Mark Sykes in the context of Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

Following Britain's declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, it began to consider the future of Palestine. Within two months a memorandum was circulated to the War Cabinet by a Zionist member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British prime minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann draft a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.

The Sykes–Picot Agreement (/ˈsaɪks ˈpiːkoʊ, - pɪˈkoʊ, - piːˈkoʊ/) was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from Russia and Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Entente would achieve success in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I and formed part of a series of secret agreements contemplating its partition. The primary negotiations leading to the agreement took place between 23 November 1915 and 3 January 1916, on which date the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, initialled an agreed memorandum. The agreement was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916.

The flag of the Arab Revolt (Arabic: علم الثورة العربية), also used as the flag of Hejaz (Arabic: علم مملكة الحجاز), was a flag used by Hussein bin Ali and his allies, the Arab nationalists, during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and as the first flag of the Kingdom of Hejaz. It was designed by Mark Sykes, but has palettes reminiscent of previous Arab flags, such as the flags of the al-Muntada al-Adabi, al-ʽAhd and al-Fatat.

The flag consists of three horizontal stripes (black, white, and green) and a red triangle on the hoist side, using Islamic religious tradition, each color has a symbolic meaning: black represents the Abbasid dynasty or the Rashidun caliphs, white represents the Umayyad dynasty, and green represents Islam (or possibly, but it is not certain, the Fatimid dynasty). The red triangle represents the Hashemite dynasty, to which Hussein bin Ali belonged.

The Declaration to the Seven was a document written by Sir Mark Sykes, approved by Charles Hardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and released on June 16, 1918, in response to a memorandum issued anonymously by seven Syrian notables in Cairo that included members of the soon to be formed Syrian Unity Party, established in the wake of the Balfour Declaration and the November 23, 1917, publication by the Bolsheviks of the secret May 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement between Britain and France. The memorandum requested a "guarantee of the ultimate independence of Arabia". The Declaration stated the British policy that the future government of the regions of the Ottoman Empire occupied by Allies of World War I "should be based upon the principle of the consent of the governed".