The Mendaciousness of the "Palestinians"

The word "mendacious" is THE word that best describes the spurious use by the "Palestinians", those "Arabs of the Mandated Areas"  who once overly identified themselves as "Syrians".

The name "Palestine" was given, in what many considered to be a malicious and malevolent manner, by Mark Sykes who was an astute student of Middle Eastern history. However this is may not be true for Sykes also showed interest in the Zionist cause as a way of improving life for the Arabs.

Sykes KNEW of the true meaning of the term "Palestine" from his studies at the Jesuit Beaumont College and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was fully aware of Hadrian's infamous speech in front of the Senate in Rome, where upon announcing the "Pyrrhic Victory" over Shimeon bar Kosiba in 135CE he forbade the mention of Judea. In it's stead referred to the area in the name of the peoples who were the ancient arch enemies of the Jews as mentioned in the Bible as the Philistines.

However that is NOT why Sykes referred to the future Mandated Area as "Palestine" he instigated the use of the term "Palestine" to designate the neutrality of British interests in the area.
So when he relayed to the Bunsen Committtee his findings, he deferred to designate the future British Mandated area as ""Palestine", since it was the wishes of  Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George who held sympathetic, as well as humanitarianism, messianic Protestantism and pro-Zionistic wishes towards the creation of a "Homeland for the Jews".

It is a historical fact that much of the geopolitical drive behind the Balfour Declaration can be traced back to long established British interest in the security of the Suez Canal and communication with India.
Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George believed they could successfully merge humanitarian philo-semitism with pragmatic geopolitics securing a better future for an oppressed people-the Jews of Eastern Europe by backing the new "Zionist movement" of Theodore Hertzl and their own empire simultaneously.
Another major factor was the news of the appallingly horrific pogroms in: Odessa and of Warsaw (1881), Kishinev (1903), Kiev (1905), and Białystok (1906) against the defenseless Jews which was foremost on their minds.

Leopold Amery, an Assistant Secretary of the War Cabinet who was involved in moving Lloyd George’s Eastern policy, once observed how:

“England was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland had always been regarded as a natural aspiration which ought not to be denied, if its fulfillment ever fell within the power of British statesmanship."

This is why Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George were adamant in retaining the area mandated to them in the San Remo Treaty of Serves.

Mark Sykes, who was a prodigy of Lord Kitchner, the Secretary of State for War, remained a purist who shunned democratic progress, instead he vested his energy in an indomitable Arab Spirit. He was a champion of the Levantine tradition, of a mercantile trading empire, finding the progressive modernisation in the West totally unsuited to the desert kingdoms.
Because of his knownledge of the Middle East he was a star member of the Committee, formed by Maurice de Bunsen on the orders of the British government. Sykes became the dominant person on the Committee, and so garnering great influence on British Middle Eastern policy, which came down in favour of long term partnership with the Arabs as opposed to that of Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

It was on the suggestion of Mark Sykes that the Bunsen Committee assigned the label of the ancient Roman territory Syria-Palestinia; "in which both belligerents and neutrals are alike interested” in case of the partition or zones of influence options. The Committee defined a British sphere of influence that included "Palestine" while accepting that there were relevant French and Russian, as well as Islamic interests in Jerusalem and the Holy Places. The French sought to secure a Greater Syria and control over Maronite areas in Lebanon.

British attitude in Middle Eastern poloicy was influenced by former Viceroy of India Nathaniel Curzon and Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu along with several army officers in the Middle East who were not only skeptical but openly hostile to Zionism.  Gertrude Bell, the pro-Arab Foreign Office advisor and Middle Eastern traveller was an advocate of the Arab cause as well as her friends T. E. Lawrence and Sir Percy Cox in the "Arab Bureau", founded by Sykes in Cairo in January of 1916.

During the early years of the conflict in World War I, Britain had made deals with the Russians, Arabs and the French.

There was the "Istanbul /Constantinople" Agreement, which was a secret World War I agreement between Russia, Britain, and France made on March 18th, 1915 for the postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire. It promised to satisfy Russia’s long-standing designs on the Turkish Straits by giving Russia Constantinople (Istanbul), together with a portion of the hinterland on either coast in Thrace and Asia Minor. Constantinople, however, was to be a free port. In return, Russia consented to British and French plans for territories or for spheres of influence in new Muslim states in the Middle Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire.

