureaucracies, on the other, and does an excellent job of establishing Sir Allan's daily trials within the broad frame of the collapse of the British Empire following World War II.

I	A Political Process as Though There Is No Terrorism November 1945 – December 1946

1
The Only Chance for Palestine Is Partition

Cunningham arrived in Jerusalem on Wednesday November 21, 1945, via the international airport in Lod. The official reception reflected the dual character of his mission: military and civilian. On the tarmac, he was welcomed by the chief secretary, the commander of the British Army in Palestine, and by air force and navy commanders in the Middle East; at the gates of Jerusalem, he was met by the Jerusalem district governor, the army commander, the chief of police, and the mayor; and on Julian’s Way (now King David Street), the convoy was joined by mounted troops from the Transjordan Frontier Force and from the Palestine Police.¹

The reception ceremony was to have taken place adjacent to the site of General Edmund Allenby’s camp in the south of the city, near Government House. Cunningham was to have reviewed a guard of honor from the Highland Light Infantry Regiment, the unit that would provide his security during his two-and-a-half-year stay in the city. The chief secretary had planned to escort the incoming high commissioner under a canopy, where the district governor was to present the invited guests. The invitation mentioned “formal and informal guests,” and they included both Jews and Arabs. However, rain forced the cancellation of the outdoor ceremony, so Cunningham, his close aides, and the mounted units proceeded straight to Government House at Jabel Mukaber (the traditional site of the Hill of Evil Counsel), which contained the high commissioner’s residence and office.²

Government House was conceived in 1927, when Augusta Victoria, the former high commissioner’s residence on Mount Scopus, was damaged in an earthquake. A new compound was built, which accommodated the high commissioner from the beginning of the 1930s and was also a symbol of the Mandate administration. The central building was designed by the British architect Austen Harrison, who also designed the Rockefeller Museum in the city’s eastern section. In addition to the two-story main building—the ground floor devoted to offices and receptions, the private residence upstairs—the compound had accommodations for the administrative and grounds staff. Cunningham was delighted to discover that the main building was surrounded by a large, splendid garden, whose northern part offered a view of the Old City, including the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There was also a space set aside by his predecessors as a cemetery for pet dogs.³

On the afternoon of Cunningham’s arrival, the letter of appointment was read out in the ground-floor ballroom by the secretary of the executive council of the Mandate administration. The text was then recited in Hebrew and Arabic by the administration’s chief interpreters. The guests obeyed the invitation and arrived in formal morning dress, complete with medals and decorations. Sir William Fitzgerald, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mandate Palestine, who was trusted by both Jews and Arabs, administered the oath of office to Cunningham. He supplemented his congratulations with a cautionary note. You will encounter here an atmosphere of civilian tension, he told the new high commissioner, which will call for extraordinary security measures aimed not only at the enemy storming the gates but also at destructive forces threatening from within.

In attendance were the mayors of the big cities, the heads of the Arab Higher Committee, and the leaders of the Jewish National Council and the Jewish Agency, among them David Ben-Gurion, who had returned from a visit abroad earlier in the day. The ceremony was aired live by the Palestine Broadcast Service, with commentary provided by the station’s director, Edwin Samuel, the son of the first high commissioner to Palestine. There was no unusual activity in the streets of Jerusalem that day.⁴

Cunningham thanked the guests briefly. He was touched that both the written congratulations he had received at the airport and the spoken comments at the ceremony cited his past activity positively. He also thanked the Mandate administrative staff, who were responsible to him, and the officers and soldiers under his command, and noted that even though he had not yet doffed his uniform in his new post, he was taking his leave of the army. He had come to fulfill what was, above all, a civilian function. He said that the collective British memory and his awareness of the postwar geopolitical situation taught him that a zero-sum game was being played out in Palestine: Britain would have a hard time getting the adversaries to consider a possible political solution. In light of this, he reminded those present that it was Britain and its allies (and, implicitly, Cunningham personally) that had saved Palestine from a German invasion. His principal goal was to ensure a good future for everyone; to this end he wished to instill in his new place of service the consensual atmosphere that had prevailed among the Allies during the war, and he would be ready to cooperate with all well-intentioned people. Cunningham reminded his listeners of the British government’s early November announcement that the United States had agreed to take part in the committee of inquiry whose members were en route to Palestine. This last point was an allusion to the possibility of a political solution aided by the Americans, an option then preoccupying the Colonial Office in London. Cunningham also cautiously alluded to the Jewish revolt, which was then in its nascent stage and was still viewed by the British as a random series of violent events perpetrated by the Yishuv. His brief remarks make it clear that he knew he faced a difficult mission. He wanted it to be known that he had come to Palestine with little knowledge of the country but without prejudice and that he was determined to help it blossom.⁵

