be able to influence the outcome of the war, the British government aligned itself with
the relatively new movement called “Zionism,” which advocated the establishment of
a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
On November 2, 1917, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, sent a
letter to Lionel Walter, Lord Rothschild, a Zionist leader in Britain, pledging that the
government would support creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. This
pledge came just weeks before General Allenby’s military expedition captured Jerusa-
lem, thus putting Britain in control of Palestine. Balfour’s letter, known ever since as
the Balfour Declaration, swung British diplomatic and political weight behind Zion-
ism, which previously had gained little backing in world capitals and was even contro-
versial among Jews.
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader largely responsible for persuading British
officials to adopt Zionism as official policy, also sought to win Arab support for the
cause. In 1918 and early 1919, Weizmann met repeatedly with Faisal, Sharif Hussein’s
son, and the two men signed an agreement calling for Arab-Jewish cooperation in the
founding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Except for its historical importance as an
idealistic vision of pan-Semitic harmony, the agreement never amounted to anything
of substance, in part because Faisal later renounced it.
The Mandates
The end of World War I in November 1918 launched numerous rounds of interna-
tional diplomacy that lasted longer than the war and resulted in the ratification of
most of the decisions about the Middle East taken in London and Paris during the
war. Of note, in July 1922 the newly founded League of Nations assigned mandates
giving Britain and France virtual colonial power over the Arabic-speaking portions of
the former Ottoman Empire. The mandate for British control of Palestine incorpo-
rated the language of the Balfour Declaration calling for the creation of a Jewish
national home on that territory.
In theory, the mandates required Britain and France to lay the groundwork for
self-governance in the territories they ruled, but London and Paris showed little inter-
est in this aspect of their control. In fact, they suppressed Arab nationalist movements
that demanded greater say in local decision making. Rising nationalist sentiments and
the tumultuous events of World War II brought an end to the mandates, leaving in
their place the independent Arab states of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria and the
Jewish state of Israel.
In forming Iraq and Lebanon, the European powers drew boundaries that brought
together disparate groups that shared no common sense of nationhood. The French
detached Lebanon from Greater Syria for the benefit of their Maronite Christian allies
who predominated in the Mount Lebanon area. Minorities of Shiite and Sunni Mus-
lims also were included within the new Lebanese boundaries, later necessitating
arrangements for uneasy power-sharing among the three communities. Britain simi-
larly created Iraq from the former Ottoman provinces of Basra (in the south, domi-
nated by Shiites), Baghdad (in the center, dominated at the time by Sunnis), and
Mosul (in the north, with a population that included Kurds). The artificial nature of
Iraq and Lebanon bred problems years later, beginning in the 1950s, when Lebanon
experienced the first of its internal conflicts, and continuing into the 2000s, when the
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