This first of a series of secret treaties on the “Turkish question” was never carried out because the Dardanelles campaign failed and because, when the British navy finally did reach Istanbul in 1918, Russia had made a separate peace with Germany and declared itself the enemy of all bourgeois states, France and Britain prominent among them.
The Sykes-Picot and Husayn-MacMahon correspondence (1915–16) clearly pulled in other directions from the Balfour Declaration in its pursuit of geopolitical objectives.

The failure in Gallipoli led to an increased desire on the part of the UK to negotiate a deal with the Arabs and because of this -Emir Faisal bin Hussein was presented with the Damascus Protocol in 1915 by the Arab secret societies al-Fatat and Al-'Ahd which declared the Arabs would revolt in alliance with the United Kingdom and in return the UK would recognize Arab independence in an area running from the 37th parallel near the Taurus Mountains on the southern border of Turkey, to be bounded in the east by Persia and the Persian Gulf, in the west by the Mediterranean Sea and in the south by the Arabian Sea.

During this troubled and difficult time during World War I -ten letters—five from each side—were exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon and Sherif Hussein.

However, in a private letter sent on 4th December 1915 by McMahon to Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst,who was a British diplomat and statesman who served as Viceroy and Governor-General of India from 1910 to 1916 and later served as a permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, with Arthur Balfour, halfway through the eight-month period of the correspondence. We can see an inkling of possible machiavellian British duplicity that led to the failure of the 1919 agreement between Emir Feisal and Dr. Weizmann :

[I do not take] the idea of a future strong united independent Arab State ... too seriously ... the conditions of Arabia do not and will not for a very long time to come, lend themselves to such a thing ... I do not for one moment go to the length of imagining that the present negotiations will go far to shape the future form of Arabia or to either establish our rights or to bind our hands in that country. The situation and its elements are much too nebulous for that. What we have to arrive at now is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy and bring them on to our side. This on our part is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from academic haggling over conditions – whether about Baghdad or elsewhere.

Sykes agreement with François Georges-Picot, which was intended to be a "temporary arrangement" between two diplomats that sketched out vague ‘zones of interest’ should the Ottoman Empire collapse suddenly, as everyone expected it to do, in 1915.
Sykes believed his agreement with Picot to be a temporary wartime measure by designating areas of likely military occupation and control that would avoid disagreements between Britain and France over their areas of responsibility.

The French for their reasons wanted a sphere in Lebanon and Syria to extend eastward towards the rich oil fields in Mosul of Iraq.
The British on their part also were highly interested in Mesopotamia for the oil of Iraq and the port of Haifa as their sphere of influence. Britain was given control of Haifa and Acre and of territory linking the Mesopotamian and Haifa-Acre spheres. The "rest of Palestine was" to be placed under an international regime.

Over time Sykes came to feel that his "agreement" with Picot gave France a better deal than expected and it bothered him. The Sykes-Picot agreement did not create any firm borders but it left most of the region in Arab hands.

Mark Sykes, championed the "British Interests" and "Pan Arab cooperation" against the Turks, remained in favour of Arab autonomy under British supervision, with some regions fully independent.

There are some items that suggest that Sykes may have had a hand in promoting the Balfour Declaration to the Cabinet. In March of 1919 he had visited Palestine in regard to the tentative agreement made between Emir Feisal, leader of the Arab movement, in Aqaba with Dr. Chaim Weizmann.
Sykes may have been converted to the cause of Zionism at that time due to the provision included in the Balfour Declaration that stated that: "... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..." and the feelings of Emir Feisal.
Feisal had written Felix Frankfurter, an associate of Dr. Chaim Weizmann in a lettter dated the 3rd of March 1919;

and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other. 

At the Versailles Peace Conference, in 1919, a junior diplomat present, Harold Nicolson, wrote in his diary the day after Sykes' death: "...It was due to his endless push and perseverance, to his enthusiasm and faith, that Arab nationalism and Zionism became two of the most successful of our war causes..."