Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect Read Online Free PDF Page A

read: “If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto of 4 January, addressed to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, I will carry out what is written in this agreement. If changes are made, I cannot be answerable for failing to carry out this agreement.”
    In addition, the General Syrian Congress, which briefly ruled postwar Syria and Lebanon, issued a declaration renouncing the agreement and censuring Zionism. British officials had never intended to establish a truly independent Arab state nor to recognize a Zionist state. The Weizmann-Faisal agreement was a dead letter within days of its signing.
    But the methodology lived on in Israeli policy. When Israel was established in 1948, the Zionists allowed King Abdullah of Jordan to seize the West Bank in hopes that the Hashemite monarch would cooperate with Israel. Abdullah was King Faisal's older brother, and his family rules Jordan to this day. For many years Israel made deals with corrupt Arab monarchs rather than respond to Palestinian demands for sovereignty.
    While the colonial powers were wheeling and dealing, there was one effort to determine popular opinion in the region. The British, French, and Americans initially agreed to set up a commission that would survey public opinion in the Arab region of the former Ottoman Empire. Did the people favor independence, colonial control, or something in between? The other powers dropped out of the project, but the United States forged ahead. President Woodrow Wilson formed the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, better known as the King-Crane Commission. It produced some surprising results.
    Henry Churchill King, born in 1858, was a theologian and an academic when chosen to cochair the commission. Photos show a handsome man wearing a clerical collar, a stylish suit, and the round glasses favored by intellectuals of the time. King had studied at Oberlin College in Ohioand went on to graduate school at Harvard. He went back to teach mathematics and philosophy at Oberlin before becoming its president.
    King was sensitive to the views of Protestant missionaries who were lobbying hard for greater US involvement in the Middle East. Missionaries had established American schools, churches, and hospitals with the aim of finding new converts to Christianity. The missionaries wanted to expand their presence but needed more active US government participation in the region.
    Charles R. Crane, also born in 1858, was a wealthy industrialist and heir to the Crane plumbing fortune (think Crane toilets). Crane had developed a great interest in international affairs. He had been appointed US envoy to China in 1909 and participated in a US delegation to the new, revolutionary Soviet Union in 1917. Crane was also an anti-Jewish bigot who later wrote favorably about Hitler's policy toward the Jews. 10 In the 1930s Crane helped finance the first oil exploration in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
    Back in 1919, when the King-Crane Commission was appointed, Crane represented the kind of activist businessman who advocated that international policy decisions should be driven by the corporate profit motive. King, Crane, and a group of advisors set out for a long journey through the Middle East in the summer of 1919. They traveled by boat to Jaffa (now incorporated into Tel Aviv) and then by car over the rutted roads of the Arab lands.
    Commission members conducted interviews in thirty-six towns and cities in what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. People in each region submitted a total of 1,863 petitions listing their demands, and the commission staff conducted in-person, follow-up interviews. It wasn't a scientific survey because the commission couldn't get proportionate responses from the region's various groups. The commission acknowledged, for example, that opinions of Sunni Muslims were underrepresented. 11 In addition, many of the petitions were suspiciously similar, indicating an