The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 48. Simon Sebag Montefiore: The impact of conflicting histories in the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Is understanding history a means to peace between Israel and Palestine? Has Putin’s obsession with Russia’s imperial history motivated his invasion of Ukraine? Is it possible to dismantle Hamas under Netanyahu’s leadership?  Rory and Alastair are joined by British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to answer these questions and more in today's episode of Leading. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. So today we have the great privilege of interviewing Simon Siebeg Montfuri, who is many things. He is, though primarily and historian, he's written great works on Russia, on everything from the era of Castoran the Great and Potemkins, through to some wonderful books on Stalin, but he also wrote a very fundamental history of Jerusalem. He is from a Jewish family, very influential Jewish family in British history in the 19th and 20th centuries. And I think has also been in the last few weeks a very important commentator on events in Israel.

So there are many things that we want to talk about. We want to talk about Israel or Gaza. We want to talk about Russia. but I wonder whether I could perhaps begin with a little bit of history and to try to get you to explain a little bit about what led up to this idea of Israel, the creation of a Jewish homeland, what part the British played in it, what the British thought they were doing, why they committed to this thing, and where this came from in the 19th century.

That's a giant question. And I think one has to stop. I think I might go away and write a book about it. I did write a book about it, which is, which is, which is, is the Jerusalem book. But perhaps we should just start by saying that one can't think of anything other at the moment than the nightmare we're going through in the Middle East. And one just can't deplore enough the images of civilians and children and women being killed in Gaza, just as we can't deplore enough the killing of civilians on October 7th in Israel. And one always

has to start by just saying, I just crave the moment when there is a Palestinian state next to an Israeli state, when the occupation is over, when this dreadful Netanyahu government is gone, but also when Hamas is scattered and taken out, we pray out of the game in the political game in the Middle East. So I think one has to start from that point. But on the other hand, I believe that the history of Israel is an authentic one, just as the history of the Palestinians has got two just causes, two just peoples. And we've got to find a way for them to live together. slaughter is not the answer. So to answer Rory's point, to go back at the beginning, one has to start from the fact that the Jewish people in exile since 17 AD have always longed to have a life

in the Holy Land, to return to Jerusalem, to return to what later became Palestine. And that has been something they've worked on throughout history. There was a moment in the 17th century when Solomon the magnificent and Salim the Grim, his son, were both backing Jewish settlement in the Middle East, in what is now Palestine. And there have been many such schemes throughout history. In the 19th century, many, many Jewish people started to dream that this was possible. And my ancestor, Moses Montefir, is one of those people. He first went there in the 1820s. And in the 1860, he was one of the first to build a small suburb outside the walls of Jerusalem.

at exactly the same time as the great Hussaini family, the great Palestinian family, started to build an Arab suburb outside the walls of Jerusalem, Sheikh Jara. So both those began at exactly the same time. Just again to remind listeners to sort of bring some, so in the 19th century, the Jewish population of Palestine was pretty small and the Muslim population was much, much larger, maybe 10 times larger by the end of the 19th century. And the Christian population actually was relatively similar to the size of Jewish population by the end of the 19th century. And many of those were Palestinian Arab Christians. But by the end of the 1880s, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. And of course, this is long before World War I, World War II, the Holocaust or anything else. So from sort of 1800 up to then, the Jewish population grows in Jerusalem, the city.

Yes. But across the broader Palestinian region, 1890, maybe censors suggests maybe 43,000 Jews, 432,000. and Muslims in that territory. Absolutely right. And of course, immigration was going to change that. And the immigration really started in the 1860s, 70s, 80s. And so just a reminder of the fact that when you look at Israelis today, there are many families that have been living in there for close to 200 years, which is many generations, which is quite long enough to count as indigenous. Even if you reject the whole of the ancient narrative that the Jews ruled and lived in what was then Judea for a thousand years before the birth of Christ, which by the way, all historians accept, accept those with a

very political bias, of course. So 1880s immigration starts from different places. Then in World War I, the British Empire is aspiring to take over the Ottoman Empire. The war on the Western Front is going very badly and creative thinkers, including Winston Churchill and the British and French side, are looking for a way to break the central powers from the East and also planning for the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which has ruled the Middle East since 1517 when Salim the Grimm takes it. That's a great name. Yeah, Salim the Grim.

