MIDDLE EAST: Concert in Cairo

To Cairo last week for a conference on Pan-Arab problems came Premier Riad Solh of Lebanon. For the first time, he and his party represented an independent nation. The crisis over France’s League of Nations mandate (TIME, Nov. 29) was settled. Syria and Lebanon had won their point: “all powers and capacities hitherto exercised by the French” had passed to their native governments.

France still had a legal claim; juridically, the mandate still existed. But this was a tenuous handhold on an area which has traditionally been the scene of Anglo-French imperial rivalry. Commented London’s Times with surprising frankness: the settlement “enables the [Syrian and Lebanese] Governments to concert measures which may eventually further that larger Arab union which is one of the aims of British policy in the Middle East.”