First World War

March 26, 1917: During World War I the great powers made a number of decisions concerning the future of Palestine without much regard to the wishes of the indigenous inhabitants.

Palestinian Arabs, however, believed that Great Britain had promised them independence in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, an exchange of letters between Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, and Husayn ibn ʿAlī, then emir of Mecca, in which the British made certain commitments to the Arabs in return for their support against the Ottomans during the war.

Yet by May 1916 Great Britain, France, and Russia had reached an agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) according to which, inter alia, the bulk of Palestine was to be internationalized.