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No. 242 Memorandum by Mr. Balfour (Paris) respecting Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia[340/1] [132187/2117/44A]
August 11, 1919
I
The effect which the Syrian question is producing on Anglo-French relations is causing me considerable anxiety-an anxiety not diminished by the fact that very little is openly said about it, though much is hinted. The silence which the French press maintains about the Prime Minister's declaration that under no circumstances will Britain accept a Syrian mandate, is itself ominous. All know it, none refer to it; and it has done little or nothing to modify the settled conviction of the French Government and the French Colonial Party that British officers throughout Syria and Palestine are intriguing to make a French mandate in these regions impossible.
These misunderstandings are no doubt in part due to the same cause as most misunderstandings-namely, a very clear comprehension by each party of the strength of his own case, combined with a very imperfect knowledge of, or sympathy with, the case of his opponent. In this particular instance, for example, I have never been able to understand on what historic basis the French claim to Syria really rests. Frenchmen's share in the Crusades of the Middle Ages, Mazarin's arrangements with the Turk in the seventeenth century, and the blustering expedition of 1861, lend in my opinion very little support to their far-reaching ambitions. I could make as good a case for Great Britain by recalling the repulse inflicted by Sir Sydney Smith on Napoleon at Acre, and a much better case by asking where French claims to Syria or any other part of the Turkish Empire would be, but for the recent defeat of the Turks by British forces, at an enormous cost of British lives and British treasure.
If, however, we start from the French assumption, that they have ancient claims in Syria and the Middle East, admitted as it has been in all the recent negotiations, then we must in fairness concede that they have something to say for themselves; and it is well to understand exactly what that something is.
Suppose, then, we were to ask M. Clemenceau to speak his full mind in defence of the attitude of resentful suspicion adopted almost...