Britain and France spawned conflict by secretly hammering out the 1916 Sykes-Picot accord, arbitrarily redrawing borders by marking straight lines with a crude chinagraph pencil and a ruler on the Middle East’s map as their shared spoils of the First World War, without letting the region’s people, especially Palestinians, have a say, condemning them to dispossession
Sometime in 1915, diplomat Sir Mark Sykes sat across a table with British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith to discuss the political future of the Middle East. Sykes slid his finger across a map on the table and told Asquith he would like to draw a line from Acre, now on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, to Kirkuk in modern-day Iraq’s northern mountains region, on the map as their sphere of influence.
A year later, Sykes and French lawyer-diplomat François Georges-Picot secretly actualised the plan by hammering out the infamous Sykes-Picot accord to formalise the scheme as their shared spoils of the First World War. They arbitrarily drew straight lines with, as Tarek Osman noted in a December 2013 piece, a ‘crude chinagraph pencil’ and a ruler on the region’s map.
The territories Sykes and Picot marked as ‘A’ went to France and ‘B’ to Britain, ignoring local identities and preferences. The pact created a geopolitical order for the West’s benefit but spawned conflict in the Middle East that the region continues to grapple with. It decided the future of Arabs without letting them have a say in it.
The Line That Changed the Middle East: The Sykes-Picot Agreement
Gertrude Bell and the Manufactured State of Iraq
Colonial administrator Gertrude Bell helped create Iraq as part of the Sykes-Picot pact. She installed Hashemite King Faisal as Iraq’s constitutional monarch, becoming his indispensable adviser, a ‘right-hand man’, as the British press put it, after sketching out the country’s border with Saudi Arabia. Bell, who made Baghdad her permanent home until her death, was the centre of attraction at Faisal’s installation ceremony marked by a 21-gun salute amid chants of long live the king in 1921.
At the peak of her power, Bell believed she would be remembered long after she was gone. In her lifetime, she had every reason to believe so. People in Baghdad knew Bell as Khatun (gentlewoman) and saluted her every time they saw her pass by. Bell organised bathing parties apart from picnics in Baghdad’s palm gardens. An overdose of sleeping pills apparently killed her at 57 in 1926 in her well-appointed house overlooking the Tigris.
Bell’s death ended her lifelong fascination with the Middle East, where, James Buchan, in a March 2003 piece in The Guardian, wrote she seemed to move ‘as an equal among the sheiks without compromising her British femininity.’ Iraqi politician and future Prime Minister Nuri al-Said felt there is ‘only one Khatun… For a hundred years, they’ll talk of the Khatun riding by.’ Bell felt they ‘very likely will.’
Betrayal of Arab Promises: Colonial Deception and Sectarian Engineering
Bell lies buried in Baghdad unsung and perhaps unsurprisingly so, as she was, after all, a key figure in the Sykes-Picot accord implementation, which betrayed Arabs. The accord placed Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine under British and Syria and Lebanon under French influence, depriving Arabs of the freedom Britain promised them in exchange for joining hands against their Ottoman rulers. The Arabs were taken in for a ride.
The promise British diplomat Henry McMahon made to Mecca’s Sherif Hussein in 1915 of an independent Arabia in exchange for help against the Ottoman Turks was broken. France and Britain instead divided the Arab world. To make matters worse, the borders were drawn to deepen conflict in the Middle East—between Kurds and Arabs, Shias and Sunnis. Arabs were pitted against each other through the patronage of one group at the cost of the other.
In Lebanon, boundaries were drawn to ensure the country was a haven for Christians and Druze. The Bekaa Valley on the Lebanon-Palestine border was effectively left to Shias, and Syria was carved out with Sunnis as the biggest sectarian group. The arbitrarily drawn boundaries changed the thrust of Arab politics. Osman wrote that it shifted focus from the building of ‘liberal constitutional governance systems’ to an assertive ‘nationalism.’
How Colonial Borders Undermined Governance and Stability
Weak public institutions and tiny civil societies in countries such as Iraq made them susceptible to coups and instability since these states were handed over to rulers of choice, who relied upon repression to maintain their hold. Osman wrote that there were three problems with the geo-political order that emerged from the Sykes-Picot accord:
First, it was secret without any Arabic knowledge, and it negated the main promise that Britain had made to the Arabs in the 1910s – that if they rebelled against the Ottomans, the fall of that empire would bring them independence.
When that independence did not materialise after World War One, and as these colonial powers, in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, continued to exert immense influence over the Arab world, the thrust of Arab politics – in North Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean – gradually but decisively shifted from building liberal constitutional governance systems (as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had witnessed in the early decades of the 20th Century) to assertive nationalism whose main objective was getting rid of the colonialists and the ruling systems that worked with them.
Tarek Osman
Palestine: The Ultimate Victim of Colonial Schemes
The colonial policies have been particularly disastrous to the Palestinians since 1917, when the European Zionist movement was promised a national home for Jews in Palestine. In the infamous Balfour Declaration, the British told existing ‘non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ that ‘nothing shall be done’ to prejudice their civil and religious rights. The promise was meant to be broken.
The British colonizers did the opposite by encouraging Jewish migration to Palestine. The Jewish population increased in Palestine from 9% in 1922 to 27% in 1935, allowing Zionists to dispossess native Arabs, who accounted for 90% of the Palestinian population in 1917. The Nakba (catastrophe) struck when an estimated 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians were forced out of their homes in 1948 for Israel’s creation.
The West has refused course correction, most blatantly reflected in its unqualified support of the indiscriminate bombing of the besieged Palestinian Gaza Strip. The bombing, including of refugee camps and hospitals, has since October 2023 left over 55,000 non-combatants, including children, dead. The United States continued shipments of arms and moved its Mediterranean Sea warships in Israel’s support, ignoring desperate pleas for a ceasefire, even as the United Nations has cited clear evidence of genocide.
From Sykes-Picot to Genocide: A Legacy of Violence in Gaza
The Sykes-Picot pact remains at the root of many of these troubles. It effectively leaves Arab states incapable of helping Palestinians in any meaningful way and allows Israel to do whatever it wants with no consequences at all. The Sykes-Picot pact defines the infamous Western divide and control policy, making its originators the most reviled people.
From secular Nasserist (Egypt), Ba’athist (Iraq and Syria) pan-Arab nationalist ideologies to nihilist cult ISIS has sought to undo the borders the Sykes-Picot accord created. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi vowed not to stop until they hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy when the ISIS chief’s murderous followers swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014. He briefly threatened to finish the veneer of statehood that Europeans such as Gertrude Bell imposed with what Buchan called ‘emptiness underneath’ in the Arab world.
France and Britain’s Recognition of Palestine: Too Little, Too Late?
The Sykes-Picot agreement was about domination. Over a century later, it defines every crisis scaring the Arab world, especially the Palestinian dispossession. Britain and France may now pledge to recognise a Palestinian state, but words cannot undo the sufferings the borders they redrew have caused. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the violent continuity of a colonial architecture—divide, destabilize, and deny. Peace will remain a mirage and justice a dream for Palestine until the West reckons with its culpability.
