Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947

199 Pages·2013·1.396 MB·English

by  Motti Golani

THE SCHUSTERMAN SERIES IN ISRAEL STUDIES
EDITORS
S. Ilan Troen / Jehuda Reinharz / Sylvia Fuks Fried
The Schusterman Series in Israel Studies publishes original scholarship of exceptional
significance on the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. It draws on disciplines across
the academy, from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations to
the arts, history, and literature. It seeks to further an understanding of Israel within the
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Israel Studies at Brandeis University.
For a complete list of books in this series, please see www.upne.com
Motti Golani
Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947
Ilana Szobel
A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Anita Shapira
Israel: A History
Orit Rozin
The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism
Boaz Neumann
Land and Desire in Early Zionism
Anat Helman
Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities
Nili Scharf Gold
Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet
Itamar Rabinovich and Jehuda Reinharz, editors
Israel in the Middle East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign
Relations, Pre-1948 to the Present
PALESTINE BETWEEN
POLITICS AND TERROR,
1945–1947
Motti Golani
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Waltham, Massachusetts
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
An imprint of University Press of New England
www.upne.com
© 2013 Brandeis University
All rights reserved
For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One
Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Golani, Motti.
Palestine between politics and terror, 1945–1947 / Motti Golani.
pages; cm. — (The Schusterman series in Israel studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61168-387-5 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61168-450-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61168-388-2 (ebook)
1. Palestine—History—1929–1948. 2. Palestine—Politics and government—1917–1948. 3. Great Britain—Politics and
government—1936–1945. 4. Jews—Palestine—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Mandates—Palestine. 6.
Terrorism—Palestine. 7. Jewish-Arab relations—History—1917–1948. 8. Palestine—History—Partition, 1947. I. Title
DS126.4 G65 2013
956.9405—dc23 2012035765
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations and Terms
Prologue: On the Road to Jerusalem
Part I
A Political Process as Though There Is No Terrorism,
November 1945–December 1946
1 The Only Chance for Palestine Is Partition
2 Toward a Clash with the Yishuv
3 Saving the Jews from Themselves: Operation Agatha
4 A State First, Immigration Later
Part II
To Fight Terrorism as Though There Is No Political Process,
July 1946–August 1947
5 “The King David Hotel Crime”
6 The High Commissioner’s “Conciliation Policy”
7 Martial Law
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Preface
On July 22, 1948, the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, in
London, held an evening in honor of the last British High Commissioner in Palestine,
General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham. A few dozen members of the institute turned up for
the event, along with interested members of the public, most of them Jews. Tea and cookies
were served. At exactly 8 p.m., the chairman made his opening remarks. The former high
commissioner spoke about his perception of his term of office and added some personal
impressions. A few questions from the audience, to which Cunningham replied in brief, and
the evening was over. From that day until his death, thirty-five years later, Cunningham never
spoke in public again about his period in Palestine. His name was rarely mentioned in the
press. The last high commissioner in Palestine seemed to fade away, like an old soldier,
after that summer evening in St. James’s Square in the center of London. Other memories too
—of the drama that accompanied his appointment, the tumultuous events that marked his
tenure in Jerusalem, and its abrupt end—seemed to recede with him, at least for a time.
Lieutenant General Cunningham’s appointment, at the beginning of November 1945, as
high commissioner of Palestine and Transjordan and commander-in-chief of the British
forces there, came as a surprise. No one had prepared him for the post. He was a veteran
army officer whose future lay behind him. His rich military career bore no direct connection
with Palestine. Moreover, he had no experience in managing civilian systems or in dealing
with diplomatic and political issues of the sort the new appointment would entail. A few
days earlier, Field Marshal Lord John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, who had been high
commissioner for only a year, had announced that he was stepping down due to failing
health. Two days after Gort landed in London, his successor was declared—a case of
unusual alacrity by the British governmental bureaucracy.
Ironically, it was on the eve of the new high commissioner’s arrival in Palestine that the
fate of the Mandate was, to all intents and purposes, decided. It is difficult to pinpoint the
exact moment of irreversibility after which, as is apparent in retrospect, the contemporary
actors could no longer alter the historical process or its pace and, above all, its direction.
Probably, there is no such moment. However, it is possible to identify the historical
framework within which those who decided the fate of the British Mandate for Palestine
functioned and its influence on them. Thus, in late 1945, against the background of the end of
the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, the status of the Great Powers—
whether on the decline (Britain and France) or surging forward (the United States and the
Soviet Union)—as they intersected with U.S.-British relations, particularly as they applied
to the Palestine question, brought about a situation in which the fate of the Mandate was
effectively decided by late 1945.
The historic event that made it possible to discern clearly the thrust of history—from
today’s perspective, but also, in large measure, in real time—encompassed the appointment,
activity, and failure of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in the period between
November 1945 and May 1946. As it happened, the committee’s work coincided with
Cunningham’s initial period in Palestine—the British government announced the committee’s
establishment on November 13, 1945, a few days after his appointment. That congruency of
events would mark his term of office indelibly.
Alan Cunningham’s years of service in Jerusalem were a period of intense hostility
between Britain and the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, the Jewish community in
Palestine. That, at least, is how the Jewish side saw it. The last high commissioner came
from a society that had paid a high price in order to vanquish Nazi Germany. His roots lay in
the British Army and civil administration, the self-perceived saviors of the world and,
above all, of the Jews, from the Nazi scourge. Although the British discourse was tinged
with a not-always-conscious antisemitism, there was also understanding for the plight of the
Jewish refugees. Even the revilers of Zionism within the British administration justified
their approach with the argument that Jewish Agency policy was detrimental to the Jewish
interest after the Holocaust. Some British officials, Cunningham among them, thought it was
detrimental to the Zionist cause itself.
Neither the sagacity shown by the British government and the Mandatory regime in
Palestine, nor their diplomatic, political, and military effectiveness, nor even the moral
aspect of their behavior can be said to have been unequivocal. From his vantage point in
Jerusalem, Cunningham watched as his government endeavored to engineer a political
solution to the Palestine question for the benefit of the two adversaries—the Jews and the
Arabs—against the sprawling backdrop of the empire’s crumbling and, more immediately,
the friction mounting between the government and the Yishuv.
This book covers the period from Cunningham’s arrival in Jerusalem, on November 21,
1945, until his return to the city, at the end of September 1947, following a visit to Britain
during which the government decided definitively on withdrawal from Palestine. His tenure
as high commissioner did not end immediately. But what remained of it—less than eight
months, as it turned out, from October 1947 until mid-May 1948—was characterized not so
much by a more or less successful effort to govern, like the six high commissioners before
him. Its hallmark was, rather, an almost desperate effort to allow Britain to leave Palestine
with a semblance of honor and with minimal casualties and material damage, amid an
escalating Jewish-Arab civil war. To put it another way: for the first two years after his
arrival, from November 1945 until October 1947, Cunningham dealt with the “chronic”
problems of Mandatory Palestine. Beginning with the period of the British military regime
(1917–1920), and more strikingly since the arrival of the first high commissioner, Sir
Herbert Samuel, the focus of all the high commissioners was on Palestine’s political future.
The absence of a concrete solution, acceptable to both Jews and Arabs, fomented sporadic
confrontations between the two national groups and between each group and the British, if
the British were perceived as favoring the other group. The persistent tension between the
political effort and the desire to maintain tranquility and security resulted in many policy
wrangles, not to say internecine disputes, between London and its emissaries in Jerusalem
and among the ministries involved—mainly the Colonial Office, the War Office, and the
Foreign Office. Caught in the middle, the high commissioner came under fire from all sides:
from the Jews, the Arabs, and from those who questioned his analysis of the unfolding
situation in Palestine or disagreed with the way he or the British government chose to
address the problems in Palestine.
Naturally, the situation faced by Sir Herbert Samuel or by Field Marshal Lord Herbert
Plumer in the 1920s was very different from what Sir John Chancellor encountered in the
transition from the 1920s to the 1930s and the conditions under which General Sir Arthur
Wauchope operated in the late 1930s. Each period possessed its own distinctive
characteristics. This was certainly so in regard to the tenures of Sir Harold MacMichael and
Field Marshal Gort, the high commissioners during the Second World War.
