Transcript: How the New Middle East Was Made w/ Simon Sebag Montefiore

No one was shocked.

Then Saudi Arabia, as you said, the Saudis welcomed this flight of Israelis, treated them warmly, and the fact is that ultimately, if various things happen, normalization could be back on the table. And there are all sorts of economic programs like IMEC, which involves India and the Middle East and Greece and Israel and UAE. But that’s an architecture that could absolutely flower in the next few years.

And then there’s the fact that in this event, first of all, you have then the dark side. We are now entering a period where Iran is in desperate straits. It is going to use everything it can. It is activating all its terrorists. We don’t know if this Omani guy was an Iranian.

BARI WEISS: (00:06:16 – 00:06:25): No, but we do know that the thing that happened at the Air Force base in the UK several weeks ago, the British Prime Minister has now said that it was Iranian-linked.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:06:25 – 00:07:55): Yeah, just soon after the British Foreign Secretary had just shaken the hand of the Foreign Minister of Iran proudly in New York. So they are going to activate all their kind of every dirty trick, every terrorist. And there’ve just been 2 occasions that could have been mass death events which weren’t, and we need this luck to continue and we must pray for it. So the fact that they tried to bring down this plane, they were going to fly it into an American base or an Israeli city, shows the danger that the conflict is now reaching a height.

But on the other hand, the actions of the Indian pilot, India is now building a very close relationship with Israel. The Indian Prime Minister who visited Israel a year ago, he said he sees great affinities between the Indian nation, Hindu nationalism, and Israeli and Jewish nationalism. That is an alliance that is only going to grow since Pakistan is now allied with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which I’m sure we’ll talk about.

So that is another aspect of this. The part of the Indian was part of a new growing relationship that is going to be hugely important. India is the most populous nation on Earth. It is going to be— it is an emerging superpower. And the third part of it is the actions of the Israelis. The Israelis, the 4 Israelis that took control of the plane, that rescued the dive of the plane and grabbed the— pulled back the lever.

BARI WEISS: (00:07:55 – 00:08:01): Because the plumber said that he had seen some Canadian documentary about air crashes.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:08:01 – 00:08:03): I mean, the lesson of— one of the lessons—

BARI WEISS: (00:08:05 – 00:08:07): Well, it’s like you can’t script it.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:08:07 – 00:08:19): No, one of the lessons is you’ve just got to watch, A, a lot of television, preferably CBS, and B, you’ve got to watch all those kind of crime, infomercial documentaries.

BARI WEISS: (00:08:21 – 00:08:27): Every person that’s ever been on a plane, especially after 9/11, I think has the thought to themselves, what would I do in that situation?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:08:27 – 00:08:33): Everyone’s thinking that all the time. And now we’re going to be thinking about it even more. But the point— my point is—

Israel Returns to the Philosophy of Its Early Days

BARI WEISS: (00:08:33 – 00:08:58): No, but where I was going to go with that is it was very hard not to— we’re coming up on the 3rd anniversary of the massacre of October 7th, a day in which ordinary Israelis, in the absence of the state and the army for a very long period of time, had to sort of step into the breach. And watching them sort of step into the breach again, I just wondered if you wanted to reflect on that.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:08:58 – 00:09:07): Yeah, I mean, that’s what— I think that’s the point here. We’re looking at an Israel that is suddenly returning more to like the Israel of its early days.

BARI WEISS: (00:09:07 – 00:09:08): What do you mean by that?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:09:09 – 00:12:08): Well, what happened was, in the early period, the pioneer period of Israel, I’d say from ’48 to the ’80s, to say 1980, that was a period when Israelis believed that you had to look after yourself. You left no prisoners. You always were brave and tried to take and defend Israel’s place in history and in the world. When the French tried to withdraw, tried to hold back their gunboats, they kidnapped them. When terrorists kidnapped, hijacked the planes to Entebbe, they went and got them. And so that was the philosophy of that period.

Between the ’80s and 2023, and just October 7th, a different era happened. Israel got more comfortable. One of the striking things about October 7th was many of the soldiers at the front in the Gaza envelope didn’t have access to their own guns. The guns were locked up. And this was a new era where Israel had been perhaps gulled into a sense of perhaps hubristic oversecurity. And that has changed with October 7th. With October 7th, it’s back to basics again.

There’s also a strategic side of this, which is interesting. Ben-Gurion’s geopolitical military strategy was always that you struck threats immediately, you struck them preemptively, and you struck them on enemy soil, not on your own soil. Well, all of that went— was rejected in effect, maybe without deep thought, by Netanyahu earlier in his premiership when he decided that you could manage. You could watch Hezbollah and prepare your intelligence, but Hamas, you could just manage them. And you could manage them by opening up Gaza, by making deals. And then in the end, it looked like Hamas was just gangsters with Kalashnikovs. And in the end, they could be bought off. And that proved to be wrong. And obviously, he has overturned that philosophy himself.

But what you saw on the plane 2 days ago is the new Israel philosophy, which is you strike threats, you don’t allow threats to build up. And so that’s why this event, which is a great place to start, so symbolizes this new era in all senses. But there’s one thing I’ll just say before I finish this answer, which is that there’s a limit to this strategy. You can’t kill everybody. You can’t strike all enemies. And in the end, you have to build relationships too.

Islam Is a House of Many Rooms

BARI WEISS: (00:12:08 – 00:12:45): There’s a lot in there. You return a lot to this theme of Israel winning sort of short-term victories without having a long-term vision. I want to come back to that. One last question about the plane, and I think what this story symbolizes. The post-9/11 world, right? It was a world of the clash of civilizations. Islam and the West cannot coexist. They cannot be compatible. You write in this book that Islam is a house of many rooms. In other words, that the Islam of Dubai is different than the Islam of Tehran, is different from the Islam of other places. Say just a few sentences on that before we move on.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:12:45 – 00:15:43): Well, I think the fascinating thing to understand is we were used to this clash of civilizations narrative. And if you speak to people in the Islamic world, they disagree with that. And this book, I spoke to a lot of people in all the— there are 19 countries in this book, and I spoke to a lot of people in those countries, and they said to me, “You’re misunderstanding this. You’re buying, in some ways, you’re buying into a sort of decolonialist anti-imperialist narrative, which you’ve just imbibed without even realizing.” And I said, “What do you mean?”

