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"Sykes-Picot" and Israel

(Jerusalem Post) Zalman Shoval - 100 years ago this week, Britain's Sir Mark Sykes and France's Francois George-Picot reached a secret agreement for carving up many of the lands then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence and domination once World War I ended. The agreement also predetermined the general borders of Mandatory Palestine and, at least in part, those of the State of Israel. During the war, Arab leaders, such as the Hashemites, threw in their lot with the British in order to gain domination over most of the Arab lands to be taken after the war from the Turks, but as their contribution to the war effort was practically nil, the promises made to them by the Allied powers were largely ignored after the war. Sykes was a committed British Christian Zionist who saw in the reestablishment of a national home for the Jewish people in its ancient homeland a moral and historical obligation - a sentiment shared at the time by another British Zionist, Winston Churchill. The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
2016-05-18 00:00:00
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