Middle EastPolitical Timelines
The end of the Ottoman order and a century of new states, revolutions and hard-won treaties. Contested history is marked as contested.
Turning points
- 1923October 29
The Republic of Turkey
The republic was proclaimed in Ankara after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president.
- 1945Cairo
The Arab League
Arab states founded the League of Arab States in Cairo in March 1945, to coordinate policy among newly independent governments.
- 1948May 14
Israel and 1948
The State of Israel declared independence. In the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled, remembered as the Nakba. The two histories are told very differently, and both shape the region today.
- 1979Iran
The Iranian Revolution
The monarchy fell, and the Islamic Republic was established after a referendum in the spring of 1979.
- 1979March 26
Egypt and Israel
Following the Camp David Accords of 1978, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state.
- 2010–11Uprisings
The Arab Spring
Protests that began in Tunisia in December 2010 spread across the region, with very different outcomes from country to country.