And they said, “Well, the idea that Islam, that certain people in the West regard Islam as totally impossible to live with, and that there’s a deep hostility between the two.” They said, “You’re misunderstanding Islam. There are two Islams. There is a great tradition in Islam of openness, of the exchange of ideas.” And the Gulf states, the Gulf sheikhdoms, the Emirates, have existed for many, many centuries. And they represent that in part. And that’s what we are seeing now with the UAE.

They were always open to trade with India, to trade with the Far East. Historically, they funneled spices and other goods from the East through the trade routes and out through Egypt to Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages, through Mamluk Egypt. And so they represent what we’re seeing now with the Abraham Accords in UAE is not some sort of pro-Western, pro-American sort of exception to Islamic history. It reflects one return. And you saw it with the great empire, the great Islamic empires, the Abbasids, the Umayyads, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, Saladin, these were all people who were perfectly capable of being both Islamic and having close relationships with the West.

And then there’s another tradition in Islam which is redemptionist, messianic, Mahdist, is hostile to Western ideas, believes that Islam should be dominant in any state and must rule. And that is what you saw with ISIS that Omar was discussing, that he encountered. That we’re seeing in Tehran, and that you’re seeing also in the new Islamism, which the Islamism of today is a new ideology, not an ancient ideology. It claims to be an ancient ideology. It’s a new ideology, and it contains all sorts of Western thought as well. In fact, ironically, fascism. You only have to look at the Hamas charter to see how much from Europe is taken into this new ideology. And so this is what we’re seeing now, the battle of these 2 versions of the House of Islam.

The October 7th Wars

BARI WEISS: (00:15:44 – 00:16:33): Okay, there’s so much more I want to get to there. I want to stay on October 7th for a minute because one thing you do in this book, not the day of October 7th, but you reframe October 7th not as a day, but as you call them, the October 7th Wars that began that day. And that have continued in different chapters, including in Iran. And you say, and this is a provocative line, I really want you to expand on it. You say that October 7th was one of the most successful Arab victories since Hattin in 1187, when Saladin defeated the Crusaders and took Jerusalem. Tell us more what you mean by that, because looked at it one way, Israel destroyed Hamas and arguably destroyed all of Gaza. So explain how it’s been a victory.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:16:36 – 00:17:59): Hamas is an organization and is part of, is a vanguard of the resistance, radical Islamism that does, it is not really interested in the wellbeing of its people. And we saw that in a million examples, which I give in the book. They purloined all the food for Gaza. They sold the food. They built 350 miles of tunnels, but the people of Gaza weren’t allowed in it. And I quote one of their leaders saying that they could easily replace these 50,000 people who had been killed at that point because that didn’t matter.

The fact that what mattered was that they have got students at Columbia and Harvard and Cambridge and the LSE believing in a one-state Palestine with the ejection, liquidation, destruction of Israel and the Israeli nation, which is 10 million people. And they said that was the real triumph. And so they’ve said this, this is not a theory that I’m putting out, which is— it is a provocative statement, but it’s a statement of actual truth.

BARI WEISS: (00:17:59 – 00:18:05): Well, you basically make the argument that Israel may have won against Hamas in Gaza, but Hamas won in the West.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:18:05 – 00:18:05): Yeah.

How October 7th Changed Jewish Life in Britain and Europe

BARI WEISS: (00:18:05 – 00:18:53): And one of the ways we see that is the way that this post-October 7th, ongoing, increasingly borderless war has transformed the lives of people all over the world. Israelis, anyone who is associated with Israel, anyone who is considered Zionist, or anyone that is suspected of Zionism. We saw that this week with this attempted plot in the Texas State Capitol carried out by a man who was angry at AIPAC. What the Texas State Capitol has to do with AIPAC, someone will have to explain that to me.

But the point is that it’s transformed our lives. And I want you to just spend a minute, given that you’re from London, talking about how it’s transformed your life. Get personal for us. How has it transformed your life, the life of your family, and the life of your community?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:18:53 – 00:20:31): I mean, I come from a very— the British community, the British Jewish community is tiny. You couldn’t even imagine it as Americans. You have 6 million Jewish people here. And one of my analyses is that the Jewish Americans became one of the establishments of America. And that has never quite happened in England. We have around 250,000 people out of 70 million people in Britain. So we are a tiny community.

And in Europe, we are now, and I say we, ’cause I’m also talking about the French Jews in France and Netherlands, we are really feeling pressure now in a way that my parents would’ve been amazed at because my parents, my mother was a second generation. She came from Lithuania, she was a Litvak. And she so believed in Britain and the royal family and that Britain had given them. But she always used to say to me, “Simon, don’t make trouble ’cause they’ll know you are Jewish. And the quieter you are, the— don’t draw attention to yourself.”

And we just can’t afford to do that now. And that’s one of the lessons that I would tell anyone who’s Jewish here or anyone who cares about the freedom, the liberalism of free society is don’t let anything go. Omar Mohammed didn’t, that’s what Omar Mohammed has taught us from the tragedy and the mass murder of Mosul. And I take that very seriously.

BARI WEISS: (00:20:31 – 00:20:34): What does not let anything go look like?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:20:34 – 00:20:36): I just think you have to challenge everything now.

BARI WEISS: (00:20:37 – 00:20:39): And you can’t be quiet. Don’t let the lie pass.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:20:39 – 00:22:02): Don’t let the lie pass. And there are a lot of lies. There’s not just the genocide lie. There’s other lies too that you cannot let pass now. And if it has some sort of cost to you, and you read out that piece, if it has a cost from pile-ons on Twitter or something. You have to take, you have to risk that, and you have to absorb it because what we’re, in Europe anyway, we are fighting what we feel like for the existence of our communities.

In Britain now, you go to synagogue, there are armed police outside, there are high gates with barbed wire, there are endless volunteers in anti-stab vests. And so in Britain, we feel pretty besieged. People don’t wear Stars of David when they go out on the tube. They wear yarmulkes, they get harassed or shouted at. So yes, October 7th has changed our lives. And I think it’s changed everybody’s life in different ways in Jewish communities.

But it’s made us very aware of who we are, and it’s made us think that eternal Jewish question. Our bags are always packed, at least mentally. Where the hell would we go? And that is a question that people are asking in England.

The Western Fetish with the Holy Land

BARI WEISS: (00:22:03 – 00:22:44): One of the things that I’ve loved about this book and I’ve loved about a lot of the interviews you’ve given, and I really recommend the one that was in the Wall Street Journal with Tunku Varadarajan, it’s phenomenal. And you talk about, you really illuminated for me what you call the history of sort of the Western fetish, not just with the Middle East, but specifically with the Holy Land. And you talk about how that obsession is prefigured and pre-programmed by the history of Christendom. And you take it all the way back to Constantine the Great. Explain to everyone here what you mean by that, because I think for a lot of people, it feels like a modern phenomenon. And you’re saying, no, it’s not. The pattern was already there. Why?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:22:45 – 00:23:41): Yeah. And I think what you’ve got to understand is that this is a pre-programmed fascination, obsession, fetish that is really programmed by the history of Christianity. I would not— Judeo-Christianity, but Christianity. And when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, starting in 306, he started his journey. His mother had already— his mother Helena had already flirted with Christianity and may have been an early convert.

When he converted, he converted the whole Roman Empire, which then of course ruled Palestina, which was the province that Hadrian had renamed Judea as Palestina. And he sent his mother to Palestina to create a sacred itinerary and to find—

BARI WEISS: (00:23:41 – 00:23:45): So just to linger on that for a second, an imperial force renamed Judea, Palestina.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:23:45 – 00:23:49): Yeah, yeah. So in—

BARI WEISS: (00:23:49 – 00:23:52): There’s all kinds of turns like that in this book.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:23:52 – 00:27:05): Yes, yeah. So what happened was, amazing. What happened was there was the famous Jewish revolt, or Judean revolt, against the Romans, against Emperor Nero, starting in 66, crushed by Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus in 70. They destroyed the temple, they destroyed Jerusalem, but they left a lot of Judeans or Jews in Judea, which was the name of the Holy Land. And of course, you will all know that the word Jew is just short for Judean.

And so, in about 130, the Jews revolted again. And they revolted because the Emperor Hadrian was going to turn the Temple, the site of the Temple, into a pagan temple to his own family and to gods associated with Jupiter. So there was a rebellion by Simon Bar Kokhba, who I’m named after, and the rebellion defeated many Roman legions and then was crushed by the Emperor Hadrian. And as a punishment, he banned Jews from Jerusalem and he also renamed Judea, Palestina.

And by the way, in this period, one thinks about slavery in our own time or the slavery of the Atlantic slavery, but there were so many Jewish slaves then that the price of slaves fell to virtually nothing. And everybody in Rome had Jewish slaves, which is quite a thought.

Anyway, the point is that when Constantine, 300 years later, 150 years, 200 years later converted. He sent his mother to Palestine, and in Palestine, his mother was the most successful archaeologist of all time. She found the very nails that had nailed Jesus to the cross, and there could only have been about 6 of them, but she found all 6. She found the wood that had been used to actually crucify Jesus. She found the place he’d been crucified and his tomb, and she built the first Church of the Holy Sepulchre there.

But the interesting thing was this made, as Europe converted to Christianity, this converted the Holy Land, or Judea-Palestine, into the Holy Land. It became the Holy Land, and everybody had to go on this pilgrimage to visit these places. And so creating this by the Emperor Constantine was a kind of brilliant piece of sort of tourism and religiosity. And that was the beginning of this relationship.

And it went on, it culminated with the Crusades when over 150,000 people set out from Europe, killing Jews on the way, to reconquer from the Muslims the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. And when they took Jerusalem, on the 15th of July, 1099, they killed everybody in Jerusalem, including all the Muslims and Arabs and Turks, but also all the Jews, all the infidels. And they killed so many people that the blood in some streets rose up to their bridles.

BARI WEISS: (00:27:06 – 00:27:06): Oh my God.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:27:06 – 00:28:30): So, and that lasted 100 years. And then Saladin retook Jerusalem, the Crusades gradually collapsed, and then the Crusader kingdoms gradually collapsed. And then there was a period in the Middle Ages when every single village hall in Europe had a Jerusalem chamber with pictures of what Jerusalem used to be. And this goes right the way through to the Reformation, which was a return to the Old Testament as well as the New Testament and to history.

And then there was the settlement of America and the Great Awakening, the evangelical awakening in America, which is still going on. And that leads us through to Victorian evangelism, and then the imperial statesmen like Churchill and Lloyd George and Balfour, who created the modern Middle East in many ways.

