(including the territory east of the Jordan River that later became Transjordan) and
Iraq (defined as the three Ottoman-era provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul), while
France would govern Syria, including Lebanon. In August 1920, the terms of the San
Remo conference were incorporated into the broader Treaty of Sèvres, which imposed
harsh terms on the Ottoman Empire, including international control of Istanbul and
the strategic Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. (The aspects of that treaty dealing with
Turkey were replaced by the more conciliatory Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July
- See Turkish National Pact, p. 634.)
In the meantime, Britain and France each took actions that would affect their pre-
sumed mandates. In July 1920, France ousted Faisal Ibn Hussein, an ally of Britain who
had proclaimed himself king of Syria, ending the first-ever attempt to form an inde-
pendent Arab state. (Two years later, Britain would install Faisal as the first king of Iraq).
Britain in 1921 created Transjordan by separating the large expanse of territory east of
the Jordan River from the rest of Palestine. The British transformed the East Bank area,
at the time largely uninhabited desert, into a protectorate under the leadership of Faisal’s
older brother Abdallah, who established the Hashimite monarchy that remains in power
to this day. (The name of the country was changed to Jordan in 1949.)
The League of Nations formally approved the British and French mandates on
July 24, 1922. Part of the delay after San Remo stemmed from the need for consul-
tations with the United States, which had refused to join the League but nevertheless
was an increasingly important power on the world stage. The mandates gave the two
European powers complete administrative responsibility, along with the task of prepar-
ing the local populations to eventually “stand by themselves” as independent coun-
tries. Britain and France took seriously their governance of these mandates but gener-
ally ignored their responsibilities to create conditions for self-government.
In historical terms, the mandate for Palestine is important because of its incorpo-
ration of the language of the Balfour Declaration, thus affixing an international seal
to what had been a unilateral British policy favoring a Jewish “national home” on that
territory. The mandate also formalized the separation of Transjordan from Palestine
(thus eliminating Zionist dreams of controlling the area east of the Jordan River),
encouraged the immigration of Jews into Palestine, and decreed that Hebrew join
English and Arabic as the official languages of Palestine. The mandate made no ref-
erence to the Arabs of Palestine directly, referring to them only as the “existing non-
Jewish communities.”
Before the official approval of the mandate for Palestine, Britain, on July 1, 1922,
had published a White Paper, a document articulating its vision of how the mandate
would be administered. Among its key features, the White Paper sought to assure the
Arab population that Britain would not impose “a Jewish nationality” upon them and
that Jewish immigration would not be allowed to exceed the “economic capacity of
the country.” Zionist leaders accepted the document, although some of them viewed
it as a retreat from the promise of the Balfour Declaration. Arab leaders in Palestine
rejected the White Paper, arguing that it would strip the Arab population of its rights.
Between 1922 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Britain gov-
erned Palestine with an increasingly uneasy hand, troubled by the inherent contradic-
tion between the legal and moral promises that it had made to Arabs and Jews. Rounds
of violence made it clear that important elements of the two communities were not
prepared to live in peace with one another. The British government’s frequently clumsy
26 FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST