Page "Balfour Declaration" Paragraph 9

Henry McMahon had exchanged letters with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca in 1915, in which he had promised Hussein control of Arab lands with the exception of " portions of Syria " lying to the west of " the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo ".

Palestine lay to the southwest of the Vilayet of Damascus and wasn't explicitly mentioned.

That modern-day Lebanese region of the Mediterranean coast was set aside as part of a future French Mandate.

After the war the extent of the coastal exclusion was hotly disputed.

Hussein had protested that the Arabs of Beirut would greatly oppose isolation from the Arab state or states, but did not bring up the matter of Jerusalem or Palestine.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann wrote in his autobiography Trial and Error that Palestine had been excluded from the areas that should have been Arab and independent.

This interpretation was supported explicitly by the British government in the 1922 White Paper.