And so, when you look at the history, you realize that this isn’t just about Israel. It’s really about a fetishistic obsession with the Holy Land, which is so deep in the Western consciousness that often we don’t even know it’s there. And when you look at the decolonialist, anti-Israel, anti-imperialist protesters at our universities, for example—

BARI WEISS: (00:28:30 – 00:28:34): You see them as— they don’t see themselves as religious, but you do.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:28:34 – 00:28:53): Well, it’s a religious movement. I mean, you only have to look at the language. I mean, it’s a totally religious movement. They think they are in a secular world, and we think we’re in a secular world. No, religiosity is terribly important. We have our secular saints, we have our secular causes, we have our credos. This is a—

BARI WEISS: (00:28:53 – 00:28:54): Who are secular saints?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:28:54 – 00:31:09): Well, I mean, David Attenborough, for example, is a secular saint. There are many. And in the anti-Israel movement, there are many secular saints. And the point about it is that deep in the souls of those students in their keffiyehs outside our universities and in our streets, deep in their souls, there’s a seam that belongs completely to Crusader knights, to Victorian missionaries and evangelicals, and to the imperial statesmen that they hate more than anybody.

And they are the successors of these people, and you can see it. In the presumptuous entitlement to adjudicate exclusively for the Holy Land, not for Sudan, not for Syria, not for Libya, not for Ethiopia, no, only for this place. And so when people say it’s all antisemitism, it’s all anti-Israel, no, it actually comes from the deepest reaches of our civilization. And that is why there is this absolute fetishistic, and I describe it in the book as weird, ’cause why? But it’s the result of history living itself, living a different identity now.

But I’d also say that the countries that are most obsessed with the Holy Land now are also those with the most brutal histories of colonialism and settlerism themselves. And that is also another side of it. And this is in part a way, this analysis of the Holy Land today is in part an attempt to redeem themselves for their own history, which is much closer. And that is also part of this story.

And I just say that the funniest thing about all this is that when it started, I said, this is going to end up with people actually calling for the West to reintervene in the Middle East. And that started.

BARI WEISS: (00:31:09 – 00:31:10): That’s what’s happening.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:31:10 – 00:31:14): That’s what’s happening. I mean, a British MP stood up.

BARI WEISS: (00:31:14 – 00:31:15): Ed Miliband.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:31:15 – 00:31:35): Not Ed Miliband, but he said, no, he said, Ed Miliband, who’s the new Foreign Secretary in Britain, has, and the first thing that the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, talked about. The first statement he made was that, “We’re going to be tougher on Israel, we’re going to crack down on Israel.”

BARI WEISS: (00:31:35 – 00:31:37): But sorry, I got it wrong on Ed Miliband. Tell the story about the—

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:31:38 – 00:32:08): Well, there’s a British MP, not quite Ed Miliband, but there’s a British MP who’s a Labour MP who stood up and said, “It’s time we intervened again in the Middle East. We need to send an armed force to intervene against Israel and to demolish it, to dismantle Israel and create a Palestinian state.” This is kind of absolute proof of my theory about that we’ve just been talking about.

The Massacre in Iran

BARI WEISS: (00:32:09 – 00:32:55): Well, there’s, I just, it’s one of the many reasons why this book is worthy of being read because you deepen the way that I see something that has become sort of a trope and a caricature. You give it deep, deep historical roots. You mentioned that the fetish of this one tiny place in the world, basically the rest of the region and the tragedies of it get overlooked, and you document many of those tragedies, the most recent of which is, of course, what happened in Iran in January, where at least 30,000 people were murdered. You say that that number is higher. Many— there’s many people that reported that it was higher. And you say that more people died on that day than died during the entire reign of the Shah.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:32:55 – 00:33:34): Do you know, 11,000 bodies are still missing? 11,000 are still missing. And partly that’s because— I mean, this is so disgusting, but they, these bodies have been demolished, especially women, because there are mass rapes took place, they then had to take out the organs of the bodies and couldn’t return them to their parents. What happened there is so disgusting, and it is the biggest massacre in cold blood in the region in the last 150 years, and that’s saying something.

Why America Went to War with Iran

BARI WEISS: (00:33:36 – 00:34:05): So you write about this as one chapter in sort of the post-October 7th wars or the October 7th wars. And I want to talk a little bit about the public narrative around this war. Okay. The public narrative around this war, at least according to some, is that Israel convinced Trump to get involved based on the idea that they sold him that the regime would topple once they wiped out the leadership. You talked to a lot of people, you reported a lot for this book. Is that true?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:34:06 – 00:34:40): I don’t think that is quite true. And I think that what happened was that, I think Donald Trump has always been determined to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon. And I think that he saw an opportunity and many leaders, see, and I’m here completely speculating, ’cause actually we don’t know what went on in the mind of Donald Trump. No one does. And that’s a very impossible thing to imagine for anybody else.

BARI WEISS: (00:34:40 – 00:34:44): Who’s the historical leader he most reminds you of? Just while we’re on him for a second.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:34:45 – 00:36:00): Well, I guess he was a mixture between Emperor Nero and Kaiser Wilhelm II. But he’s also unlike both those, and I say this with, I have very mixed feelings about this administration, but he’s also, but I also wrote a book about speeches and about communication, and he has reinvented a new form of popular discourse that will influence everyone for decades, whether they hate him or love him.

And Trumpism, whatever one wants to call it, he’s completely changed politics in America. His enemies also have aped his style of shocking— of shock talk, of insulting enemies. The extremism that he’s created and he’s fostered has been echoed exactly in his opposition too. And we will see that in the Democrat Party and what happens with the DSA and in the Democrat Party.

BARI WEISS: (00:36:00 – 00:36:06): But your perception is the United States got into this war to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:36:07 – 00:37:23): That’s your perception? I believe that is what he wanted to do. I also think that his intervention in the 12-day war last year was in a very un-Trump way, because one thinks of Trump as wildly unbuttoned, undisciplined, chaotic, and sort of blowhard in his kind of public statements. But he’s also weirdly capable of great stealth and focus. And that always surprises everybody.

