Simon Sebag Montefiore is one of Britain’s most popular historians, the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, on historical themes. Long known as an expert in the history of Russia from Catherine the Great to Stalin, Montefiore also has a longstanding interest in the Middle East, which he attributes in part to his ancestry in the region – in particular the Montefiore family’s role in reviving the Jewish community of Jerusalem in the 19th century.
His latest book, The Cauldron, tells the story of the making of the Middle East from 1900 to the present-day. He joined me on the New Society podcast to talk about the roots of today’s Middle East, whether it has to be the way it is, and his views on the unfolding events in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, which his book was rushing to catch up with as it was being written.
Tanjil Rashid: your book invokes this metaphor of a cauldron, a place of intense pressure and heat. Most of us will know what you’re referring to. But if you were a merchant in Damascus in the 19th century, not long before your book begins, you might not have thought that your region would be engulfed in violence in the century to come. Why is it that the people of the Middle East ended up embroiled in this cauldron?
Simon Sebag Montefiore: The reasons for this are both ancient and new. Because of its bridge-like position, anybody who wants to be an empire or to be a global planetary power has to have an interest in the Middle East. This starts right with the Babylonians, if not earlier. People have tried to impose on the Middle East their religion, their political system, and they’ve tried to settle people there, and each empire has left a living legacy of people who they positioned and promoted and also people they deported in order to promote their control of the Middle East; all these people still exist in different forms.
And that’s why you have this huge challenge: how to live peacefully there, how to find a harmonious way of governing the Middle East. At various times, giant empires almost solved this problem, most recently the Ottoman empire. When my book opens in 1900, the Ottoman Empire is ruling large parts of the Middle East. Their solution changed from era to era. But essentially: providing you regarded the sultan as absolutely all-powerful and recognised his political supremacy and the political supremacy of Islam, you could live there as a subordinate ethnicity or sect. When that broke up, there was a huge question: how on Earth do we govern this?
One of the ways they governed it was to impose the new fashionable idea, which was nationalism, and the new form of governance, which was the nation state, which had worked well in Europe. They imposed this on the Middle East, and that didn’t necessarily work very well in these multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian new states that were created.
You are effectively making the case that many historians do that imperialism is to some extent to blame?
You only have to look at the states now to see how this is true. I mean, look at the crisis of states. You have Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya… and I could go on.
I want to go back to this question I have asked you about why the Middle East is the way it is. Essentially what I’m asking is a version of the question that Bernard Lewis, historian of the Middle East, asked, which was, “What went wrong?” His answer was Islam went wrong. You seem more interested in the role of imperialism and imperial blunders. You emphasise less Islam as a problem. Is that fair to say?
Yes. I do, and I see it as less of a problem. Historians also have often argued that Islam is at an earlier stage than the West. I’ve heard this many times from people in the Middle East, in Egypt and so on, people telling me, “We’re at an earlier stage. We haven’t had the Renaissance yet.” And I don’t agree.
I don’t understand this framing really. That’s not how societies work.
Of course not. As if there’s a preformed narrative you have to follow. I think this is an old-fashioned, post-Orientalist approach. I don’t buy that. But I do think that the emphases are different [in the Middle East]. The emphasis has been on keeping these states together; that has been a massive challenge and has led to these incredibly ruthless dictators.
I want to ask you about yourself. You’ve written many history books. You studied history at Cambridge, did a PhD there. What drew you to history?
I always loved history. Some of it has come from family connections. I never wanted to write British history because I was never interested in Britain in that way. My father loved history, so I kind of grew up in a house filled with history books and discussion about history.
You’ve written many books about the history of Russia, and I presume that’s because you have some family history. Your mother’s side, I believe, were Jews from the Russian Empire. How did you get interested in the Middle East?
Yes. my family is a Sephardic family, a Mizrahi family.
Which refers to Jews from the Middle East.
So the Montefiores were from Italy, though originally from Spain and Portugal. And the Sebags, which in Arabic would be pronounced “Sebagh” – it’s an Arabic name, it’s from Morocco – were from Marrakesh and Essaouira.
So that’s a name that’s normally spelt Sabbagh?
That’s right, and you see it very often in North Africa. It means dyer of clothes. And that’s because Jews did a lot of dyeing, though some of the Sebags advised the sultans of Morocco on their building projects, and one of these was Essaouira, which was built in the 18th century. They’d been there for hundreds of years, and they left in the 1820s. And Moses Montefiore, who was one of my ancestors, arrived in Britain in the 1790s. These were very much Sephardi Jews living in Britain, but we always kept relations both with Morocco and also with the Holy Land, with Jerusalem.
So obviously you have a personal family history that connects you to the Middle East and particularly to Israel-Palestine. I want to ask you more generally as a historian: why do you think we care so much about Israel-Palestine?
It’s such a good question, and the reason isn’t just to do with Zionism, Israel, antisemitism, philosemitism, or anything else. The Western fascination with Israel-Palestine or the Holy Land is – the clue is in the name “Holy Land” – so deeply ingrained, entrenched, in our consciousness: the history of Judeo-Christianity, the Bible, the fact that Jesus was a Jew, a Judean, who founded the religion that became European-American Christianity, and the fact that when Constantine the Great, between 306 and his death, made Christianity the imperial religion and converted the Holy Land into a location for pilgrimage. And then of course you have the Crusades. The two centuries of crusading left a complete fascination with the Holy Land and a belief that the West could shape the Holy Land as they wished.
The West has a very weird fetishistic obsession with the Holy Land and that includes a proprietorial moral entitlement to adjudicate what happens in the Holy Land. That spirit looks secular when you see it amongst decolonisation/anti-Zionist activists, for example. What could be more secular than that? It’s neo-Marxist. But actually you only have to look at the language to see that there’s a great religiosity. It’s an effectively religious movement, a post-Christian religious movement.
I wouldn’t fundamentally disagree with you, but I think the interesting thing here is that it works both ways, doesn’t it?
Definitely.
Because people often tell me, “Why do you care so much about what Israel’s doing? Do you care so much about what’s happening in Sudan, what’s happening in all these other places? Why are you inordinately fascinated and obsessed by these atrocities as opposed to others?” But that really does work both ways. 7 October for instance, was mourned with much more interest and feeling than atrocities in Sudan. I think we just have to be honest about the fact that there is this historical relationship that links us to the Holy Land, and it gets there in multiple directions.
I agree. I think that’s very true. There’s this fetishistic fascination with the Holy Land, and you see the contrast to that so strikingly in Sudan. The third Sudanese civil war, which is what we’re seeing now, starts just before 7 October. And the death toll is over 150,000 civilians.
And it’s happening just across the Red Sea from Gaza.
It’s so close.
But what’s your view here? Do you think we should care less about Palestine and Israel both? Or do you just accept we are intimately linked by history to this region?
The reality is that if you look at the history, you’ll see that the Jews in Israel for a while benefited more from this fetishistic obsession with the Middle East. And now it’s the other way around, and we see exactly the opposite, the inverse happening, and there’s a rising sympathy for the Palestinians against Israel. But they’re both manifestations of exactly the same thing.
Do you really think the Israeli side benefits less from this now? Israel is an ally of Britain, of America, and most European countries. Israel clearly still benefits from that historic sympathy with their cause. Do you really think the tables have turned?
I think they’ve turned to a certain extent, and you see that in our streets and in the anti-Israel utterances of our governments all the time. But to go back to your original point, one of the themes of this book is that everyone counts or no one counts, and I think everyone should count. And in the book, I don’t argue for any particular people in the Middle East, whether it’s the Sudanese or the 600,000 people killed in the Syrian civil war or the Israeli hostages or the civilians tragically killed in the Gaza War. I don’t argue for any of these people. My job is to treat them all equally.