Six days later, on November 27, 1945, Cunningham attended the ceremony of his other appointment: high commissioner and supreme commander of the armed forces of Transjordan. (This second title, held by each high commissioner in Jerusalem since 1928, expired in May 1946, when Transjordan became independent.) Cunningham spent only six hours in Amman, and dined with the Emir Abdullah. He was escorted by the two senior British figures in Transjordan, Sir Alec Kirkbride, the resident minister in Amman, soon to become the ambassador to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Transjordan’s Arab Legion.⁶

On December 14, the new high commissioner and supreme commander of the armed forces in Palestine and Transjordan reminded the War Office that he should be promoted to the rank of general, commensurate with his new duties. He did not wait for the routine procedures; waiting could be detrimental to his interests. Prior to his appointment, the Colonial Office had informed him that as high commissioner he would have to retire from the army. However, he was reassured by the War Office that the extension of his service for one year, in order to bring about his promotion, was being positively considered—promotion would be impossible if he were retired or did not have at least a year of service ahead of him. Indeed, his term of service was extended until October 30, 1946. In January 1946, the War Office informed him that the rank of general had been approved for him retroactive to October 30, 1945. An announcement to this effect would appear on January 29, 1946, in the London Gazette, the official newspaper of record in the United Kingdom. Cunningham thus gained the recognition—formal, at this stage—for which he had longed since the fiasco in the Western Desert five years earlier. At the end of September 1946, the War Office duly informed him that, effective October 30, he would conclude his active service and be transferred to the reserves until May 1, 1949, unless he was otherwise informed. After that date, he would be fully retired. The letter concluded on a formal note, though not without personal significance for him: the secretary of state for war thanked him at the king’s directive for his long and devoted military service.⁷

Holding the rank of general also bore practical significance for Cunningham’s Palestine service. It was clear to both him and to London that the high commissioner’s rank and status in Britain contributed to the way he was perceived in the country under his authority. In the case of Palestine, this was particularly important in his contacts with the Yishuv, which was in the midst of a confrontation with the Mandate administration. Indeed, the president of the National Council, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, congratulated Cunningham on his promotion. Ben-Zvi’s message was a formal one, on behalf of the body he headed, but at the same time very personal. At that point, General Cunningham did not know that the National Council and its leader had long since ceased to be a meaningful factor in the Zionist movement’s national and international politics. The Jewish Agency and its head, David Ben-Gurion, did not extend congratulations. Cunningham’s emotional response to Ben-Zvi’s gesture shows how unusual this letter was in the relations between the Mandate authorities and the Yishuv at that time.⁸

The Yishuv knew very little about the new high commissioner. So little, in fact, that at first the Jewish community made much of an unconfirmed episode supposedly showing that the commander of the southern sector of the British campaign in Ethiopia in 1941 was a close friend of Major General Orde Charles Wingate. Wingate, an innovative British officer who served in Palestine during the period of the Arab Revolt, was pro-Zionist and revered by the Yishuv. The story went that Wingate told Cunningham, during their joint expedition from Kenya to Addis Ababa, of his aspiration to establish a Jewish state. This connection ostensibly boosted Cunningham’s prestige in the eyes of the Yishuv. In reality, it is not clear what sort of relations existed between Wingate and Cunningham. Certainly, the two were not together during the push to Addis Ababa, though they did meet afterward in the Ethiopian capital. Cunningham removed Wingate from Ethiopia for the same reason that he had been removed from Palestine earlier: excessive independence.⁹

