Arab Revolt in the context of "Battle of Maysalun"

Mandatory Palestine was a British administrative territory that existed between 1920 and 1948 in the region of Palestine, and after 1922, under the terms of the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine. The British took the territory deeming it presently unfit for self-governance.

After an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War in 1916, British Empire forces drove Ottoman forces out of the Levant. For the British, the United Kingdom had agreed in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence that it would honour Arab independence in case of a revolt but, in the end, the United Kingdom and France divided what had been Ottoman Syria under the Sykes–Picot Agreement—an act of betrayal in the eyes of the Arabs. Another issue that later arose was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain promised its support for the establishment of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. Mandatory Palestine was then established in 1920, and the British obtained a Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922. Mandatory Palestine was designated as a Class A Mandate, based on its social, political, and economic development. This classification was reserved for post-war mandates with the highest capacity for self-governance. All Class A mandates other than Mandatory Palestine had gained independence by 1946.

Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi (Arabic: ٱلْحُسَيْن بِن عَلِي ٱلْهَاشِمِي, romanized: al-Ḥusayn bin 'Alī al-Hāshimī pronunciation; 1 May 1854 – 4 June 1931) was a Hejazi leader from the Banu Qatadah branch of the Banu Hashim clan who was the Sharif and Emir of Mecca from 1908 and, after proclaiming the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, King of the Hejaz, even if he refused this title, from 1916 to 1924. He proclaimed himself Caliph after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and stayed in power until 1925 when Hejaz was invaded by the Sultanate of Nejd. His Caliphate was opposed by the British and French empires, the Zionists and the Wahhabis alike. However, he received support from a large part of the Muslim population of that time and from Mehmed VI. He is usually considered as the father of modern pan-Arabism.

In 1908, in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, Hussein was appointed Sharif of Mecca by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II. His relationship with the Ottoman government deteriorated after the Committee of Union and Progress took power, particularly because of their policies of Turkification and persecution of ethnic minorities, including Arabs. In 1916, with the promise of British support for Arab independence, although it is debated as to what extent the British were influential in his choice, he proclaimed the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, accusing the Committee of Union and Progress of violating tenets of Islam and limiting the power of the sultan-caliph. While his armies, led by his sons, were engaged in fighting the Ottoman and German troops in the Middle East, Hussein supported the Armenians during the Armenian genocide and saved up to 4,000 of them. In the aftermath of World War I, Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, in protest of the Balfour Declaration, a document supporting the Jewish settlers in Palestine, and the establishment of British and French mandates in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. His sons Faisal and Abdullah were made rulers of Iraq and Transjordan respectively in 1921.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz (Arabic: المملكة الحجازية الهاشمية, romanized: Al-Mamlakah al-Ḥijāziyyah Al-Hāshimiyyah) was a state in the Hejaz region of Western Asia that included the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula that was ruled by the Hashemite dynasty. It was self-proclaimed as a kingdom in June 1916 during the First World War, to be independent from the Ottoman Empire, on the basis of an alliance with the British Empire to drive the Ottoman Army from the Arabian Peninsula during the Arab Revolt.

The British government had promised Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz, a single independent Arab state that would include, in addition to the Hejaz region, modern-day Jordan, Iraq, and most of Syria, with the fate of the Palestine region (today's Israel and Palestine) being mentioned in more ambiguous terms. However, at the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles turned Syria into a French League of Nations mandate and Iraq, Mandate Palestine and Transjordan into British mandates. Hashemite princes were installed as monarchs under the British mandates in Transjordan and Iraq; this became known as the Sharifian solution.

Arab nationalism (Arabic: القومية العربية, romanized: al-qawmīya al-ʿarabīya) is a political ideology asserting that Arabs constitute a single nation. As a traditional nationalist ideology, it promotes Arab culture and civilization, celebrates Arab history, the Arabic language and Arabic literature. It often also calls for unification of Arab society. It bases itself on the premise that the people of the Arab world—from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea—constitute one nation bound together by a common identity — ethnicity, language, culture, history, geography, and politics.

Rooted in the 19th-century Nahda under Ottoman rule, Arab nationalism emerged in the early 20th century as an opposition movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, later evolving into the overwhelmingly dominant ideological force in the Arab world. Initially focused on resisting Ottoman control, it later opposed Western imperialism after World War I due to the undesirable outcome of the Arab Revolt — in successfully achieving their primary goal of dissolving the Ottoman Empire, the Arab rebels simultaneously enabled the partitioning of their would-be unified Arab state by Britain and France. Anti-Western sentiment grew as Arab nationalists rallied around the Palestinian cause, viewing Zionism as a threat to the region's integrity and linking the Arab–Israeli conflict to Western imperialism due to the Balfour Declaration. Arab unity was considered a necessary instrument to "restoring this lost part" of the nation, which in turn meant eliminating the "relics" of foreign colonialism. Its influence steadily expanded over subsequent years. By the 1950s and 1960s, the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser championed Arab nationalism following his seizure and nationalization of the Suez Canal and his "victory" over British–French–Israeli forces in the 1956 Suez Crisis, and political parties like the Ba'ath Party and the Arab Nationalist Movement demonstrated remarkable capabilities for mobilization, organization, and clandestine activities. This ideology seemed to be on the rise across the Arab states, with independent Arab governments such as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt adopting Arab nationalism as official state policy.

