British did not have the same connection with the Middle East, they were still interested in expanding and defending their existing colonial empire. In what came to be known as the Sykes Picot agreement, the French and the British agreed to divide the Middle East between the two of them after the war. When they reached the Paris Peace Conference, this agreement made negotiation on the Middle East nearly impossible. When American diplomats proposed the King–Crane Commission to investigate popular sentiment in Greater Syria, both French and British Diplomats greeted it with public approval, but behind the scenes the outcome had already been decided. The British also engaged in secret negotiations with Arab powers in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence before the conference occurred. Ultimately, this would cause the British to fall into poor standing with the Arabs because they would betray Arabian trust by conducting simultaneous negotiations in the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration. When the time came for a mandate to be selected, Arabs felt they could no longer trust Great Britain because of their support for Zionism. Zionism and early Jewish settlement Zionism has been a popular and contentious subject among historians for many years. According to the author Nadim Rouhana, “the essence of the encounter therefore took place between a group of people living in their homeland and a group of people who arrived from other parts of the world guided by an ideology that claimed the same homeland as exclusively theirs.” Zionism in Rouhana's eye revolved around a system of exclusion in which Zionist arrived and stole the lands they resided on. This interpretation is understandable given the nature of the future state of Israel, but it does not give a full picture of Jewish people in Palestine. Author Dina Porat rounds off Rouhana's argument by stating, “Almost none of the Zionist leaders educated in Europe studied Arabic…Arabs did not master European languages or the Hebrew spoken by the settlers. The absence of a common language created an abyss that exists today.” The reason for the distance between the two groups rested in the lack of cultural assimilation. These two viewpoints demonstrate that the encounter between Zionists and Arab was one where cultural differences were ignored or exploited. The British in particular exploited the rivalry between these groups with the Balfour declaration. The Balfour Declaration aligned the goals of Zionism with their imperial goals. The 1919