British diplomacy during the First World War made a set of promises that could not all be kept, and this film traces how that failure set the Middle East on a path toward decades of conflict. It follows the competing wartime agreements: the pledge of Arab independence made to Sharif Hussein, the Balfour Declaration's support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the secret Sykes-Picot carve-up of Ottoman territory between Britain and France. Historians including Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at Oxford, walk through the archival documents and maps that show how London tried to satisfy Arab nationalists, Zionist leaders, and French ambitions at the same time. The film treats the mandate period that followed as the direct consequence of those contradictions, with rising violence between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine as British control weakened. Rather than starting the story in 1948, it locates the conflict's roots thirty years earlier, in the paperwork and backroom deals of a collapsing empire.