The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I saw action between 30 October 1914 and 30 October 1918. The combatants were, on one side, the Ottoman Empire (including the majority of Kurdish tribes and Circassians, and the relative majority of Arabs), with some assistance from the other Central Powers; and on the other side, the British (with the help of a small number of Jews, Greeks, Armenians, some Kurdish tribes and Arab states, along with Hindu, Sikh and Muslim colonial troops from India) as well as troops from the British Dominions of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the Russians (with the help of Armenians, Assyrians, and occasionally some Kurdish tribes), and the French (with its North African and West African Muslim, Christian and other colonial troops) from among the Allied Powers. There were four main campaigns: the Sinai and Palestine, Mesopotamian, Caucasus, and Gallipoli campaigns. There were four more minor campaigns in Persia, South Arabia, the Arabian interior, and Libya.

Both sides used local asymmetrical forces in the region. On the Allied side were Arabs who participated in the Arab Revolt and the Armenian militia who participated in the Armenian resistance supported by Russia during the War; along with Armenian volunteer units, the Armenian militia formed the Armenian Corps of the First Republic of Armenia in 1918. In addition, the Assyrians joined the Allies and saw action in Southeastern Turkey, northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), northwestern Iran and northeastern Syria following the Assyrian genocide, instigating the Assyrian war of independence. Turks were persecuted by the invading Russian troops in the east and by Greek troops and Armenian fedayis in the west, east, and south of Anatolia. The theatre covered the largest territory of all theatres in the war.

The Arab Union is a theoretical political union of the Arab states. The term was first used when the British Empire and French empire promised the Arabs a united independent state in return for revolting against the Ottoman Empire, with which the United Kingdom and France was at war. It never came to fruition following the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Despite this, many in the Arab world have since called for the creation of a pan-Arab state. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser made several unsuccessful attempts to unite Egypt with other Arab countries (including Iraq and North Yemen), and briefly succeeded in forming the United Arab Republic with Syria in 1958, which dissolved in 1971. The union is considered as one of the solutions to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Similar attempts were made by other Arab leaders, such as Hafez al-Assad, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Faisal I of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Gaafar Nimeiry and Anwar Sadat.

The McMahon–Hussein correspondence is a series of letters that were exchanged during World War I, in which the government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence in a large region after the war in exchange for the Sharif of Mecca launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The correspondence had a significant influence on Middle Eastern history during and after the war; a dispute over Palestine continued thereafter.

The correspondence is composed of ten letters that were exchanged from July 1915 to March 1916 between Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner to Egypt. Whilst there was some military value in the Arab manpower and local knowledge alongside the British Army, the primary reason for the arrangement was to counteract the Ottoman declaration of jihad ("holy war") against the Allies, and to maintain the support of the 70 million Muslims in British India (particularly those in the Indian Army that had been deployed in all major theatres of the wider war). The area of Arab independence was defined to be "in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca" with the exception of "portions of Syria" lying to the west of "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo"; conflicting interpretations of this description were to cause great controversy in subsequent years. One particular dispute, which continues to the present, is the extent of the coastal exclusion.

Abdullah I (Abdullah bin Hussein; 2 February 1882 – 20 July 1951) was the ruler of Jordan from 11 April 1921 until his assassination in 1951. He was the Emir of Transjordan, a British protectorate, until 25 May 1946, after which he was king of an independent Jordan. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the royal family of Jordan since 1921, Abdullah was a 38th-generation direct descendant of Muhammad.

Born in Mecca, Hejaz, Ottoman Empire, Abdullah was the second of four sons of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and his first wife, Abdiyya bint Abdullah. He was educated in Istanbul and Hejaz. From 1909 to 1914, Abdullah sat in the Ottoman legislature, as deputy for Mecca, but allied with Britain during the First World War. During the war, he played a key role in secret negotiations with the United Kingdom that led to the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule that was led by his father Sharif Hussein. Abdullah personally led guerrilla raids on garrisons.

Sir Vincent Arthur Henry McMahon GCMG GCVO KCIE CSI KStJ (28 November 1862 – 29 December 1949) was a British Indian Army officer and diplomat who served as Foreign Secretary in the Government of India from 1911 to 1915 and as High Commissioner in Egypt from 1915 to 1917. As the Foreign Secretary McMahon conducted the tripartite negotiations between Tibet, China and Britain that led to the Simla Convention. Even though China did not in the end sign the Convention, the agreement governed the British relations with Tibet till 1947. In Egypt, McMahon was best known for the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and the Declaration to the Seven in response to a memorandum written by seven notable Syrians. After the Sykes-Picot Agreement was published by the Bolshevik Russian government in November 1917, McMahon resigned. He also features prominently in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence's account of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.