Was the area of Palestine excluded from British promises made to Sherif Husain of Mecca during World War I? A British investigation in 1939 said it was not part of a British promise for Arab geographic independence at the conclusion of the war. During WWI, Britain, France, Russia and Italy, allies in their war against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, drew up secret and public understandings with each other, 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 to fall under Arab control. It spilled into the public domain with the publication of the 1937 Peel Commission Report and George Antonius’s, Arab Awakening (1938) when British officials reviewing all of the documents and statements made, asserted that Palestine was never intended to be part of any pledge made to Arab leaders. (Before 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, included in the Articles of the Palestine Mandate (1922) proved conclusively what their intentions were for Palestine. Issued in March 1939, after hearing Arab claims to the contrary, the British reviewed the relevant documents and issued this report. The British concluded that the area of Palestine was excluded, though the British allocated fully 80% of the area to Abduallah, one of Sherif Husain’s sons, where Transjordan was created. In the context of the May 1939 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 ten years (which the Mufti rejected, but 14 members of the Arab Higher Committee—Palestinian leaders endorsed), Britain firmly asserted that it had both the right in 1917 to foster the establishment of a Jewish national home, to include the Declaration in the Mandate’s governing articles, and twenty years later, the right to slow or stop Jewish growth that was headed toward statehood.
Ken Stein, June 2010