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141 5 “The King David Hotel Crime” On Monday July 22, 1946, shortly after being pulled from the debris of the southeast wing of the King David Hotel,1 Sir John Shaw, the chief secretary of the Mandate administration,2 cabled the colonial secretary and the British ambassadors in the Middle East, Washington, and Moscow. A particularly large bomb had exploded in the Chief Secretariat at approximately 12:30 p.m., he wrote. He added that an entire wing of the King David Hotel had collapsed and that the damage and destruction were apparently widespread. Badly shaken, Shaw could only promise that he would send a full report as soon as he was able. Shaw was just the acting high commissioner, but he continued to work out of his office in the Chief Secretariat. (The cable itself was sent from Government House, because the telegraph facility in the hotel was destroyed.) Shaw survived because the Chief Secretariat was located in the hotel’s southeast wing, which was only slightly damaged. The explosion occurred at 12:37 p.m.3 Cunningham was at the last place he would have chosen to be when the news reached him—Whitehall, where he was attending a meeting at the Ministry of Defense, the height of a triumphant visit to London to reap the fruits of his offensive in Operation Agatha. On his third day in the capital, he seemed to be having success in explaining to the government the connection, as he saw it, between the military’s action, the cessation of the Jewish insurgency and the Jewish Agency’s enlistment in the fight against terrorism, and the one possible political solution: partition. But the news from Jerusalem set him on a different course. Within a few months, he would be pushed, entirely against his will, into dealing with terrorism as a separate issue in itself, rather than as part of the political process. Cunningham’s gradual exclusion from diplomatic activity after July 22 was brought about by the army, the Foreign Office, and even the Jewish Agency.4 This was not the high commissioner’s first encounter with terrorism since arriving in Palestine. Heretofore, however, the violence had remained within the Yishuv’s institutional framework and taken the form of street demonstrations and guerilla-like operations. These actions were 142 To Fight Terrorism carried out under the aegis of the Jewish Agency, a legally constituted body against which the administration could act, as in Operation Agatha. In contrast, the classic terrorism perpetrated by the breakaway groups, and not coordinated with the Jewish Resistance Movement, straddled the fault line between criminality (robbery, abduction) and senseless brutality (the murder of British soldiers in their sleep in Tel Aviv, in April 1946) of a type that infuriated the organized Yishuv. Cunningham and his aides had previously turned the terrorism to their advantage, invoking it to exert effective pressure on the Jewish Agency, which bore responsibility. From this perspective, the primary goals of Operation Agatha were to moderate the Zionist leadership ahead of a political settlement, and to prove its responsibility for Haganah and Palmah guerilla actions. A secondary goal was to induce the Jewish Agency to take action against Etzel and Lehi, though these entities were not targeted in the operation. Even if Cunningham tried to deny it, the King David Hotel event represented a quantum leap compared to past actions. With the exception of Government House itself, there was no more sensitive, symbolic, and operational target than the King David Hotel, whose southern wing housed the Chief Secretariat (the Palestine government) and army headquarters. The terrorists struck at the very heart of the administration, with all the implications this entailed. The King David Hotel, which was owned by the Jewish-Egyptian Mos­ seri family, opened its doors to the public in late 1931. From the beginning , the King David was an extraordinary international and intercultural meeting place in Palestine and indeed throughout the Middle East. Britons , Jews, and Arabs mingled at the bar and in the frequent parties held at the hotel. The guests came from all over the world: kings, princes, and leaders—whether genuine or self-styled—along with politicians, intelligence personnel, journalists, artists, businessmen, jurists, men of the military, administration officials, and anyone who wanted to see and be seen, obtain information, forge ties of various kinds, or close a deal. During the Second World War, Palestine as a whole and Jerusalem in particular were an island. The King David Hotel was...

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