Britain in 1939 Reaffirms Area of Palestine Was Not Promised to Sharif of Mecca During World War I

March 16, 1939

Was the area of Palestine excluded from British promises made to Sharif Hussein of Mecca during World War I? A British investigation in 1939 said it was not part of a British promise made by the high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, in correspondence in 1915 and 1916 to Sharif Hussein for Arab geographic independence at the conclusion of World War I. Britain, France, Russia and Italy, allies in the war against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, drew up secret and public understandings with one another and with Arab and Zionist leaders about the geopolitical and political configuration of the Middle East at war’s end.

The controversy centered on whether the area of Palestine, not yet a defined geographic area, was to be reserved for the Zionists to create a national home or be included in an area for eventual Arab control. It spilled into the public domain with the publication of the Peel Commission Report in 1937 and George Antonius’ Arab Awakening (1938), when British officials reviewing all of the relevant documents and statements asserted that Palestine was never intended to be part of any pledge to Arab leaders. Until then, the secret elements of the controversy were not known to the general public. The British concluded that their strategic interests in Haifa, their relationship with the French, and their Balfour Declaration promise to the Zionists in 1917, included in the Articles of the Palestine Mandate (1922), proved conclusively what their intentions were for Palestine.

After hearing Arab claims to the contrary, the British issued this report in March 1939. The British concluded that the area of Palestine was excluded, though the British allocated fully 80% of the area to Abdullah, one of Sharif Hussein’s sons, where Transjordan was created. In the context of May 1939’s British White Paper on Palestine, which truncated the Jewish national home’s growth and offered the prospects of a federal state to the Palestinian Arabs in 10 years — an idea that the Mufti rejected but 14 members of the Arab Higher Committee endorsed — Britain firmly asserted that it had the right in 1917 to foster the establishment of a Jewish national home, in 1922 to include the Balfour text in the Mandate’s governing articles, and in 1939 to slow or stop Jewish growth toward statehood.

— Ken Stein, June 2010

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