Well, he did kill all his brothers and their children and probably most of his own sons except the chosen heir, Solomon, the Magnificent. So he deserved his name. He was grim. He was grim, but he was also great. And it's worth remembering, by the way, I'm glad you've asked about him because from 1517 to 1918,

the Ottomans, essentially the Turkish Empire, ruled the Arab world in its entirety. They threw out the Mamalukes who had ruled it before, and they built the walls in Jerusalem, which are now the walls of Jerusalem, which we all think is terribly ancient.

They weren't. They were built by Solomon Magnificent, same time as Henry VIII basically. And they ruled with increasing repression of the Arab population. So by World War I, Arabs are dreaming of throwing off the chains of Ottoman rule. And the Ottomans are getting increasingly fascisticistic and ultra-nationalists. And somewhere in this period, Lord Balfour in Britain puts out a declaration supporting a homeland for the Jewish people. Apart from the rights or wrongs of it, what were the British thinking about?

What was in it for the British? What was their cunning plan? The British didn't have a cunning plan. The British, like many, many powers in many wars, were simply looking for different friends, different alliances, and promising different panaceas to those groups in order to win allies.

Which allies were they hoping to win by promising a Jewish homeland? It started with, in 1915, with the negotiations with Hussein of Mecca, a Hashemite prince descended from the Prophet Muhammad and who they had ruled Mecca on and off since the time of Saladin. They and the British were discussing the Hashemite family wanted to rule the entire Arab world, one family. And the British made an agreement with them that they would lead an Arab rebellion. This was all to do with Lawrence of Arabia as well.

And this Arab rebellion would undermine the Ottomans in the East. But they were very careful not to promise anything too specific, such as Jerusalem. Why did the British think it was a smart move in this war to promise a homeland for the Jewish people? There were various reasons. One was that they were all biblically educated. People brought up in the tradition of Victorian evangelism. Lloyd George was really the Belford Declaration. He was the driver of it.

He was the Balthallel Declaration is really the Lloyd George Declaration and should be. Balthor was the former Prime Minister who had been brought back as Foreign Secretary in case that sounds familiar. And so that was one part of it was cultural. one. And another part of it was the belief that the Jews had great influence in America and in Russia. So a way of getting the Americans on the side of the British during the war

and keeping them on the side. Yes. And also a way of keeping Russia in the war because there were around 5 million Russian Jews at that time. How important do you think history is in the middle of a crisis like this? When a crisis like this erupts in the way that it's done, and interesting

that, for example, you felt right from the outset of this interview, you had to set yourself in that current situation. Correct. But how important is history? How much should the current leaders who are trying to grapple with this know about the history? And how should they try to apply it to what were they trying to do now? Well, I think history is very important. But the last part of that answer and the most important is that people believed that

Jewish national determination meant that they needed and deserved. a return to their historic home. So that was the sort of biggest. I told you what the British wanted, but what the Jews wanted was that, and that was recognized by the British Empire. And that is the most important part of this, the ancient Jewish connection and love of and homeland in the Holy Land. That was the key part of that British decision to back the powerful declaration, which

was backed by the French government and also the US Congress at the same time, and then by the League of Nations. In terms of history, I mean, you may find this a surprise from a historian, but you can have too much history. And actually, what I think really matters is how people want to live now. And that's why I started with that declaration at the beginning of this conversation, because you can have way too much history. What really matters in Ukraine, in Russia and in the Middle East, is how people want to live now for their families. But what lessons can be taken from history that could be usefully applied now? I mean, the key lessons that really need to be applied now are this,

that you have two peoples with completely legitimate stories, narratives, histories, cultures, and connections to this land. And there is no point in denying either one of those histories today. Because to deny those histories is to deny those people's rights. right to live and flourish in freedom. Gives us examples of people denying the histories on either side so that listeners can understand what you mean when people say denying histories. When I was researching my Jerusalem book, for example, and by the way, the mission of

that book was exactly this. The whole point of the Jerusalem, the biography history book that I wrote was to show the histories of both peoples to deny neither. That was my mission, because without that, peace is impossible. And my dream is that of two states. So let me give you an example. I spoke to many of the top Palestinian professors of history, and they all helped me because I was writing the history of great Palestinian families and showing their histories over the last thousand years. And they would tell me, in private, we can tell you, of course there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem on the temple mound. But in public, the Palestinian authorities' official position is there was no Jewish temple. The Jewish connection to the Holy Land is completely tenuous and invented in the 1890.