At the same time, it is crucial to bear in mind that all the high commissioners in Palestine
functioned in the shadow of the dismantlement of the British Empire after the First World
War. In addition, all of them were at loggerheads with the Zionist movement over British
versus Zionist interests and whether the two could ever meet, and all faced growing
Palestine Arab discontent. Basically, and certainly at the local level, all the high
commissioners encountered a situation spawned by these seemingly intractable problems.
Wauchope, for example, had to deal with a revolt by the Palestine Arabs; Cunningham, with
an insurgency mounted by the Jews. Although the two uprisings contained marked
differences, a comparison is unavoidable.
The watershed can be dated to the beginning of October 1947. From then on, the high
commissioner was responsible for taking apart the British infrastructure in the country amid
a war. It was a situation unprecedented in the history of the Mandate. This book is about
Cunningham’s methods of coping with problems that were typical of the Mandate era as such
and were a product of British rule in Palestine. But it is also about how he dealt with a very
particular and extraordinarily dramatic period: the end of the Second World War—and of
the Holocaust—and its diplomatic, political, and military consequences. A separate book
will cover the riveting period of the evacuation from Palestine.
In the period covered by this book, Cunningham’s tenure as high commissioner was
shaped by three basic elements. First was the dire political and economic plight of Britain
and the British Empire following the Second World War and its impact on the developments
in Palestine, throughout the empire, in Britain itself, and in the international arena, where the
empire’s status had declined sharply. Second, there was the understandable sense of
helplessness felt by the Jewish community in Palestine after the Holocaust and its
consequent inability to sustain a political process without a foreseeable time frame for the
establishment of a state. The Yishuv and its leadership were unquestionably the dynamic
element in Palestine in the waning part of the Mandate period, and particularly after the
British suppression of the Arab Revolt (1936–1939). The Arabs tended to react to Jewish
moves rather than take independent initiatives. The result was that the Jews “hijacked”
Cunningham’s agenda. This situation engendered a Jewish uprising—accompanied by
terrorism—aimed at forcing Britain to revise its policy immediately. The third element was
the singular biography of High Commissioner Cunningham himself.
Accordingly, Cunningham’s tenure as high commissioner is examined through the prism of
these three elements, which occupied most of his time in his headquarters at Government
House in Jerusalem. His biography until 1945 is recounted briefly in the service of the
primary purpose: to further an understanding of his performance as high commissioner. From
late in 1941, Cunningham was engaged in a struggle for his reputation after being replaced
mid-campaign as commander of the Eighth Army in the Western Desert, in Libya. That
struggle for personal rehabilitation was much on his mind during his term as high
commissioner and undoubtedly affected his perception of the unfolding events in Palestine.
As such, it influenced the decisions he made—and those he did not make. About a month
before the end of the British Mandate, at the peak of the internal British argument on how
and exactly when to leave Palestine, Cunningham wrote to the colonial secretary, Arthur
Creech-Jones, that he was unable to express his opinion freely because of “an unpleasant
episode in my own personal history.”1
The two other elements of the historical situation each involve substantial sections of the
story. The first, under the part heading “A Political Process as Though There Is No
Terrorism, November 1945–December 1946,” describes the high commissioner’s efforts to
further the idea of partition as the desirable solution, in his view, for Palestine. The second,
“To Fight Terrorism as Though There Is No Political Process, July 1946–August 1947,”
narrates his struggle against Jewish violence and terrorism. There is nothing arbitrary about
the decision to separate Cunningham’s efforts to press the political issue from his attempts to
cope with Jewish violence. He himself was determined to set policy in terms of that
differentiation. How successful this approach was is a major theme of this book.
