Ask Haviv Anything - 141: Why Western ideas crash and burn in the Middle East, with Simon Sebag Montefiore

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Why does the West misunderstand the Middle East? Best-selling historian Simon Sebag Montefiore returns to the pod to discuss The Cauldron, his sweeping new history of the region, from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of its modern states to oil, Islamism, revolution and the Arab Spring.The book is a kind of prehistory of present-day Western stumbling in the Middle East. Western powers repeatedly arrive with grand political theories — imperialism, nationalism, socialism, liberal democracy — only to watch them change beyond recognition or collapse on contact with the region’s deeper identities, loyalties and social contracts. It is a conversation about the states that endured, the ones that failed, and why the Middle East remains so intensely debated in the West — and so poorly understood.--This episode is sponsored by the Technion.Israel became the Startup Nation by turning talent into strength, ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who transformed Israel into the Startup Nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world. Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel’s next chapter.Israel. Engineered by the Technion.Join us. Visit https://ats.org/rebuild .--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

One of the themes of the book is that, you know, virtually every Western ideology that the West tries to impose on the Middle East crumbles instantly on contact with the reality of what, of how it really works there. And I don't just mean, I don't just mean Islam. I don't just mean the autocracies. I mean the personal way that deals are done there and the relationships work there. And I think that, you know, all of these kind of, The book is really one part of the book all the way through is just like one attempt after another of various, from the left, from the right, from empires, from liberal democracies, as attempts to impose on the Middle East these ideologies that we all are very excited by and which either change radically once they're filtered into it through the Middle Eastern mindset or just disintegrate on a, on a road.

arrival. And 2011, the 2011 to 13, the Arab Spring, is exactly a case of that. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khaliv Anything. It is a pleasure and a privilege to have back to the show Simon Sebag Montefiore. We had a great conversation in our last episode together about the history of the Jews of the United Kingdom at a moment of great tension and stress for that community a few months back. We are thrilled to have him back to discuss his fascinating new book on one of our favorite topics, which is the history of the Middle East. Simon is an internationally bestselling author, historian. His prize-winning books have been published in 48 languages. They include Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar, the Romanovs, the world,

a family history, and his new book, which is the topic of our conversation, The Caldron, the making of the modern Middle East. It comes out on August 25th. Before we jump in, I want to tell you today's episode is sponsored by our good friends at the Technion. Israel became the startup nation by turning talent into strength, ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who transformed Israel into the startup nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world. Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter. Israel engineered by the Technion.

Join us at ats.org slash rebuild. I'd also like to invite everyone to join our Patreon, subscribe to our Substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, please join us in those communities,

in those forums. You also get to take part in monthly live streams or I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash as chaviv-anything or chavivgur. com. Those links are in the show notes. Simon, how are you?

Thanks for coming on. This book is marvelous. It is sweeping. It is the story of the formation of the modern Middle East, in which you essentially tell the story of 19 countries from Morocco to Iran, starting in 1900 until today. And I want to start with the question of why you wrote it. This is essentially the story of this region told through the eyes, the interests of the leaders, of the revolutionaries, princes, diplomats. You draw sharp contrast between the states. of the Middle East that are sort of awkwardly cobbled together badly cobbled together by European

diplomats like Iraq and Syria and nations that are built by native sons or often ruthless autocrats, Adythurk, Reza Shai, Iran. And there are these very different origin stories in some ways Saudi Arabia that dictate whether the countries succeed, whether they fail, whether they're stable. Is that the core? Who are you responding to why tell this story? Why write this Well, that is one of the great themes of the book. Yeah, it is. And the question is, you know, do nation states work in the Middle East? Has sort of has nationalism been an effective state creator in this region? That's one question. And yeah, one of the arguments is that is that those states that were created either in anti-imperialist rebellions like Turkey and Israel or, you know, by tribal autocratic leaders who conquered their, or conquered or developed their realms like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, like, or like Morocco, where, you know,

where a royal family associated itself with the nation. I mean, all of them are different, but there's certainly an argument in the book that the better governed countries are those not cobbled together by Western imperialists, like, as you mention, Syria and Iraq. But, you know, in answer to the bigger question of why I wrote this book, I wrote this book because it didn't exist. I always love the quote by Benjamin Disraeli, who's one of my heroes, who said,

when I want to read a book and I can't find it, I write it myself. And in this case, you know, you know, you know so well about the sort of you read everything on this. There is such a strange concentration of interest on little episodes of modern Middle East and history to the neglect of others. I mean, there are no books virtually on the Sudanese civil walls which have killed sort of six million people or more. But there are endless books on Sykes Pico and that little bit of the end of the end of World War I. which is always regarded in modern political culture as showing the folly and flaws of empire. And then there's another bunching of books

all about 48 and the creation of Israel. And of course, now we have the efflorescence of books on Gaza and the moral meaning of Gaza. So, you know, there are many books like that. There are many histories of the Arabs. There are many histories of the Jews. there are books on Turkey and on all the individual countries, of course. But no one's put them all together.

And so that's what I try to do, the 19 countries. And I try to treat them all the same. And also there are also umpteen peoples in here who are neglected by historians. I mean, the biggest one is the Kurds, of course. But there's also the Al-Awhites, the Druze. And all the different identities. the Turkmen, the Yazidis, and so on. And so I wanted to put it all together.

And, of course, this is an insane project, which has almost killed me to write. But the good thing is I can now talk about it with you. Yeah. Let's dive into the history. Let's start at the beginning. You open the timeline of this book in 1902, with 25-year-old Ibn Saud, scaling a mud-brick wall

to storm a fortress in Riyadh with, what was it, 40 men, something like that? Yeah, 40 men. A little bloody desert raid that is the starting point for understanding the entire Middle East. What about that raid and what does it tell us about, just to lay that same year in 1902, a young David Bingurion arrives in the land of Israel in Palestine, just as Jews are starting to buy up land from Arab aristocrats for farming communes. All of these forces on the chessboard, there's a dying. empire, there are people stepping into the breach. So tell us about that empire, the leaders

who step into the gap, what that raid means and why you chose to start with it. Well, I chose to reach start that because most histories of the Middle East start in, you know, 1917, 1918. Most of them are concerned with the Levant, you know, which is, you know, Syria, Israel, Lebanon. Every history of this period starts with the British, you know, at Versailles, you know, deciding how to carve up the Middle East. And so for all sorts of reasons, matters of agency, but also accuracy and also understanding, I wanted to start in 1900-ish, because you literally can't understand the Middle East today unless you understand the Ottoman Empire. And to certain extent, we're still seeing the fallout from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire right now

in all sorts of ways. So that's why I started them. But I really especially started because I wanted to move the agency and the center of this work onto Arab life, Arab leaders, and particularly the Gulf and Arabia. And, you know, when Trump visited Arabia about two years ago, it seems like an age ago, doesn't it, given all the stuff that's happened. But it was, you know, when he visited reality at the beginning of the second term, He gave a speech where he said, you know, Riyad is now the center of the world. And to a certain extent, that is still true. Or least the Gulf is the center of the world.

And some would say for the better or for worse, that is very much true. The whole world is now looking at, you know, the Gulf and Hormuz. So I think that's why I started it, in fact, in that world. And it's also a very nice liminal world because Ibn Salh, existed in a world between empires. So to the east and north, he had the Ottoman Empire, which still controlled much of the Arab world under Abd al-Abdhaimid, who was the Sultan Caliph of that empire. And then to the east, you have the British Empire, which control the trucial states, now UAE, and Aden, which is now Yemen, and Muscat, which is now Amman.

And these were all British interests, and they also had, of course, India, Afghanistan was a client state of the British, and Pakistan was part of the Indian Raj. So all of these were British interests. So, and then to the west you have British, the British protector of Egypt and the Suez Canal. And then further, further west, you have French North Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, and the growing French power over Morocco. And then to the south of that, you have huge French-dominated Sahel. And then Britain and France kind of calves up the whole of Africa. So this is the world that we have.

at that time. And, you know, further east, of course, you have Iran, you have Persia, then called Persia, which is still ruled by a dynasty that has ruled since the late 18th century and is also falling apart as an empire, but has a strong concept of itself as a civilization, as an empire, as a state. And so that's why I started at that point. But more specifically about Saudi Arabia, one of the things one needs to know about Saudi Arabia is that this is the third Saudi state that we now have today. And so even Saud was an exceptional character, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, and one of the most successful Arab leaders of the last 150 years, without a doubt. one of the few who died in his bed, as it were, with a successful state left behind him.

But this reminds you a few things about the Saudi state. One is it's a family business. It's a dynastic state. Two is it's formed by the Saud family and the Wahhabi family in a religious political conjunction alliance. And thirdly, it's always worth remembering when you see how MBS behaves, for example, that it's a conquest state and it's a family conquest state. And that explains a lot of the way that the Saurwood family works, the confidence that they have. How do you mean?

Obviously, it's born in a kind of civil war for control of Arabia. But in what way does its birth as, first of all, family business, it's the only state in the world named for a family. Well, there's the Hashemite, this Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, and the Hashemites also play a big part in the book. They were the other family, right. So this is a cultural thing, naming states after families, but really that touches on something very profound. And it goes also to the structure of the book. The Ottoman Empire is collapsing. into the breach, at least in the Turkish and Iranian spaces,

step out of Turk and Reza Shah. And they try and officers in the army, the Reza Shah was in the Persian Cossacks, right? And they're trying to either build out, save some kind of nation state out of the ashes of the fall of this empire or two out of the fall of various empires. The Arabs, in a sense, are much weaker, much more loss, much more divided, split between British and French zones of control. And here we find these two families, the Sauds and the Hashemites.

How do they respond? Well, these two families are two of the families that are fighting for control of Arabia. But they have very different origins. The Saud family are an ancient family, but without lineage connecting them to the Prophet. But the Hashemites, on the other hand, are the ultimate Arab aristocracy. They are directly descended from the Prophet. it and they enjoy all the kudos and prestige that comes with that. And more than that, at least in Saladin, that family has governed the holy city of Mecca. And different branches

of it, always fighting each other for control. And when other rulers controlled the hijazz where Mecca and Medina stand, they traditionally, whether they were the Mamlux or Saladin or later the Ottomans, they usually appointed one of the Hashemite family to rule Mecca. And in the early 20th century, Abdu Hamid appoints Hussein bin Ali as ruler, and he is the father of the future kings of Syria, Iran, Palestine, Jordan. And so he has this dream of ruling, of recreating a single Arab state. And as World War I happens, he starts to negotiate with the British for this idea.

At the same time, he's negotiating with the Ottomans to try and get a hereditary kingdom from then. And he becomes a bit of a master at playing off these different sides against each other. And the British, of course, start to make the famous promises that they make to all sorts of people in the Middle East, which are notorious in Arab nationalist history, because this is the promise to give the Arabs a huge state at their own. But it's not quite what it seems, because what in fact Hussein asks for is a sense. single state that will contain all of Arabia, all of Syria, all of Palestine, all of Iraq, and that he will rule that himself. And of course, this is ironic considering that the Hashemites had about 4,000 met soldiers at the time and had only ever ruled Mecca. But he, you know,

he was, he was, he believed in accentuating the positive. And he rightly believed, that the British were desperate enough to launch this rebellion against the Ottomans. Why were the British desperate? They were desperate because they were bleeding millions of men on the Western Front. And they couldn't find a way to break the stagnation of World War I. And so they made this promise. But they were very careful in their negotiations not to promise Hussein everything. And there was some mockery behind the scenes that Hussein of Mecca was asking for this kind of mega state for his family.

So the British deliberately, from the very beginning, negotiated an agreement which were these letters with McMahon and Hussein that deliberately blurred the promises made to the Arab leadership. And of course, a whole lot of other promises were also made by the British at this time, all for the same reasons. None of these promises would have been made in any other time in world history. And those promises were included the Balfour Declaration to the Jews. That's the other famous one. But now forgotten in the realms of history are promises or at least interest in creating a Kurdish date. an Armenian state, and to their allies, the French, they promised in various different versions to split the whole Middle East with the French.

And at the same time, they promised the Russians that they could have much of modern Turkey, the whole eastern part, and Constantinople, Istanbul, and a share of Palestine, Jerusalem. And of course, the promises to the Russians long since forgotten. And at the same time, they promised the Greeks and the Italians that they could have much of what is now modern Turkey. So the Arabs and the Jews were not the only people who were given extravagant promises by the British. And all of this is because the British Empire itself, does it understand itself to be receding? Is this literally just the desperation of that moment of World War I? This promises are are an astonishing thing.

It's this. And they trigger, as the book covers in great detail, and I want to get into this as the next question, they trigger an anti-Anglo-French politics in the Middle East that very quickly is going to turn fascist. It's going to sign with the Nazis. It's going to side with the Italians because they're anti-British, basically. Do the British not understand that this is foolish policy, that they're not going to be able to satisfy everyone or even 90% of the promises

are not going to be satisfiably? even if they want to fulfill them. That's right. I think that in World War I, I think they're literally just thinking, how on earth do we win World War I? And I think that all these promises, I mean, to the Greeks, to the Jews, to the Arabs, to the Hashemites, all of these promises, to the Russians,

are all about just holding the Western alliance together and winning the war. And remember, you know, the Ottoman Empire did fall, but actually it was much stronger and more resilient than we thought, and one forgets that though about 10,000 Arabs fought for the Arab revolt against the Ottomans,

more than a million fought for the Ottoman, more than a million Arabs fought for the Ottomans throughout World War I, and was still loyal by the end of the wars. It's easy to forget that, when one hears all about the heroics of Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab armies under King Prince Faisal.

So the British were really, I think, thinking... as a lot of states do, and we're seeing that with America now, they're thinking in short term, in short termism. And so at the same time, they thought they could pull off all these rival plans because, you know, they didn't promise too much clearly to Kit to Hussain. The Jewish promise was not of the whole of Palestine, It was a homeland in Palestine.

So that could mean anything. The promises to the Greeks, well, the Turks had been, they regarded as beyond the pale because of the Armenian genocide. So no one in the Western side was interested in thinking about what the Turks wanted. They were discredited by the greatest crime of the time of the era. And so they were quite happy to give the Greeks, And the Russians were extremely demanding. And if Lenin hadn't seized power in 1917 and if the Tsar hadn't fallen, the Russians would have become a massive Middle Eastern power with a share of Palestine. And you wonder what would have happened if they had got that share of Palestine.

And of course, they also would have got Constantinople. What would they have done with Constantinople? Would they have turned it into a Christian city, Zagrad? But anyway, that didn't happen, obviously. So at the end of the war, the British and the French were really interested in their interest. And in answer your question, they just decided basically they were going to split it between the two of them. And at the same time, they embraced a new concept of sort of Arab nationalism, that they would promote the creation of Arab client states under their protection.

and so they took control of the so-called mandates, which were basically imperial provinces. And, of course, the British got Iraq and Jordan and Palestine, and they named that mandate Palestine, and Mesopotamia, which they named it called Iraq. And the French got Syria and Lebanon. And of course, what is now Turkey, they were going to, they gave. to the Greeks. They gave the Western part to the Greeks, essentially. The eastern part they were going to give to the Armenians and the Kurds. They were going to keep Constantinople themselves. And they gave the Turk, they were going to leave the Turkish Sultanate, as it still was, just a little block around Ankara. And of course, this was all undermined by the extraordinary character of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became known as Ataturk. And the reason why he was able to do this was, in the end of the war, the British and the French were actually exhausted by the war. And he found himself in command of a still intact Ottoman army in Anatolia.

And that enabled him to seize control of a new or create a new Turkish state and to first of all attack the Armenians and the French, then to turn and defeat the Greeks in a series of massive wars, massive battles. And by the way, it's pretty interesting because the Greek-Turkish War of 1921-22 involved armies of a kind of 150,000 men on each side. In other words, kind of World War I-size armies, which is such a contrast to, for example, what happened in 1948, when the armies are all sort of start off as sort of 10 or 15,000 men. And, you know, which is, And yet the war between the Greeks and the Turks is kind of forgotten now. But it has had huge consequences. And the reason why I go into it in detail is because the next thing Ataturk does is confront the British at Chanak in 1922.

And his challenge brings down Lloyd George, who's really the architect of this, all these promises. And it brings him down. and it really challenges the whole British and French arrangement of what is now Turkey. And out of it comes the Treaty of Lausanne, which creates modern Turkey under Ataturk. And it creates a new nationality, a religious nationality, which is the Turkish nation that rules the Turkish Republic. And there are huge parallels between the creation of Turkey, the creation of Turkey, the creation of Pakistan and the creation of Israel.

And what you have is, in a brutal ethnic war, the creation of a new religious nationalist idea, massive population transfers and population swaps, a brutal war, as I say, an anti-imperialist rebellion, in this case against Britain, similarly with the Israel and out of it you get a new state with an interesting ethos, a state born with a dynamic defiance to the world, a militarist ethos, and the potential for a nationalism that could become increasingly religious in its focus. And so if that sounds like Israel, it's interesting how similar, the two are, but the difference is the side, the scale. In the Turkish war in 1922,

millions of Christians were driven out of what is now Turkey. Millions of Muslims had to leave Greece, too, by the way. Hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks were killed. Armenians had been already ethnically cleansed and slaughtered. And what you get

out of this is basically a Muslim Turkey and a state that inherits some of the military ethos and some of the confidence of the Ottoman Empire. And of course, Atatouk wasn't happy with this. He wanted to get Mosul as well, which became part of Iraq. And he lost, he had to retreat from Syria. And of course, that is one of the trends we're seeing now with Oduan and Turkey in 2026 is, you know, there really is a strong resentment. The fact that they had to bow, but, you know, bow to a treaty with Britain, which kind of compromised and which limited Turkey to the borders of the present Turkish Republic and meant that they had to lose cities that they really regarded as essentially Turkish property. And that includes Jerusalem, by the way, but it also includes Aleppo and Beirut and so on, Damascus. And you see now in the rhetoric of Erdogan and his ministers a real aspiration to project influence into these places again.

This is one of the core themes of the book. You can't understand what's happening now if you don't know the last 120 years because everyone is still responding to the last 120 years in many ways. And the book doesn't get too much into religion, but as people in this podcast know well, and we've discussed it with many experts, a lot of modern radical Islam is a response to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In a sense, we're all living in this shadow in a profound way. And you mentioned the Treaty of Losan, which is 1923, I believe, where it was an agreement. upon. The Greeks and the Turks agreed, in addition to all the things that treaty did, to exchange populations, to create homogeneity in their respective nations, to prevent future endless

ethnic war. And so Greeks who had lived in Western Anatolia since the days of the Trojan wars no longer live there. Literally, no longer live there. And this population exchange was considered at the time a much better way forward than the Armenian genocide, than, then this collapse of multi-ethnic empire we're also seeing in Russia and in the new nationalisms of the Balkans and against the Austro-Hungarians. I want to move on to the 1930s. When you grasp the scale of British, in Hebrew we have the word brichas stirring of the pot in this region, the amount, the promises, the control, though trying to raise up, an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans that is in the five digits, compared to a million Arab soldiers in the Ottoman army, but nevertheless trying to drive an Arab nationalist anti-Ottoman narrative,

that is in the British attempt to engineer the Middle East. And you see the scale and the depth of it. And then in the 1930s and 40s, you begin to understand why Arab nationalists from the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Ali Rashid regime in Iraq, ally explicitly with Nazi Germany, with fascist Italy. How did this flirtation with European? fascism as in an attempt to oppose more effectively or find European allies against British and French rule.

How did it alter the trajectory of these independence movements, of these Arab nationalist movements? Well, I mean, World War II is so fascinating. And it's like a sort of forgotten, again, like World War I, it's like a forgotten and misunderstood episode. I mean, for the British Empire, you know, this was, the Middle East and Empire did pay off for them strategically. And that's the important thing from the British point of view, is that having these client states, all these protectorates in Egypt, the Band-Ed in Palestine, they did pay off because they held the line for the British Empire against the Nazis.

But they also had to launch three different wars to secure the Middle East, which have forgotten wars. They had to invade Vichy, Syria and Lebanon because Vichy was now on the Nazi side. So, and of course, every Israeli knows that's how Moshedain lost his eye on the Littani River. So they invade Syria and Lebanon and they take Damascus for the second time. The first time was in 1918. Then they have the Iraq. They also have the Iraqi problem. And as you said, there was a pro-Nazi regime in Iraq.

now kind of, I'm guided by the Mufti, who we forget we always think of as a Mufti Jerusalem, you know, busy in Palestine. No, he was in Baghdad at this point, and he was running the regime almost as a member of the government. And he attended cabinet meetings, by the way. And so, so then the British invade Iraq, and there's a short war against the Iraq, a short first Iraq war, if you like. And interestingly, in that war, there are Ergun militia, paramilitaries, who join British forces and who may or may not have been sent to assassinate the Mufti in Iraq. And the commander of the Ergun, Ra'all, is actually assassinating, or is killed by a sort of, by a plane strafing his car before he can do anything.

that the nature of his mission is one of those interesting mysteries of of um of uh jewish history at this time but anyway then they have the problem of iran and iran is where all the oil is a large part of the oil is and um resa shah who is one of the great nation builders of the book and a fascinating character of all sorts of reasons do read about him um but here he makes a fatal error when he tries to preserve Iranian neutrality. And Stalin and Churchill just can't tolerate that risk. And so they invade launch a war against Iran and overthrow the Reschard, defeat the Iranian army,

and occupy Iran, which is why the Tehran Conference of the Big Free, Stalin and Churchill and so on, and Roosevelt, is in Tehran. It's basically controlled by the British and the and the Soviets. So that's what happens in the Middle East and it pays off. This control of the Middle East now pays off for Britain. But as you say, it is also encouraged a backlash against British and French Empire,

but particularly British. And in the 30s and early 40s, many of the nationalists from Anwar Sadat in Egypt to Gaglian, Al-Gariani in Iraq and other places, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, of course, support the Nazis in different ways. For Anwar Sadat, it's not that he's a Nazi, it's not that he's a racist, it's not that he's an anti-Semite, but he's an Egyptian nationalist,

and he thinks that the rival of Rommel, who's fighting his way with the Africa Corps across Libya into Egypt, is the best chance for Egypt to get independence. The Mufty of Jerusalem, on the other hand, everybody knows, actually embraced Nazi annihilationist anti-Semitism. And after the fall of Baghdad, when the British move into Iraq, he escapes, he makes it to Rome, he meets Mussolini, then he makes it to Berlin. And in Berlin, he meets Hitler, he meets Himla.

And he throws himself 100% into the Nazi project. the final solution. And of course, this is one, just an example of appalling me bad judgment, as it turns out, because Germany loses the war. And he's actually lucky not to face war crimes, a war crimes trial.

But nonetheless, he remains in control of the Palestinian side or a Palestinian Arab side. In the late 30s, he launches, is, he plays a part in launching an Arab revolt in Palestine against the British and the Jews. And that is ruthlessly crushed by the British, the British. But after they've done it, the British look at the Balfour Declaration and completely reverse their policy. And it's often forgotten that in 1939, Neville Chamber and the British Prime Minister offers the Mufti and the Al-Husseini Party an independent,

an independent Palestine state. There would, of course, could still contain a large Jewish minority in some form of over 400,000 people. But, you know, it would have been a single, a single Palestine state that would have been dominated by its Arab majority. And we don't know how that would have played out. It may have led to instance of a war. It may have led to the creation of the potential of a Jewish canton or federal state with a Jewish autonomous region in it. Who knows how it could have worked out. But they didn't want that.

And the Mufti preferred, he said this is sacred Islamic territory. It's unthinkable that there could be this Jewish presence on it. And so he rejected the state. an insane mistake, you might think. So all of those nationalists in different parts of the Middle East embraced the idea of German sponsorship against Britain. That failed because Britain in America and the Soviet Union won the wars, we all know. And so in 1945, the British emerge as, as face.

a huge crisis of how to run their empire. They're bankrupt, they're in hoc to the Americans, and they they embrace a concept of pan-Arab nationalism with Arab states that they will back to create a hopefully a network of pro-British client states that would hold the line for Britain, for the West and against communism in the Middle East. And that was the idea. And so, for example, Churchill actively encourages King Farouk and Nouri al-Said, the dominant leader 14 times Prime Minister of Iraq. And they create the Arab League in Cairo in 1944-45,

which is an organisation to express pan-Arab nationalism and the idea of an Arab community of nations. And at the same time, the British face two massive imperial problems. The first one is India-Pakistan, where they hope to hand over to a single Indian state that would have contained both the Hindu and the Muslim state. That doesn't happen because Jinnah and the Muslims believe that the leading Congress Party of Gandhi and Neroo,

is essentially a Hindu party. And so they demand a Muslim state. And again, there is a partition, not unlike what happens in Turkey with the Greeks and the Turks, there is a partition and a new state is created. And that state is called Pakistan, and it's an idea of a Muslim national estate.

And in this partition, something like 12 to 14 million people are displaced, and something like one to three million people are murdered in that process. And out of it emerged two new states that have never existed before India and Pakistan, a Hindu state, a Muslim state. And in its birth, in its creation, in its ethos, in its military traditions, there are parallels between Pakistan and Israel. And Israel brings me on to the next crisis that the British had.

Because after the disaster of India, they now, had what to do with the brutal ethnic struggle for power in Palestine, and they completely fail to solve this and therefore invite in the United Nations. But this is just a story that is well-down to your listeners, so we don't need to go into it. But what's interesting is it's just the latest of what Churchill called scuttle, the British scuttling from responsibility of their empire. They had done. done it, they had retreated in Turkey, they had retreated in India, Pakistan. They would retreat from Aden disastrously in 1967, 68, and then from the Trucial States in 1971.

And probably the most notorious today is, of course, their scuttle from Palestine. When they handed it over the United Nations, the United Nations had the right idea in a partition. partition was so appallingly conducted, the division of Palestine into what was in fact seven different segments, each of them indefensible, which was supposed to be the Jewish and Arab states, and where nobody was there to enforce how this would happen, the British just went into their barracks and then left on May the 15th, 1948. And the United nations just did nothing. And the result was 1948 and the most notorious of all those succession of British scuttles. I did not realize, remember, maybe I'd read it once until I

learned it again from your book that part of the 39 white paper was the establishment of this Arab majority state and no Jewish immigrate. The Arabs turned down multiple international, whether British or UN attempts to say to them, you've got this. You'll be the majority forever more. No more Jewish immigration. They turned that down repeatedly over a decade. And a question that arose from reading about this in your book again was, could that have been influenced by Khadhamin, the Mufti of Jerusalem's, you know, Nazism?

That he talked about Palestine is sacred Muslim land, as you said. That's in the Hamas charter, that Palestine is a waif. And therefore, you can't compromise on an inch of it because it is sacred Muslim term. I mean, that is very much, that is in his testimony to the Peel Commission. Is this what, they had an easy, free path to preventing a Jewish state, having an Arab state over just about the totality of the land, offered to them by the first British Empire, then UN. They turned it down because there couldn't be any Jews in the land, not even a minority. Is that actually a function of that radicalization, either under Nazism or Islamism? In the case of HHHJM?

I think partly, yes, because it's, you know, it's always been a narrative in the West that, you know, that it should, you know, that there was always a compromise to be had. But there wasn't in this case because Hajahman-Arsani had taken control of the Palestinian Arab side. In a sort of civil war in the 30s, he had confronted the Nashibi family's faction. there was willing to reluctantly, but was willing to concede some sort of Jewish entity in the land. And that would have led to a completely different history today. Because in the Peel Commission's partition, but also in 1947, 48, one of the interesting things, which is little known now, is that, first of all, in 1947, yes, the British, Ernest Bevan

offered the Palestinian Arabs a state again, a single state. And yes, Hussein turned it down because it was sacred Arab land and he didn't want to contain a massive Jewish entity of some sort. He was only willing to concede that the Jews who were, who were, had been there under the Ottoman Empire, the small number of Jews who'd been in the Ottoman could live in the state and no one who'd come after that World War I could stay. Of course, they had nowhere to go. So it was on, that was an, that was a completely impossible gambit. But also, once the, once the Unscott, the UN plan had come into, had been, had been declared, obviously the Jews

accepted it, Bevin then secretly backed the idea that the King Abdullah of Jordan would take over the Arab parts of the state and his prime minister would probably have been Nashashibi

the leading one of the most aristocratic families of Jerusalem like the Hussein's, but someone who was always willing to compromise and actually sensibly. The Nashashibi Abdullah plans would have, would have saved tens of hundreds of thousands of lives and created a different Middle East. And I think actually it would have worked.

So the tragedy of not one of the many tragedies of 48 was that that fell apart. Let's shift over to another fascinating episode, which is oil. It's kind of a common obvious refrain that almost definitional, that the Arabs have oil. You trace the rise of the automobile and the demand for oil, how it shapes Western interests, European interests, Middle Eastern politics, and turns the Saudi state into this vast extraction economy, incredibly wealthy. And you also bring the names, the stories of European investors, of Western investors and explorers who find and develop this oil industry. What did oil do? When does it begin and And what is that profound influence that oil has on the Middle East?

But it begins very early in the 20th century when Darcy, an actually sort of Anglo-Australian oil tycoon who had made money in Burma, starts to, you know, buys a concession in Iran where they actually, were they amazingly, they hit a massive oil field. and that suddenly makes Anglo-Persian oil, which is now BP, into a powerhouse. And at various stages, the Royal Navy starts to be oil powered, and that oil is powered by oil from Persia. Soon after that, they start to look for oil in what is now in Iraq, around Mosul. And that also, there also oil is discovered. And so Iran and Iraq become absolutely key to the world economy, to the British economy, and to the British Empire. And so many of the decisions that were made from that point on, that's in the 20s, become decisions made about oil. And this is all, this story is told very well in that brilliant book, The Prize,

Daniel Juergen's book. And it's told again in the caulder in my book now. And so, you know, the oil fields in Abidjan, you know, the oil field around in Iran, in Persia, it becomes an essentially key asset of the British Empire. At the same time, you know, they start to find oil also in Saudi Arabia, as you said, And suddenly Saudi Arabia goes from this kind of sleepy, dusty, impoverished personal shakedom to this absolutely kind of rising world power. And the same thing happens in the shakdoms of the Gulf, places like Qatar and UAE.

And so that's how oil becomes a feature. But it's only really in the 70s with the Yonkian. war, that the Arab states and indeed Persia, Iran, start to really deploy the power of that oil gives them. It's a fascinating also story in Algeria and replicated in many places. The independence war of the FLN is already underway in 1956 when vast reserves are discovered in the Sahara. And that complicates the French calculations about leaving, because do you, tell us a little bit more

about the sort of, there's a lot of conversation about how oil has affected the Arab world and the Middle East, both in terms of imperial control, Western influence, you know, we're now the third Gulf War, as you call it in the book. How much of that is about so much of that, obviously, is about oil. The whole Hormuz conflict right now is about oil. Has that really shaped the region more than we know, less than we know? How do you see that question? I think it's hugely important and it has shaped the region. And in some countries, the presence of oil has, I think, prevented the countries really having to settle down and look at their own governance. And an example of that is Iraq, probably, is one of the best Libya, Iraq and Algeria.

In those three countries, you know, systems were able to stagnate, reforms were never made. Governance was never really looked at. but also one has to recognize that part of that process is other factors too, and that is the fact that these nation states, what we touched on at the beginning, were created in such a false way by outsiders, by imperial powers, so that you had these cobbled together states that really had no coherence. And that's another aspect of it. Another aspect is Islamism. In all of these countries, there was a strong argument. among the educated elites that they needed dictatorships or at least autocrats in order to prevent the fall of their civilizations, their cultures, their cities, two Islamist rulers. And that was something

that these elites, and I mean the elites in Cairo, in Baghdad, in in in in in in in in in in in in in in Algeas in all of these places we're willing to put up with considerable Latin, giving like a considerable lack of considerable attitude to pretty brutal autocrats in order to avoid an Islamist rule that they believed would be worse. Of course, it's questionable when you look at the sort of colligularian rule of someone like Saddam was saying whether that really worked. But in Egypt today, repeatedly, in modern Egyptian history, from King Farouk to Nassah to Sadat to Mubarak Barak to Al-Sisi.

You know, a considerable part of the educated classes in Egypt have repeatedly chosen to favor an autocrat with all of that means rather than the chaos and intolerance and persecution of an Islamist of Islamist presidency. And we saw that with the fall of Morsi and the Sisi coup raised recently. So that's that's another thing that's going on here in a big way. And then there's the fact that there is a division between these countries that developed with either the idea of an empire and state already present. And that's like the ancient states of Egypt and Persia or Iran, for example, and, you know, the imperial ethos and confidence that comes with the Turkish state as a successor state of the Ottoman Empire. And then you have the states that were literally invented by by, by, by Churchill and, you know, Churchill and Lloyd George and people like, Clemenceau. And then you, which we've discussed, you know, where they tried what you might call a one state solution, especially Lebanon. Lebanon is the one state solution. You know, the French thought about creating a Christian state or tried to create a Christian state, but what to do with the other minorities, you could break it up into smaller states.

And that was the way it had been ruled on the Ottoman Empire, with a Christian, Mount Lebanon as a kind of Christian state. But they decided to do a greater Lebanon that would still be dominated by Christians. And of course, that hasn't, that's worked, worked rather badly. And we'll see what will happen with that. So it's more than just a question of oil, but there's also the question of those countries with hereditary monarchies based on either an imperial history or in tribal prestige. So like Saudi Arabia, like Morocco, like US,

and all those, all those shakdoms, that has actually worked pretty well. It's not about oil, ultimately. It's about the existence of an authentic social contract between ruler and ruled, authentic identity. The Egyptians are a people. The Iraqis are three to four to five peoples depending on how you look at it. And the Syrians and Lebanese, again, many. So I want to bring us into the modern times and just we're coming to the end.

One of the interesting chapters here is the Arab Spring, where I have heard the argument made to me very convincingly that the Arab Spring was not about democracy, as it was often portrayed in Western media, and the Obama administration responded to it in that way. But in fact, the Arab Spring really was part of this deep tension that you're describing in places like Iraq and Libya and Egypt between the Islamist. and I don't know what to call it, the conservatives, the rest of society, where the Arab Spring really was an Islamist rebellion. And one of the ways this argument is made is to point out that the monarchies that are invested in religious validation, like the Hashemites, like the Sauds, were untouched by the Arab Spring. Whereas the secular sort of veneered presidents, right, the elected presidents like Assad were brutal dictators, but pretend to be elected, at least. East as the sort of official regime ideology, they're the ones who were toppled. They're the ones who were overthrown. And what replaces them often, the rebellion in Syria, the Morsi government in Egypt is almost entirely Islamist. And so really this tension, it's not about democracy. Nobody

in the Middle East is genuinely working toward any kind of democracy. There's traditional social contract of tyrants, tyrants, sometimes very, you know, sensible kings, but not at all Democrats. and people and Islamists. Those are really the two forces. Is that how you see it? I think one of the themes of the book is that, you know, virtually every Western ideology that the West tries to impose on the Middle East crumbles instantly on contact with the reality of what, of how it really works there.

And I don't just mean, I don't just mean Islam. I don't just mean new autocracies. I mean the personal way that deals are done there and the relationships work there. And I think that all of these kind of, the book is really one part of the book all the way through is just like one attempt after another of various, from the left, from the right, from empires, from liberal democracies, as attempts to impose on the Middle East these ideologies that we all are very excited by. and which either change radically once they're filtered into it through the Middle Eastern mindset or just disintegrate on arrival. And 2011, 2011 to 13, the Arab Spring is exactly a case of that.

I think there was undoubtedly, when you look at the discourse, there was, probably among a sort of higher bourgeois graduates, in places like Cairo. Of course there was a democratic discourse and a wishing for Western democracy. But it lacked the organization that was possessed by the Islamist movement that controlled a network of mosques and hostels and welfare organizations.

And also that had existed since the 1920s. We're just talking about Egypt here. But of course, there was also Islamists had a Muslim Brotherhood, for example, had a sort of shadow organization also in places like Syria as well, which we see. So, yeah, it was always about more than just democracy. And you saw this when, in the Egyptian case, when Baraday, the head of the nuclear, UN nuclear agency, returned, the West was very excited by him because here was a real Egyptian liberal Democrat, if you like,

or Democratic liberal, we should say. But the moment he arrived in Egypt, he completely failed to arouse any interest at all. And, you know, except among a very small group of sort of liberal bourgeoisie

in Cairo. And he just achieved no, he made no impression at all on the politics. And it just was reduced again to Islamists and the army. And And it was always thus. Isn't that the story of the 79 revolution in Iran?

The women's groups, communist students all joined the Ayatollah, the Khomeini in the overthrow of the Shah. Within a year, the Shah is running the place and they're all subdued and marginalized. Khomeini is running the case. Yeah. And the thing is, that's exactly what happened. But there you have a slightly different situation because with Al-Ci, you have the army, which which has a kind of, has ruled Egypt since 1952.

So it has, it has the confidence and it has the contract in place with a large part of the population to rule as it does today. And it has rules since 1952 with that short break for the Muslim Brotherhoods Morsi. But in Iran, in 1953, 52, 53, you see that the Shah makes a deal with. with the army. And when he sees his power, in 79, the army agrees to retreat from its normal position as an ally of the monarchy. And Kameney performs this kind of partly a brilliant act of leisure de ma'a sort of playing everybody, an incredible cunning. And that's why Kameney really ranks as one of the great statesmen of the 20th century. I don't mean that in a positive sense,

but one of the great revolutionary leaders, the 20th century up there with Lenin, because like Lenin, he can make these amazing compromises, and he understands when to make them and when not to make them. And he resembles Stalin and Mao because he's willing just to kill tens and 20s of thousands of people when he needs to, with absolute ruthlessness. But you're right, 79 is. is how Khomeini, using his cunning, using his Islamist organization, but also helped enormously by outside events, mainly the American attempt to rescue their hostages, and Saddam, and above all, Saddam's invasion, which placed the revolution in danger and enabled him to create the Islamic Republic to crush and kill all those liberals, Marxists, Islamic Marxists, and so on, all these

different groups that had allied with him across the entire spectrum, he could just wipe them all out and create what we see today, which is this extraordinary hybrid structure of a sacred monarchy in Iran with a sort of shadow democratic structure. but real power endowed in a sacred monarch for life and his pritorians. Right. So winding down with two quick questions, we didn't get this book. Well, the book was supposed to be published in 2024. After October 7, what changed after October 7?

Well, no, I didn't actually. That's incorrect. What happened was I wasn't commissioned to write it until very recently. and I hadn't planned it. After October 7th, my American publisher said, would you write a history of Israel, a short history of Israel? And I said, no, because in my Jerusalem book,

I've already written, I've already written a history of, you know, the Holy Land over 5,000 years, and it includes Israel. So I up, but I did update, I had updated it anyway. That's Jerusalem. And so I,

brought it up to October the 7th. And so Jerusalem is updated history of the Holy Land. But this book was a different thing. They said to me, would you write a history of Israel? And I said, no interest in doing that because I've done it. And that's what Jerusalem is, in part. So I said, what I'd love to do is write a book called The Caldron, the making of the modern Middle East since 1900. And they said, we're not interested in that. But then a year later, which was now like 2020, late 2024, and the beginning of 2025, they said, would you write it?

And I said, yeah, I'd love to write it because it doesn't exist. And it's an amazing story. It would be all the great, it would contain all these great characters, you know, Saddam, Gaddafi, Arafat, Netanyahu, Ben-Gurian, Reza Shah, Atatutuk, and so on. But it also, you know, if no one else has written,

no one else has written this book, and it's so necessary given how ignorant everybody is about the history of how we got here and how impossible it is to understand the history of Iran today, the Hormuz crisis, or Israel, all what's happening in Morocco? How has Morocco become the leading industrial state in Africa, for example, now? So all of this, and so that's why I wrote it. Simon, I want to stop you because this is my last question, and you're leading into it perfectly, but I want to have you reflect on this. You write this, by the way, in the introduction.

You write, the events of the last 30 years, and indeed the last 80 years, are incomprehensible without knowing what was happening in the Middle East at the start of the 20th century and its early decades. It's hard to think of any era or any epoch, more entwined with snares laid with traps, set with ambushes than this one. It's hard to write about the Middle East.

I share that concern. This region looms larger in the Western consciousness than any other. its history of the last century is more debated and contested than anywhere else, yet conversely, less understood. The history is fascinating, complicated, paradoxical, diverse, interwoven, and surprisingly little known, yet it is essential to know if we are to understand what is happening now, how we got here, and what will come next. Now, that's right there in the introduction, and it just, and you've touched on it in this conversation several times, and it is a burning question for me. what is the Middle East's power over the Western imagination?

And why does nobody seem to know much about it? Why is the conversation so ignorant? I put it down to the morality plays of the Western mind. They're not talking about the Middle East. They're talking about themselves. So it doesn't matter to understand the ideology underlying the Iranian regime and how it influences policy. The only thing to know is whether Trump is a good guy or a bad guy.

Why is... I'll stop. It's such a burning question for me. so much talk about this place and so little knowledge. I mean, the book is, the reason I write the book is because we historians have that duty, I think you've put it very well. So I'm not going to add to that, actually. I'm just going to say, you know, we historians have a special duty now to tell the stories

and to insist on source-based history. And, you know, one of the great challenges is that we now have a social media world, which is based on emotion and hyperbole and also just also falsity. And, you know, we have to make a stand on facts and on sources and on balance. And on telling people's things they don't know. And we have to be, we have to take some risks to do this. And all of us who are in this sphere are in some way or other doing this. The reasons why the Middle East is so significant in the Western imagination is a collection of things.

You know, one is entirely pragmatic and selfish, oil, but the other is the special place that the Middle East holds, particularly the Holy Land, the Holy City, holds in the Christian imagination. and the Christian imagination, the Christian history, I mean, there are lots of examples of this, but you know, you just have to remember that in the Middle Ages, you know, every village in Europe had a Jerusalem chamber, you know, in their church. And everyone spent that whole time in the church because there was no television. So, you know, so the Holy Land, just to answer that bit of the question,

you know, has, exists deep in the Western soul. And, you know, whether you are an imperial statesman like Winston Churchill, whether you are a so-called progressive activist in the decolonialization, anti-Zionist space, both of those people think that they're completely different. But in this way, they're exactly the same. the splinter of the Holy Land is buried deep in their consciousness. And that's why it's very important to write this book. And that's why I wrote it.

I can't recommend it highly enough. I learned a great deal. And thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for enlightening us once again. Thanks for having me. And I love talking to you.