TRIGGERnometry - True History of the Middle East with Simon Sebag Montefiore

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

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One of the things we see in the moronic discourse is that Israel's a new country. While all the Arab countries are ancient countries, this is completely untrue. These ancient countries have actually existed for 18 months. They are invading a country that has literally only existed for 12 hours. The French and the British said, well, we totally agree with you about the empire thing, but we'll call them mandates instead. So mandate was just a new word from an imperial province, until the people were ready to rule themselves.

There are 500,000 Jews there, roughly, and they have nowhere to go. It's either survive or die. Many of you have commented that you're seeing too many ads in our videos. We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of interviews. Can we ask you a favour in return? According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show aren't subscribed. Please help us to continue to bring you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting like and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video.

Simon Seabag-Montifero, welcome to Trigonometry. Lovely to be here, guys. Thank you very much for having me. Well, it's great to have you on. You have written this amazing book about the recent history of the Middle East, the last 120 years or so. And it's rather timely, given everything that's going on, but it's also history, which we love on the show. We've really enjoyed reading it.

It's great to have you on, and it's great to be able to look at this complex region in the level of detail, but also objectively, which is something that you do, which literally no one who now talks about the Middle East does. And that's the great challenge. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote the book is because this book didn't exist. And Benjamin Disraeli, who's one of my great heroes, always said, when I want to read a book and I can't find it, I write it myself.

So that's sort of what I've done here. I mean, as you know, there is an industry now on the Middle East. I mean, the sort of publishing industry that's partly, historical, partly sort of moral. It's almost a religious movement. And it's just sort of, obviously, it's virtually always partisan and is kind of following an ideological pathway that is like so narrow and so inaccurate. And so I wanted to avoid writing, you know, obviously a book, just following the ideal, sort of a neo-Marxist ideology of sort of decolonialization. But at the same time, I didn't want to write a Zionist book either.

I didn't want to write Martin Gilbert's books again, wonderful as they were. I wanted to do something like you were touching on, something that was as balanced as I could make it for all sides and without ideology. Well, you've definitely succeeded. So let's talk about it. You basically cover the 20th century and the recent 20 years as well up to October 7th. And it's absolutely fascinating. I think we have to start with something that people now don't

talk about, which is the role of Turkey, which was at that point, the Ottoman Empire, which controlled pretty much all of that region at the time. And it's collapse following World War I that leads to much of the chaos. Yeah, I mean, the Ottoman Empire is a fascinating institution. I mean, it goes on for 400 years and more. It's like all great empires, like the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, it has many kind of versions of itself during that period. It's not always the same institution. It's a, it's a very great empire. It's a very important. It's It's an Islamic empire, that's the point. It's a sultanate caliphate. And the later sultans really emphasized their roles as caliphs as well as sultans, which is, of course, very relevant today

because the ideas of caliphates are often in the news. But the point about it was, it was, it was, it was, it was tolerant up to a point. And, you know, it's often stated, it's a huge cliche when people said, like, you know, it was so tolerant that the Middle East has been destroyed by America or by nationalism. And that's too up to a point. But actually, the myth of the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire is something that you see, you read about quite often. In journalism, of course. And in fact, there was a period when after Tansimat, which would the series of reform, starting in 1839, going up into the 1850s, when everyone was made citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

And for about 20 or 30 years, there was a sort of period of quite extraordinary tolerance. But it ended pretty quickly because this opening up of the Ottoman Empire, which happened right after the Crimean War, led to a discombobulation of all the arrangements they'd made to rule it. And so the first thing that happened in the Middle East was

this massacre of Christians in Damascus, known as the Damascus events in 1860. And it started in a war between the Christians and the Druze, which we made sects that are complicated, and we may get to talk about later if we have time, but we want to do a more, a larger, more overarching trajectory. But that led to one of the first Western interventions in 1860 when the French and other powers sent an army there.

But anyway, the point is, after that, Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, started to impose a sort of religious Ottomanism on the empire and using various minorities like the Kurds to crush the Christians who were restive and gradually seeking independence. And that led to the Armenian massacres, the Bulgarian massacres. And Abdulahmid was nicknamed the bloody Sultan. So the Ottoman Empire was a little different from the cliché. And then one has to remember, too, that the Ottoman Empire, far from being tolerant,

it ended with the rule of the three pashas in World War I. And the Ottoman Empire was on the side of Germany and the central powers in Austria, and the Ottoman Empire fought much more, in a much stronger way than the British or French or anyone expected, because it was known as a war. the sick man of Europe. But it ended up under this regime of the three Pashas, Enver Pasha, Talap Pasha, and Jamal Pasha, who really brought in and imposed a sort of proto-fascism, a sort of racial eugenicist, Islamic Turkish supremacism. And that included the massacre of the Armenians, the killing of the Armenians, of over 1.1.

million Armenians, and also forgotten genocides then, too, that included the killing of the starving of Maronaut Christians, and also the massacres of Greeks in what is now Turkey, and particularly the Pontic Greece, Pontus means the Black Sea. So the Ottoman Empire in the end was something quite different from the way it had started, and in many ways we're still seeing now. the consequences of and the sort of chaos after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Well, right. I mean, it's often said by people who may be ignorant, but I'm probably one of them, about the Middle East, that it seems from the outside superficial analysis that it's hard to have control of any of those portions, unless you're really, really tough, unless you're willing

to be quite brutal about it. And the Ottomans controlled that area for 400 years. it's therefore no surprise then that once their empire collapses, you know, it becomes as volatile as things have become. That's fair. That's fair. And also the Ottomans, you know, lost control of huge parts of their empire for large periods of time, as I explained in the book. At one time, an Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali the Great, almost conquered the Ottoman Empire

and was only stopped by the British. And it was incredibly ruthless. And in fact, throughout its rule, there were kind of... massacres of minorities, by the early 19th century, so in the early 1800s, much of what is now the Levant or the period, the area that is now, you know, Israel, Syria, Jordan, was incredibly impoverished and empty. I mean, Jerusalem. I wrote a book about Jerusalem. By the sort of 1780s, Jerusalem was pretty much empty. It was still run by a small group of Palestinian Arab families,

like the Hussainis and the Nashashibis and others, who controlled the holy places there. But basically, it was half empty. There were about 2,000 people living in Jerusalem. So it was tiny. Because nowadays, in our age of CNN news, when it's sort of like Jerusalem, you know, sacred to three faiths, you know, you won't imagine so it's always been,

the center of the world. Well, it wasn't. It was very neglected for about two or three hundred years. But you're right that, you know, the idea was that you had to be pretty tough to control the Middle East and the Ottomans were absolutely ruthless. During World War I, apart from slaughtering the Armenians, they had to deal with a bigger problem. And the big problem was Arab nationalism. In the beginning of the century, the 20th century, there were three big imperial powers dominating the Middle East. So you have the Ottomans from Constantinople, who were Turks. Everyone spoke Turkish, by the way.

If you wanted to get on, you had to speak Turkish. It's interesting that in the dynasty that ruled Egypt, only the last king, Faruq, spoke Arabic. All the rest of them just spoke Turkish and didn't speak any Arabic. everything was done through Turkish, everything was done in Constantinople, and basically, they were absolutely ruthless about any kind of rebellions. And in World War I, for example, there was rest of Arab nationalism, the beginnings of Arab nationalism, the three pashas went down there and hanged enormous numbers of Arab notables in Beirut,

Damascus and Jerusalem. The bodies of those Arab nationalists were dangling around the walls of Jerusalem and in the main square of Damascus. It's still called Execution Square. So, yeah, they had ruled it very toughly. Then you have World War I when there's a sort of entire story, the entire story of World War I is now rather neglected and forgotten and most people don't know it. It was really hard fought. The great majority of Arab soldiers fought for the Ottoman Empire and fought all the way through the whole war without deserting or defecting or anything. But at the same time, the British started to look for a way to organize an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. And they did that for a family called the Hashemite family, which whose story is very much part of the story of the

Middle East up to today because Jordan is still ruled by a Hashemite king who's descended from these people. So it's a very interesting process. At one point, the Ottomans fought so hard, they defeated an Anglo-French army at Gallipoli, as everybody knows. In another time, they surrounded a British army at Kut in Iraq, and that army surrendered in probably one of the greatest disgraces of the British Army during World War I. So for much of World War I, the Ottomans actually were pretty impressive. And of course, their most important general at Badalda Nels at Gallipoli was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became Ataturk and who created Turkey.

And the creation of Turkey is, I think, one of the most misunderstood parts of this story. And I don't know if you'd like to... Tell us more. Well, at the end of the war, the Ottomans had conducted this genocide of the Armenians. They'd kill 1.1 million. And we have all the orders and telegrams and so on that they sent in order to organize this. So it's a historical fact. And at the end of it, most of the victors, in other words, the British and the French,

and the British were led by Lloyd George, were convinced that the Ottoman Empire was a sort of should be punished. The leaders of it should be punished and tried. But the actual empire must be broken up. And to do this, they would support a lot of nationalisms. And those nationalisms included the Armenians, the Kurds, and of course the Arabs. They also included in a much less important factor, the Jews. And the Balfour Declaration was a part of that. At the same time, they made promises to each other about what they would get.

and what they would get was so extraordinary, and this is Sykes-Pico, and Sykes-Pico is totally misunderstood, it's constantly unquoted by people who don't know what Sykes-Pico was. The reason is it's come to mean a sort of an imperial mentality where you divided up places against their will. Of course, that's the whole idea of empires. That's what empires do. That's why they're called empires. But in this case, Russia was really one of the big winners of Sykes-Picco, because Sykes-Picco should be called Sykes-Piko Sazanov, who was the foreign minister of the Russian Empire. And the Russians were going to get Constantinople, most of what is now Eastern Turkey, where they were going to have a vassal state, the Armenians. And they were also going to have a share in Jerusalem and Palestine. So if the Tsar hadn't been overthrown, and if the provisional government that succeeded the Tsar in 1917 hadn't been overthrown, Russia would rule Constantinople.

Russia would rule Eastern Turkey, and Russia would have played a much bigger role in Palestine. That didn't happen because, as we know, the Russian revolution happened. The other powers that were going to do really well out of this, were the British, who wanted a sort of, who wanted a large, section of the went from Haifa in Palestine all the way to Iraq and that was about oil and the French who wanted basically wanted greater Syria and the Greeks and the Italians who'd been promised large parts of what is now Turkey and Constantinople was going to be international. So it would have been an entirely different Middle East. There would have been a large Greek empire and after the war that's that they started to put this into practice. So at the treaties of Severa and San Remo in 1920, the ruling powers agreed on this carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. And it's so fascinating because it's San Remo and Severa, not Sykes-Pico, that actually happened.

And the big difference was that Britain got the mandate for Palestine, because they didn't have to share it anymore with the Russians, because the Russians were now Bolsheviks. And they themselves had liberated it, so they didn't have to share it. it with the French. So they got it all, and the French got greater Syria. And greater Syria, which included Lebanon, what's now Lebanon? By the way, their idea of what Syria should be was also very different. They were actually going to divide it into five or six states. And there was going to be a state for the Christians, that would be Lebanon, a state for the Druze, a state for the Aloitites, who the Aloites later provided us with the Assad. family that ruled that ruled until recently.

Great guys. Yeah, great guys. And then two Sunni states, but they didn't do that. But for Turkey, it all went wrong because the Greeks started to invade Turkey. And Kemal Pasha, Mustafa Kemalpasha, Ataturk, said, I'm going to take control of this. I'm going to stop this. And the Turks had been assigned a small square around Ankara, what is now? Ankara, and he based himself there, created a national pact, became, was appointed commander,

took control of the main surviving Ottoman army, and started to resist. First, he defeated the Armenians who were trying to set up a state. Then he defeated the French, in a small, in the French, the Franco-Turkish War, completely forgotten story. He threw them out back into Syria, and then he turned round and he took on the Greeks. And the Greeks were advancing towards Ankara. And he defeated them. And out of this defeat, he faced down Britain and France and overturned the whole plan.

And in that plan, he also overthrew the Lloyd George government. That's how Lloyd George fell from being Prime Minister, thanks to this story. So in the end, there was another treaty called the Treaty of Lausanne, which created what is now modern time. Turkey, and with Ataturk as Prime Minister, and the new nation the Turks created, basically the Muslim inhabitants became Turks, the Christian inhabitants became Greeks, and there was a huge population swap in which a million people basically moved between the two countries.

So out of this sort of imperial, a counter-imperial rebellion of a brutal ethnic war in which Smyrna, that was including the burning of the Greek town of Smyr and Smyrna, now Izmir, and then a sort of new kind of religious nationalism, and then the creation of a new state that had never existed before. again, it sounds very like Israel, and it is very similar to Israel, but on a much bigger scale. And out of that came the Turkish state. Now, it's very relevant today because of what is Erdogan is doing now. And what is he doing now? Well, let's be honest about modern life. For a second, processed food, stress, not enough sleep, and whatever we're calling a good night out these days, your liver sits there quietly dealing with all of it while you carry on like nothing's happened. Here's the thing. Your liver is running about 500 jobs a day. Energy, digestion, fat metabolism, storing vitamins, filtering everything you put into your body. You never hear about it until something's off.

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Dot-Co-slash-Trig for 35% of your first month subscription. What Erdogan is doing now is promoting what is usually called neo-Ottomanism, which just means that he's looking back before. before Ataturk, to the sultanate, the great Ottoman sultanate, which is an extraordinary institution, which ruled the whole Middle East from from Algiers to the borders of Iran and to Baghdad, let's say, all the way from Yemen, all the way to the Black Sea, to Crimea at its greatest. And of course, into Europe, to Budapest, as far as Budapest, just a huge institution.

But what he's interested in is the Muslim part of it. And he's now saying, Turkey has the biggest army in NATO after America. We now make our own weapons. It's a very impressive, sophisticated society. It's got mass, which is still important in our era. And he's saying now it's natural. Iran has been someone diminished. And we now need to take our place.

in the Middle East, and we can control or regain control of some of the areas that we once controlled as Ottomans. And so he's challenging the Treaty of Luzan, I agreed earlier. And people often say, well, did Ataturk, is this totally new? It's not totally new. Even at the time Ataturk wanted to get control of Mosul, which is now part of Iraq. But in the end, that was stopped, and he didn't get control of Mosul. went to Iraq, which was then a British mandate. So interestingly, he's now talking openly

about, you know, Ottoman cities, Turkish cities, Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem. And, you know, the government is fanning flames of war with, potentially with Israel. I mean, one of the interesting things about the area now is that, you know, it's the Arab world, but the three, you know, most powerful countries in it, are non-Arab speaking even, you know, which is the three preeminent military powers, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. And so, so, you know, a book like mine, the cauldron, has to be also a history, not us of the Arab world, but also of the Jewish, Persian, and Turkish worlds, too. But that was how they created Turkey. And that's why it's very relevant now. You know, what's happened is Erdogan has managed to achieve some influence.

in Washington, basically through his relationship with Trump. He's established Turkey as a really powerful drone manufacturer, which has been incredibly influential. And he's also really engineered the fall of the Assad's in Syria. And that has meant that Turkey is now incredibly powerful in Syria. It's not often realized, because we often hear about occupations in the Middle East. And we often hear about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, for example. In 2016, the Turks occupied a large strip of northern Syria, which they still occupy.

And he is now the preeminent power. Erdogan is now the preeminent power in Syria. They're very involved in Libya. They're very involved in Somalia. So, you know, actually, we're seeing a real Turkish ascendancy. and to understand it, you have to go back to the creation of Turkey in 1922, which is why it's worth telling the story. They also played an integral part in the October 7th peace deal,

Cease-Fi deal, I should say. They did, they did, and they are playing an increasing part. And one of the ways that these powers are placing themselves in the Middle East is by mediating with the West, particularly with the West that is struggling to control the, these factions. And you're absolutely right, because Erdogan comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, or Muslim Brotherhood aligned party. And so he had a special relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood plays a big part in this book, and in this story, is something

again that anyone who's interested in the Middle East needs to know about. It was founded in the late 20s in Egypt by Hassan al-Bana, a teacher, an Islamic teacher. And the idea was that Islam is completely central to all political and national life. And it's also supranational. It's not just in Egypt. It's outside. And it became a challenge to the people who were ruined the cast that had long ruled Egypt from Ottoman times, from Mameluk times. And that is the Turcos circam. Aletian elite. And it's a great word, Turkicakasia. No one knows what it means, but basically it means that the people who set up the Ottoman Empire and the empires before it were slaves who had been stolen from their families by Muslim warlords like the Ottomans or the different dynasties.

They'd been taken as tribute. They'd been enslaved. The women had been put to work as what put to work in households in harimes or become wives and the boys had become the administrators and soldiers of these empires and the idea was that as they grew up they were brought up as Muslims they learned the language and they forgot their childhoods in circassia in other words in Ukraine in south Russia in the Caucasus or in the Balkans Bosnia or Serbia, and they became Turks. And these Turks were the rulers of the empire. They married into the Ottoman family.

They became viziers and generals and so on. And in Egypt, that class was known as the Turkish Circassian class, descended from these slave generals. And by the way, it is an amazing story, because many of these slave generals started as a Christian boy, Christian boys, became Islamic converts, then officers, then generals, and then kings. So the stories that, you know, some of them became sultans. So there's a meteoric, right?

Took about a meteoric rise from literally from slave to king. But anyway, so the Turkish Circassians ruled, still ruled Egypt all these centuries later. And in Egypt, in the 20s, they were increasingly associated with the British who dominated who ruled Egypt and what was called the veiled protectorate for obvious reasons. They pretended that the royal family were ruling Egypt, but in fact, they've dominated Egypt. And so the Muslim Brother got more and more popular. It had hundreds of thousands of members.

It was growing, but it also had a terrorist wing and also had youth kind of armed youth wings, but then so did everybody in the 1930s. the time of fascism. But over time, it came increasingly to threaten, first of all the kings of Egypt, and then after the coup by Nasser, it threatened him. So he arrested all of them, hang many of them, and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood. Jump ahead to 2011, the fall of Mubarak, the Arab Spring. And you have an election in which one of the Muslim Brotherhood is elected more. So this was a moment of great opportunity for President Erdogan of Turkey, because this is an ally from the same movement as himself.

But that didn't last long. The generals retook control, crushed the Muslim Brotherhood presidency, and President Al-Sisi is still ruling Egypt. But another offspring of branch or offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood was Hamas in U.S. Gaza and Hamas was a Muslim Brotherhood faction that gradually declared its separation from the Egyptian mothership and became the leading terrorist faction that destroyed the Oslo Peace Accords and really the idea of a two-state solution of that more later so that's why is it you're right that Turkey had special influence of Hamas and Turkey and and

Qatar are the two big Sunni backers of Hamas, alongside the Iran, which is the Shia, but still also backs Hamas. So everything in the Middle East is kind of complicated. It is. But fascinating. I mean, when you come to regions, it doesn't get more fascinating, really. But let's go back now to, so the British had a mandate for Palestine in that area at the time. What does that mean a mandate? Well, there was such a good question. The British and the French invented a new word for empire, because they had to deal with President Woodrow Wilson. And President Woodrow Wilson, who created Wilsonian foreign policy,

which is that everyone should have self-determination, and that American foreign policy should be essentially a kind of moral, it should support human rights, it should be moral, it should support self-determination for everybody. As soon as President Wilson, who was a tremendous hypocrite incident, he was a Democrat, he went from the president, He went from the head of a university to president in literally two years, extraordinary rise, and he was highly intelligent, but more, he was actually had a higher, kind of higher conception

of his genius than everybody else did. And when he came to Europe, he found out that it was actually incredibly hard to manage the Middle East and Europe. And he had to deal with Lloyd George and Clemelsso, who was the French leader, who had to to get empires in the Middle East out of the Ottoman Empire. And dealing with Clemenceau and Wilson, Lloyd George said it was like sitting between Jesus and Napoleon, which is quite funny.

But, you know, so when he got there, he said everyone has to have self-denomination, but what does that mean? You know, so out of this, the French and the British said, well, we totally agree with you about the empire thing, but we'll call them mandates instead. So mandate was just a new word for an imperial province until the people were ready to rule themselves. It actually says that in the League of Nations in the clauses about the mandates. So the French got mandate for Greater Syria, which we discussed a little bit earlier,

and the British got a mandate for Iraq, which was originally called Mesopotamia, just to confuse your listeners, which means the land between the rivers. They renamed it Iraq, and they also got Palestine. and Palestine included what is today Israel and the West Bank and Jordan. And this was a completely invented entity. It wasn't that the word Palestine wasn't ancient. Palestine is a very ancient name that goes all the way back to Philistia and the Philistines and was used at various times by the Romans as a net province provincial name.

