Transcript: True History of the Middle East w/ Simon Sebag Montefiore on TRIGGERnometry

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 the sick man of Europe.

But it ended up under this regime of the 3 Pashas — Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Cemal 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 over 1.1 million Armenians. And also forgotten genocides then too, that included the starving of Maronite Christians, and also the massacres of Greeks in what is now Turkey, and particularly the Pontic Greeks. Pontus means the Black Sea.

So the Ottoman Empire in the end was something quite different from the way it had started. In many ways, we’re still seeing now the consequences of, and the sort of chaos after, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:07:33 – 00:08:02): 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. Yeah. 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 the empire collapses, yeah, you know, it becomes as volatile as things have become. Is that fair?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:08:02 – 00:12:23): 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 — you know, the area that is now Israel, Syria, Jordan — was incredibly impoverished and empty. I mean, Jerusalem, I wrote a book about Jerusalem. You know, by the 1780s, Jerusalem was pretty much empty. It was still run by a small group of Palestinian Arab families like the Husseini 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 sort of CNN news, when it’s sort of like, Jerusalem, sacred to 3 faiths, one imagines that it’s always been the center of the world. Well, it wasn’t. It was very neglected for about 200 or 300 years.

But you are right that 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 20th century, there were 3 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, Farouk, 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, you know, in World War I, for example, there was restive Arab nationalism, the beginnings of Arab nationalism. The 3 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 through a family called the Hashemite family, 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. At 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 the Dardanelles, at Gallipoli, was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became Atatürk 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—

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:12:23 – 00:12:24): Tell us about it.

The Creation of Modern Turkey

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:12:24 – 00:16:30): Well, at the end of the war, the Ottomans had conducted this genocide of the Armenians. They’d killed 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 should be punished. The leaders of it should be punished and tried, but the actual empire must be broken up. And that 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-Picot. And Sykes-Picot is totally misunderstood. It’s constantly quoted by people who don’t know what Sykes-Picot was. The reason is it’s come to mean an imperial mentality where you divide 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-Picot, because Sykes-Picot should be called Sykes-Picot-Sazonov, 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 share, 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 large section that went from Haifa in Palestine all the way to Iraq. And that was about oil. And the French, who 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’d have been a large Greek Empire.

And after the war, they started to put this into practice. So at the Treaties of Sèvres 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 Sèvres, not Sykes-Picot, 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 with the French. So they got it all, and the French got Greater Syria.

And Greater Syria, which included 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 5 or 6 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 Alawites, who later provided us with the Assad family that ruled until recently.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:16:30 – 00:16:31): Great guys.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:16:31 – 00:18:55): Yeah, great guys. And then 2 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 Kemal Pasha Atatürk, 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 what is now Ankara. And he based himself there, created a national pact, 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 Franco-Turkish War, a 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 Turkey. And with Atatürk as prime minister and a 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, a sort of counter-imperial rebellion, a brutal ethnic war in which Smyrna — that included the burning of the Greek town of 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 Erdoğan is doing now.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:18:56 – 00:18:56): And what is he doing now?

Erdoğan’s Neo-Ottomanism

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:18:56 – 00:20:29): [Advertisement removed]

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:20:30 – 00:24:11): What Erdoğan is doing now is promoting what is usually called neo-Ottomanism, which just means that he’s looking back before Atatürk to the Sultanate, the great Ottoman Sultanate, which is an extraordinary institution, which ruled the whole Middle East 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 somewhat 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 Lausanne I agreed earlier. And people often say, well, did Atatürk — is this totally new? It’s not totally new. Even at the time, Atatürk 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. That went to Iraq, which was then a British mandate.

So interestingly, he’s now talking openly about Ottoman cities, Turkish cities — Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem. And, you know, the government is fanning flames of war 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 3 most powerful countries in it are not even Arab-speaking — the 3 preeminent military powers are Iran, Turkey, and Israel. And so, you know, a book like mine, The Cauldron, has to be also a history not just 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 Erdoğan 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 Assads 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 Erdoğan 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.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:24:12 – 00:24:17): They also played an integral part in the October 7th peace deal, ceasefire deal, I should say.

The Muslim Brotherhood

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:24:17 – 00:29:35): 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 these factions. You’re absolutely right, because Erdoğan comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, or a 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-Banna, 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 ruling, the caste that had long ruled Egypt from Ottoman times, from Mamluk times. And that is the Turko-Circassian elite.

And it’s a great word, Turco-Circassian. 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 in households, in harems, 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 slaves, started as Christian boys, became Islamic converts, then officers, then generals, and then kings. So the stories that some of them became sultans — there’s a meteoric rise. Talk about a meteoric rise from literally 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 ruled Egypt in what was called the Veiled Protectorate, for obvious reasons. They pretended that the royal family were ruling Egypt, but in fact they dominated Egypt.

