Empire and Imperialism

The British mandate for Iraq was affected by its attempt to renege on their wartime promise of 1916 (Sykes-Picot Agreement) to acknowledge French paramountcy in Syria. They did so by installing in Damascus Emir Faisal ibn Husayn of the Hejaz. When the British ploy failed and the French ousted Faisal, Britain gave him the kingship of Iraq in 1921 as compensation and agreed to lessen the scope of its mandatory powers. In return, Faisal agreed to host a British military presence in Iraq; the Hashemite dynasty he created lasted to 1958.

The Palestine mandate contradicted the official intent of that arrangement. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain had promised the Jewish national movement, Zionism, that it would sponsor the growth of a Jewish national home in Palestine; it was understood that Palestine would become a Jewish state. This was done for several reasons: immediate wartime propaganda; sympathy for past Jewish suffering in Europe; and for strategic reasons of empire, to justify a British presence in Palestine to block any potential French threat from Syria/Lebanon to Egypt and the Suez Canal.

The Balfour Declaration was written into the British mandate for Palestine. Thus, the people Britain would prepare for self-government were not the Palestinian Arabs, but the future Jewish majority once enough immigrants had arrived; Jews were at most 12 percent of the population in 1920. The legacies of this decision are the Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflicts.