192 A Short History of the Middle East

But worst of all for the Syrian government, the Draft Treaty of
1936 had to face a formidable and growing weight of opposition in
France. Besides those who were genuinely concerned over the
future of the Christian minorities under a predominantly Muslim
administration, there were others whose opposition to the tend-
ency towards Syrian independence was less disinterested; and their
influence on French policy was greater after the fall of the Front
Populaire government. Moreover, the growing tenseness of the
international situation made the French increasingly reluctant to
weaken their strategic position in the Levant. Towards the end of
1938 the French Foreign Minister assured the Syrian Prime
Minister, in return for new guarantees of French and minority in-
terests, that the Treaty would be ratified before 31 January 1939;
but a month later he yielded to the opposition of the Foreign
Affairs Commission, and announced that the government did not
intend for the present to ask parliament to ratify. Six months of
deadlock between the nationalists and the French followed; and in
July 1939 the High Commissioner once more suspended the Syrian
constitution and appointed a council of directors to rule under his
own orders. Separate administrations were re-established in the
JebelDruze, the territory of Latakia, and thejazira.

Thus, while the twenty-one years that elapsed between the two
Wars raised the Middle East as a whole out of the stagnation in
which it had lain under the Ottoman Empire, and appreciably im-
proved its economic and social conditions under European tute-
lage, the progress made towards political self-determination had
by no means come up to the aspirations of the nationalist forces.
Egypt and Iraq had achieved national sovereignty., though with
important limitations in the field of foreign aflairs, and subject to
the presence of British garrisons on their soil; the Syrian national-
ists had continually been frustrated of their hopes, most sharply in
the last year when sovereignty seemed within their grasp; and
whatever economic and social progress the Arabs of Palestine had
made under the Mandate, their political status had been markedly
worsened by the rapid increase in the Jewish immigrant com-
munity, for whose sake Palestine was subjected to crown-colony