Lines on the Map: Sykes-Picot and Balfour

While Arab forces fought the Ottomans on British promises of independence, the powers were secretly deciding the fate of the Arab lands among themselves. In 1916 the British and French governments, with Russian assent, concluded the agreement named after their negotiators Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, which divided the Ottoman provinces of the Mashriq, the Fertile Crescent, into British and French zones of direct rule and influence, drawing the first of the lines that would become the borders of the modern states. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, a single short sentence pledging support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, a land whose population was then overwhelmingly Arab. These two commitments flatly contradicted the promise of Arab independence, and after the war they were translated into the League of Nations mandates that placed Syria and Lebanon under France and Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine under Britain, with frontiers largely ruled from outside. In the memory of the Arab and wider Muslim world, the secret partition and the Balfour Declaration are remembered as a foundational betrayal: independence promised and withheld, a region cut up by foreign hands, and the planting of a conflict over Palestine that has not ended. This scene depicts the act in its truest form, not a battlefield but a map table, the coast and hinterland of the Levant with boundary lines ruled across it, the dividers and documents of a partition decided from afar.