I know you’re not a supporter of the current Israeli government. You’ve been very critical of them. You wrote an article in the Atlantic three years ago in the aftermath of 7 October. You said there was no genocide then.
Actually, I didn’t go into the genocide. I went into decolonisation.
But you do at one point in that article say that you didn’t think there was anything like a genocide happening. Have you changed your mind in subsequent years?
No, I stand by that position. There is no genocide happening there. I agree with the present view of the British Government. I think that there’s a brutal war happening there. The genocide is a particular inversion of the Holocaust and a particularly malignant inversion of what happened on 7 October. And it’s designed to undermine the legitimacy of Israel, and it inevitably reverberates on Jewish populations around the world. But ultimately the charge of genocide falls flat in the face of the facts. If Israel wanted to destroy Gaza or destroy the Palestinian people, it would’ve done so immediately. For genocide to be proven, intent must be established. International law is extremely clear about this. There’s no evidence of any intent whatsoever.
No evidence of intent whatsoever?
There are statements by ministers, and those are the main arguments for this.
Does that not count as intent when ministers are saying the Palestinians “are animals” or they need to be “exterminated”?
The correct comments are all quoted in the book, by the way. (That first one is always misquoted: it clearly refers to Hamas not the people of Gaza). As for the other vile comments, I’m certainly not someone who is defending them
I know you’re a critic of them.
I’m a huge critic of this government. I think this is the worst government Israel has ever had. I think these extremist ministers are just disgraceful. But there is a tendency now to describe all horrible wars or even blockades as “genocides”; but that word is important and sensitive. And I don’t think that this is, for many reasons of fact, a genocide.
But what are those reasons? You say there’s no intent. When the then energy minister says, “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water until they leave the world,” that sounds like intent.
I think that those are disgusting comments. But what actually happened was very different: some massive figures of aid have been sent in. Israel has allowed over 1.4 million tons into Gaza since 7 October, more than prewar daily averages.
There’s been the tonnage of aid. There’s also the tonnage of bombs.
I am personally heartbroken by the civilian toll and of women and children and civilians in Gaza. That is an unbearable fact of what is in fact a brutal war to destroy Hamas and free Israeli hostages. One cannot dismiss the facts, that first of all, looking at actual evidence, there is no intent, secondly, Israel was attacked by Hamas on 7 October who massacred women and children but also took civilian Israelis as hostages, thirdly, this was a war between two ruthless adversaries, Israel and Hamas; and the genocide narrative only works if you erase the presence of Hamas, its armed force and fighting between them.
For example, the vaccination against polio of 600,000 children. If you were doing a genocide, why on earth would you do that? There’s the enormous measures to move people and give people the chance to go to safety. There’s the huge delay, for example, in Rafah in order to give civilians the chance to move away. Yes, they used a massive amount of bombs, but they also used house-to-house fighting. They used their own troops, in order not to cause civilian harm. And over 900 Israeli soldiers were killed in the campaign. So there are many reasons why if they’d wanted to wipe out the people of Gaza, they could have done so.
There is another wider point that I think is interesting. The only way that this hyperbolic definition of “genocide” works is to widen the international legal definition of what genocide is. But if you do that, you’re ultimately degrading the definition of genocide, which was so carefully defined after the Second World War and which has been used to define things that are undoubtedly genocides, like in Rwanda, Bosnia and of course the Armenian genocide and it means degrading the real history of those victims.
And I do not deny, and I absolutely chronicle this in great detail, that the Palestinians suffered a grave injustice, and that the Palestinians deserve the same self-determination that the Israelis do. Also, one could criticise much about the conduct of that war. Were there war crimes committed? Surely. That is common in most wars, including the British and American campaigns in Iraq, for example, and Afghanistan. I think there is an enormous amount to criticise. You see that on 7 October, as well as in the Gaza conflict, and you cannot describe one without the other. They’re totally linked. This societal conflict is just a disaster and a tragedy for both peoples. The big question now is: somehow we have to get out of this stage. How do we get out of it?
