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58 2 Toward a Clash with the Yishuv In the spring of 1946, with the mission of the AngloAmerican Committee completed, the high commissioner enjoyed greater freedom of action. The waiting period mandated by the committee’s work had the effect of tempering his approach—which sprang from his military experience—and enriching his experience of the situation. Now placing the emphasis on the civil-political-diplomatic aspect of the high commissioner’s office, Cunningham moved to deal with the Jewish Agency’s stance regarding a political solution and Jewish terrorism. He was determined to moderate the approach of the agency’s leadership. Initially, Cunningham, who was learning on the job, had supported an effort at dismantling the Jewish Agency. Afterward, he accepted a recommendation from the Colonial Office not to discuss policy issues with the agency’s leaders. Adoption of this posture had first been broached toward the end of 1945, but the government rejected plans put forward by the Colonial Office, the high commissioner, and the army to take direct and vigorous action against the Jewish Agency, maintaining that such an effort would strengthen the extremists at the expense of the moderates. (By “extremists ,” the British meant not the breakaway groups Etzel and Lehi but “activists,” as David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sneh, and their colleagues were known in Zionist argot.) By June 1946, Cunningham had a different perspective. He now believed that the alternative to a large-scale military operation and civil noncooperation with the Mandate administration lay in restoring to the moderates in the Zionist leadership the power they had lost as Yishuvperpetrated ­violence and terrorism surged beginning in the autumn of 1945.1 The contemporary reader may be wondering why the British were preoccupied with the question of who would lead the Yishuv and the­ Zionist movement. In the reality of the time, it was understood by both the British and the Zionists, in the spirit of the Mandatory approach, that the latter would choose their own leadership. On the other hand, neither side could ignore the thorough involvement of the government of Britain 59 Toward a Clash with the Yishuv and the Mandate administration in both security and the question of a political solution, and also their say in matters of principle and personnel , such as the leadership of the Jewish Agency. (The agency’s existence derived from the Palestine Mandate received by Britain from the League of Nations after the First World War.) The question in dispute was how far the legal authority of the Mandate administration and of the Jewish Agency extended. The legality of the Mandatory power and the Jewish Agency was not in dispute. And beyond any legalistic quibbles that might nevertheless arise, the two sides were interdependent . Cunningham, like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion—the head of the Jewish Agency at the time—understood this, each in his way and from his particular vantage point. Each side might reject the legality of the other’s actions, but not its existence as such.2 The road to upgrading the moderates’ status naturally passed through Chaim Weizmann. There is no need to elaborate here on the ties that Weizmann—a British citizen and president of the Zionist movement whose reputation as both a statesman and a scientist preceded him—had developed with the British authorities since the First World War. His approach , with variations, was shared by others in the Zionist leadership on both the right and the left, from Zeʾev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion. Its gist was that the Zionist movement’s alliance with the Great Power that had issued the Balfour Declaration and was responsible for validating the idea of the Jewish national home was the elixir of life for the Zionist movement . But Weizmann’s quest for a moderate policy was informed, particularly in his second term as head of the Zionist movement (1935–1948), by his Anglophile inclinations. Zionism, he believed, should pin its hopes on relations with Britain and the United States as an alternative to resorting to violence. Weizmann held violence to be both morally repugnant and concretely counterproductive.3 In his major biography of Ben-Gurion, Shabtai Teveth writes about a “strong friendship” that supposedly developed “very quickly” between Weizmann and Cunningham beginning at the end of 1945. In practice, the relations between the two men were complex. They were certainly not marked by friendship, let alone intimacy. Weizmann habitually prefixed letters to friends and those he was close to with the salutation “My...

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