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 Arden.

And me, William Durable. 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 Ben Gurion 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,

will 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, but it's the beginning of that process. Well, you know, there's that old hackneyed

expression, all roads lead to Rome. Well, all catastrophes in the Middle East seem to lead back

to this one episode where two men in the locker room decide the fate of an entire region

in which they do not live. And in many ways, you're going to, I think, hear echoes of that

sense of confusion, betrayal that happened over partition, where again, a man who didn't know

an area is seated in front of a map in a sweaty place where he doesn't want to be, but he has to

solve this quickly. And therefore, just completely arbitrarily draws a line. And it is literally

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