Re Echoes of the distant past,
See also, Michael Howard's The Lessons Of History, ch 2, at paragraph at fn 3, re the politics and reasoning in 1917 surrounding the British decision for a small scale Jewish Homeland in Palestine.
At least one British cabinet minister apparently sensed the coming travails.
Of course there were various other irons in the fire, at that time:
Britain entered into more specific obligations to other allies. In April 1915, it signed a secret treaty promising Constantinople to Russia, thus explicitly jettisoning Britain's long-standing reservations about Russian control of the Straits. (In fact, British governments since the time of Lord Salisbury at the turn of the century had resigned themselves to eventual Russian control of Constantinople.) At the same time, as part of the price of persuading Italy to enter the war on the Allied side, Britain agreed in the Treaty of London that, in a postwar carve-up of the Ottoman dominions, Italy would receive southwest Anatolia. Under an agreement negotiated in 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, Britain promised France most of Syria, Cilicia, and the oil-bearing region around Mosul in northern Mesopotamia. Most fraught with evil consequence for the British was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 in which Britain undertook to facilitate the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine - with provisos protecting the "civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities" and the rights of Jews in other countries. All of these engagements were designed to serve urgent wartime objectives rather than long-term interests.
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/britain-and-the-middle-east-from-1914-to-the-present#ixzz1DQvzXruy
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