"The borders of mandatory Palestine, first drawn up in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, were given their definitive shape during lengthy and tedious negotiations by British and French officials between 1919 and 1922 ... In October 1919 the British envisaged the area that is today southern Lebanon and most of southern Syria as being part of British mandatory Palestine ... In the East, matters were more complicated...[Transjordan] was part of the Ottoman province of Damascus which in the Sykes-Picot agreement had been allocated to the French."[4]