They had Palestina Prima, Seconda, and so on. But in modern times, the Ottomans for 400 years had ruled this region, and they divided into provinces that they called Villiers, ruled by a valley. And each one, you know, ruled from a certain city, ruled a certain area. So what is now Palestine, Israel, Jordan, was then ruled from Damascus and from Beirut. And so that's how they... called it. But Westerners had always used the word Syria and Palestine, which were nice, good old Roman names. And so Britain got Palestine and Jordan, but almost immediately they faced

a problem because in World War I, they had promised this one family, the Hashemite family, that they would support their independence in the Middle East. And we were talking earlier about the promises that everybody made in World War I. The key thing about these promises are, They made promises to everybody, not just the Arabs and the Jews, in the sort of cliche history version, but also as we saw the Greeks, the Italians, the French, the Russians, I could go on, the Kurds, the Armenians. They made promises to everybody because they were desperate to win the war. They wouldn't have made these promises at any other time in the whole of human history, but they made them then because they were losing hundreds of thousands of men on the Western Front,

anything to try and get, to try and get away to stop the slaughter on the Western Front. And so they made these promises. As we've seen, the Armenians and the Kurds didn't get theirs. The Turks destroyed the promises made to the Greeks and the Italians. And then, so now the British have to deal with the Arab and the Jewish promises. Well, the Jewish promise was easy initially because it was just like a homeland, you know, in Palestine, not of Palestine. So whatever, it just meant we can allow more Jews into this prophet. basically.

So, may I interrupt you just there? Because I think it's really crucial. How are the Jews there at this point? The history of the Jews is inextricably linked with Judea. And it's always important to realize that the word Jew comes from Judea, which is the kingdom of Judea, which ruled what is now Israel, Palestine, also known as Palestine. And so it's often said that Zionism is a sort of was invented in the 1890s and that it had never existed before. The opposite is true.

Zionism was just a modern name for a specific political movement with many branches and mindsets and approaches, but which was a new name for an ancient, an absolutely ancient, 2,000 years ancient belief. that the Jews were linked to Judea, hence the name, and that they were linked to Jerusalem. And they were virtually always Jews living in Judea, Palestine, whatever you want to call it. And even when they were expelled from Judea in 586 BC, in other words, 2,500 years ago, they were taken to Babylon and they dreamed of getting back to Judea, hence the famous song by the rivers of Babylon, beautifully performed by Boni-M, among others. So that went right through the history.

And there were other times they went back. In the Roman times, there'd been the Maccabian kingdom and the Herodian kingdoms of Judea. And King Herod, a Judean Jewish king, had built the second temple. all its glory. And that was the building that was seen by Jesus. When Jesus throughout the money changes, etc. That was the building. That was the place he prayed in as a young Jewish, a young Jewish man from, from Galilee. The people who watch this show have generally done more thinking about how governments operate the most, but there's a difference between understanding the problem and having actually built insulation against it. That's the world McElhorrop operates in. He's

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And in 66 AD, the Jews rebelled. against Emperor Nero, the Romans. There was a huge Jewish revolt. It was crushed by the new Roman empress, Vespasian and Titus. And they crushed the Jews. They crushed Jerusalem. And they destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. And the money was so vast that they got from the temple

that they were able to build a Colosseum, which you can still see. That is the prizes. That's the prizes of the conquest of the temple. And you can see the picture of the triumph on Titus' arch if you've been to Rome. And if you haven't, you should go and see it. But there was one more Jewish revolt, again, in about 130 to 35. And that was the revolt of Simon Barcoff, Prince of Israel. And he again defeated the Romans under Hadrian.

Hadrian sent an army. And this time they really destroyed. They killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. And they changed the name of the land from Judea to Palestina, which was also an ancient name. But the point was it was no longer belonged to the Jews. And it was then that the Judeans became Jews and many, many hundreds of thousands of started to live around, dispersed, around the Roman Empire and in Persia and what is now Iraq. And many communities started them. And the ones that lived in the Arab world were known as Safar digs or Mizrahi.

And the ones that lived in Europe became known as Ashkenazi mainly. And the Jews that lived in the Arab world or the Islamic world, the Mizrahi, I mean, my family's descended from them, the Seabags and the Montefuris. And, you know, they had multiple identities. and one of the themes of the cauldron is understanding that the Middle East is full of multiple identities. We think everybody is a, you know, is a Palestinian or Israeli.

No, it's actually very complicated. And, you know, you've got Syrian Druze, you've got Iraqi Kurds, you've got, you know, you've got Mizrahi Israelis, you've got Palestinian Israel. So it's complicated and much more interesting and nuanced than we're expected to believe. So all this time, throughout these central,

the Jews craved returning to Judea, to the Middle East, and Zionism in the 1890s was a new movement that grew up, but a reheating of an old movement that had existed without interruption for 2,000 years. And it was recognized by the rulers of the British Empire and the ruler of the British Empire and the ruler of the French Empire and the Americans. So it's always blamed just on Britain, but actually it was the three kind of leading allied powers, all for very similar reasons, decided to embrace Zionism. And by the way, there was also a Zionist movement in the Ottoman Empire and in Berlin, in other words, with the central powers. And it's possible that they would have recognized a Jewish homeland as well. They were considering it and discussing it, which is often forgotten.

But in 1917, when Balfour and Lloyd George, it's always called the Balfour Declaration, but it really should be called the Lloyd George Declaration. But when they recognised the Jewish idea of a homeland, they were partly reflecting the fact that, like, the Jewish Bible, because of Christianity, was so much part of the education and culture of Western Christendom, that they were very familiar. And Lloyd George said, you know, the place names in Judea are more familiar to me than the names of the battles on the Western Front.

And so that was partly what they were doing. They were partly recognizing something they'd been brought up on. But also, they were recognizing what they thought was an injustice, that the Jews had faced great anti-Semitism over centuries, had never had their own land. And why not now that the ultimate empire was breaking up? facilitate this small group along with other groups. And the other groups that were promised homelands were the Armenians, the Kurds, and of course the Arabs already were there in their

homeland, and the Arabs also wanted states. So the Arabs were represented by the family called the Hashemites. And the old Emir of Mecca was called Hussein. And he was one of the Hashemites and he negotiated with the British as well. So while all these other negotiations were going on, he was negotiating. And he said, I'm a family descended, I'm the Hashemite family descended from the Prophet Muhammad. They were directly descended. They are directly descended from the Prophet Muhammad. So they literally have the most kind of kudos of any family, though there were a hell of a lot of people in the Arab and Muslim world descended from Muhammad, including much of the leaders today. I mean, you know, the supreme leader, Al-Ichamania

is also a Saeed. He was also descended from the Prophet. And descent from the Prophet is probably accurate in many cases. It's probably been handed down. But the Hashemite family, with this Arab family, who were traditionally ruled Mecca and Medina, the Holy Cities. And they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire. So they were also in the Ottoman Empire. And when World War I started, they, among many other people started to negotiate. And they said, we Hashemites can lead a huge Arab revolt, and we can bring down the Ottomans. But to do that, you've got to promise us that we, the Hashemite family, me and my sons, can rule an empire that will include all of Arabia, all of Jordan, all of Israel, and all of Iraq, and all of Syria. So in other words, just the whole

map. And you've got to realize that the Hashemites had it most under their command at this point, about a thousand men. And they'd only ever ruled NECA, which is of immense importance. It's the holy city. But it's very small and far away from all those other places. So the British understandably negotiated a slightly blurred agreement that deliberately didn't quite promise anything. And it said, you can have things to the sort of east of this line, west of this line. And also, this is all dependent on what we've promised the French. And they did this knowing that they were promising the French, the whole of Syria and also another thing. And they themselves wanted Iraq and Palestine. So they were double-crossing them. But the Arab family,

the Ashmaics, were also double-crossing the British, because they were asking for everything, understanding that they were unlikely to get it all. And on both sides, when you look into the correspondence of both sides, you see that both say, like, you know, asking, for more and we'll sort of manage to sort of blur that. And so in the end, they agreed vast amounts of money descended on the Arab desert, delivered by people like Lawrence of Arabia who joined them. And they launched this rebellion in 1960. And in fairly small armies of about 6,000 people started to fight their way along the railway line,

the Ottoman railway line in Arabia and then into Jordan. but they couldn't really defeat the major Ottoman armies. So it was a British army with lots of Australians that then invaded, what is now Palestine, fought their way up Palestine, which took a year. They took Jerusalem. And Lloyd George said, I want to give a Christmas present to the British nation. The Christmas present is Jerusalem. So in December 1917, the British people got a Christmas present, the Holy City.

And so they got the Holy City and then the British and French, as we were saying, had to decide what Nerf to do with these promises. So they set up the mandates. And the mandates, as we said, were kind of imperial provinces under a different name. The League of Nations, a new international organization, included these in its charter, in its charter, and recognized it. So it was recognized by international law, whatever that means. And they started to rule.

but of course they then found these places incredibly hard to rule. So they renamed Mesopotamia, Iraq, so they ruled Iraq. The French tried to rule Syria and tried all sorts of different ways to rule it. And the British had Palestine, and they really enjoyed having Jerusalem. But almost immediately, one of the sons of the Hashemite Emir, Abdullah, galloped up from Arabia and conquered Amman and said, I want this to be my mom. my little kingdom since we haven't got the other places we've been promised. And so the British said, okay, you can have that. We'll create Jordan out of that bit of Palestine. So half of Palestine was

given to a new Emirate, which was called Transjordan. At the same time, his brother, Faisal, there's a bit of family politics here, but his brother Faisal was declared king of Syria. There was a problem there, because the French had been promised Syria. And so, so, he was a bit of So the French invaded and threw him out. So then the British have another problem, what to do with former King Faisal of Syria, and they decided to give him Iraq. So they made him king of Iraq. And the kingdom of Iraq lasted from 1920 to 1958. So we may come to that later because there's a horrible massacre in 1958.

But so the British tried to create Iraq into a sort of stable, mandate under this king, and there was a huge revolt against the British, an interfaida, which the British crushed ruthlessly with the new RAF. And then in Syria, there was a huge revolt against the Syrian mandate in 1925, and the French crushed that brutally, bombarded Damascus, and they realized that, you know, that that was going to be harder to rule than they expect. And then in Palestine, the British hopes that they would rule Palestine. for a while, and ultimately, they would create a state of Palestine that would be a joint Jewish

and Arab state. And Churchill published a white paper explaining this, and Jews started to immigrate to join their compatriots who had already been there for centuries. And so the population started to rise. But at the same time, the Arab population of Palestine rejected British. rule. But they didn't quite revolt. They could have done, as the Syrians had done, as the Iraqis had done, as the Egyptians had just done too. So everybody revolted against this system of mandates. But they decided just to protest and to refuse to take part in the British schemes for the Palestine mandate. And the Jews, the Jewish idea for Palestine was pretty difficult. different from the image you now see in sort of the ideological decolonization picture.

In fact, completely different. Most of the Jewish immigrants were from the Russian Empire. They were socialists of various kinds. And they wanted to create little farming communities which were called Moshevim or actual communist communities which were called Kibbutzim. And to do this, they just wanted to labour the land. And a lot of the time, they laboured the land with Arab workers. And sometimes they didn't want to seem like Western landlords.

So they work the land themselves. And they bought farmland. And some of this farmland, there was from money they raised themselves. And some of it was from philanthropists like the Rothschild family. And so that's what happened in the 20s. And actually, there were spasms of violence, but actually the British mandate of Palestine was relatively successful until 1929

when stories that the Jews hoped to destroy the Arab shrines and mosque on the Alaxa Compan, the former temple site of the Jewish temple, created an, an event, event that was very like October 7th in our own time when an Arab mob attacked the Jews in Jerusalem, but especially in Hebron, where the Jewish population had been there for centuries. Because it was one of the, Hebron is one of the holy cities of Judaism. And also in Svatt, which is another of the holy cities of Jerusalem. And in those attacks, there were mass rapes,

There were beheadings. There were children killed and so on. And so then the British started to realize that they had a bit of a problem. But at that point, there were actually relatively few Jews had immigrated. What changed everything, of course, was Hitler. And the rise of Hitler enormously raised again the Jewish immigration. And that led to the crisis. in the mid-30s, which led to an Arab revolt. It's crushing. And the idea, the conviction that

the Jews in Palestine could only be safe if they had a state. And this is, I think, the perfect moment to talk about the Grand Mufti, because he was a fascinating character at that time, particularly his views, which, you know, you look at now and you go, they're kind of on brand for some people. Yeah. And also his relationship with Hitler. Right. Let's Let's talk underwear. Admittedly, not the topic I expected to be discussing when we started this show, but here we are. Turns out, most men are wearing genuinely bad underwear and have just decided that's fine. It's not fine.

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Sheaf.com. Once you go Sheath, you won't go back. Sheaf.com. Well, the Graham Mufti was a fascinating character. He was the ultimate aristocrat of Jerusalem. The Hussaini family had basically run Jerusalem, or run the Temple Mount in the Haramashirif in Jerusalem for hundreds of years. And they were the grandest of the families,

but they were also the most Islamic of the families. And they normally acted as one of the major, they held one of the major roles, the major jobs by hereditary right on the Temple Mount. And different of these families all controlled different places in Jerusalem. and the grand mufti was actually created by the British. There hadn't been a grand mufti really before. The British, in order thinking, and again, you see this so often in our own society here,

and it's still going on, where there's a huge British tendency to think, like, let's find the most extreme Islamic organisation, and we'll make that the official Islamic organisation, and then they'll become moderates. Yeah, and that's exactly what happened with the grand mufti. They literally said, like, grand mufti, we'll hold an election for the Grand Mufti. They held an election, but a moderate won the election.

So the British typically said, like, well, but we'll scrap the election then. What we'll do is appoint the most extreme young nationalist, Islamic Islamic Islamist nationalist, who is this young member of the Hussaini family. And this is Amin al-Hassani. We'll appoint him. And we'll not only call him Mufti, we'll call him Grand Mufti. So he's the leader of the whole Islamic community in power. Palestine, because that will be much easier to deal with.

And if we give him all this power, he'll become more moderate. And not only did they do that, but they also gave him the entire economic organization, which was called the Supreme Muslim Council, which owned everything and owned all the institutions, the mosques, and controlled the budget of the entire Islamic. So they said, they made him not just the religious leader, but the political leader and the economic leader. And they gave him everything. And he was in his 20s.

But they thought this guy, this is, you know, he'll be able to control that side of things. And of course, we have the Jewish agency, or which is under, which was under Weizmann or under Ben Gurin, who were the Zionist leaders. And they control their little community. And together, then we can simply deal with these two communities, but it didn't turn out like that. Because he gradually turned against the British. And then when Hitler came to power, he immediately saw, the German consular. And what he said to the German consul was that he didn't just say, I'm an Arab nationalist, and I'd like you to back us against the evil British empire, which would have been understandable. And lots of other people did that, in fact, in Egypt.

And whilst Sadat did that in Egypt, the future of president, for example. No, he said, I actually, I'm a convert almost to Nazism. And I embrace your racial view of the world. and I embrace your war on the Jews. And during the early 30s, there were actually negotiations, interesting negotiations between the Mufti's people and Ben-Gurie and the Jewish leaders. And they really did get, they did actually come up close to ideas that could have worked, actually. Then in 1936, a rebellion began. This was the Arab revolt of Palestine.

And out of it first, the British came up with an idea, and they came up the first idea, what the hell do we do with this problem? We're going to divide it up. We're going to partition it. And so they offered a very small Jewish bit and a large Arab bit, and they offered it to the Arabs. And they said that the Arab bit could be ruled by King Abdullah, who we met earlier. creating his own kingdom next door in Transjordan. This was actually a extremely good idea, and it could have worked.

And they even had the great rival of the Hussainis is the Nashashibi family, very distinguished and wealthy Arab land-owning family. And the leader of that family, Regebel on Ashashibi, said, I'll be the prime minister of this new state. And the new state would have been Jordan and the Arab areas of past. That was always the best idea, and it was doable. And the Jews would have got a small area. But the Mufti said absolutely we will reject it.

Why did he reject it? And this is where this explains much of the history subsequently. And it really explains what's happening today. He said, we reject that because Palestine is sacred Islamic land. And therefore, though we could tolerate the small Jewish population, before World War I, we cannot tolerate this Jewish population. And so he restarted the revolt, rejected the plan, killed as many as he could of the Nashashibi's supporters who were the moderates in the Palestinian Arab community, and led this massive armed

uprising, which the British crust crushed with absolute brutality, using many of the methods that were later used by the Israelis, blowing up villages and so on. And also, they were commanded by General Montgomery of El Alamein fame, who we've all heard of. And they also trained Jewish commandos. And among those commandos they trained was Moshe Dian, and all the other kind of leading Jewish generals were trained by the British. And at the end of this period, the Palestinian community was devastated, and the Mufti had escaped.

And he went to Iraq. This is the bit that's often missing from the story. went to Iraq and led an anti-British revolt in Iraq and became the chief advisor, almost the sort of cabinet minister, he sat with the cabinet of this rebel government in Iraq that was anti-British and was calling for in Hitler. And so Churchill ordered the invasion of Iraq. The first Iraq war forgotten now in 1941. They took Iraq, they threw out the Mufti, and the Mufti escaped. And Churchill was toying with the idea of assassinating the Mufti.

King Abdullah said, please assassinate the Mufthi. Even the new king of Saudi Arabia, which we may discuss somewhere in this, before we ran out of time. We've got lots of time. Even the king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, King Abdullah's Ibn Saab, said, please, can we just, can we eliminate this character? So he was hated by all the reasonable people in the Middle East, but he escaped. and he went to Rome, and through Rome he went to Berlin.

And in Berlin, he was received by Hitler, who incidentally said to him, you're very blonde, you're obviously all Avarian descent, because the Mufti was fair hair, with sort of reddy hair and freckled features. So Hitler thought, like, this is a sort of Arab leader I can deal with. And he also promised him that there'd be a liberation of the British and French power in the Middle East, and that the Jewish community in Palestine, which was now about 400,000 people, would be eliminated. And they actually assigned an Izatzen group, in other words, an SS extermination squad in Greece, which was ready to join the Mufti's people in Palestine to exterminate

the entire Jewish community there. The Mufti completely embraced the Holocaust. He was told about the Holocaust by Hitler and by Himmler, and he completely supported the elimination of the Jews in Europe and in the Arab world in Palestine. And this was regarded ultimately as a disastrous mistake for the Palestinian side. And the Mufti kind of just made one mistake after another. And, you know, when one looks at the leaderships of the Palestine, Israel, both sides, I mean, the Israelis always say, the Palestinians never missed an opportunity, to miss an opportunity. Same also, I'm afraid, is true of the Israeli side, but the Mufti made just colossal errors.

And this was the biggest one. He spent the war in Berlin, and frankly, afterwards, he was lucky not to be prosecuted and hanged as a war criminal. But at the end of the war, he made it back to Egypt. And the king of Egypt gave him, who was trying desperately,

to project Arab nationalist vibes, gave him sanctuary. But just to jump back one step, which is important, after the Arab revolt, after they'd crushed these Arabs and the Mufti had gone into exile, Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in Britain. And Neville Chamberl said, if we have to offend one side, if we have to offend the Arabs or the Jews, we really need to offend the Jews. because there are more Arabs. So we are going to reverse entirely our pro-Jewish policy.

So he does a complete U-turn and decides to rescind the offer of a partition and a small Jewish entity. And instead, he holds a conference in London called the St. James' conference. And he invites the Mufti to send delegates. Mufti is now in Iraq, as I said. And these delegates start to negotiate. with the Jews. And what the British say is we offer you a single Palestine state, a state of Palestine, is what you've always wanted, a Palestine state. And the only kind of problem with the

Palestine state is that there are 400,000 Jews in it. And, you know, they are going to have to have some kind of community relations, you know, some kind of entity to ensure defense, but also some sort of self-government, some sort of autonomy. The Mufti rejected this completely. And of course, this was another act of madness because, you know, I mean, this wouldn't have been a great thing to happen. But inevitably, the Arabs lived with the majority in Palestine, and they would have taken control of the state of Palestine. And if they were controlled by moderates like King Abdullah, the Jews would have stayed as a sort of protected entity within a community. If the Mufti had taken control, they would have no doubt been driven out in a brutal civil war.

But things would have been different and there would have been a Palestine state. The Mufti turned this down. So... For the same reason, that even why Jews too many to live? Well, one of these, one, yes, basically he would not recognize a Jewish community on this sacred, on the sacred Arab soil, sacred Islamic soil, as he called, And it's this belief that, you know, this area has been controlled by Islam since 638, when it was taken by the Arab invaders in 638, during the great Arab conquests,

and that it had to remain, it had to remain completely Arab and Islamic ever since. And, you know, much of this viewpoint is the viewpoint we see today. And I think it is in some ways, there's definitely, and that was always always, been definitely large constituencies within the Palestinian community and within the wider Arab community who are willing to make peace with Israel, to recognize Israel, to compromise. And of course, that was what the Oslo Peace Accords were about. But there's also another large constituency that really has always rejected any compromise with the Jewish state in the Middle East. And, but was willing to make some sort of settlement, some sort of compromise as a sort of middle stage,

perhaps, in the dismantling of the Jewish Republic. And there's another section that would say, you know, let's negotiate with the Jewish state. It's here. We may not have liked the way it was created. We didn't like 1948, but it's there. It's going to be there for the still-seeable future. we need to negotiate with them and work out a deal that also includes autonomy for the Palestinians. So some of the more extreme view now represented by people like Hamas and some of their supporters in the West is exactly that of the Grand Mufti. The sort of maximalist position. The maximalist position.