And so in the 12-day war, when he intervened last year and hit with his B-1 bombers Iranian nuclear facilities, I mean, that was an intervention that would’ve delighted Clausewitz and von Moltke, who said that strategy and plans never last beyond contact with the enemy. And he then declared the war over, and that was the end of it. So that was a very successful intervention. But he then had the intervention, that was Midnight Hammer. Oh yeah. But he then had the intervention in Venezuela, which was an extraordinarily successful intervention. Whatever you, again, whatever you think of what he was trying to do, and not one American—

BARI WEISS: (00:37:23 – 00:37:24): But now this, right?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:37:24 – 00:37:24): Yes.

Can the Islamic Republic Fall?

BARI WEISS: (00:37:24 – 00:37:38): And the administration’s trying to say that the war is, the official war is over. Yeah. But obviously, the war goes on. And the question is, as we sit here on, I think it’s October 1st, who is winning that war? What is the endgame for this war?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:37:38 – 00:41:40): Well, I think that the intervention on the 28th of February was an opportunistic, impetuous intervention. I don’t think he needed Netanyahu to sell him on it. I think that both of them were, for different reasons, Trump because of Midnight Hammer and Venezuela, Netanyahu because after the huge humiliation of October 7th and an unparalleled disaster in Israeli history, he had conducted an amazing set of spectacular military operations. And therefore, both of them, for different reasons, embraced a wildly overoptimistic sense of what could be achieved by air power and assassination.

And, if you look at history, we bombarded, we killed 80,000 people in a night in a firestorm on Dresden and Cologne and Tokyo. And those governments weren’t even close to surrendering in World War II. There are very few examples of air power succeeding in overthrowing a regime. Also, regimes are very hard to overthrow if they have a huge dedicated security organs and militias that are willing to kill for the regime. That’s the big test. If you have that, popular power never works, never. It’s virtually unheard of for that to work if they remain loyal.

And in this regime, those people, the Basij militias, the Revolutionary Guards, the secret police, the security ministry, they are totally loyal because they have nowhere to go. And so it would’ve been very unlikely, especially since they’d killed the whole opposition, 30,000 to 40,000 of them a few weeks earlier. So it was unlikely to succeed.

As for now, if I’d been advising them, no one asked me. And actually, they’d fired recently many of the experts on Iran who might’ve told them this. But the point was that they should have used that massive armada that they amassed in February to do what they’re doing now, which is launch a brutally ruthless cold blockade of Iran, which would change the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, from an asset that allows Iran to strangle the Western supplies of oil to a ligature that will throttle Iran itself.

And this has happened before. This is what happened in 1953 with Mossadegh when he threw out the British, he nationalized the oil, and then the British said, “Well, we’re not going to deal with it. We’re not going to sell your oil. We’re not going to allow you to sell your oil.” And Mossadegh was overthrown very quickly afterwards.

And now Trump, in a much quieter way, I mean, he has kind of explosions of saying, “We’re going to bomb them, we’re going to destroy Iran.” But what’s actually happening is being run by Bessent and obviously by the defense, by the Pentagon. And they are doing what they should have done all along, which is an incredibly quiet, brutal, tight blockade that is going to prevent Iran from selling the one thing that it can sell, oil. And it’s going to strangle.

When a revolution works, whether it’s in the Russian Revolution in 1917 or Iran now, this is what has to happen. The people who are bureaucrats, who have jobs in the government, who have family, have 3 children, they have to— they’re earning a salary. They have to feel that they’re going to lose that salary and it’s worth risking that salary and their children’s future in order to join that revolution. And that hasn’t happened yet in Iran.

BARI WEISS: (00:41:40 – 00:41:41): Do you think it could?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:41:41 – 00:41:56): Yeah, it could. And it is going to happen. And the revolution— this revolution is going to fall. There is going to be a revolution against the Islamic Republic. It’s such a vile regime. And Iranians, most Iranians—

BARI WEISS: (00:41:56 – 00:42:00): But vile regimes can go on for a very, very long time, as this book proves.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:42:00 – 00:42:31): They absolutely can, but it will fall at some point if they continue. If Trump ignores domestic American politics, which is a big if, and continues this blockade, the regime will subside at some point. The big danger for this regime in Iran is peace. Is peace. When peace happens, when quiet happens, then the Iranian people will say, “We are impoverished, everything is destroyed.”

BARI WEISS: (00:42:31 – 00:42:32): Peace as in the region?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:42:32 – 00:43:31): As quiet. When the regime is quiet and the war with America has been put on a lower gear, then this regime will face a massive crisis internally. And people will ask questions about how they’ve managed to so mismanage and misgovern Iran that this wealthy country with this incredibly rich history and rich elites and sophisticated culture has ended up like this.

And that is— and incidentally, that is why the Iranians have attacked so brutally the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Kuwait, because those are living repudiations of the Islamist way. They show that Islamic countries can be incredibly rich and successful and comfortable and look after their people as well. And that is the lesson of this.

The Rise of the Gulf States

BARI WEISS: (00:43:31 – 00:43:46): Talk to us about just the sweep of the past 25 years in the Gulf, because you think about the roots of Wahhabism, right? That’s the Gulf. And yet look where the Gulf is now. How did that happen?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:43:46 – 00:44:54): Well, I mean, the Gulf is so interesting ’cause obviously Saudi Arabia is, I start the book with the conquest of the capture of Riyadh by Abdulaziz, the future king, the founding king of Saudi Arabia. And I start that because I so want this book not to be about, most books in the Middle East start with Lloyd George and President Wilson sort of drawing the map of the Middle East. I don’t want to do that. I want this to be about the Middle Eastern agency and the agency of the peoples there.

So I start with him taking this city. He gallops in with 40 friends. He’s 25 years old. He’s 6 foot 4. He has a sword on his belt. He has a Lee-Enfield rifle on his shoulder. And he gallops in with 40 friends into this small town. He climbs over the wall into the date groves. He seizes the harem of the governor. And he waits till dawn. And then when the governor walks out to visit his harem, as you do, he jumps out.

