In late April 1920, the UK, France, Italy, Japan and later the US (as an observer) convened in San Remo, a northwestern Italian town and decided to divide the Ottoman empire into three parts. One of them later became the British Mandate of Palestine.

Crucially, the so-called San Remo Declaration charged the British mandate with implementing the Balfour Declaration, which three years earlier had endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”