The End of the British Mandate for Palestine, 1948: The Diary of Sir Henry Gurney Motti Golani Henry Gurney served as the last Chief Secretary of the Mandate Government of Palestine. From mid-March until mid-May 1948, at his headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Gurney wrote his diary. He wrote under fire from Jews and Arabs alike, as both groups took aim at the British Administration in Palestine while the Mandate drew to a close and the country spiraled into violence. This book provides, for the first time, an inside view of the Mandate government during its final days. Jerusalem in 1948 was a microcosm not only of the historic Jewish-Arab conflict over the country, but also of the British Empire on the eve of its disappearance from the international arena. By vividly and candidly describing the details of this critical period in Palestine, Gurney's diary provides a unique window into the evolution of the Jewish-Arab conflict. The events he recounts helped define many of the contours which have continued to shape the Arab-Israeli conflict up until the present day. Motti Golani is Historian of the British Mandate and Israel at the University of Haifa, Israel, and a former Senior Member at St. Antony's College, Oxford. His books include: Israel in Search of a War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955-1956, Wars Don't Just Happen: Israeli Memory, Power and Free Will, and, forthcoming, The Last Commissioner of Judea: Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham in Palestine, 1945-1948, to be published by the Weizmann Institute of Tel Aviv University.