The Palestine Deception, 1915–1923: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and the Jewish National Home by Joseph Mary Nagle Jeffries

Formerly a war correspondent in Europe and the Middle East, working for Britain's largest-selling newspaper, the Daily Mail, J.M.N. Jeffries was sent to Palestine in 1922 by its owner, Lord Northcliffe, to report on its developing political and economic affairs—just five years on from the Balfour Declaration and its promise of British support for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. A Zionist Commission had arrived there in April 1918 and working, often tensely, alongside British military and civilian authorities, had succeeded in setting up a nascent Jewish polity—the nature and implications of which Jeffries sets out to appraise. Jeffries' articles, reproduced in full here for the first time, highlight Britain's duplicity in its dealings with the Arab population of Palestine—arguing that clear, written pledges of Arab political independence, offered in 1915–16 as a means of gaining Arab military support in the war against Germany and her Ottoman ally, had be