Don't Forget: "Palestine Was for the Jews"

From Pierre Van Paasen's "The Forgotten Ally" published by Dial Press, 1943:-


"When in later years an Arab nationalist movement was born in Palestine and its leaders, in support of their opposition to the Jewish national home, invoked the correspondence that had passed between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sherif of Mecca at the start of the war and incited the peasants to bloodshed and destruction of property by alleging that Britain had broken her pledge to make Palestine an independent Arab country, Sir Henry McMahon, then long since retired from government service, wrote two letters to clarify the earlier understandings. In the first, dated March 12, 1922, addressed to the British government, he said that he had intended to exclude Palestine from the area of Arab independence as fully as the Syrian coastal regions to the north. In a second letter, addressed to the editor of The Times and published by that newspaper on July 23, 1937, he wrote: 'I feel it my duty to state, and do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge (of independence) to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.'" [pp. 115-116]


"Sir Ronald Storrs, who as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner (Sir Henry McMahon) handled the Anglo-Arab correspondence, wrote in his [book] Orientations: 'Palestine was excluded from the promises made to the Arabs before those British (military) operations which gave freedom to so large a proportion of the Arab peoples.'" [p. 116]


"In the year 1937, when Palestine was plunged into chaos and bloodshed by the Arabs, and their leader, Haj Hussein Amin, Mufti of Jerusalem, again invoked the McMahon correspondence, William Ormsby Gore, who was attached to the McMahon staff in 1916, stated in the House of Commons, on July 21, 1937, 'that it never was in the mind of anyone on that staff that Palestine west of the Jordan was in the area within which the British Government then undertook to further the cause of Arab independence.' Colonel Lawrence also took the view that Palestine was excluded from the areas in which Britain intended to foster Arab independence and said so in a letter to The Times on September 11, 1919." [p. 116]


As per here.

And a bonus, p. 47-48

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