The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915-1916) was a series of letters exchanged between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in which Britain promised support for an independent Arab state in exchange for an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire, aiming to weaken the Ottomans during World War I.
What would become contentious is what lands constituted the independent Arab state.
This is is compounded somewhat because the correspondence took place in English, with translators translating McMahon’s correspondence to Hussein into Arabic and Hussein’s replies in Arabic back into English.
In 1939, an Anglo-Arab committee would review the correspondence, hoping to come to some sort of consensus on what was defined as the territory of the Arab state. That committee’s report is available on the United Nations website.
The Arab understanding is that the British had promised independence to the Arabs in what is now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Syria and Lebanon. Those promises were later contradicted by subsequent agreements like the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France and the Balfour Declaration between Britain and the zionists.
The British would later claim that they were only granting to the Arabs territory in which nobody else had any claims. That meant the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and possibly Jordan. But it excluded Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon because, according to the British, the French had claims to Lebanon and Syria due to Christians in the region, and Palestinian Arabs had a claim to Palestine, and also zionists were making claims to Palestine. Hence, according to the British, subsequent agreements like the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France and the Balfour Declaration between Britain and the zionists did not contradict the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence but supplemented it by articulating those competing claims.
Arab Contentions
1. “There is no room for doubt that Palestine was in fact and in intention included by both parties to the McMahon-Husain Correspondence in the area of Arab independence. This is abundantly plain from the terms of the Correspondence itself and is, moreover, borne out by the evidence of the historical background.”
2. British had already considered French claims and had limited them to Northern Syria.
3. “It cannot be (and it has never been) disputed that Palestine was included in the area demanded by the Sharif Husain as the area of future Arab independence. That area was accepted by Sir Henry McMahon in toto, save for certain reservations. Palestine was not mentioned in those reservations. Whenever he had reason to make an exception, as in the case of the coastal regions of northern Syria, or of the Mesopotamian provinces, Sir Henry McMahon was careful to specify the exception, since the onus of exclusion lay on him. The fact that he does not mention Palestine, either specifically or by paraphrase, makes it impossible for anyone to contend that Palestine was excluded from the area which Sir Henry McMahon had accepted as the area of future Arab independence.”
4. Subsequent British insistence that all of Syria was to be French is based upon the quote from the correspondence “the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo”, which equates the word “district” to the Ottoman word “vilayet”, which in turn approximately means “province” or “governate”. The Arabs content that this equivalence is “demonstrably false”.