Palestine, Ataturk's Turkey and Modernizing Iran, 1917–1941
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Flip to reveal answersWhat did the Balfour Declaration (1917) promise?
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All 12 Flashcards — Palestine, Ataturk's Turkey and Modernizing Iran, 1917–1941
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Question
What did the Balfour Declaration (1917) promise?
Answer
British support for establishing a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, while stating the rights of existing non-Jewish communities should not be harmed.
Question
Why did British Palestine policy keep failing between the wars?
Answer
It tried to honour two incompatible promises at once — a Jewish national home and Arab self-determination/rights — so every step to please one side provoked a crisis with the other.
Question
What did the Peel Commission (1937) recommend?
Answer
The first official proposal to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, since Arab and Jewish demands were judged irreconcilable.
Question
What triggered the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939?
Answer
Rising Jewish immigration after 1933, land purchases displacing Arab tenant farmers, and Arab frustration at British policy failing to limit Zionist settlement.
Question
How did the Great Arab Revolt end and with what effect?
Answer
Britain deployed over 20,000 troops and used collective punishment to crush it by 1939; Palestinian Arab leadership was devastated (many killed, jailed, or exiled) for years afterwards.
Question
What did the 1939 MacDonald White Paper do, and why is its timing significant?
Answer
It capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years — right as Nazi persecution of Jews was intensifying towards the Holocaust, making the restriction especially controversial.
Question
What major political change did Ataturk make in 1922–1924?
Answer
He abolished the Ottoman sultanate (1922) and then the caliphate (1924), ending over 600 years of Ottoman rule and founding a secular Turkish Republic.
Question
Name three of Ataturk's westernizing/secularizing reforms.
Answer
Any three of: replacing Arabic script with the Latin alphabet (1928), banning the fez, adopting secular legal codes, closing religious courts/schools, giving women the vote (1934), adopting the Western calendar.
Question
What is 'etatism' as used in Ataturk's Turkey?
Answer
State-directed economic development — the government led industrialization and protected Turkish industry from foreign competition.
Question
How did Reza Shah come to power in Iran?
Answer
Reza Khan, an army officer, seized power in a 1921 coup, then crowned himself Shah in 1925, founding the Pahlavi dynasty.
Question
Compare Reza Shah's Iran to Ataturk's Turkey.
Answer
Similar: both modernized education, infrastructure, and dress, and weakened clerical power. Different: Iran's power stayed concentrated in the Shah personally (no reforming party), relied heavily on oil revenue, kept land concentrated among elites, and Reza Shah was forced to abdicate by British/Soviet occupation in 1941.
Question
Why was Reza Shah forced to abdicate in 1941?
Answer
Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran and forced his abdication, fearing his government's ties to Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
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Topic 21.13 hub
War and change in the Middle East and North Africa 1914–1945
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