Two days after his arrival in Jerusalem, Cunningham met with a Yishuv delegation for a get-acquainted talk. The participants, representing a cross section of the Jewish community, were personally invited by the high commissioner’s advisors so that he could hear a range of approaches. In the event, David Ben-Gurion spoke and the others assented. The chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive praised the high commissioner as the king’s representative and a “freedom-fighting soldier,” but without giving him a moment’s grace noted the rift between Britain and the Zionist movement: “The blow is most bitter when it comes from a friend—the English people, our friend.” Ben-Gurion said he could not promise to act against the violence emanating from the Yishuv—for which the Jewish Agency refused to accept responsibility—unless the regulations of the 1939 White Paper were rescinded. “We parted tensely and courteously,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary after his first meeting with Cunningham.¹⁰

The History of the Haganah, the closest work to an official Yishuv history, which reflected the approach of the leadership of the organized Jewish community, offers an unfounded appraisal of the new high commissioner, probably gleaned from Ben-Gurion himself. It shows wishful thinking, expresses regret at Gort’s departure, and alludes to the Western Desert episode:

The British began to prepare for riots that were liable to break out in the country following a public declaration of their policy [Bevin’s address to the House of Commons on November 13], and this time on the part of the Jews. Lord Gort, who refused to accept the new policy line, resigned as high commissioner “for reasons of health.” He was replaced by another army man, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, “a fair man but weak” (D. Ben-Gurion).¹¹

In contrast, the Yishuv press, particularly the nonestablishment papers, took a generally positive approach to the new high commissioner. As in the past, a high commissioner with a military background was perceived as the antithesis of the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office, which was generally considered hostile to the Yishuv.¹² The fact that the appointment had been made within two days of Gort’s resignation was taken as evidence of the importance that London attached to Palestine. And the fact that a military man had been chosen was seen as reflecting awareness of the problematic nature of Palestine and as proof that the political question would be resolved in London and other capitals, not in Jerusalem. According to this point of view, the Mandate administration had the temporary role of imposing order until a political solution could be found. The new high commissioner would only carry out orders. His arrival thus dovetailed with the Yishuv’s growing expectation of the establishment of a Jewish state and a period of quiet and security, internal and external. According to the contemporary Yishuv press, not everyone applauded the Jewish Agency’s declaration of the Jewish Resistance Movement in October 1945. In contrast, the Palestine Arabs, according to their newspapers, believed that a military figure had been appointed in order to deal with Zionist violence.¹³

Along with this positive spin by the Yishuv press, an implicit threat was also discernible, originating mainly in labor movement newspapers but probably reflecting a broader outlook. In this view, the new high commissioner would be given a chance, but his ideas would be judged from a strictly practical point of view: it made no difference whether he was personally likable. The press abstracts read by Cunningham suggested that the Yishuv was determined to fight the policy advocated by the 1939 White Paper and that its battle was not with Britain and its troops but with British policy. These were not mere words, as Cunningham was to discover immediately.¹⁴

On November 13, 1945, the day on which Cunningham’s appointment was approved in London and a week before his arrival in Jerusalem, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin informed the House of Commons that an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry had been established to examine and recommend an agreed policy for Palestine by the two powers. The next day, a stormy rally against British policy in Palestine was held in Tel Aviv, with the Yishuv reacting furiously to the foreign secretary’s statement that the White Paper policy would not be revised at this time and to his comment that the question of the Jewish refugees must be solved in Europe, in their places of origin. Six demonstrators were killed and many wounded. On November 25, in reaction to the British interception of the Berl Katznelson, a ship carrying illegal immigrants, Palmah commandos blew up the shore-patrol stations at Sidna Ali, next to Herzliya, and at Givat Olga, outside Hadera. In response, the British security forces systematically searched suspects, along with imposing a curfew and closure of the Sharon area, north of Herzliya. The security operation targeted the agricultural hinterland of Herzliya and Hadera, the Palmah’s staging ground. The British moves triggered an unguided and uncontrolled p...