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News Analysis
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret treaty Britain and France signed more than a century ago. Many consider it to have seeded a legacy of strife in the Middle East.
Aug. 3, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
When Britain’s foreign secretary declared last week that his government would recognize the state of Palestine if Israel did not agree to a cease-fire with Hamas, he said the British were doing so with the “hand of history on our shoulders.”
His French counterpart also invoked history in explaining why France had taken the same step a week earlier. French leaders going back to Charles de Gaulle, he said, had called for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on “the recognition by each of the states involved of all the others.”
Neither man mentioned the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret treaty between Britain and France in 1916, under which the European colonial powers carved up the Levantine territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire into spheres of British and French control. And why would they?
Sykes-Picot is cited by historians as an enduring example of Western imperial arrogance — a cynical exercise in drawing borders that cut across religious, ethnic and tribal communities in what is today Israel, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories. To many Arabs, who view it as a great betrayal, it seeded a legacy of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East.
The real-time crisis unfolding in Gaza — the starving children, the Israeli restrictions on aid, the Palestinians killed as they try to collect food — undoubtedly had a greater impact on Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France than the stains of the past. Yet their momentous decisions have cast a light on the shadowy roles of both countries in a region where they once vied for influence.
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