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27 1 The Only Chance for Palestine Is Partition Cunningham arrived in Jerusalem on Wednesday November 21, 1945, via the international airport in Lod. The official reception reflected the dual character of his mission: military and civilian. On the tarmac, he was welcomed by the chief secretary, the commander of the British Army in Palestine, and by air force and navy commanders in the Middle East; at the gates of Jerusalem, he was met by the Jerusalem district governor, the army commander, the chief of police, and the mayor; and on Julian’s Way (now King David Street), the convoy was joined by mounted troops from the Transjordan Frontier Force and from the Palestine Police.1 The reception ceremony was to have taken place adjacent to the site of General Edmund Allenby’s camp in the south of the city, near Government House. Cunningham was to have reviewed a guard of honor from the Highland Light Infantry Regiment, the unit that would provide his security during his two-and-a-half-year stay in the city. The chief secretary had planned to escort the incoming high commissioner under a canopy, where the district governor was to present the invited guests. The invitation mentioned “formal and informal guests,” and they included both Jews and Arabs. However, rain forced the cancellation of the outdoor ceremony , so Cunningham, his close aides, and the mounted units proceeded straight to Government House at Jabel Mukaber (the traditional site of the Hill of Evil Counsel), which contained the high commissioner’s residence and office.2 Government House was conceived in 1927, when Augusta Victoria, the former high commissioner’s residence on Mount Scopus, was damaged in an earthquake. A new compound was built, which accommodated the high commissioner from the beginning of the 1930s and was also a symbol of the Mandate administration. The central building was designed by the British architect Austen Harrison, who also designed the Rockefeller Museum in the city’s eastern section. In addition to the two-story main building—the ground floor devoted to offices and receptions, the private residence upstairs—the compound had accommodations for the admin- 28 A Political Process istrative and grounds staff. Cunningham was delighted to discover that the main building was surrounded by a large, splendid garden, whose northern part offered a view of the Old City, including the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There was also a space set aside by his predecessors as a cemetery for pet dogs.3 On the afternoon of Cunningham’s arrival, the letter of appointment was read out in the ground-floor ballroom by the secretary of the executive council of the Mandate administration. The text was then recited in Hebrew and Arabic by the administration’s chief interpreters. The guests obeyed the invitation and arrived in formal morning dress, complete with medals and decorations. Sir William Fitzgerald, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mandate Palestine, who was trusted by both Jews and Arabs, administered the oath of office to Cunningham. He supplemented his congratulations with a cautionary note. You will encounter here an atmosphere of civilian tension, he told the new high commissioner, which will call for extraordinary security measures aimed not only at the enemy storming the gates but also at destructive forces threatening from within. In attendance were the mayors of the big cities, the heads of the Arab Higher Committee, and the leaders of the Jewish National Council and the Jewish Agency, among them David Ben-Gurion, who had returned from a visit abroad earlier in the day. The ceremony was aired live by the Palestine Broadcast Service, with commentary provided by the station’s director, Edwin Samuel, the son of the first high commissioner to Palestine. There was no unusual activity in the streets of Jerusalem that day.4 Cunningham thanked the guests briefly. He was touched that both the writtencongratulationshehadreceivedattheairportandthespokencomments at the ceremony cited his past activity positively. He also thanked the Mandate administrative staff, who were responsible to him, and the officers and soldiers under his command, and noted that even though he had not yet doffed his uniform in his new post, he was taking his leave of the army. He had come to fulfill what was, above all, a civilian function. He said that the collective British memory and his awareness of the postwar geopolitical situation taught him that a zero-sum game was being played out in Palestine: Britain would have a hard...

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