Why is there so little hope of resolution, do you think?
I think resolution is possible.
Do you?
I don’t think it’s possible tomorrow. There’s been too much tragedy on both sides. But there was a period between 1990 and 2010 when Israel was constantly offering more and more generous offers to the Palestinians, which the Palestinians turned down. Now, you can argue that these always involved demilitarisation. They weren’t offering a real state and Israel was always dominant, and there were lots of sort of reasons why they turned down these offers. They weren’t offering the real right of return. But, you know, one can’t deny that process was happening, and that, by the time you get to Ehud Olmert, Israel was offering what even many Palestinians regarded as kind of acceptable offers to launch what would become a Palestinian state in the end. And all of those were in the end turned down, to the fury of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
But isn’t the other part you’re missing the consistent refusal, especially of the Israeli right, to actually leave the Palestinian occupied territories and the settlements.
I totally agree with you. What is happening in the West Bank is a colossal disaster for Israel as well. Israel should not be occupying the West Bank, should not be building these settlements, and certainly should not be protecting these hilltop youth, these militias. A new government in Israel could actually arrest all of them, deport them all even if they had the will to do so. And there is a wide recognition in Israel that this is now a disastrous self-mutilation and a threat to the state itself, on top of being completely wrong as far as the Palestinians are concerned.
So in both cases, the Palestinian national movement in which Hamas became the most dynamic part, and in Israel where the far right became the most dynamic part, they are mirror images of each other. We see in the tragedy of Gaza exactly what happens when they lock horns. There was a time in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, when majorities among both peoples were keen to try the two-state solution. That can happen again. Look at the deals that Olmert offering Abbas in the 2007-08 period.
It was a missed opportunity, the closest the world had ever got to fixing that situation. But leaving aside the electoral dynamics, there’s also the social dynamics. Even if there was democratic consent for a solution, as Yitzhak Rabin came close to, he was assassinated by people who are now in the Israeli government and show no signs of leaving it.
True.
Which is why I’m perhaps much more pessimistic. It is heartening to know that you are hopeful.
These are extracts from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s interview with Tanjil Rashid on the New Society podcast which have been edited for length and clarity.
[Further reading: Andy Burnham’s real work is just beginning]
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Subscribe here to commentWhen the Record Speaks Louder Than the Narrative
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a gifted storyteller, and The Cauldron will be read as a sweeping account of how the modern Middle East was forged. History, however, is not only a contest of memories. It is also the record of what those who hold power have said in public—and of what they have then done.
It remains striking how much commentary proceeds as if Israeli leaders and American presidents have not spoken plainly. For years, senior Israeli officials have treated settlement expansion, demographic control, and the rejection of a viable Palestinian state as policy, not accident. American politicians have framed open-ended military support as an unquestioned strategic good. These are speeches, coalition texts, and televised statements. To write as though the obstacle to peace is only “extremists on both sides” is to treat the public record as optional.
The deeper problem is structural. A durable political settlement has long been treated as a threat by those who profit from managed conflict: contractors, donors, and a narrow circle of influence in Washington and allied capitals. The language of perpetual victimhood is then used to deflect scrutiny of policies that have reduced a captive civilian population to ruin. Whether one accepts the legal term “genocide” or not, the scale of destruction, displacement, and deprivation is documented fact. International law exists so that power cannot declare itself immune. Responsibility is not a slur; it is the condition of a rule-based order.
Encouraging development is not another grand theory of the region. It is the slow weakening of the old permission structure. Publics worldwide are less willing to accept that some lives are expendable and some leaders unaccountable. That shift, if it holds, serves no faction. It serves the common good of humankind: an end to wars maintained by the few, and a politics in which law, not impunity, decides the fate of many.