Britain and France were pressured not to take over the Arab territories of the Turkish Empire as colonies. Those territories had been governed under Turkey not as colonies, but as participants in the Turkish Empire, with representation in the Turkish Parliament. The World War I Allies, as part of the peace treaty with Germany, wrote what they called a covenant for a new international organization that would hopefully keep the peace, the League of Nations. This covenant set up a system whereby states taking territories from Germany and Turkey might opt to govern them by committing to promote the interests of the populations. For the Arab territories being taken from Turkey, the covenant said they should be deemed provisionally independent. France and Britain both opted for this system, France taking Syria, and Britain taking Iraq and Palestine. The populations in all three objected that their independence should be immediate. They asserted a right of self-determination and deemed the provisional independence mentioned in the covenant to violate that right.