British Mandate for Palestine, April 1920
The British Mandate for Palestine, sometimes referred to as the Mandate of Palestine, was a League of Nations Mandate created after the First World War when the Ottoman Empire was split up by the Treaty of Sèvres.
At the 1920 San Remo conference of the Allied Supreme Council, at which the Mandates were granted, the precise boundaries of all territories, including that of the British Mandate of Palestine, were left unspecified, to “be determined by the Principal Allied Powers” and were not completely finalized until four years later. However, it was clear that the boundary of Britain’s mandate for Palestine was to extend eastward to the western boundary of its mandate for Mesopotamia. In 1921, following Churchill’s negotiations with Emir Abdullah Transjordan (later Jordan) was accepted into the Mandate, but it was separated from the area on which a Jewish National Home could be established, a move formalized by the addition of a September 1922 clause to the charter governing the Mandate for Palestine which allowed for postponement of all mandatory provisions which related to the ‘Jewish National Home’ on lands which lay to the east of the Jordan River.
The objective of the League of Nations Mandate system was to administer parts of the recently defunct Ottoman Empire, which had been in control of the Middle East since the 16th century, “until such time as they are able to stand alone”.
The borders of the Mandate for Palestine extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the British Mandate of Mesopotamia to the east, the French Mandate of Lebanon to the north, the French Mandate of Syria to the northeast, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Kingdom of Egypt to the southeast and southwest respectively.