BARI WEISS: (00:44:54 – 00:44:55): We all have one, sir.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:44:55 – 00:46:30): He jumps out and there’s a shootout and they’re fighting with swords and spears and these kind of basically Enfield rifles. And he takes the city. And that is the founding of the 3rd kingdom, the 3rd Emirate of Saudi Arabia, which we have today. And so Saudi Arabia is a bit different ’cause Saudi Arabia is a conquest state. It’s the biggest state in the Middle East. And he conquered it personally in battle and he was in battle himself.

But the interesting thing is that the Gulf states, UAE and the others, they were actually British protectorates right until 1971. When the British under Harold Wilson were too impoverished to keep their garrisons there, they begged the British to stay, and they said they’d even pay for the British garrisons to stay, which is pretty unusual in colonialist history.

But the point about it is that they had found a kind of very— a model of how to govern themselves. And when they became independent, they created the UAE. That has been the best governed state in the Middle East, really, including Israel, by the way, which may surprise you because Israel, of course, is a democracy, a very flawed and messy one, but a democracy nonetheless. The successful Gulf states, which I call the boutique powers, they are very well governed, but they are family absolutist monarchies. Right.

BARI WEISS: (00:46:30 – 00:46:34): You’re saying they’re well governed, but they don’t have a vote. They don’t.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:46:34 – 00:47:08): No, they don’t. And that’s when you’re writing about the Middle East, if you insist on everyone having a Western system of liberal democracy, it’s a bit like insisting on a secular view of human life. If you’re writing about the Middle East, you have to accept that Western democracy isn’t necessarily thriving there. And you have to accept that this is a world of religious observance, of increasing religious observance, not only in the Arab world, but in Israel too.

The Dragon Bear and the Planetary Struggle

BARI WEISS: (00:47:08 – 00:47:38): So if you see sort of Israel, the Gulf states, America as one group, you have obviously Iran and what you call the dragon bear of China and Russia as the other. Talk to us a little bit just about how that axis is. It’s not simply that you see China showing up all over the world. It’s that it’s increasingly in the war in Ukraine. These things are converging. Converging, yes.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:47:38 – 00:49:21): I mean, what you see is very— there are different levels of these conflicts. And if you step back from the minutiae of which tanker has got through the Gulf of Hormuz today and the oil price. You step back, I’ve talked already about how on the regional level, of course, there are all sorts of regional powers— Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt— trying to gain as much as they can. And we’re seeing that happen in East Africa and in the Middle East itself. But there’s another level, which is the battle within Islam that I talked about.

And then the higher level is a systemic battle for the world, a planetary struggle between open systems like America and Britain and the comfort democracies of Europe, as I call them, and also the West. And in that, I include South Korea and Taiwan and other states and Ukraine. And against the closed world, the control world of Russia and China, which have completely different values to us.

And what’s happening in the Middle East is a part of that. And Iran is an ally of both China, which it sells most of its oil to, and Russia, who is— that is giving it intelligence that it’s using to hit American bases. So this is part of a much bigger— this is something part of something much bigger too. And to understand it, you have to step back a little bit.

Comfort Democracies and War Democracies

BARI WEISS: (00:49:21 – 00:49:29): But do the people in the comfort democracies even understand, most of them, that that is the great clash?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:49:29 – 00:50:14): Yeah, but I mean, the people in the comfort democracies or the legacy powers, as I call Britain and France. That’s a nice way of saying decadent and decaying. Decadent and decaying, but still nuclear powers and still members of the Security Council. I see, I mean, there is a trajectory that I see where Europe needs to get its act together basically as a power bloc. And I see a Europe in the next few years, I hope, where you have war democracies, what I call war democracies. War democracies. War democracies are countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Ukraine.

BARI WEISS: (00:50:14 – 00:50:21): People that are alive, people that are at sort of the barricades of the free world.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:50:21 – 00:50:24): They’re at the front, they’re at the vanguard, they’re at the spine.

BARI WEISS: (00:50:24 – 00:50:43): This is what I mean. I mean, if you talk the public consciousness, I imagine, of people in China, of Russia, in Iran, they understand. Their goals and what they’re about. If you asked the average Brit or the average American right now, what would you be willing to die for? What is your country about?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:50:44 – 00:50:56): Yeah, they don’t know. And if you asked if there was conscription in these countries now, very few people would agree. There’d be a revolution. I mean, very few people would serve their countries because—

BARI WEISS: (00:50:56 – 00:51:00): So can you become a war democracy without war?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:51:01 – 00:51:22): No, you can’t become a war democracy without struggle, without realizing the stakes. And the reason why war democracies exist and are different, and this brings us back, right back to that flight, 4 British people would never have stormed that cockpit. Well, I was on a stage in Germany. 4 Ukrainians would have.

BARI WEISS: (00:51:22 – 00:51:23): Yes.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:51:23 – 00:51:33): 4 Taiwanese would have. 4, this is the difference. 4 Poles would have. And that’s why—

BARI WEISS: (00:51:34 – 00:51:36): So go deeper into what that means, that high agency.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:51:37 – 00:52:47): These people, the Israelis, Taiwanese, Ukrainians, everybody in their countries understands what is at stake, that their freedom, their democracy, their way of life is at stake. And it has to be defended as it always has been defended. Throughout history. Nothing has been gained— thank you— nothing has been gained, nothing worth having has been gained without struggle.

And that is the lesson that we’re facing today in America, in Britain, France, Spain, these countries that were, that in America’s case is still the greatest power on Earth. In Britain and France, still with huge potential because they are nuclear powers, they’re sophisticated societies. But what you have, especially in Europe today, if you’re wondering what the hell’s happening in Europe, what you’re having in Europe is the result of the most successful societies in history. I mean, these— the people who are protesting in the streets, it’s the ultimate— it’s the ultimate sign.

