The exclusion of Jews from Sykes-Picot was an absence, not an erasure.

Evidence

Sykes and Georges Picot almost included Zionism in their plan, but only as an afterthought in response to discussions in London aimed at gathering supposed Jewish power behind the Allies. In the event, French premier Aristide Briand would not accede to a pro-Zionist policy. Among other concerns, he was not convinced that Zionism would be compatible with the promised Arab state. As a result, Jews, Zionism and the Semitic were kept out of the new cartography. This was a case of absence, not of erasure. The invention of the Semitic as a political category was counter-intuitive, and required the undoing of the Semitic idea’s intellectual foundations. Let us recall that the Semitic emerged as a category to further the study of the politico-theological history of an ancient people—the Jews—whose genius, and agency, were thought to have been superseded by Christianity centuries past. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 686

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘absence, not erasure’ distinction, plus the reversal that the Semitic category — originally invented to study a superseded ancient people — had to be reconstructed as a prospective political identity, is a dense counterintuitive insight about how racial categories travel from scholarship to geopolitics.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the intellectual-scholarly Semitic category get ‘undone’ in practice? Which specific writings/arguments dismantled its foundations enough for it to be redeployed politically?
• XREF: connects to: To be deemed a Jew was a legal exclusion, not a self-ascription. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1496