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164 6 The High Commissioner’s “Conciliation Policy” On November 20, 1946, Field Marshal Montgomery, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, launched a concentrated attack on Cunningham’s policy. Meeting that day with the Cabinet Defense Committee and the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Montgomery explained that the “conciliation policy” in Palestine had failed and that the limited initiative achieved by the army—not the high commissioner, who had initiated and managed Operation Agatha—had vanished as though it had never been. The security situation was deteriorating and army and police casualties were rising. Unauthorized attacks on innocent Jews by members of the security forces in retaliation for acts of terrorism were a direct result of this feeling of helplessness, the field marshal explained, without condemning the manifestations of retaliatory rage. Montgomery’s solution: to reinforce the police and the army in Palestine . As for the high commissioner, he is not the right man for the job at this grim time, Montgomery told the committees; he is reprising the weaknesses that he displayed in the Western Desert, particularly his defensive mind-set. If he cannot be removed (as far as is known, Montgomery did not dare demand this explicitly, if only because it was not within his purview , a matter of great weight in the British system), then the cabinet must order him to stop interfering and allow the police and the army to gather intelligence freely, and to conduct searches and set up roadblocks based on their professional opinion. In short: let the army win.1 The debate over how to deal with Jewish terrorism dated from autumn 1945, when the Jewish Resistance Movement was formed. However, until the tail end of 1946 the issue was overshadowed by the political effort. By November 1946, it was clear that the commissions of inquiry had been unproductive. On the eve of the Jewish-Arab “last-chance conference,” scheduled for January 1947, and against the looming British evacuation from India and Greece, a political and military reassessment seemed necessary in Palestine as well. In the policy debate, the Colonial Office acted as a buffer between Cunningham and his adversaries in London, mainly in the Foreign Office. On the terrorism issue, the confrontation was a di- 165 “Conciliation Policy” rect one, as the high commissioner was the supreme commander of the army in Palestine, the operative superior of the military commander in the country and parallel in authority to the Cairo-based chief of the Middle East Command. The latter was directly accountable to the cigs and the War Office, whereas the high commissioner received his instructions from the Colonial Office. Day to day, Cunningham worked with General Miles Dempsey, the commander of the Middle East Land Forces, and with the army commander in Palestine, Lieutenant General Evelyn Barker. Both were Montgomery’s men and, not coincidentally, were appointed to their posts on the eve of his becoming cigs, toward the end of June 1946. Indeed, Montgomery sought to groom Dempsey as his successor. The two supported their superior’s approach unreservedly. In this situation, Cunningham and Montgomery clashed head-on.2 The governmental bodies represented by Cunningham and Montgomery had long been engaged in a battle over the Palestine question, as over other colonial issues. From the War Office’s point of view, the Second World War naturally strengthened the army, at least temporarily. Britain’s postwar situation—the collapse of the empire and the onset of the Cold War—left the Colonial Office in something of a shambles, but in the final analysis also reduced the stature of the War Office and the military. It was the Foreign Office that gained at these two agencies’ expense. However, at the end of 1946, not all those involved, particularly the army, understood which way the wind was blowing. The situation was compounded by the two men’s strikingly different personalities and by the bitter memories that colored their relations; substantive disagreements became personal and made consensus between them impossible. Montgomery’s view of Cunningham’s policy as soft, not to say defensive—a view derived from the Western Desert events of 1941—seemed amply confirmed during Montgomery ’s visit to Palestine in June 1946 and in the months that followed. The source of the complaints about Cunningham that reached the chiefs of staff and the Defense Committee in London was apparently Dempsey. Immediately upon taking over as commander of the Middle East Land Forces in June 1946, Dempsey clashed with Cunningham over the...

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