A critical motif in this connection is Cunningham’s complex relationship with British
institutions other than the Colonial Office (for which he was emissary) that were
instrumental in shaping British policy in Palestine and the Middle East, particularly the War
Office (incorporating the army) and the Foreign Office. The disputes that arose between
these entities were not always substantive in character and were often tainted by residues of
the past. In Cunningham’s case, what was at stake was the “right memory,” namely, the
rehabilitation of his war-tarnished reputation. Some, mainly in the army, missed no
opportunity to dredge up the Western Desert episode almost as an “unconventional weapon,”
certainly an irrelevant one, in connection with the disagreements over Palestine policy. In
my reading, Cunningham’s agreement to take up the post in Palestine with only a few days’
advance notice and no preparation, his behavior there, and the decisions he made cannot be
understood without reference to his past and the deep psychic scars it left. Did he not grasp
fully the nature of the arena he was entering? Almost certainly he did not know how his
tenure as high commissioner would end. He harbored opinions of his own, certainly, even as
the situation increasingly lurched out of his—and Britain’s—control. He was an actor in a
time of high drama.
The narrative and analysis of Cunningham’s tenure as high commissioner in Jerusalem,
which was without a doubt the pinnacle of his professional life, shed new light on the
waning period of the British Mandate in Palestine. This book takes the British perspective
as its point of departure, not the Jewish or the Arab viewpoint. Our view of the events in
Palestine in this fraught time is through the high commissioner’s window in Government
House, a mansion perched atop the Hill of Evil Counsel, in southeast Jerusalem. As such,
the story related in these pages juxtaposes biography with British imperial/colonial history,
specifically the case of Palestine. My underlying assumption is that the subjective
understanding of events by the senior official of the Mandatory administration in its final
years is of surpassing importance. I have not counterpoised Cunningham’s approaches with
other approaches espoused by the British authorities or by the Jews or the Arabs. I have
dwelled on such approaches only when they seem to have helped shape the high
commissioner’s outlook.
As for terminology: it presents problems of language, time, and subjective perception. A
cardinal case in point is the very name of the country in which these events took place. The
British called it Palestine, and for the English-language version of this book I have used that
name. However, the Jews, certainly at this late stage of the Mandate period, referred to it
almost exclusively as Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), whereas for the Palestine Arabs it was
Filastin. The Jewish community in Palestine is called the Yishuv (more fully, hayishuv hame
urgan, the organized Yishuv), the name used by the politically organized Jewish community
in Palestine from the 1920s until 1948. The overwhelming majority of the Jews in the
country, across the political spectrum, belonged to that community. Indeed, this was the chief
source of the Yishuv’s strength. Nothing comparable existed on the Arab side. For the small
Jewish underground groups that engaged in terrorism, Etzel and Lehi, I use the term
breakaways (porshim), as they were dubbed at the time, for having broken away from the
organized Yishuv’s voluntary authority. They are also referred to, in certain contexts, as the
Irgun and the Stern group or Stern gang, respectively—as they were called by the British. It
is important to bear in mind that these groups, though small, posed a challenge both to the
Yishuv and to the British, both of which suffered as a result of their violence. At the same
time, a considerable disparity exists between the groups’ actual historical role and the place
they occupy in the contemporary memory in Israel and elsewhere, especially among those
who are not well informed about the historical reality. The British used the term Jewish
terror mostly in reference to the breakaways. One can argue about the motivation, but not
about the type of operation. In the Hebrew version, I occasionally make use of the present-
day term pigua, translated as “terrorist attack.”
The contemporaries referred to a “political solution,” which I sometimes supplement
with the notion of a “political process.” The term administration refers to the Mandatory
government; the term government to the governmental apparatus in London. The army is the
British Army. Because the land forces were part of the War Office, the term army is
sometimes used for the ministry to which it belonged. Cunningham and his staff used the
terms Jews, Zionists, and Yishuv interchangeably. Yishuv was generally used in a positive
context. Use of the Arabs might refer to Arab states, but more usually refers to the Palestine
Arabs. I have refrained from using short forms of people’s names or pet names, unless they
were in regular use or appear in a quotation.
The military historian Correlli Barnett was the first to interview Cunningham extensively,
in the second half of the 1950s. Their conversations revolved around the 1941 episode in the
Western Desert, when Cunningham was relieved of his post as commander-in-chief of the
Eighth Army. Barnett informed me that he could not locate the drafts of the interviews.
Accordingly, I resorted to the sections from the interviews that appear in his book The
Desert Generals (1960). In 1958, Cunningham was interviewed by the Israeli mass-