King–Crane Commission

A commission of inquiry led by the United States in 1919 to survey public opinion in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire one year earlier. The commission was formally known as the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, but France, Britain, and Italy withdrew from it out of concern that the findings of the commission would conflict with their goals in the region. France and Britain had already signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement in 1916, and the Balfour Declaration had been announced in 1917—among other inter-European deals to divide up the territories. The commission’s recommendations, which were submitted to the Paris Peace Conference in August 1919 and warned against the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, were inconsequential, since the Allied Forces had already decided the region’s fate.