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into a rebellion against the Turks, and thus Arab nationalism was born. Sharif Husain entered into a correspondence with the British high commissioner in Egypt to determine the price for an Arab rebellion.
    The British led Sharif Husain to believe he would be made king of a Greater Arab Nation in exchange for his cooperation. The letters were a sham. The British and their French allies secretly had other ideas for the future of Arab lands.
    On May 9, 1916, the British and French entered into a clandestine treaty on how they intended to carve up the region. The treaty was the Sykes-Picot, named for the negotiators. Always described as infamous, the treaty ignored both Jewish aspirations and Sharif Husain’s personal ambitions. And so Palestine became the ‘twice promised land.’
    To pay the passage for their aspirations and the promise of the Balfour Declaration, the Jews of Palestine supplied a Jewish Legion to the British Army. One of these units, the Zion Mule Corps, engaged in fierce combat at Gallipoli.
    On the Arab side, Sharif Husain and his sons promoted some effective guerrilla sabotage on the Trans-Jordan rail line, the Hejaz Railroad, a vital Turkish route. This Arab ‘revolt’ of a few thousand men was led and later glorified by the British officer T. E. Lawrence.
    Sharif Husain modestly declared himself King of the Arabs, a title reduced by the British to King of the Hejaz. Later, Husain’s son Faisal entered Damascus and had himself proclaimed King of Syria, a title that he believed would automatically include the Palestine district.
    By Christmas of 1917 British forces under General Allenby had conquered Jerusalem, and both Arab and Jew went to the allies to collect their IOUs.
    Faisal wanted a large Jewish settlement in Palestine, so long as he ruled it, just as the Turks had wanted it for the Jewish infusion of money and progress. But the French grabbed off Syria and booted Faisal out. No longer King of Syria, Faisal reversed himself and condemned the Jewish settlement of Palestine.
    In the end, the British were to commit a series of perfidious acts that not only denied Jewish and Arab claims but stole the Palestine district away from their French allies.
    The British arranged for themselves to rule Palestine through a mandate of the League of Nations. After a series of international conferences and treaties the British Mandate was bound by law to honor the Balfour Declaration and a Jewish homeland. However, the war was done and Palestine’s location as a flank on the Suez Canal was more important to them than honoring the promise to the Jews. When in the early 1920s oil was discovered on the Persian Gulf and British interests increased, they drifted further away from their commitment.
    The eastern side of the Jordan River held a vast area of this Palestine Mandate that was inhabited mostly by Bedouin. The British, to protect their interests, created a puppet state called Trans-Jordan. This area consisted of 75 percent of the land mass of the Palestine Mandate. Before 1921 there was no such thing as a Jordanian people or nation. They were all Palestinians. The Jordanians were an invention of the British Colonial Office.
    In order to temper the Arab thirst for nationalism, the British threw them a couple of bones. Faisal, the deposed King of Syria, was made a puppet King of Iraq, ruling under British direction.
    As for their new colony of Trans-Jordan, the British reached down into the Hejaz once again and plucked up Abdullah, another of the sharif’s sons, and declared him Emir of Trans-Jordan. As Hashemites from the Arabian Peninsula, both Abdullah and Faisal were strangers in the lands they now ruled under British direction.
    As for the Sharif of Mecca, who had envisioned himself ruler of a nation that stretched from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and included Iraq, Syria, Palestine, the Sinai, Lebanon, and the Arabian Peninsula ... he ended up with nothing and fled into exile when the conquering