And there's so many questions to open up here. But I think because we want to keep this relatively concise, we should probably skip over, you know, there's a long period between the two wars, but if we head to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and what follows the Nagba, as the Arabs call it, tell us about that. How is the state of Israel ultimately created and what is the reaction to it? The creation of the state of Israel actually was very like the creation of Turkey, which was only 25 years earlier. And what happened was at the end of World War II, Churchill had put aside the offer from Neville Chamberl and his predecessor, to create a state of Palestine. But in 1945, the election

was won by the Labour Party. Atlee came to power. And he came to power with a plan to get out of many of the big problems that the British Empire faced. This was an interesting, because it wasn't full decolonization. It was decolonization of two extremely awkward places. One was Palestine. and the other was India, the Raj. Churchill, by the way, from your book famously, I think, described having to have control of the Middle East as sitting on an ungrateful volcano. He did, an ungrateful volcano that cost 40 million a year.

Yeah. So Churchill and Attlee were both very sympathetic to Zionism, but the challenge was how to solve the impossible problem of the Middle East. And so the first thing they did was to negotiate, was to invite all the parties to a negotiation in London again. And now you're dealing with Attling and the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. And they invited everyone to London and they said to them, basically, again, you can have a state of Palestine, a full state of Palestine, which they'd offered, which chamber that it offered in 1939. And they said, but again, there's a large Jewish community in Palestine now.

By the way, the Jewish community in Palestine called themselves the Palestinian Jewish community, which is why all the institutions like the Palestine Bank, the Palestine football team, the Air Palestine, and the Palestine Post were actually all Jewish. So, but... Are you saying Jews control Palestine? I'm getting to... Am I right? That at that point, my reading,

certainly from your book and elsewhere, is that the vast majority of the Jews who were living in that part of the world at the time wanted to be part of a state that wasn't just them, they were happy to share in a broader entity in which they would be allowed to live, right? That's right. The fact that you're with us this deep into an episode

about the history of the Middle East says something about you. You don't do shortcuts when it, comes to understanding a topic properly. That is exactly the audience, a show called Unpacking Israeli History is built for. It's hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman, an educator who spent his entire career

studying and teaching Israeli history. Each episode walks through the people, events, and decisions that shaped modern Israel from the earliest roots of Zionism through to today. What makes it work is that Weissman isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ, and he brings on guests who don't all agree

with each other or with him. from journalist Haviv Retic Gheh to Palestinian activist Ahmed Fuud al-Katib. It's built for people who want to understand the place properly, not just have what they already believe confirmed back to them. We all know podcasts can go either way. This one held our attention. It doesn't rush the story to get to a neat conclusion, and that's rare than it should be.

Search unpacking Israeli history on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts, or click the link in the description to start listening. I mean, especially in the 20s and the 30s. after, if you look at the 30 years before Israeli independence, the Ndakba and the Israeli War of Independence, Zionism just means that they believe that they should live in the Holy Land. And there was a huge span of opinions. On one side you had people who actually believed that they should be in an Arab kingdom living as an independent entity. And that was what King Faisal had discussed, King Faisal of Iraq and Syria had discussed.

that was what his brother, King Abdullah, had discussed. And actually, that was one road that could have worked if they had been provided with safety and if they'd been recognized. And it might have worked in a system under these Hashemite kings because they grew up in an Ottoman world. They, you know, they were kind of, they'd grown up, they'd been educated as Ottomans, and they understood there could be more than one community, which Islamists, like the Mufti, did not understand. understand and did not recognize. And so there are these two great traditions in the Arab world. And that's, that again brings us to what's happened now in a much wider plane, which is, what is happening now is not just between kind of the West and, and a resistant axis of

Iran and its allies like Hamas and Hezbollah. No, what's really happening today is a debate and a war within Islam, about which road of Islam they should follow. And there is a huge tradition, a huge tradition, and one that I love within Islam, which is open to others, which is always negotiating how the relationship between Sharia law and society and states should be, which recognizes all sorts of viewpoints within itself. And that tradition is as ancient as the Arab as the Arab state is ancient. And you see it throughout the history of the two great empires, the Umiyads and the Abbasids, into the Fatimid. This is constantly a presence there. And it's one that we would, we recognize, and we would welcome. The other one is actually a much

more modern invention. Of course Islam has often seen extraordinary revivalist, puritanical explosions, such as the Almoravids and the Almohads who burst out of the Moroccan deserts with these kind of extremist, the messianic, Mardist versions of Islam. Again, we saw it in Sudan famously with the Mardi, you know, in the 1890s when General Gould was killed and so on. So, and we see it again today in all sorts of different ways. We see it in the Islamic State. We see it in another version of it in the Iranian state, a Shia version of it. We see it in organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, even though they're both from different sects of Islam. But the new version of this of Islamism is a modern invention. And it's really a

modern invention of the Islamic Brotherhood in the 1820s and Koot in the 1950s in Egypt, and then it's developed through to what we see today. And it's called political Islam, but it's a modern invention. It pretends to be a return to the ancient purities of the 7th century. But actually, it's as modern an invention as American Christian evangelism or modern military religious Zionism are, are modern political inventions. And it really belongs with them. So going back to this period. We were talking about the negotiations in London. So they had the negotiations in London.

And in these negotiations, again, the British offered a state of Palestine. And again, the Mufti turned it down. The Mufti was in exile and in disgrace, but still controlled with a ruthless iron hand, by the way. He had everyone assassinated, who disapproved him his delegation, which was led by members of the Hussaini family. Three of the delegates were called Hussaini, and they rejected this offer, in which point the British were now in despair. And at the same time, they were dealing with an even bigger problem, which was India. and exactly the time in these negotiations, they were facing the problem,

that India, which they'd hoped to hand over as a single entity, this is relevant, by the way, to hand over to a single entity to the Congress party led by Nero, who had very good relations with the British, and they had hoped to hand over independence and create a new entity which had never existed before.

There'd been any Indian states. Very few of them had controlled all of them, all of what is now, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, and Burma, which were all parts of the Raj. They hoped to hand this vast territory over to a single state that they were called India. But there was a problem. And the problem was the Islamic community, led by Jinnah, who wanted an independent Islamic state and to carve out an independent Islamic state regarding the Congress Party as over the government. overwhelmingly a Hindu party. And the British had hoped to avoid this because all imperial

powers want to keep things as neat as possible and find neat leaderships, neat ways to package, neat administrations. And so they knew this would be deeply complicated. But Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, suddenly realized that there was no other way but to do this. And so he agreed that they would divide the Indian Raj into two states, a two states. A two states. And the two-state solution was Pakistan, which was in two halves where the overwhelmingly Muslim areas were, which is now Bangladesh and now Pakistan, then called East and West Pakistan. And the larger part of India, Burma would become an independent country, and the larger part of India would be a Hindu state ruled by Neroo.

So that was what was agreed. This led to a massive, massive violent, violent spasm and also. massive transfers of population. Around 12 million people were forced to move from their homes. There was a vast population swap between the Muslim areas and the Hindu areas of India. Because in each of these areas, let's say something, an era was a majority of Muslim. There would have been a minority of Hindus, for example. Because it was India, it was huge. The numbers are huge. So in each of those places, there was a massive population transfer. Just as a massive population transfer, just

In the creation of Turkey and Greece, over several wars and many decades, millions of people were swapped in desperate circumstances as refugees. And in this case, 12 million people, they estimate, moved as refugees, and a million people were killed. And you have the sort of the Indian partition, and you have trains arriving with everybody in the train massacre. You have these extraordinary scenes. So the British give independence to India, and then they turn back to the next problem. And they've now tried to solve the problem of Palestine. And so they've offered the state.

The state has been rejected. And now they turn back to a new supranational organization, which is a new version of the Wilsonian version. We talked about President Wilson earlier of the League of Nations. That's called the United Nations. Nations, and it's created by President Wilson's Secretary of the Navy, Deputy Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt. So the United Nations is handed Palestine by a desperate British government who just kind of

understand what to do and are desperate to get out of that. By the way, as I said, they were decolonizing these places, but their presence was totally important to Britain. Their military presence in Egypt, their military presence controlling the Suez Canal, and their military presence in Iraq because of the oil, the supply of oil. In Persia, the British and the Russians were occupying large parts of Persia. We'll come to that in a minute. So in this, in this frantic debate about what to do with Palestine, the United Nations, the new organization, meets, appoints a United Nations Palestine committee, and this committee decides to partition Palestine. And they do it in an appallingly bad way. Just as the civil servants who designed Pakistan

and India just months earlier had done in India with disastrous consequences, same happened here. Palestine is actually divided into seven parts. If you look at the moment, maps, you may show one while we're talking, you'll see that not one part of this was defensible. Every part of it was militarily and economically unsustainable, politically unsustainable. And the British kept a large section of South Judea around Jerusalem, which they called in the document, by the way, South Judea. And so the Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion accepted this and the Palestinian Arab leadership, still under the Mufti, rejected it. However, the King of Jordan, he was now King of Jordan, he'd got a new name. He'd become king and he was now, he'd got a new country,

Jordan. So King Abdul. He was no longer trans. No, no, no, the trans Jordan. No more trans, Jordan. Gender neutral Jordan. This is, this is really, this is really, this is really comprehensive. combustible material. But the British said to the king of the King of Jordan, Abdullah, who by the way is one of the heroes of these stories, because he risked everything to make a settlement, and it cost him a lot. Sorry, just to interrupt,

but you actually made that point in the book that actually some of the best rulers in the Middle East were these kings who served their country for a long period of time. Yes, I mean, some of the best government, and this is ironic, to our ears, because we're so used to hearing everything has to be democracy. But the best governed states in the Middle East have often been absolute monarchies. And that is counterintuitive to us.

But it's just a fact. It may be something to do with the fact that many of the monarchies were created by generically, organically, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and Morocco, rather than created by Britain. and France. But, you know, that's an interesting debate. But anyway, the British said to King Abdullah, why don't you just take the Arab bits of Palestine? The Jews will take the Jewish bits if they've been assigned, which is they've accepted. And you can take that and you can rule it and make a much bigger kingdom of Jordan. And he agreed to this. And there were many meetings with the Jewish leaders. and this actually, it's a tragedy this didn't work, because again, this would have worked.

He also said to the Jewish leaders, don't declare independence, because I'd love to create a big Jordanian, Palestinian Jewish state, and I will make sure you're safe within it. And by this point, the Jews had been through the Holocaust, they'd been through the Arab Revolt, and they were convinced that they needed an independent state. A view they'd come to later, come to quite late. We were talking earlier about what did Zionists want. Well, some of the Zionists wanted to be part of an Arab state and learned Arabic and went to see King Faisal and King Abdullah to discuss it.

