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.
Motti Golani is Ruhama Rosenberg Professor for Jewish History and heads the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University. He has authored and coauthored over a dozen books, including Palestine Between Politics and Terror, 1945-1947 and Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948, Two Narratives of the 1948 War and its Outcome.
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