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What They Taught You In School About The Middle East Is Dead Wrong
Here’s the real story, and it starts with a pledge made over the desert in 1915… and a backroom deal that shredded it two years later:
Britain made a deal. Then it made another deal. And when the two deals collided, it buried the evidence and hoped nobody noticed. That’s not conspiracy theory. That’s history… and it’s one of the most consequential double-crosses of the modern age.
A Promise Made in the Desert
Back in 1915, Palestine was still under the iron boot of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Arabs were fighting for the Turks… not by choice, but because that’s who ruled them. Britain needed to change that.
So Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, started writing letters to Sherif Hussein of Mecca. The message was plain: fight with us, and we’ll give you independence.
A free Arab nation. Your land. Your people. Your future.
British planes even dropped leaflets over Palestine, calling on Arab soldiers to desert the Turkish army. The message was simple and powerful… come over to the Allied side, and Great Britain will fight for your freedom alongside you.
The Arabs believed it. They deserted the Turks by the thousands and joined the Allied cause. They bled for Britain’s war. And Britain’s October 24, 1915 letter from McMahon to Hussein made it as clear as daylight: Great Britain would “recognise and support the independence of the Arabs” within the territories the Sherif had outlined.
Those boundaries stretched from the Persian border all the way to the Red Sea and Mediterranean. Palestine was squarely inside those lines.
A Second Deal Cuts Across the First
Meanwhile, something else was brewing a long way from the desert… in the drawing rooms of London.
As early as January 1915, a scheme was already circulating among powerful men to turn Palestine into a Jewish state under British protection. Prime Minister Asquith heard about it. Lord Bertie called it “absurd.” But the Zionist movement kept pushing, kept lobbying, kept knocking on doors.
Then came November 2, 1917. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour signed a letter to Lord Rothschild. That letter — just 67 words for the part that mattered — said Britain would support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
It added that nothing should be done to harm “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. But that protective clause was already hollow, because Britain had just promised the same land twice.
The Balfour Declaration directly contradicted the McMahon pledge. Britain simply could not offer Palestine as a Jewish national home if Palestine was to become part of an independent Arab state. It was a legal impossibility. A moral impossibility. Call it what it was: a breach of contract.
The Buried Correspondence
Here’s where it gets darker still. The British government never published the McMahon correspondence. They hid it. The Balfour Declaration was printed everywhere, quoted in full, celebrated widely. But McMahon’s letters to Hussein? Suppressed. Classified. Buried.
When the Shaw Commission later investigated the situation in Palestine, it couldn’t bring itself to quote McMahon’s letter at all. It just said “no useful purpose would be served” by discussing it. Think about that. The British government’s own investigation couldn’t face the letter that proved they’d broken their word.
It took investigative journalist J.M.N. Jeffries of the Daily Mail to drag the key passages into public view in his 1922 book The Palestine Deception. Members of Parliament eventually challenged the government on the suppression directly. One MP, Mr. Morris, put it plainly: the McMahon correspondence “has not been published. Why not?” Another MP, Mr. Seymour Cocks, was even blunter… Britain had shielded itself “behind suppressed correspondence.”
Even the Shaw Report, in its evasive way, admitted that the “real impression left upon the Arabs generally was that the British were going to set up an independent Arab State which would include Palestine.”
A Third Pledge — and a Third Betrayal
By late 1918, the Arabs were starting to hear rumors. Whispers that Britain had made some deal with the Jews about their land. Alarm spread through Palestinian villages like wildfire.
To calm things down, on November 7, 1918, General Lord Allenby — commanding British forces in Palestine — posted proclamations in every village across the country. The war, the proclamation said, was fought to assure “the complete and final liberation of the people so long oppressed by the Turks.” The administration would come from “the initiative and free desire of the native population.”
At that point, Palestine was 90 percent Arab. Nobody could pretend that the proclamation meant anything else. It meant Arab self-rule. It was promise number three.
It, too, would be broken.
The League of Nations Joins the Betrayal
The Paris Peace Conference came and went. The League of Nations was formed with high ideals. Article 22 of its Covenant recognized former Ottoman territories — including Palestine — as communities that could become independent nations, with only temporary administrative guidance from a Mandatory Power.
That was actually the right call. That was in keeping with both pledges to the Arabs. But then came the San Remo Conference in April 1920. Britain received the Mandate for Palestine — and tucked the Balfour Declaration right inside it. The very promise Britain had made to the Zionists was now baked into international law, overriding its own prior commitments and, arguably, overriding Article 22 of the Covenant it had just signed.
Article 20 of the same Covenant was clear: any prior obligation that contradicted the Covenant was supposed to be considered abrogated. The Balfour Declaration had been made before Britain joined the League. It was incompatible with Article 22. By their own rules, it should have been void. The League confirmed the Mandate anyway, on July 24, 1922… and notably, the British Parliament never even endorsed it. Only the House of Lords voted on it, and voted against it.
The Land and the People
What happened on the ground was brutal in its simplicity. Arab farmers who’d worked the same soil for generations suddenly found themselves landless. (Sound familiar?)
About 30 percent of Palestinian Arab cultivators lost their land as Zionist organizations acquired large tracts, often exploiting desperate farmers who’d fallen into debt at interest rates as high as 60 percent — with no Agricultural Bank left to help them after the war.
Even British government reports — the Hope Simpson Report, the Shaw Commission Report — were forced to admit the scale of dispossession. The Hope Simpson Report stated plainly that land purchased by the Jewish National Fund was effectively “extra-territorialised” — permanently removed from any possibility of Arab use or employment.
Two White Papers from the Labour Government in 1930 acknowledged Arab suffering, called for limits on immigration, and proposed protections for Arab agricultural land.
The reaction was swift and overwhelming. Jewish communities worldwide erupted in fury. Dr. Weizmann resigned in protest. New York crowds shouted “Down with England!” Politicians of every stripe scrambled to denounce the Labour government and declare their loyalty to Zionist aims.
A Wound That Still Bleeds
Britain’s leaders in 1917 made a choice. They chose the Balfour Declaration over the McMahon pledge. They chose the Zionist lobby over the Arab soldiers who had bled for them in the desert. They chose silence over honesty, suppression over transparency.
And they set the stage for a conflict that has never ended. As one voice said presciently at the time… in promising Palestine to the Jews, British statesmen showed “as reckless a disregard of the existence of the 600,000 Arabs as the Zionists themselves.”
Old-time farmers understood what it meant when someone breaks a promise over property. When a handshake deal gets betrayed by fine print. When the powerful trample the word they gave to the vulnerable.
That’s exactly what happened in Palestine. The broken contract was signed in a London drawing room. The price was paid in blood… and is still being paid today.
This article is a summary of one chapter in Nesta Webster’s book, Surrender Of An Empire.
The book is a remarkable work. A free PDF of the book is available by clicking here.
Article Sources: McMahon-Hussein Correspondence; Balfour Declaration; Shaw Commission Report; Hope Simpson Report; The Palestine Deception by J.M.N. Jeffries (1922)