Other ones just wanted farming communities where they would rule themselves but be part of a larger sort of Palestine state. Other of them had much more, like Jabot. had much more nationalistic viewpoints, and Jabotinsky was part, created a militia of the Ogun, which was about to become part of this story. And, but he, even their views were surprising. I mean, Jabotinsky is now regarded as the precursor of Netanyahu and Likud. But he was an interesting character, and he said, what I want is not one Arab should be removed from Palestine. And I want to create a state where the Jews are saved, but no Palestinian Arabs are removed.

And in fact, I want a state where when the prime minister's Jewish, the deputy prime minister should be Arab. And when the Arab's prime minister, the deputy prime minister should be Jewish. In other words, in many ways, a one state solution, but one where there was real coexistence. So what Zionism meant is completely different from the view now being propagated in demonstrations by activists, in Britain, It was not to sidetrack you again, but reading the book, I kind of, the way, correct me if this is wrong, because you're the expert here, but it sort of felt like there's a process of mutual radicalization going on. Of course. Where the extremists on both sides always win out. At every juncture, it's the extremists that kills some of the civilians on the other side, and then they go, this is what they're all like. And it just, that's been going on the entire time. That's right. Yeah, it is. And actually it does make you, you know, it makes you wish for a responsible

imperial power or responsible supernational organization that actually could have managed this, because the tragedy of 1947, 48, which we're getting to actually is relevant of this, it's like, United Nations, take, agrees control of this. Britain completely abdicates any responsibility. Appalling act, by the way. And the plan that's offered an agreed by the United Nations. Yes, it offers a Jewish state for the first time, and it specifies, this is a Jewish state, this is an Arab state. And the problem is that it's absolutely unworkable, unworkable, and that, as I said, there are seven different kind of segments, all of them, half of them not properly joined. And there's no overseeing, no one to oversee how this would

happened. So of course, what happens is a drive to violence. And almost immediately, even though King Abdullah had secretly agreed with the British and the Jews that he would take over the Arab bits, which, as I said, would have been ideal. He is under massive pressure from the Arab League, which is a new organisation just formed in Egypt. And He's under massive pressure not to do this deal. But if the deal had gone according to plan, it would have solved the crisis. It would have solved the entire Israel-Palestine problem. But instead, what happened was that militias, Palestinian Arab militias immediately started attacking the Jewish community.

The Jewish community had celebrated the announcement of this plan and accepted it. they immediately started to attack Jewish farms and boroughs in the cities. And at the same time, the Arab League, namely the newly independent countries of Syria and Iraq and Egypt as well, started to put together a new organization, an Arab Liberation Army, which they hoped would avoid them having to do anything, but they could fund it. and it would somehow back their Palestinian-Arab brothers, Palestinian Arab brothers, and prevent a Jewish state. And that immediately started to militarize the situation.

Well, it's got to realize that it was not a done deal. It was not a certainty at all that the Jewish community in Palestine would survive at all. And in fact, in 1947, Ben-Gurian had rushed to Britain, to London and to Liverpool, where there was, I think the Labour Conference was taking place. And he'd rush there and said, please stay another 10 years. We don't want, we won't declare independence, we promise. He thought that the Jews would be wiped out by this attack. And indeed, the Jewish community, which had its own militias, had two main militias, the Haganah and the Urgun. but the Jewish community was in military desperate states, and it was not a full, it was not a, it was not a done deal that the Palestinian Arab militias would win. They seized large areas of Palestine and the whole of Galilee in effect, and they also, other militias under the control

of the Mufti attacked the Jewish communities around Jerusalem under the command of the of the Wufti's cousin, Abdul Qadir Hussaini. So this is happening. And when you look at the documentation, there is huge panic in the Jewish community there, whether they will be completely wiped out. But there's two things. One is they literally have no choice.

They have nowhere to go. There are 500,000 Jews there, roughly, and they have nowhere to go. It's either survive, all die. And the rhetoric of the Palestinian Arab side and the Arab powers is entirely genocidal. It is literally, you could analyze these things any way you like, but, you know, the actual quotes are, you know, we will drive them into the sea, we will, we will massacre them, there will be a massacre like the Mongol massacres, and so on and so forth. And though they've all been, like all the

quotes in this story, all of them have been kind of manipulated by both sides and misused and put on X and TikTok and stuff. The fact is these quotes are pretty clear what they mean. And so the war begins. But the British are still there in their barracks and there's fighting all over Palestine. And in the end, the day comes when the British are leaving. And Ben-Gurion declares an independent state of Israel. He looks at other names, by the way, because the obvious name is Judea, to call it, but they weren't clear that they would ever get the southern part around Jerusalem, which is Judea, and they weren't clear that they would secure that, but they were more likely to secure the northern bit, which is the historic kingdom of Israel, hence they call it Israel.

But also, Jewish people had always called it Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, for 2,000 years. So that's why they named it Israel rather than other names. And so they declare independence at that moment. Something interesting and terrible is happening at this moment. Huge communities of Palestinian Arab population is leaving and fleeing their towns and cities. They are not being driven out. Yes, there are cases where the Israelis would drive out. People would come to that in a minute. But at this stage, no one is being driven out. No one's being driven out. But hundreds of thousands, and it's estimated, I think, something like 300,000, which is half the entire refugee number of the NACPA, is happening now out of fear of the coming war or what the Jews would do when they got control.

But they are not being driven out. They are leaving, a move which was in. least encouraged by much of the Arab leadership. And in places like Haifa, Svat, Safed, Tiberius, Jaffa and Haifa, big cities, big mixed cities, the Jewish agency and the Jews beg the Arabs to stay. And if you read the memoirs and diaries of Palestinian Arabs, there's a very famous one by Wasif Jowir, who's called the Lute Play of Jerusalem. Everyone should read. It's a must read. He describes how, you know, they left.

They were very frightened, and they left, and they had every plan to come back, but they weren't driven out. Similarly, a certain Arab, a Palestinian Arab talking about the Nakhba recounts how he was brought up in Safed, pronounced Fat, where he said that, you know, the Arab Liberation Army in the end moved out. and me and my family, I was just a boy, we left, we left Svat and we fled because we were afraid that the Jews would take revenge for the massacres of 1929, which more than 10 years before, 20 years before. The name of that boy was Marmad Abbas, now president of the Palestine Authority.

In other words, half the Arab population that were made refugees in 1915, 47, 48 in the NACBA, had left before Israel was declared and before Israel launched any kind of offensives and before anybody was driven out of anywhere, which is a very important detail. So in other words, much of the history of the NACBA is mist-told. Why would so many of them leave if there was no violence being committed? There was violence. I mean, there was violence. There was a sort of asymmetric war going on between.

the Arab militias and the Jewish militias. And so it was violent. And they left because they were afraid of the war. But they also knew that the Arab states would invade if the Arab militias failed. And that would be a major conventional war. And they felt that they wanted to get their families out. But there are lots of records of leaders saying, like, anybody who's got cousins in Beirut or Alexandria has left us and only kind of the ordinary people are left. So there was a kind of, there were all sorts

of things happening in this period. And, you know, it's a tragedy for the, for the Palestinian Arab people that this happened. But the next stage is interesting. Ben Gurin declares an independent state on the 15th of, on the 14th of May, 1948. And almost immediately, the Arab states, five Arab states, invade to crush the new Jewish state. Why didn't the plan of King Abdullah just to take the Arab, take control of the Arab sector's work? Well, that comes to your point about extremists continually pushing and sabotaging schemes to make it work. And so what happens is, a Jewish militia goes in today a sin, a village or on the edge of Jerusalem and massacre some of the people there.

There was also fighting in Daeson, and it's unclear how many were fighters, how many were civilians, but it's totally clear that it was a Jewish massacre that included massacre of Palestinian Arab civilians, and the news of this massacre radicalized the Arab world in the news, And it forced King Abdullah to change his plan. And rather than fulfilling his secret plan, he was forced to take command of the Arab League forces, which were five countries, and now they invade. And now this becomes a full-scale war.

And again, all of these Arab leaders are hoping to steal, to annex, to carve up Palestine. The Egyptians hope to get the Negev and South Palestine. They are very keen to add territory to the Kingdom of Egypt. The Jordanians want to get as much of it as they can, and the Syrians want to get more of the north, add to the Lebanese. But the Arab side is hopelessly,

misled, badly commanded and divided amongst itself. Even before the invasion started, the Arab Liberation Army was basically at war, not just with the Jews, but with the Mufti's forces. And so the Arab situation was hopelessly divided and the leadership was appalling. The most efficient army on the Arab side was the King of Jordan, King Abdullah's Arab Legion, which was British officered, British-led, British-armed, and was incredibly more efficient than any of the others. There's one point that's very important to make here. One of the things we see in the sort of in the moronic discourse about this subject is that Israel's a new country and that had never existed before. While all the Arab countries are ancient countries, this is completely untrue.

One of the interesting parts of this, all these countries have just been created. So, you know, these are just like, this is a war of totally new countries. with new armies that had only existed for a matter of months fighting each other. Syria and Lebanon had just been invented and created by the French. Jordan was only 20 years old. Egypt had just become independent of Britain. And of course, Iraq was a newly invented country that had never existed before, ever. So all of these countries,

had just become independent in 1945 or 46. So these ancient countries have actually existed for 18 months, and they're invading a country that has literally, has only existed for 12 hours. So war has joined, and it's now that the Jewish forces do, the Israeli forces do a counter-offensive. At first, they could have been crushed by these invasions. This is what they'd most feared.

But there was great chaos, and there was no coordination between the Arab forces. And the Egyptians sent one force straight up the coast to take Tel Aviv and another towards Jerusalem to try to get there before the Jordanians got there. The Iraqis moved through Jordan and invaded and took Janine and northern West Bank. And the Jordanians took the south and fought for Jerusalem. and the northern powers invaded from the north. Finally, when they had survived this initial attack, the Israelis counter-attacked,

it's a very messy war. There are massacres on all sides. And I think it's a waste of time to try and say, who's massacred who first, and which ethnic group massacred the other. But there were massacres on both sides of civilians. There were many massacres by the Arab side. There were many massacres by the Jewish side.

And ultimately, the Jews counterattacked. And this was the Israeli offensive known as the Dalit offensive, Plan D. And in this offensive, again, it's notorious in the anti-Zionists discourse. But in fact, it was, A, an essential and desperate struggle. to seize the roads, the key roads in Palestine, and to try and recover from the initial attack. And B, it gives local powers the orders that if in villages there is resistance by Palestinian Arab or Arab forces, they can attack that village and drive out,

drive out the people. If the villages accept Jewish rule, they are to appoint Arab leaders for the village and move on. So much is left to local officers. There's also another situation, which is that two things happen, and it's different in different places. On one side, Israeli leaders and officers

rush to places like Haifa and beg the Arab population to stay, and in Jaffa, and in Tiberius, and in Safan. In other places, mainly in the middle, where the waste of the Jewish territory is tiny, there are apparently allegedly verbal orders given by Ben-Guriam to drive out the Arab populations of Ramla and Lidda. And this is the notorious driving out of over 40,000 Palestinian Arabs from their towns in an unforgivable atrocity, which we now call cleansing. And that is an undeniable truth. And it was done for, I would say, strategic reasons in that the form of these segments of the Jewish and Arab

state was so unsustainable that they were indefensible. And therefore, they wanted to secure this middle area. And by the end of the war, by the way, Israel was nine miles wide there. So you can see why they did it strategically. But in terms of humanitarian, in terms of our tamitarian standards, it was also would be regarded as a war crime now. So, you know, so it was different in all sorts of places. And so that's what happened. In the Israeli counteroffensive, all of these forces were defeated one by one by brilliant Israeli commanders who were fighting with their backs against the wall.

