Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947

By Motti Golani

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611683882

Book preview

Prologue

On the Road to Jerusalem

Alan Gordon Cunningham was born in Dublin, Ireland, on May 1, 1887, to a Scottish family. The fifth and youngest child of Elizabeth and Daniel Cunningham, he had two sisters and two brothers. Daniel Cunningham was a leading anatomist of the time and taught at the University of Edinburgh and afterward at the University of Dublin. Devoted to his work, he was an ardent and creative researcher, author, and teacher. Everything else took second place in his life, not least his children.

Alan Cunningham was born when his father was at the height of his academic and scientific career. Daniel inculcated in his children the virtues of self-discipline and hard work. The Cunninghams were an established family, confident of the future. The children were closer to their mother, who often acted as a mediator and protector in the face of their father’s strict demands. Daniel served on many royal commissions of inquiry that investigated the treatment of diseases and injuries in the colonies and the armed forces. The children were thus exposed not only to stories about the medical world but also about the empire and its armed forces. Indeed, Daniel urged his sons to pursue a military career. He died suddenly, at age fifty-nine, when Alan was twenty-two and had recently embarked on lifelong army and national service.¹

Alan Cunningham had his heart set on soldiering from an early age. He preferred the navy but was inducted into artillery. Educated at Cheltenham College and afterward at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he was commissioned as an artillery officer in 1906, when he was nineteen. In the First World War, he served on the western front in the Royal Horse Artillery and apparently acquitted himself well. In 1915, he was awarded the Military Cross, and toward the end of the war, in 1918, the Distinguished Service Order. No less important for the career of a young officer, Cunningham was cited five times in the distinguished service list. Extraordinary among the members of his generation who spent the whole war on the front lines, young Cunningham emerged unscathed from the carnage. He had found his niche and remained in the army.

Those who pursued a military career in the interwar period often encountered a glaring disparity between their ambitions and the hard reality of what the imperial army could offer. Britain’s reluctance to get involved in another armed conflict limited the options to two: service in one of the garrison forces scattered throughout the empire or service in the military training system. Those who chose the colonies found themselves performing what were essentially policing functions, quelling insurrections or coping with repeated waves of terrorism. Nor did service in the training units offer much of a challenge, given Britain’s military stagnation. Promotion was correspondingly slow. Nevertheless, this was the world Cunningham knew, and no other profession seems to have appealed to him.²

In 1919, the young officer received an assignment that had nothing to do with the military profession but brought closer the fulfillment of his old but still passionate wish to serve in the Royal Navy. For two years, until 1921, he was posted to Singapore; afterward, he was accepted to the Naval Staff College. Despite completing the college successfully, he was posted to the ground forces’ training system for what would become a frustrating fifteen-year stint. He spent most of this period at a small auxiliary weapons school at Netheravon. Unwillingly, he remained in artillery.

Cunningham rose through the ranks slowly. The only way to accelerate a stalled career was by obtaining a field command post. In 1937, now fifty years old and holding the rank of lieutenant colonel, Cunningham gained admittance to the Imperial Defense College, the highest institution for senior officers. In the same year, he was appointed commander of the First Division of the Royal Artillery, primarily an administrative position, with the division’s units scattered across Britain. In 1938, as tension surged in Europe, he was promoted to the rank of major general and appointed commander of the Fifth Antiaircraft Division.

Though he spent most of the interwar years in Britain, Cunningham did not acquire property and did not marry. The army was his life. But he remained unknown to the public at least until the spring of 1941. The opportunity to scale career heights, out of reach in peacetime, arrived in the war that erupted on September 1, 1939. The British armed forces suffered a severe jolt and lessons were learned rapidly in the wake of the debacle in France in 1940. In the course of a year, as military units were expanded, manpower increased, and swift personnel changes ensued, Cunningham commanded several artillery and infantry divisions as necessity demanded. In October 1940, he was chosen by General Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief of the British Middle East Command (1939–1941), to lead the British expeditionary force in East