And so the Muslim Brotherhood got more and more popular. It had hundreds of thousands of members. It was growing, but it also has a terrorist wing and also had armed youth wings. But then so did everybody in the 1930s. It was 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, hanged 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, Morsi. So this was a moment of great opportunity for President Erdoğan 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 or offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood was Hamas in Gaza. And Hamas was a Muslim Brotherhood faction that gradually declared its separation from the Egyptian mothership. And it 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 you’re right that Turkey had special influence over Hamas. And Turkey and Qatar are the two big Sunni backers of Hamas, alongside Iran, which is Shia but still also backs Hamas. So everything in the Middle East is kind of complicated.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:29:35 – 00:29:36): It is.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:29:36 – 00:29:37): But fascinating.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:29:38 – 00:29:49): I mean, when you come to regions, it doesn’t get more fascinating, really. But let’s go back now — so the British had a mandate for Palestine in that area at the time. What does that mean, a mandate?

The British Mandate

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:29:49 – 00:34:20): Well, it’s 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, believed that everyone should have self-determination, and that American foreign policy should be essentially a kind of moral policy — 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, incidentally — he was a Democrat, he went from the head of a university to president in literally 2 years, an extraordinary rise, and he was highly intelligent, but he had a higher conception of his own genius than everybody else did — 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 Clemenceau, who was the French leader, who were determined 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-determination. But what does that mean? 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 the 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 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 it into provinces that they called vilayets, ruled by a vali. And each one ruled a certain area from a certain city. So what is now Palestine, Israel, Jordan, was then ruled from Damascus and from Beirut. 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 is they made promises to everybody, not just the Arabs and the Jews in the sort of cliché 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 to get a way 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 in Palestine, not of Palestine. So whatever, it just meant we can allow more Jews into this province, basically.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:34:21 – 00:34:24): Simon, may I interrupt you just there? Because I think it’s really crucial.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:34:24 – 00:34:25): Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:34:25 – 00:34:28): How are the Jews there at this point?

Zionism and the Jewish Connection to the Land

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:34:29 – 00:36:29): 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, the kingdoms of Judea, which ruled what is now Israel, Palestine, or also known as Palestine.

And so it’s often said that Zionism 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-year-old belief that the Jews were linked to Judea, hence the name, and that they were linked to Jerusalem. And there 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 Boney M, among others.

So that went right through the history. And there were other times they went back. In Roman times, there’d been the Maccabean Kingdom and the Herodian Kingdoms of Judea. And King Herod, a Judean Jewish king, had built the Second Temple in all its glory. And that was the building that was seen by Jesus when Jesus threw out the money changers, etc. That was the building. That was the place he prayed in as a young Jewish man from Galilee.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:36:30 – 00:37:52): [Advertisement removed]

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:37:53 – 00:52:29): So it remained the home of the Judean people, or the Jewish people, and Judean and Jewish are entirely interchangeable. But Judea is useful because it reminds us of the land where they came from.

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 emperors 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 the Colosseum, which you can still see. That is the prizes of the conquest of the temple. And you can see the picture of the triumph on Titus’s 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 135. And that was the revolt of Simon Bar Kokhba, 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 no longer belonged to the Jews.

And it was then that the Judeans became Jews, and many hundreds of thousands started to live dispersed around the Roman Empire and in Persia and what is now Iraq. And many communities started then, and the ones that lived in the Arab world were known as Sephardics 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 Sebags and the Montefiores. 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 Palestinian or an Israeli. No, it’s actually very complicated. You’ve got Syrian Druze, you’ve got Iraqi Kurds, you’ve got Mizrahi Israelis, you’ve got Palestinian Israelis. Okay, so it’s complicated and much more interesting and nuanced than we’re expected to believe.

So all this time throughout these centuries, the Jews craved returning to Judea, to the Middle East, and Zionism in the 1890s was a new movement that grew up, but a new 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 rulers of the French Empire and the Americans. So it’s always blamed just on Britain, but actually it was the 3 leading Allied powers, all for very similar reasons, who 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’ve recognized a Jewish homeland as well. And 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 recognized the Jewish idea of a homeland, they were partly reflecting the fact that the Jewish Bible, because of Christianity, was so much part of the education and culture of Western Christendom. They were very familiar with it. 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 antisemitism over centuries, had never had their own land. And why not, now that the Ottoman 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 a Hashemite family descended from the Prophet Muhammad. They are directly descended from the Prophet Muhammad. So they literally have the most kudos of any family, though there are a hell of a lot of people in the Arab and Muslim world descended from Muhammad, including much of the leadership today. I mean, you know, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is also a Sayyid. 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 were this Arab family who would traditionally rule 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, all of it, 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 at most under their command at this point about 1,000 men. And they’d only ever ruled Mecca, 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 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 they themselves wanted Iraq and Palestine. So they were double-crossing them. But the Arab families, the Hashemites, 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, can you ask for more? And we’ll sort of manage to blur that.