But they had central command, which the Arab forces didn't. And that always gives a certain cohesion and coherence to the military operations. So by the end of 1948, the Israelis have secured a single sort of area under their control. And the Egyptians are besieged in the Gaza Strip. The only people who had any success against the Israelis were the Arab Legion of the Kingdom of Jordan, which had defeated the Jews. and had taken the whole West Bank, and kept the whole West Bank and the old city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem itself, the Jewish community, had been ethnically cleansed from all of that territory.

So at the same time as the Israelis have driven out 40,000 Arabs from Lydia and Ramla, at the same time, the... the Egyptians and the Jordanians have equally cleansed all the Jewish settlements and farms from their areas. And some of these, by the way, some of these communities, like Hebron, for example, had been Jewish communities for 2,000 years. So that's how 1948 ended. 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes. Israel was independent, and Jordan had taken control of Jerusalem and the West Bank, what they called the West Bank. and the Egyptians who'd hoped to conquer as much of Palestine as they got were left with nothing

but the Gaza Strip, which they'd named the All-Palestine Protectorate, but they were only left with that. And that's the way it remained. All sorts of peace plans were attempted by King Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1951 for trying to make peace with Israel and for taking the West Bank. For 17 years, the Jordanian Arabs, Arab Kingdom, controlled the West Bank, and the Egyptians controlled the Gaza Strip. During that period, no attempt was made to form a Palestinian state. In 1967, Israel was on the verge of being attacked by all the Arab powers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, and they launched a preemptive strike and took control of West Bank

and Gaza, and essentially that is the situation that endured right into very recent times. So, Simon, there's going to be people listening to this podcast who, let's just say, don't have a favourable view of the British, who are listening to this and going, well, isn't this all the Brits' fault? I think a lot of it is the British fault. I think you're right. Because just as they had in India, just as they had at Chanak in Turkey, the British just literally, literally just abdicated all power and took no responsibility

whatsoever for what had happened. Admittedly, you know, Britain was kind of out of money. You know, it was overstretched in India and the Middle East. But they literally just abdicated power. No one took responsibility for what happened in Palestine. And, yeah, the British have a lot to answer for. And moving on now, one of the areas or the countries that you deal with in the book that is really interesting towards the end is the nation of Iran, particularly the revolution of 1979. So let's talk about that. And let's talk about how the Ayatollah was underestimated by pretty much everyone until he got to power and showed his true colors.

Well, you know, Iran, Persia is a fascinating, is a fascinating country. It plays a huge role in this book. And if anyone wants to understand what, you know, how Iran ended up where it is, you know, I've go into immense detail in the cauldron because it's so important. And Iran, modern Iran, had really been created by the Shah's father. And he's a fascinating character called Reza Shah, who had literally been a Cossack groom and was a peasant soldier who made it in 1925 to become king of Persia. an amazing, almost Napoleonic trajectory

and he was an extraordinary character he was six foot six terrifying Martinette who regularly whipped his generals with his riding whip he walked around with and a walking stick so he was a sort of Iranian Peter the Great really

and he created the modern state of what he called and renamed Iran and Persians had always called that always called their country, both Iran and Persia. So he created a monarchy there. But in 1941, he tried to keep Iran neutral between the Nazi Germany and the British. And this was a fatal mistake. The British and the Soviets, Churchill and Stalin, agreed to partition Iran between them. And they invaded Iran. And this was the first, really kind of a first Gulf War, if you like. They invaded Iran.

and they divided it between north and south, and they controlled it. And that's why they held the Tehran conference there for the big three in 1943, because they controlled it. But at the end of the war, his son had succeeded to the throne, and Mohamed Reza Palavi, known to us as the Shah, because he's the only Shah we've known, which is just the Persian for King. And he was literally in his 20s, and he inherited a country that was occupied partly by the Soviets, partly by the British. And his whole dream was to restore the autocracy that had been created by his father, but also to create a nationalistic monarchy that would be a power in the Middle East.

And so that was the Shah. But first of all, he had to get the Soviets out. Stalin really wanted to keep northern Iran for himself to get more oil, to get more oil for the Soviet Union. And therefore he set up two republics, semi-independent Soviet vassal republics in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, which he was forced to give up by the Americans. And so the Shah started his road to power in Iran. And Shah is a fascinating, another fascinating character. He's regarded as a tragic figure because his rule ended in such disaster with his downfall. And his autocracy reflected many of his characteristics.

It was brittle. It was vain. It was majestic. But at the same time, he was an extremely capable politician and reformer and a radical reformer in a way that his father had been too. So he's a very complex figure. By the 1970s, because we're jumping ahead here, because we've got a lot to cover, by the 1970s, the Shah of Iran had successfully reformed Iran, and he had made Iran highly educated. He had created an education system.

He had emancipated women. And at the same time, he had taken control, total control of Iranian oil. and he had made Iran really the sort of the great power of the Middle East, the most important power. He had good relations with Israel. He had good relations with Saudi Arabia. And he was always opposed to any religious extremism. But at the same time, there is a great tradition in Iranian and Persian history of rebellion and rejection of state and those state corruption. And the Iranian state was corrupt. It was also inefficient. And the Shah had created a system where everything was decided by one person. And the trouble with the one man's state is that when that man takes his eye off the ball, becomes exhausted, as all politicians do. After all,

most politicians are mad after 10 years in power. He'd been Shah Iran for 40 years. And so he began to lose control of Iran and how to rule it. And over time, the different oppositions against his autocracy began to coalesce around the figure of Ayatollah, Ruhala Khomechamani, who had resisted the Shah all along since the 60s. In 1963, he led a rebellion against the Shah's reforms, and that was ruthlessly crossed by the Shah. But by 1978, the Shah had cancer, which no one knew about, by the way, it was a secret, but he was losing his grip. He was losing his concentration. He wasn't really sure where to go next. And meanwhile, the decision to create a rigid autocracy had been a terrific mistake because there were many parts of the Iranian opinion that were religious, even Islamist,

but would have accepted the monarchy as a guarantor of stability and even a respecter of Shia Islam. And the Shah had rejected all these parts of opinion. There was another part that were really liberal Democrats that again would have accepted a more constitutional monarchy, maybe not a fully constitutional liberal democracy. They understand the way we understand it. But the way the Shah ruled was no opposition at all. And so there was nowhere to go for opinion. This is the terrible flaw of rigid autocracies.

And so he was being hoisted by his own partard. Now everything was blamed on him. And things had gone wrong. Part of his economic success had been industrializing Iran. But the problem was that millions of peasants from the countryside had moved to the towns, inspired by his reforms. But when they got there, they found only slums. And in fact, the state was extremely inefficient.

Inflation was rising. State spending was corrupt. Massive amounts were stolen. And so they found themselves at a loss. And they turned to the mosques. And they turned to the mosques. Meanwhile, in Iraq, in exile, was Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, a very complex and interesting character.

He was part of a tradition of increasingly political Ayatollahs and clerics in Iran. And he had managed to make himself, often thanks to the Shah's mistakes in handling these oppositions, the focal person of the opposition. He was recording cassettes, which were smuggled back into Iran, that denounced the Shah's corruption, his relationship with the Americans, his relationship with the Israelis, and blaming him for everything. And in 1978, Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, rang the Shah several times and said, what do you want me to do about Ayatollah Khomeini? Can I kill him for you?

He literally made this offer three times, and the Shah said, we don't do that sort of thing. Of course, that wasn't quite true. The Shah had actually assassinated quite a lot of people. But they obviously discussed it because they decided that it would make him into a martyr, and he could be more dangerous, dead than alive. I questioned that decision. It was also a certain snobbery in it is that we don't deal with people like a Stam Sain. Saddam Hussein is also a major character in this book.

And the Shah had met Saddam Hussein and made a deal with him in 1917. which was one of the Shah's triumphs and got him control of the Shat al-Arab and much of the Straits of Hormuz, which is very relevant today. It was his taking of the Straits of control of the Straits of Hormuz that the Iranians are manipulating right now. So they owe a lot to the Shah who came before them. But anyway, when he met the Saddam Hussein, he was then in his 20s or early 30s, he said, I think he's a very well-dressed young man, very polite and intelligent young man. Anyway, he didn't want to take any favors from Saddam Hussein.

So Saddam Hussein, who was facing his own problems with his own Shia majority in Iraq, expelled Khomeini. And Khomeini wondered where to go and asked the French if he could go there. And the French president just kind of asked Iran if it was okay. And the Shah thought mistakenly, he said, fine, take him. And Khomeini was actually, I would say, a brilliant politician. And this is strange, because our image of him is of this kind of bearded firebrand, who in our westernized mind seems to belong, you know, in the sixth, seventh century of Islamic history. And he dressed in robes and turban, he rejected incorruptible authoritative.

and legitimacy. But in 1970, he had done an extraordinary thing. He was an innovator. And he'd come up with an idea that no one took seriously. And the idea was that of a supreme leader who would be a religious judge, a religious scholar, the jurist in power, it was called. And the jurist in power, sounded like a mad idea from distant, distant Islamic sort of ancient history, was that a cleric would have supreme power in the state. And in the absence of the occulted 12th imam, who the Shiites expected to return, occulted meant means hidden, who the Shiites expect to return one day in a messianic, modest, glorious apocalypse,

in the absence of him, this clergyman could rule as supreme ruler of Iran. He wrote this in 1970. No one took it seriously. And no one even expected, A, if it would ever happen. But B, most people didn't really think he believed it either. Now in Paris, in 1978, outside Paris, he's sitting in his garden, and suddenly coalesces around him is the entire Iranian opposition. Now, this opposition goes from the few people that believed in this idea of an Islamic clergyman, a theocracy,

to people who are literally liberal Democrats, like you and I, who wanted a liberal democracy in Iran. And in between are all sorts of Islamist Marxists, Leninists, Stalinist, Marxists, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, all of them. And because the Shah's has alienated all of this rainbow of opinion, they all coalesce around Ayatollah Khomeini. So, of course, what do the liberal Democrats think? They think that he's really just going to be a kind of constitutional monarch, maybe like a pope. And then there's other, the people on the, the extreme clergyman around and his inner circle,

they hope that he will somehow rule. And in between there are all these Marxists and liberals and socialists. and they all have different views. But Khomeini offends none of them. He remains entirely enigmatic. All he says is he wants to restore the Constitution. What constitution? What does he mean by that?

