Free 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris Page B

two young sergeants struck a deadly blow against British patience and pride," Arthur Creech Jones, Britain's colonial secretary, was to comment thirteen years later.8 But bestiality was by no means a monopoly of the Jewish terrorists. On the evening of 30 July, responding to the hangings, British troops and police in Tel Aviv went on the rampage, destroying Jewish shops and beating up passersby. In one area, the berserk security men sprayed Jewish pedestrians and coffee shops with gunfire, killing five and injuring ten. High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, in a cable to London, explained what had happened-in the process highlighting the sorry state of his force's morale: "Most of them are young ... they have had to work in an atmosphere of constant danger and increasing tension, fraught with insult, vilification and treachery; and it can be understood that the culminating horror of the murder of their comrades ... in every circumstance of planned brutality, should have excited them to a pitch of fury which momentarily blinded them to the dictates of principle, reason and humanity alike. "9
    Nor was this all. In London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Gates head, and Holyhead there were anti-Semitic demonstrations; Jewish shopand synagogue windows were smashed.
    In Palestine, several policemen were fired-though no criminal proceedings were ever instituted against anyone. In Parliament, in special session on is August, there was an all-party consensus to quit Palestine, quickly; "no British interest" was served by soldiering on, said Churchill.
    On a April the British had asked the UN secretary-general to convene a special session of the General Assembly, which duly met in New York on z8 April-9 May. The General Assembly resolved to set up the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to recommend a solution to the Palestine conundrum.
    The Arab delegations opposed UNSCOP's appointment and sought, instead, a fiill-scale General Assembly debate and decision on immediate independence for an Arab-dominated "united democratic ... Palestinian state." 10 They were handily defeated, the majority of the fifty-five UN members preferring to leave debate and decision until after the committee had examined the problem. The Arabs then tried to restrict the committee's terms of reference to Palestine and Palestinian independence. The Zionists, for their part, sought to include the problem of Europe's Jewish DPs-of whom there were more than four hundred thousand. i 1 Again, the Arabs lost.
    The final terms, hammered out in the General Assembly's First (Political) Committee, authorized UNSCOP to recommend a solution on the basis of an investigation in the country and "anywhere" else it saw fit, an allusion to the DP camps. Holland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia, India, Iran, Peru, Guatemala, and Uruguay were asked to send representatives. UNSCOP included no Zionist, Arab, or Great Power members.
    Zionist officials were not enamored with this composition, given the membership of three Muslim, or partly Muslim, states (Iran, India, and Yugoslavia) and two Dominions (Canada and Australia) that, it was feared, would automatically defer to London.
    The Arabs were not overly concerned about the ultimate upshot in the General Assembly. With five member states and a handful of reflexive Islamic and third world supporters, they expected an easy victory. They came to the assembly cocky and disorganized and remained so until the bitter end. They failed to appreciate the significance of Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko's General Assembly speech of 14 May 1947, a speech that stunned almost all Western and Zionist observers (though almost no one understood its full purport). Hitherto, Soviet policy on Palestine had been anti-British and pro-Arab. Now, while criticizing the British, Gromyko spoke of "the Jewish people['s] ... exceptional [and `indescribable'] sorrow and suffer ing" during the Holocaust and