On 18 September Faisal met in London and the next day and 23 had long meetings with Lloyd George, who explained the memory aid and the British position. Lloyd George stated that he was “in the position of a man who had inherited two groups of commitments, those of King Hussein and those of the French,” Faisal noted that the agreement “seemed to be based on the 1916 agreement between the British and the French.” Clemenceau responded about Memory Aid, refusing to travel to Syria and saying that the case should be left to the French to directly manage Fayçal. The French elected Picot as French High Commissioner for the soon-to-be-occupied territory of Syria and Palestine. The British appointed Sykes political chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. On April 3, 1917, Sykes met Lloyd George, Curzon and Hankey to receive his instructions on the matter, namely to keep the French on their side as they pushed towards a British Palestine. First Sykes in early May, then by chance, Picot and Sykes visited the Hejaz together in May to discuss the agreement with Fayçal and Hussein. [55]166 Hussein was persuaded to accept a formula that the French of Syria would follow the same policy as the British in Baghdad. As Hussein believed that Baghdad would be part of the Arab state, he was finally satisfied with this. Subsequent reports from participants expressed doubts as to the exact nature of the discussions and the degree to which Hussein had actually been informed of the Sykes-Picot conditions. [61] After Russia`s agreement on 26 April 1916, the final conditions were sent on 9 May 1916 by Paul Cambon, French Ambassador to London, to Foreign Minister Edward Grey and ratified in Grey`s reply of 16 May 1916. [34] [35] Loevy referred to a similar point with respect to sections 4 to 8 of the agreement, recalling that the British and French practiced “Ottoman colonial development” and that this experience served as a roadmap for subsequent war negotiations. [51] While Khalidi examined the negotiations of Great Britain and France in 1913 and 1914 on the Homs-Baghdad railway line, as well as their agreements with Germany, in other regions, as a “clear basis” for their subsequent spheres of influence under the agreement.
[52] In April 1920, the San Remo Conference distributed Class A warrants on Syria to France and Iraq and Palestine to Britain. The same conference ratified an oil agreement reached at a London conference on 12 February, based on a slightly different version of the Long Berenger agreement, previously signed on 21 December in London. Picot had made disproportionate gains over the real balance of forces in the Levant, a fact that the British took advantage of to recover most of the concessions made by Sykes after the war. After Russia was abducted by the revolution, it was no longer necessary to obtain a buffer that protected Mesopotamia from Anatolia. Mosul was then attached to the new mandate of the British League of Nations in Iraq. In Palestine, the Balfour Declaration was used to replace the international regime agreed with Picot with a purely British mandate. In eastern Galilee, the borders of the new Palestinian mandate were then moved north to the Jordan springs and to Yarmuk to embrace the Samakh Triangle. These forced concessions rekindled French resentment and eventually prompted the French authorities in Damascus to refuse cooperation with British troops contested in Palestine during the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt. After World War II, France`s continued hostility led them to retaliate against Britain`s support for Syrian and Lebanese independence by supporting Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine. Their attacks played a crucial role in forcing the British to accept the partition of the Palestinian mandate, with disastrous consequences for their image in the Arab world.