No one knows. He meets with the Americans. He tells them that he won't persecute the Jews in Iran and he won't exclude America. He'll still sell oil to America. He only will exclude Israel. Though if you read his writings, he regards the Jews as an inherently evil,

I quote what he wrote in the book. But the point is, he plays this brilliantly, and it gets better, because crowds are now gathering in Iran, in a momentum that becomes millions of people protesting. And constantly, things go so wrong, and the Shah is blamed. There's the famous cinema that is lit on fire by actually by Islamist terrorists. but the Shah is blamed. And the Shah is incapable of regaining the initiative, the control of the narrative of what we would now call.

And he's just unsure what to do. He sacks his prime minister and then appoints another one. That's a disaster. He's sacks and finds another one. Soon he can't find any prime ministers and he's unclear what to do. The crowds get bigger and bigger. The police and military fire into the crowds. There are funerals and all the time.

Maya Khaled Khmer, Khmerin, is waiting. And so, ultimately, the Shah loses control, and he leaves the country, and he flies out of Tehran, hoping one day to return. And to his credit, he has refused, really to allow massacres of the people. And of course, this is one of the problems of being a monarch. Because if you make yourself a bloody ruler, your son, you may destroy the throne for your son. And he wants his son to succeed ultimately. But it's important to realize how few people have been killed by the Shah. The Shah, again, there's a narrative of the Shah as the brutal autocrat. He was certainly an autocrat.

He was certainly vain. There was certainly corruption. Clearly, he made a lot of mistakes. But the numbers of people killed are actually tiny. It's something like a little over 2,000 people die violently at the hands of the state during a 40-year rule. I repeat that, during a 40-year rule. And the great majority of those 2,000 are killed in the build-up to the revolution. And so, yes, the Shah had a secret police, the Savak.

Yes, they tortured hundreds of people. Yes, terrorists were killed in shootouts, and yes, they did fire into crowds at various times. But the numbers compared to the Islamic Republic are literally tiny. In one day, in January this year, one day, which is the 8th of January, they killed thousands more people than the Shah killed in 40 years. Now, that's extraordinary figure. The Islamic Republic itself admitted to killing 6,000 people in those, between the 7th and 8th of January, 6,000. That is a vast understatement.

The real numbers are something like 42,000. But that's 6,000 on that one day, which even the Iranians lying, and the completely mendacious Iranian Republic has admitted, is three times, as much as were killed under the Shah, into the autocracy of the Shah during 40 years. And by the way, this was the Shah that people were demonstrating all over the West about the evil of this man. So the actual, the story of the Shah is a fascinating one. But now the Shah's left, and now there's this amazing moment when Ayatollah Khomeini flies back in. And when he gives a speech in chaotic scenes, he says, you know, I am the authority, and we are just going to punch in the mouth

the present government. And what happens between now 1979 and 19, about, in the next two years, between now and 1981, is a sort of master class in how to assemble absolute power. And he's helped by events. But what he gradually does is he appoints a point to Prime Minister, Bazargan, who is a sort of suit wearing, tie-wearing, a moderate Islamist. And by the way, the sort of Islamist from one of the Islamist parties that in the 60s would have been happy to work under the Shah, but was alienated by the Shah. So he points him, Prime Minister, but at the same time he points a shadow government, a commitment, an Islamic committee, which is run by his top people, who include Ali Khamenei,

who became the supreme leader who was assassinated this year. And they set up a sort of committee in the school, in a school which becomes the real government of Iran that undermine the prime minister's government. And gradually, because a series of things happen, there's a rebellion by the Marxist opposition militias, and they put that down. They start to execute all the Shah's ministers

and anyone they can find who's been involved in the Shah, they start to execute, then Saddam Hussein invades. And this is the key moment, because Saddam Hussein invades, hoping to reverse everything that the Shah had achieved in the Straits of Hormuz, the Shat al-Arab, and the borderlands, and to conquer the oil fields of the mainly Arab areas of Western Iran. And that enables the Ayatollah Khomeini and his people to create the Revolutionary Guards Corps, to absolutely radicalize the regime,

to crush all the national peoples like the Kurds who had hoped to achieve autonomy, and to destroy all the factions and militias that had helped them make the revolution. including all these Marxists militias. And they kill all of them in astonishing kind of blood purge. And out of this emerges something that no one had taken seriously. And the Americans have said, like, the Americans have said he's a Gandhi-like figure. There's a famous, there's a famous very ultra-liberal sort of decolonialist professor, Professor Falk, who typically in the New York Times, nothing has changed, writes an article.

saying that, you know, Kamenia is going to be the great liberal humanist of a humanitarian of our time. And you can read that article. We can all make simple mistakes. Yeah, simple mistakes. So he has pulled off this amazing confidence trick and this brilliant leger d'Amah of political, I mean, almost political genius. And out of it, he creates a new constitution in which there is a president elected, there is a parliament, a magistrate, elected, but actually they are all under a supreme leader, this jurist in power, jurist in law, and that is which we call the supreme leader, but is in fact much more than that name gives. And it is basically a sacred monarch for life, pointed for life, and with absolute authority. And that is the system that we've inherited today. When he was dying, his own chosen heir, another very senior Ayatollah,

denounced his massacre of the opposition and said that he was much worse than the Shah, by the way, which he was by many, many, many multiples. And he dismissed him and had him arrested. He couldn't quite execute him. And he appointed Ali Khomeini as his successor. And Alec Chameen succeeded him after 10. years in 1989, and he ruled for almost 40 years, almost as long with the Shah. And he plied a very radical path. He made a few concessions, mainly the deal with the Obama deal,

nuclear deal, which was a concession. But basically, he stuck to Kameney's kind of ideology in path, which was to ensure absolute Islamist control and theatrical control of the people of Iran. But at the same time, he added a new idea, which Khomeini had also fostered, which was to exploit weakness in the rest of the Middle East and to create a web of militias that would take control of states, and which would be what one of his top generals, General Soleimani called the six armies so that Iran could be defended against America or whoever threatened it with Arab blood, with Arab militias, and without having to fight on Iranian soil. And this is the system that he was able to create thanks to the mistake possibly of the Iraq war, the America's Iraq war,

because in 2003, President Bush knocked out Iraq out of Iraq. the power structure of the Middle East. And in doing that, he just removed the main counterbalance to Iran. Iraq is a sort of massively powerful country, and it's been removed from power there ever since. So for the next 25 years, or whatever we are, 24 years, Iran is removed as a power, and Iran succeeds and is able to create what I call the informal empire, or the six armies empire. And this enables them to control essentially Iraq for the last 24 years, 23 years, and then Syria under the Assad's, which, by the way, is the slaughterhouse of Syria. And I mean, 600,000 people were killed under that regime, and Lebanon through the paramilitary Hezbollah,

and Hamas in Gaza, through Hamas and Palestine and Palestinian Islamic jihad, which is their other little entity there, their faction that they control. And so that actually created a sort of informal Iranian empire that was really the most powerful Iran had been, you know, since Nadia Shah in the 18th century. Nadia Shah was the Shah who actually took Delhi. So he did, he was a pretty effective conqueror. But, and before that, the most powerful since the Sassanid Empire in the fourth, fifth centuries, sixth centuries. So, I mean, in a way, an amazing achievement. But all the time, they were also preparing, A, to try and get nuclear weapons, which so far, only in the Islamic world and the Arab world, only Pakistan had achieved nuclear weapons,

and which they called the Islamic bomb. Iran also sought one, as we now know. And at the same time, The top commanders there, people like Vahadi, Soleimani, had created an idea which was of defense, which they called mosaic defense, which is that if they were attacked, ever went to war with America, they would sort of divide up the country and everyone, everyone according to a pre-ordained plan, would defend their parts separately. so that if the command structure, the leadership was knocked out, the war could go on even more effectively in some ways. And at the same time, the other part of it was to destroy the hated Arab kingdoms, which they hated, the moderate kingdoms in the Gulf. And one of the reasons that, the big reason they hated them, and obviously they're Sunni, the reigns of Shia, but the big reason they hated them was that the lifestyle in places like Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or Dupu,

is a sort of living reproach to the sort of economic disaster and the dictatorship of Iran. But they would also take control of the Straits of Hormuz, which is exactly what's happened. And they'd practiced that during the Iran-Iraq War in the 80s. And so that's exactly what's happened. And so we reach where we are today, which is that in the end, they had said, repeated and their generals have said, repeat, I quote them in the book, you know, their big dream is a sort of apocalyptic war with America because in the 80s against the conventional army of Iraq

and also even more during the Iraq war where they organized the insurgency against the Americans, they had worked out how Americans so strong in technology, so vast in their grandeur and their majesty and their forces, had this great weakness that they hated to lose men, and that their attention span was incredibly short, and that their political system was incredibly inconsistent and constantly changing.

They could never have imagined they'd have such an erratic president as they have today. But all of these things convinced them that in an apocalyptic struggle, they could beat America in this way, and that's exactly what they're trying to do now. It's that saying that I think is very popular in the Middle East. In the West, you have all the watches.

And the East we have all the time. Yes. Which brings us, sadly, to the end of our conversation, because we have, unlike the Iranians run out of time, we have. We've talked for over two hours, barely scratched the surface it feels like to me, even though you've done a fantastic job laying all out. So it means we must have you back to talk about this in more depth again at some point.

I hope you'll come back. I'd love that. And thanks for giving my book a bit of a moment in the sun. Thanks for having me. It's been really interesting. For the listeners, it's called The Cauldron. Before we wrap up, Simon, what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? The one thing that we aren't talking about is something which I feature a lot in the book, and that is the beauty of Arab poetry. And what I wanted to do in the book, The Cauldron, was make sure that it wasn't just a book about endless wars and dictators. And I also wanted to celebrate the culture of the Middle East.

And by that I mean in history books, there's a real tendency, just to have one bloody thing after another. And you don't get a feel of life passing. So this book, The Cauldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East, it tells you how the modern Middle East was made. But I also wanted some feel of how people live and have lived and will live in the Middle East. And the way I've done that is to use all sorts of Arab poetry. Iranian poetry, Hebrew poetry in the book.

And I think the most moving to me are the famous suspended odes of pre-Islamic Arabia. And I've quoted them a lot in the book. And I just hope people enjoy them and understand that this should give a feel for the Middle East that isn't just wars. Poetry is all important. What a pleasure. Simon, can't wait to have you back for round two. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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