Teaching about self-determination this week. At the end of WWI, Woodrow Wilson spoke about "self-determination," though he never meant immediate emancipation of the colonized. So "advanced" Western powers invented "mandate" system to "assist" post-Ottoman Middle East.

Problem was that any definition of self-determination in ME had to contend with fact that most Arabs did not want European colonial domination after Ottoman empire. In Palestine, the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population was opposed to imposition of European Zionism.

Though Britain and France blocked anticolonial ME delegations from going to Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson blessed a commission of inquiry known as the King-Crane Commission to ask how people of Levant wanted to determine their own future.

Though American commission was clearly paternalistic, it nevertheless reached some startling conclusions that defied British and French sectarianism: commission stated that clear majority of the Levant was for an independent and unified Syria.

King Crane commission also said in 1919 that if interests of people of region genuinely counted, no reason to partition Levant. They also stated that there was no way to reconcile self-determination in Palestine with Zionism, and no way to impose Zionism there without violence.

The King Crane report was ignored. Wilson washed his hands of the Middle East. Britain and France partitioned the region in 1920 & divided Ottoman Turkey. France then divided Syria along sectarian lines & created separate Lebanon. Britain enshrined colonial Zionism in Palestine.

Interestingly, neither Erez Manela's Wilsonian Moment nor Adom Getachew's more recent Worldmaking after Empire mentions King Crane commission at all.