by Zionists. So they would quite happily admit this in private. They said, but in public, we'd be killed if we said it. So that's one narrative. So there's a narrative from some parts of the Palestinian community saying, really, there were very, very few Jews in Palestine, and they didn't have much of a presence. And this leads into something you've been very worried about recently, which we'll get onto, which is your worries about stories about settler colonialism. And then presumably on the other side is an Israeli narrative which downplays the significance the Palestinians as a people and the type of state they had and how much repressants they had. Yeah, well, just to finish, just give you another part of that, another part of this denial of the Jewish history, which I'm not going to dwell on because I'm dying to get on to the other one too because I despise that just as much.

But the sort of settler colonial narrative is a huge denial of modern Jewish history because it claims, for example, that it imposes on this story a whiteness narrative. And I'm going to interrupt for a second time. So again, for listeners, this is very, very common, particularly in university campuses, particularly in the United States, where recently we've seen over the last few weeks, the projection of a lot of narrative around race, where Jews are depicted as whites, where Palestinians are depicted as black adjacent, where the conflict is interpreted through a lens of settler colonialism, right? Well, you think de-legitomizes those who've gone there. It dehumanizes the Israelis completely in all sorts of ways.

We might come to the details of that in a minute. But just for this denial of history point, something like approaching 60%, but certainly over 50% of Israelis are Mizrahim, who are descended from black or brown peoples in the Middle East. They are indigenous to the Middle East. They come from Iraq, from Persia, from Yemen, from Ethiopia, from Morocco. Like my own family comes from Morocco, the sea bag. So they are far from that white narrative. It's just completely ignorant. On the other side, ultra-nationalists in the Netta, New York, Yahoo government, which I loathe, by the way, and the ultra-right nationalists on the Israeli side claim that Palestinians don't exist, that there's no history of Palestinians ruling themselves, which is an anathema to me. And we must also deny that. And that's one of the reasons I wrote Jerusalem in the biography was to show how the Palestinian connection is an ancient one as well. You said that you loathe the Netanyahu government, and presumably particularly those extremist elements on the hard right. But have the events of October 7th made you load them less

or differently? It's a good question. They haven't. I mean, I find them, I find, I found them appalling from the moment they were, they were elected. I've always found the Netanyahu approached to this a deep, deep mistake from the time he came to power. In the 90s, he undermined the two-state solution in which he was aided weirdly. And I'm not making a little. And I'm not making an equivalence between the two-by-hamas. I mean, Hamas's entire campaign has been to destroy a two-state solution or any hope of a compromise because they want a Jew-free, all-Arab caliphate in the Holy Land, which would involve the slaughter of all the Jews there, as we've seen on October 7th.

Can I challenge on that, actually? It's very interesting because Hamas says very different things on this. Their official line, I believe, is that they want an Arab majority state in which Jews would be welcome to remain. So they would say what they deny is the idea of a Jewish homeland. They see it as a Palestinian state from the river to the sea. They would deny that their objective is to try to murder every Israeli. I agree what happened October 7th was completely hard. Isn't that the stated objective of Hamas leadership? And in other words, it's actually, it often appears when they talk that it's exactly the shadow of what people like Smotrich are saying. In both cases, they're saying,

we should be controlling the state. The others are welcome to remain if they wish to cooperate with our form of government, and if not, they can leave. But they're both talking about creating a state, effectively, from the river to the sea. Well, I think from the river to the sea is one of those, I'm not as obsessed with that phrase as some people are. I think it's all to do with the context, rather like the famous green octopus, which could be a children. What's the green octopus? Well, the famous green octopus could be a children's toy, but has also become a symbol of the international Jewish conspiracy. So, I mean, if it's in a child's room and they're playing with that I'm not claiming it's a subliminal anti-Semitic symbol.

But from the River to the Sea, when quoted by Hamas and Hamas supporters clearly means the ethnic cleansing of the whole land of its Jewish population, and much of the celebrations among some well-intentioned, but mostly I would suggest, malignant actors in universities on our streets, when they say from the River to Sea, they are very clear what they mean. Or they don't know. That's why it was a little surprise that your answer. earlier. Yeah.

I mean, that history. Yeah, because, for example, I read recently that only 2% of British schools learn about the history of the Middle East. Yeah. I mean... That doesn't exactly help current understanding, does it? But mind you, we always blame everything on the fact that there's, you know, they didn't learn about this in school, they didn't learn about the empire, they didn't learn about

the Middle East. We don't learn anything in school. You know, none of these things are taught. It's not a great, it's not always a great crime. It's just an indictment of the fact that history is very low on the list. But I think the point is that if you look at the statements of Khalid Michal, Hamad and other Hamas leaders since October the 7th, Rory, they've been absolutely specific that they wish to annihilate Israel. They've said so. They would do October the 7th over and over again. Yes, over the last 30 years, Hamas have played all sorts of games with the West, with Western bien-Pons sympathizers, telling them that they were going to recognize 67 borders, telling them that they might. might do this, they might do that. But they have now spoken pretty clearly on October 7th. And is it radically different to the IRA who also completely refused to recognize the existence

the British state in Northern Ireland and would have argued that Ireland needed to be free from sea to sea? I think that British people always want to use the Irish parallel because we did rather well in the end in making peace there, which we're very proud of quite rightly. Thank you, Alastair, and your administration. But the real parallel, I think, which is much more important, is that you never can convince everybody. There are always extremists left. And we will never convince the ultra-altras in the Palestinian movement that Israel should exist in any form. But I think the real answer is that let's just go back to the beginning again. Many modern nation states are created by partitions.

Partition is not necessarily an evil thing. The real success in our, was the partition in 1921, 1922, which created an Irish state and a Protestant province. And many, many modern countries, India and Pakistan is the other big example, but also Greece and Turkey, were created in partitions that created nation states that I'm afraid were accompanied by huge ethnic violence. and out of that came states that we regard us entirely legitimate and now part of the modern world. Israel is simply one of those states. Okay, Simon, Lori, let's just take a quick break. I'll be back in a minute. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Sauerich here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away, and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History,

which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got to feel.

few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about.

We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode.

And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. Can I talk a little bit about you? You've got this amazing name. You've already mentioned one of your ancestors, Moses, which is another amazing name. Not the Moses, but a pretty significant

Moses. You had grandparents on your mother's side who fled the Russian Empire because of anti-Semitism, moved to Ireland, if I'm right, and then moved from there as well because of anti-Semitism, and finally settled in Britain. Is that right? Yes. That's the basic story. So does your kind of passion for history and your particular interest in Israel, Palestine, and Russia, does it come very simply from that family background? Yes, it does. It does. It does. Very simply. I mean, the Russian history part of it comes from, they came from Russia in 1904, and they were escaping the Kishnev, pogrom, which launched a sort of wave of pogroms. And pogroms comes from pogromit, from the Russian, which means to destroy, to lay waste. And so, Tsarist regime in

Russia, the Romanov's, had been increasingly repressive against the Jews. And in fact, Moses Montefuri, who was a friend with, of Queen Victoria and Israeli and Palmerston and all these people went to see Nicholas the first in Russia to try and persuade the... So what's his relation to you? He is my great, great, great, great uncle, something like that. Right, right. But also I should say that the sea bags came from Morocco. So I am a complete Jewish mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi, not unlike the people in

Israel, in fact, in that sense. You know, I'm very typical of that. But when they arrived in Ireland in 1904, they were driven out of Limerick in the famous Librick-Pogrom, which is a sort of forecast. detail. But basically, they were welcomed in Britain. They loved Britain. And Britain has always been exceedingly tolerant. And, you know, my parents and grandparents loved Britain. Both Roy and I have spoken to Jewish friends who've, not all of them, but some of whom have said that they do feel very, very differently at the moment, including in Britain, that they,

that they feel that their Jewishness has become a bit of a problem for them in a way that most of their lives they haven't. Are you feeling any of that? Yeah, I mean, it started in the Jeremy Corbyn years when, you know, I had never been a sort of public Jewish person. I mean, I've always been very Jewish and proud of my Jewishness, but I'd never spoken out about being just regarded myself as a sort of Jewish historian. I just wanted to be a historian. And when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, and I really feared what would happen then. And that has continued now with these protests. Now, I'm not one of those people who think that these protests are hate marches. I'm perfectly aware that, you know, many, many, perhaps most of the people on these marches are protesting against the images they see from Gaza of children of families hit by Israeli bombing. And against a government that you hate as well. And against a government that I hate. But I'm also completely clear and so should we all be that there is a minority. And I don't know how big that. But I suspect. a rather large minority in these marches who are celebrating Hamas, who are celebrating the killing of Jewish and Israeli civilians

or mass who are denying what happened on October the 7th. It's odd paradox, isn't it? Because it was true with 9-11, too, that you have this sort of strange conspiracy theories going on, where on the one hand, and I found this often at she amongst people I met in Pakistan and in the Middle East, where you could both simultaneously deny that 9-11 had happened and celebrated.

Yes, that's exactly. what we're having now is that many of these people in these crowds are both denying that it happened and also celebrating the killing and rape of civilian, the beheading of babies. Yes, and although even that's very complicated, isn't it? Because often what they're doing is celebrating the attack, but distancing themselves from atrocities. The weird thing is there that they're actually saving Hamas from themselves, because after all the evidence of all this is not invented by some Jewish conspiracy. It's filmed by Hamas. themselves on their GoPro cameras and on their smartphones and put up online by them.

Have you personally ever been felt directly anti-Semitic abuse attack, verbal or otherwise? I have at different times. I have when I've been speaking in public. I've been accused many times of being part of an international Jewish conspiracy of some sort, for example. and that is an alarming conspiracy theory, which is always the sign, which I used to regard it as the sign of a kind of half-mad crank, but is now widely espoused by people who don't know the history, which brings us back, Alistair, to the point is like, we really care about how people want to live now. And that means Palestinians living in a face Palestine, Israelis being safe in a safe Israel next to each other somehow. And that's going to be very difficult. But, in order to achieve that, we have to know the history. And the history is being violently misused and abused. Most of the people who are supporting Hamas and probably chanting from the river to the sea actually don't know the history of Israel and how it was created. And it also doesn't reflect the Palestinian plight either. And that's why this new history theory, which Rory mentioned

and which partially explained at the beginning of this conversation, is a disgraceful. distortion and abuse of history, but it also rules out ever having a two-state solution. Can you tell us a bit about that, then? What in the most optimistic scenario could a two-state solution look like? Give less than a bit of a sense of what some of the ingredients might be and what it would take to get there towards peace. Well, two of the basic things are extremely hard to achieve. One is Hamas has to be out of the picture and has to be scattered as a political power. At the same time, there needs to be an Israeli. partner in peace too. And that means not having people like Netanyahu Smot, Rich and Bingavir

anywhere near the process. But if there was an election in either of those places now, an election in Gaza right now, how much are going to win it? With this happening. They might do with this happening. And then Israel, one of the reasons why people are maybe not pushing as hard to get rid of Netanyahu because of worry that actually the guys who are even worse getting. I think it's more likely that some of the things Netanyahu has done, like the judicial reforms, which would have made Israel less democratic, have recreated a centre that had vanished from Israeli politics. And so that it's quite possible. As we saw, I mean, it was only a year, but one forget so much has happened.

It's only a year and a half ago. There was a centrist government in power in Israel with an Arab party as part of the coalition, which was a thing we all celebrated. Because Israeli Arabs, the vast majority of them, our citizens in Israel, have the vote. vote, sit on the Supreme Court and actually want to live in Israel. In fact, the leader of Hamas's family, Hanewa's family, are all very pro-Israeli Arab. Fast forward then. Back again. Two-state solution. How are we going to get there and what's involved? We need to have partners on both sides who are capable of. We hope Netanyahu will be gone soon. We hope that Israel won't re-elect these ghastly, messianic settler leaders again. And explain to listeners why settlements

is a significant challenge for the two-state solution or continuing to expand settlements. The majority of Israel, of which there are now 9 million Israelis, live in Israel proper within the lines of the 1967 lines, and many of them have been there for many generations. So they are not settler colonialists. And reminding people, the 1967 lines, and broadly speaking, the edge of the Israeli state,

as was inherited from the late 1940s before following the 1967 war, Israel expanded and took the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza. So the majority of Israelis live within that original state and then the settlers. Tell us about the settlers. Yeah. And so we're not talking about them at this point. The same time, post-67 and sometimes victory can be a disaster for all everybody, even the victors, post-67, messianic, religious Israeli settlers began to settle in the West Bank.

And their reason for doing so is they're saying this is where Abraham was buried, this is where Joseph was born, these are parts of traditional Israel and they wanted to put settlements there. And they were traditional parts of Israel, but you can have too much history. And so they began to build settlements there and Harris and undermine and drive out Palestinians who lived there. So they would build settlements. And then the Israeli army often would come in and protect their settlements. And suddenly Palestinians would find living next to them a community of people with a pretty

aggressive messiah. And the harassment, and when it has to call this out, the harassment post-October the 7th, has been intensified in a way that is completely despicable. But the harassment, pre-October 7th, was a pretty difficult thing. It was already pretty bad. It was already pretty bad, and there are figures of over 100 people have been killed in the year before. Though some of those were terrorist attacks and the trouble, one of the things we should probably just mention is the danger of statistics in this whole affair. I mean, for example, the Western media completely accepts Hamas statistics for the number of people.

civilians killed in Gaza, for example. So the settlers are pushing out, and they're doing so because from the point of view of these people who are calling messianic settlers, they're actually hoping that by putting their houses there, they're staking a claim to territory and that ultimately they will be able to reclaim their vision of a historic Israel. Correct. And a two-state solution demands that a substantial Palestinian state be created, most probably in the West Bank and in the rebuilt, we hope. And that means that 400,000 militant, messianic fanatics, the settlers in the West Bank,

the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, will have to be many of them moved. That is not going to be an easy task. That will require the Israeli army to be involved, as it was when Israel remember does not occupy or did not occupy before October the 7th. The Israeli army, me and Israel had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. And in that process, they had to remove fanatic Jewish settlers then, and they will have to do so again to create a Palestinian state, which is essential. Now, you wrote a very long piece recently on the Atlantic, where you're quite angry about this whole kind of decolonizing settler argument that you felt was being run to dehumanize Israelis. But you ended it with this. You said, in the wider span of history, sometimes terrible

events can shake 45 positions. Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War. Yichak Rabin and Yasseravid made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas

after Netanyahu is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years and killing, and stunned by one weekend's Hamas butchry into mutual recognition. There is no other way. But that feels so distant at the moment. I don't think I've ever felt it so distant. It does look

really distant. The suffering, the trauma in Israel after October the 7th, and I only start with that because that's what happened first. And that's what's set in this chapter. In this chapter. I'm not saying it's a long, not a longer problem. It goes back to 1948. And the history of 1948 itself is completely distorted and misunderstood by the narrative of Israeli ethnic cleansing. You're right. It will be distant. Terrible things have happened in Israel. Israel is completely traumatized, by the way, and will be until every one of those 220 hostages are returned. Israel will not be a normal place until that happens. Every Israeli is bleeding now. At the same time, the devastation, the killing of civilians, children in Gaza is tearing terrible lacerations into the soul of Palestinians and everyone who cares. it's about humanity anywhere. And both of those wounds will have to heal, and that will take time. But you seem to be saying that you sometimes need these terrible moments to create progress.

I'm not an advocate of them for that reason. No, I'm not saying Harvard. Do you have any reason to be optimistic that that might happen out of this? You know, oddly, I do feel strongly that the two-state solution was widely regarded as something that was never going to happen before this. and I think that Netanyahu's aim is much too simplistic to say that he was encouraging Hamas. It's not really true. He allowed Arab money from Qatar to go to Hamas to maintain their repressive rule. And it's wrong to blame him for what happened. That is a sort of moral equivalence that we've asked avoid. On the other hand, his plan was undoubtedly a bad one, which was to maintain Hamas and to deplete, undermine and degrade the Palestinian authority, which should.

should be and must be the Western and Israeli partner in making peace. Now, what was going to happen just before the 7th of October? Well, Saudi Arabia and Israel were going to come to some sort of agreement which would have seen the Saudis reinvigorating with both, not just with money, but with political dynamism, the Palestinian Authority. And that's what we need to make peace. Let me now transition as we come to the end. You've been very patient with so we've got a lot of ground. But when you look at Russia, Ukraine, do you feel resonances in the way that you talked about two historical narratives? And you talked about the complexity of what happened 100 years ago or 300 years ago, 500 years ago, and lives today. Apply that to how Russians

view Ukraine, how Ukrainians view Russia. There are similarities because just as Israelis and Palestinians have an interwoven, shared history, often living together happily for centuries and other times at war and promoting rival histories and narratives, both of which must be recognized. It is similar. And remind us what the Russian narrative about Ukraine is, the extreme Russian nationalist narrative and what the extreme Ukrainian narrative is. Well, the Russian narrative is that over a thousand years since the conversion in the 10th century of Vladimir the Great, who was baptized under the Aegis of Basil the Bulgarian, Emperor

of the Eastern Roman Empire. You like all these names. The grim of the better. The grim of the better. And so they believe that since then, Russia and Ukraine have shared a slavophile Russian history and that Kievan Rus, Vladimir the Great's principality, was essentially a pre-Russian entity. And that ever since then, Ukraine has been a sort of minor sub-Russian culture, not an independent one, not a separate state, not a separate language, but part of Russia.

And that since the 18th century when Peter the Great and Catherine and Potemkin annexed it, it has been little Russia or new Russia, but Russia, and has not existed as a separate culture, nation state. The Ukrainian view is that over many centuries, the Ukrainian language developed as a separate language to, the related direction to Russia. that since the 17th century, there have been Ukrainian pre-states, like Klemnitsky's, for example, Klemnitsky's Hepmanate in the 1640s, but that in the 19th century, a national conscious, a sort of new nationalism, a Ukrainian nationalism began to develop, as did in our other part

of the world we're looking at in the 19th century, a Jewish nationalism and an Arab nationalism, both began to develop in the late 19th century. Same thing happened in Ukraine. And the Russian Romanov Tsars, people like Nicholas I, Alexander II, repressed that, ban the language. In 1918, Ukraine declared its independence from the Russian Empire. And again, here's a little parallel, just because this is the moment, again, where Balfa Declaration are happening, where self-determination for peoples is spreading, where the League of Nations and Wilson is trying to get behind Armenian self-determination and Kurdish states. That's exactly the point. The point is that, you know, the creation of Jewish nationalism in the 1890s,

is not in any way recent and exceptional in the creation of nation states in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's completely typical, you know, started with Greece in the 1820s. In the World War II, Britain and France offered exactly, as Rory says, offered, you know, the nation states to the Armenians, the Kurds, the Jews, the Arabs and others. Not all of them happened. So offers for all Ukraine. To Kays independent. Lenin and Stalin seized power, the Bolshevik party, sees power in Russia. And essentially, they realize that in their view, even though they are communists, Marxists,

they believe, and they are liberating the prison of nations, they believe that Ukraine is essential to the Russian state, even though they are supposedly anti-imperialist. They are also imperialist. And all of this necessitates having more than one idea in your head at the same time, just as we have to with Israel and Palestine. And so they retake it, and they include it in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which is a very clever creation. It's a sort of empire that says it isn't an empire. It's a bit like Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And so it's only by a historical accident in 1991 that the Soviet Union breaks up and all the republics become

independent and Ukraine finally achieves the independence. The Ukrainian people have always aspired to. Now, I've never met Zelensky, but I have met Putin a few times and I do remember Putin constantly making historical references and illusions. At one point, I also remember our interpreter, this amazing guy called Tony Bishop, saying after some of these meetings, you know when he said such and such, it wasn't, he got that wrong, it was this, it was that.

So maybe he was using his own assessment of history. First of all, what's your sense of that, Putin and his knowledge of reliance upon and calling upon as a political force, great figures in history? I'm sure he's very pissed off that there's already been a Vladimir the Great, because that is clearly what he wants to be seen at.

He definitely does. I mean, he aspires to channel both the Tsar, great czars like Peter the Great and also Prince Potemkin and also Stalin, you know, the victor of 1945. He wants to be both those things. History is one of those propulsive powers that people believe has a legitimacy to justify any, and politicians believe to justify political events in the presence. So would he look at Stalin as a net positive? He would look at Stalin as a net positive. And in fact, he is now fostering textbooks that say Stalin was a pretty good manager of Russia. And I remember this is great.

We're coming towards the end. We could keep going forever. This is wonderful. But maybe we should have you back at some point. I love to. But I remember you writing, I think, that when you produced your book on Catherine the Great and her great General Petemkin, it was celebrated and Putin enjoyed the book. And George Bush read it to his wife. But as soon as you started writing a book on Stalin, you suddenly found.

found that you were not welcomed as much in Moscow. That's right. That's right. I mean, what happened was I wrote the Catherine the Great and Potemkin, which is the story of this amazing romantic partnership. They were lovers. It was the first, my first history. Did you over did the sex scenes a bit?

No. No. No, because the great thing about the great thing about the sex scenes on, you know, with Catherine the Great and Potemkin is unlike the Daily Mail today, they are based on their love letters, over a thousand of which exist. And so we know exactly how they talk to each other. And the great thing about them was, not only did they have an uninhibitedly passionate sex life, but they also spent the other part of their time talking endlessly about politics, art, culture,

and their haemorrhoids, which everybody in the 18th century talks about all the time if you read their letters. But when that book appeared, I was approached by the new administration, the new presidency in the Kremlin, where there was a young, hopeful, reforming, liberal who was admired by George W. Bush and Tony. Blair as a hope for the future of Vladimir Putin. And I was told by them that the Minister of Culture approached me and said that he really admires the book, but he can't read it because it's in English. Can you write us an essay about how Catherine the Great and Potemkin took Ukraine and Crimea in 1783 to 91, which I did? And then I was approached again and they said it's been translated into Russian. A certain personage has read the book and would like to give you a present.

and the present, I was slightly alarmed about taking a present from Vladimir Putin, but the present was access to... In case it was Novichok. But the actual present was, would you like to... We're about to open Stalin's private archives. Would you like to work on it? So, as Rory said, that's how I wrote my biography of Stalin, Stalin the court of the Red Tsar.

But when it came out, they all hated it and it showed Stalin, because again, all Stalin's letters... Didn't show Stalin in a great light. I didn't show Stalin at a great light. And so I was then exiled from the favour of the Kremlin, where I remain. And what does history tell us about how the current situation between Russia and Ukraine might end? I believe that obviously it could end with a Ukrainian victory, which would achieve the Ukrainian borders as roughly as they were meant to be. And Russian defeat would bring about, I believe, the fall of Putin and the fall of Putinism,

sort of ultra-nationalist repressive autocracy. Which is why he feels he has to win. Which is why he feels he has to win now. More likely, though, given the fact that we are still withholding some high-tech weaponry from Ukraine, is that there'll be some sort of stalemate, which brings us back to the other subject. Because that would be our mystic line signed, which would create a Ukraine that rather like happened with Indian, Pakistan, after partition and therefore wars, rather like happened with Iraq. with the Arab states and Israel after 48, would create borders that would be recognized. There would be periodic wars in the future. But Ukraine could develop as a pro-Western EU member. And in that sense, it would be not unlike Israel, which brings us full circle.

Now, my final question, if I can, when we were researching ahead of this interview, I was intrigued to discover that whilst you were at what I think Rory considers to be the country's second best school, Harrow, that you interviewed Margaret Thatcher. I did. So do you have any memory of that? And what do you think were she sitting on the shoulder of the current British Prime Minister, or dare I say the next one? What do you think she would be saying about what Britain could do in this,

in both of the two contexts that we've talked about? Well, first of all, it was an amazing experience. I was 17. I wrote to Downing Street as a sort of Harrow schoolboy and said, could I come and interview you? and I never expected to hear any more of it. But when the letter arrived saying, like, please present yourself, I had to go and buy a suit. And, you know, because I was a slight, and I was at the time, I regarded myself as a sort of Trotskyite.

So I was very keen to, you know, to put her in her place as a completely infantile teenager. And so I went to see her. And she was actually extremely nice to me. I went with me and the deputy editor of the school magazine. We went together. and we had an amazing conversation and I did accuse her of all sorts of terrible things like had she used the Falkland to walk purely

to promote herself as Prime Minister and so on and so forth which caused brought an intake of breath from her sort of private secretaries and when I left she did say no more schoolboys so I was the last schoolboy interview Have you still got the piece that you wrote? I've still got the piece I wrote to see it

but what happened was one of the deals was that I would write a piece about it and she would be allowed to censor it herself. And so we sent her the... What the quotes or what you said? Not the quotes because they were recorded, but my comment on my report on which... So you saw you're back in Starlinked Russia. So I finished up.

The last lines of the piece were I lent against the famous black door of Ten Downing Street with the relief that a prisoner feels when they're released from the torture chambers of the Great Khan. And when we got the proofs back, because it was in the day. days of proof. We got the proofs back. All of the article was fine and that it just had a red line through that and it just said in the margin just said, no, in a Margaret Factor voice. Well, thank you so much. There's so much more to talk about, but we really, really appreciate having you on. And thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Enjoyed it.