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W.

W. empire pod UK.com. The Sykes Pico Agreement is a shocking document.

It is not only the product of greed at its worth,

that is to say of greed allied to suspicion

and so leading to stupidity,

it also stands out as a startling piece of double

dealing. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan and me William

the report. Now that is quite a powerful quote but what is he going on about?

Well we're hoping to explain this in the podcast. First of all William who is that

quote from? That quote is from the great Palestinian nationalist leader,

George Antonius, who in many ways

was the sort of early Palestinian version

of what David Bengurian would successfully become the political leader of the

Palestinians, the one though who failed to take the Palestinians to statehood.

And this was his reaction on discovering the Sykes Pico agreement, which is what we're going to be talking about today, which is, I mean, it's one of those classic moments in Imperial history, which in a sense the very reason that we're doing this entire podcast where the

Middle East is sort of stitched up by a bunch of people who share the same club

in London who are chums who have very little personal experience of the Middle East.

Sykes who is the main character we'll be talking about today claims to have Turkish and Arabic but probably has very little and he divides up the

Middle East it doesn't actually become the shape of the map that we have today

...