BARI WEISS: (00:52:47 – 00:52:47): Ultimate luxury.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:52:48 – 00:52:54): Is the ultimate— we use the word luxury beliefs, but let’s dig down into that. This is the ultimate—

BARI WEISS: (00:52:54 – 00:52:58): And credit to our Free Presser, Rob Henderson, for coining that phrase.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:52:58 – 00:53:04): Yes. Yeah. And it’s a brilliant phrase. And actually, that’s typical of what Free Press is coming up with.

BARI WEISS: (00:53:04 – 00:53:05): Nice. I love that.

Immigration and the Future of Europe

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:53:09 – 00:53:24): It’s very good. But anyway, but the point is that this is something that is so important. And what you have in Britain, Britain, France, I mean, have you seen France today? I mean, France, Paris is burning.

BARI WEISS: (00:53:24 – 00:53:24): It’s on fire.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:53:24 – 00:53:26): Paris is on fire today. There are—

BARI WEISS: (00:53:26 – 00:53:28): Kids are being kept home from school.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:53:28 – 00:53:47): There’s no school. And people, someone just sent me a picture from their daughter’s apartment. There was burning, there are 5 burning cars outside. And there are kids staggering around there on bikes kind of. So there is a huge— there’s huge denial.

BARI WEISS: (00:53:47 – 00:53:48): What is that? What’s going on there?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:53:48 – 00:54:48): What’s going on there is the result of mass immigration starting in the ’70s from the former imperial territories of France. And well-meaning governments for decades have welcomed these people. With the best of intentions. And that has been a disaster for the French state and the French society. And it is going to be a disaster for Britain.

And this is not, this doesn’t mean that I’m actually a huge celebrator of the diversity of Britain, the enrich— our society is so enriched by the majority of people who come in. But we are just entering a period of massive immigration and movement. It hasn’t even started yet what is going to happen in Europe because the population—

BARI WEISS: (00:54:48 – 00:54:55): Fast forward for everyone, just because I want to get to one or two more questions. But fast forward 50 years, what’s Europe going to be?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:54:55 – 00:56:20): I mean, all the governments in Europe are either going to have to surrender their entire program architecture of government. They will not be— if they accept more and more of people coming from the Middle East and Africa, who are going to come because of instability, of the cauldron of what is happening in Africa, which is this incredible population explosion, the only part of the world where population is increasing, where fertility is thriving, those people are going to move north.

And they’re moving north because of the comfort democracies. The word is— the clue is in comfort. Can you believe that these states now offer free welfare, free health, free housing, free hotels for anyone who comes into the country? Of course, everyone wants to live in them. Who wouldn’t want to live in these societies? But if those societies allow everybody in, they will not be able to— the tax base will not be able to afford it. And they will cease to be comfort democracies and they will become failed states.

So there’s a great balance here between humanitarian good intentions, which I support, and sensible governance, sensible and responsible and truthful governance.

Which Powers Are Rising and Falling

BARI WEISS: (00:56:21 – 00:56:48): Your book opens in 1900 where the greatest power in the region was the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans no longer exist. Their empire no longer exists. And this book, and so much of your work, is the story of how fickle power can be, how quickly it can change. So I want to ask you, what power is rising as we speak that would surprise everyone here, and whose power is diminishing?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:56:49 – 00:57:59): The potential for some of the great— for some of the powers in the world to rise is colossal. I mean, India is the next superpower. It now has more than a billion people. It has an incredibly educated society. It has a thriving economy. It has great patriotism, and it has incredibly dynamic foreign policy. Some people regard it as cowardly and being friends with everybody, but actually, it’s a nuclear state and has a colossal army. Its potential is enormous.

And as we started this conversation, I was, the fascinating thing is that its relationships are completely transactional and unideological. So it’s quite happy to be friends with Russia and Israel, Greece and Turkey, and this is the shape of the world to come. This is the shape of the multiplayer world game that we’re seeing now.

BARI WEISS: (00:58:00 – 00:58:04): So 100 years from now, will America be the most powerful country in the world still?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:58:04 – 00:58:34): I think it might still be because America’s system is partly accidentally, but partly by design of the founders. The federal system is an insurance against idiotic presidents. And that is a brilliant system. And it’s messy, it’s not perfect, but I think America is the irrepressible republic.

Israel in 100 Years

BARI WEISS: (00:58:35 – 00:58:42): We started the conversation to some extent with Israel. Where will Israel be in 100 years, the length of this book?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (00:58:43 – 01:00:07): Israel faces a massive challenge and an existential challenge. We often talk about states like Lebanon, which are being destroyed and captured by militias and the civil wars that we see in these countries and the splintering of Iraq, for example, into a federal with a huge Kurdish autonomous zone. We see many of these societies, many of the states of the post-Ottoman world, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, we see them disintegrating, maybe dividing into new countries.

And we think of Israel as outside that because Israel is our ally. But Israel is very much part of the Middle East and becoming more like the Middle East all the time. And some of the things we’re seeing, the presence in the government of supremacists, Jewish supremacist ministers. You’re thinking of Ben-Gvir? Yeah, Ben-Gvir and so on. The fact that the sort of indiscipline of the Israeli army in Gaza, something you don’t see in most armies. And it’s a sign that it’s a citizen’s army, but it’s also a sign of an army that could splinter. When you see—

BARI WEISS: (01:00:08 – 01:00:09): That’s a pretty radical statement.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:00:09 – 01:01:18): Yeah, when you see units of the Israeli army sent to discipline aggressive settlers in the West Bank, and they put their guns down and pray with them, that is when you see something terrifying about Israel. That is when you see the possibility that Israel could be captured by militias and could disintegrate. And you may think this is very unlikely, but this has happened to many states in the Middle East.

And yet with so little discipline, a new Israeli, a different Israeli government could restore discipline very easily. But equally, another Israeli government without that discipline could see what Ben-Gurion feared when he fired on the Altalena ship in 1947-48, when it was landing Irgun arms. And he made the decision. He saw a real danger then of what is happening now. And Ben-Gurion was the ultimate strategist. We should listen to him.

