1920 - The Sanremo Conference

The Sanremo conference was an international meeting held in Sanremo, Italy, from 19-26 April 1920. In it, the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council determined the allocation of Class "A" League of Nations mandates for administration of the former Ottoman-ruled lands of the Middle East by the victorious powers. The decisions of the conference mainly just confirmed (e.g. concerning Palestine) those of the First Conference of London (February 1920). Britain received the mandate for Palestine and Iraq, while France gained control of Syria including present-day Lebanon. The boundaries of all these territories were left unspecified, to "be determined by the Principal Allied Powers" [1] subsequently, and was in fact not completely finalized until four years later. To enforce its mandate, France subsequently intervened militarily at the Battle of Maysalun to depose the nationalist Arab government which King Faisal had meanwhile established in Damascus.

The conference broadly reaffirmed the terms of the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 16 May 1916 for the region's partition and the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, under which the British government had undertaken to favour the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The conference's decisions were embodied in the stillborn Treaty of Sèvres (Section VII, Art 94-97). As Turkey rejected this treaty, the conference's decisions were only finally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922 and the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne.