The FaisalWeizmann Agreement was a 3 January 1919 agreement between Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader who had negotiated the 1917 Balfour Declaration with the British government, signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference. Together with a letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal's name to Felix Frankfurter in March 1919, it was one of two documents used by the Zionist delegation at the Peace Conference to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.The agreement was presented to Faisal in his room at the Carlton Hotel on 3 January in English, which Faisal could not read, and its contents were explained to Faisal by Lawrence as the sole translator. Faisal signed the document in the same meeting, without consulting his advisors awaiting him in a separate room, but added a caveat in Arabic next to his signature, such that Faisal considered the agreement was conditional on Palestine being within the area of Arab independence. The Zionist Organization submitted the Agreement to the Paris Peace Conference without the caveat.Yoav Gelber described the document as "of propaganda value only", since it quickly became clear that Faisal's conditions would not be met.

The Paris Peace Conference was the formal meeting in 1919 and 1920 of the victorious Allies after the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers. Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the United States and Italy, it resulted in five treaties that rearranged the maps of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands, and also imposed financial penalties. Germany and the other losing nations had no voice in the Conference's deliberations; this gave rise to political resentments that lasted for decades.

The conference involved diplomats from 32 countries and nationalities. Its major decisions were the creation of the League of Nations and the five peace treaties with the defeated states; the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates", chiefly to Britain and France; the imposition of reparations upon Germany; and the drawing of new national boundaries, sometimes involving plebiscites, to reflect ethnic boundaries more closely.

Wilson's liberal internationalist foreign policy goals, stated in the Fourteen Points, became the basis for the terms of the German surrender during the conference, as it had earlier been the basis of the German governments negotiations in the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

The main result was the Treaty of Versailles with Germany; Article 231 of the treaty placed the whole guilt for the war on "the aggression of Germany and her allies". That provision proved very humiliating for Germany, and set the stage for the expensive reparations that Germany was intended to pay (it paid only a small portion before its last payment in 1931). The five great powers (France, Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States) controlled the Conference. The "Big Four" were French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, US President Woodrow Wilson, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They met informally 145 times and made all major decisions before they were ratified.The conference began on 18 January 1919. With respect to its end, Professor Michael Neiberg noted, "Although the senior statesmen stopped working personally on the conference in June 1919, the formal peace process did not really end until July 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed."It is often referred to as the "Versailles Conference", but only the signing of the first treaty took place there, in the historic palace; the negotiations occurred at the Quai d'Orsay, in Paris.