Jabotinsky and the Israeli Election

BARI WEISS: (01:01:18 – 01:01:26): We are going to have to have a whole conversation about your love of Ben-Gurion, your hatred of Menachem Begin and the revisionists. This is a fascinating conversation.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:01:26 – 01:01:28): Well, Jabotinsky, Jabotinsky.

BARI WEISS: (01:01:29 – 01:01:31): Okay, we got to let these people go have a drink.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:01:31 – 01:01:32): We don’t have time for Jabotinsky.

BARI WEISS: (01:01:33 – 01:01:36): Okay, go on Jabotinsky really quick, and then I’m going to take us to a close.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:01:36 – 01:02:24): The fascinating thing about Jabotinsky, who is the political father of Benjamin Netanyahu and Menachem Begin, is that the fascinating thing about him is he was a much more interesting thinker than any of them gave him credit for. He stated many times, not one Arab should be driven out of the Jewish state, and that the Jewish state should be governed alternatively by Arab and Jewish prime ministers.

And when there was a Jewish prime minister, there should be an Arab deputy prime minister. And when there was a Jewish deputy prime minister, there should be an Arab prime minister. So his attitude was very different from the way that Jabotinsky and revisionism has been seen.

BARI WEISS: (01:02:24 – 01:02:37): Just quickly, because there’s an election coming up in Israel. Who do you predict is going to win that election? Not who do you want, who do you predict will win it?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:02:37 – 01:02:49): I think Netanyahu could easily form the next government. And you’ve got to see that, what has happened? I saw Netanyahu sitting with the— this works. This is a very nice full circle.

BARI WEISS: (01:02:49 – 01:02:51): It’s a nice close. See if you can do it.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:02:51 – 01:02:54): Well done. Well done, Bari. This is a very full circle.

BARI WEISS: (01:02:54 – 01:02:55): He’s there with the plumber with the bloody shirt.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:02:55 – 01:04:05): Yeah, he’s there with the plumber. He’s singing a song. He’s singing a song with the plumber and the people from the plane. That is— I mean, that is just great politics, isn’t it? And he could win.

But I also think that Eisenkot, I come from a Moroccan Jewish family, by the way. The Sebags come from Morocco. So does Eisenkot. He’s had a very distinguished career. It could be that Israelis are just exhausted with the Netanyahu show. And if I was an Israeli, I would be. I also would be, by the way. But I could also see a Netanyahu government.

But what I hope is that either Eisenkot will form the next government, which would be, by the way, brilliant for Israel because, as we started to say at the beginning, this is an amazing opportunity for Israel. There’s never been a greater opportunity for Israel, just as the events of the last days show. But if there is a Netanyahu government, which I’m less keen on, but if there was, and he was able to form a government without those, the Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, he also could negotiate a new era.

Why History Still Matters

BARI WEISS: (01:04:06 – 01:04:12): I want to end with one question, last question, and you’re going to answer it quickly, but it’s going to take us back to your book.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:04:12 – 01:04:13): Can I answer any question quickly?

BARI WEISS: (01:04:14 – 01:04:58): No, but it’s incredible and we love it and we can listen to you and your accent all day. Our mutual friend Niall Ferguson wrote a really important piece in the Free Press recently, and he talks about sort of, he admits defeat as a historian. He talks about how in the algorithmic age that is taking Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat. And we see increasingly that it’s not even counter-history, it’s just unhistory. It’s total ignorance and disinformation is being passed off and ingested by millions of people as truth. Make the case to us, give us the white pill that history and historians and books like this still matter.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:04:59 – 01:06:03): I always tell the story of the Chinese imperial court historian of the 1st century who was writing a history of China and the world. And the emperor— and I start my world history with this. And when he was called in by the emperor and he fell victim to a court intrigue. And the emperor said to him, “I’m going to sentence you to death.” And the historian said, “I beg you to let me finish my book.” And he said, “Okay.”

The emperor said, “Okay.” The Han emperor said, “Okay, but you can either be executed or you can be castrated.” And he chose castration in order to finish his book. And he finished his history book, and he said, later he wrote, he said, “When I look back at the decision I made to be castrated,” which was quite a risky procedure in those days.

BARI WEISS: (01:06:04 – 01:06:05): This is not where I thought we were going.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:06:06 – 01:08:33): Yeah. And he said, “But my book is read in many countries, and I am pleased that I took the terrible decision to be mutilated.” And by the way, I just want to reassure you, ladies and gentlemen, that I have finished this history intact. Though I would have done anything to finish the book.

But my point of this history is, and this brings us back to Niall Ferguson’s brilliant article, back to what Omar Mohammed was saying in the beginning, and this is a good place to end, is that we have to fight for history because history is truth. And a society, the societies that rejected truth and source and systems of analysis and evidence, whether in science or in history or in politics, those societies will collapse. And therefore, we have to take risks in our small ways.

And believe you me, when I was writing my Stalin book, I was helped by a guy in Russia. Recently, he called me and he said, “The FSB have just raided my—” he called me in the middle of the night and he said, “It’s 5 in the morning here. At 3 AM, the FSB raided my house.” And that brings me back to the castration story. But the point is we have to risk what we can risk, what we dare risk, to stand up for history, which means truth, which means sources, which means evidence.

And Niall was right, we let this happen. We haven’t sort of risked enough. And when you hear the story of Omar Mohammed at the beginning, you realize what he risked. And he said, in Mosul under ISIS, the risk was beheading in public on television. And for us, the risk is a pile-on on Twitter, we hope, in most cases. And therefore, we must stand up for this. We must do better. We must struggle. And history means a lot, and that’s why I wrote this book.

BARI WEISS: (01:08:34 – 01:08:35): Thank you all so much.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: (01:08:36 – 01:08:37): Thank you.

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