And so in the end, they agreed vast amounts of money to spend on the Arab desert, delivered by people like Lawrence of Arabia, who joined them. And they launched this rebellion in 1916, and 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 it, they took Jerusalem. And Lloyd George said, I want to give a Christmas present to the British nation, and the Christmas present is Jerusalem. So in December 1917, the British people got a Christmas present, the Holy City.

And then the British and French, as we were saying, had to decide what on earth 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 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. And 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 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 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 intifada, 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 that was going to be harder to rule than they expected.

And then in Palestine, the British hoped 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’d 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 Jewish idea for Palestine was pretty 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 moshavim, or actual communal communities which were called kibbutzim. And to do this, they just wanted to work the land. And a lot of the time they worked the land with Arab workers. And sometimes they didn’t want to seem like Western landlords, so they worked the land themselves and they bought farmland. And some of this farmland, it 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 Al-Aqsa compound, the former temple site of the Jewish temple, created an 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 Hebron is one of the holy cities of Judaism. And also in Safed, which is another of the holy cities. 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 who 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, its crushing, and the conviction that the Jews in Palestine could only be safe if they had a state.

The Grand Mufti

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:52:30 – 00:52:43): And this is, I think, the perfect moment to talk about the Grand Mufti, because he was a fascinating character at that time. Yes. Particularly his views, which, you know, you look at now and you go, they’re kind of on brand for some people.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:52:43 – 00:52:43): Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER (00:52:44 – 00:54:06): And also his relationship with Hitler. [Advertisement removed]

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:54:07 – 00:58:18): Well, the Grand Mufti was a fascinating character. He was the ultimate aristocrat of Jerusalem. The Husseini family had basically run Jerusalem, or run the Temple Mount and the Haram al-Sharif 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 held one of 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 all the 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, let’s find the most extreme Islamic organization and we’ll make that the official Islamic Congress, and then they’ll become moderates. And that’s exactly what happened with the Grand Mufti. They literally said, we’ll hold an election for the Grand Mufti. They held an election, but a moderate won the election. So the British typically said, well, we’ll scrap the election then. What we’ll do is appoint the most extreme young national ultra-Islamic nationalist, this young member of the Husseini family. And this is Amin al-Husseini. 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 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 all the institutions, the mosques, and controlled the budget of the entire Islamic community. 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, he’ll be able to control that side of things. And of course, we have the Jewish Agency, which was under Weizmann or under Ben-Gurion, who were the Zionist leaders. And they control their little community. And together, then we can simply deal with these 2 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 sought out the German consul. And what he said to the German consul was that, you know, 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’ve been understandable. And lots of other people did that, in fact, in Egypt. Anwar Sadat did that in Egypt, the future president, for example. No, he said, 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 interesting negotiations between the Mufti’s people and Ben-Gurion and the Jewish leaders. And they really did come up close to ideas that could have worked, actually. Then in 1936, a rebellion began, the Arab Revolt of Palestine. And out of it, first, the British came up with an 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.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (00:58:19 – 00:58:20): This was a—

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (00:58:20 – 01:05:21): This was actually an extremely good idea, and it could have worked. And they even had — the great rival of the Husseinis is the Nashashibi family, a very distinguished and wealthy Arab landowning family. And the leader of that family, Ragheb al-Nashashibi, said, I’ll be the prime minister of this new state. And the new state would’ve been Jordan and the Arab areas of Palestine. And that was always the best idea, and it was doable. And the Jews would’ve 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 supporters, who were the moderates in the Palestinian Arab community, and led this massive armed uprising, which the British crushed with absolute brutality, using many of the methods that were later used actually by the Israelis, blowing up villages and so on. And also, they were commanded by a 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 Dayan and all the other leading Jewish generals, all 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. He went to Iraq and led an anti-British revolt in Iraq and became the chief advisor, almost a sort of cabinet minister. He sat with the cabinet of this rebel government in Iraq that was anti-British and was calling 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 Mufti. Even the new king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, said, please, can we just 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 blond, you’re obviously of Aryan descent, because the Mufti was fair-haired, with sort of reddy hair and freckled features. So Hitler thought, this is the sort of Arab leader I can deal with. And he also promised him that there’d be a liberation of 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 Einsatzgruppe, 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. 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 Palestine and Israel, both sides — I mean, the Israelis always said the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The same, 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, 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 Chamberlain said, if we have to offend one side, if we have to defend the Arabs or the Jews, we really need to offend the Jews because there are more Arabs. 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’s Conference, and he invites the Mufti to send delegates. The 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. It’s what you 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 they are going to have to have some kind of community relations, 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, I mean, this wouldn’t have been a great thing to happen, but inevitably, the Arabs were 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.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:05:22 – 01:05:26): So, for the same reason that even the white — too many Jews to live.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:05:26 – 01:06:53): Well, yes, basically he would not recognize a Jewish community on this sacred Arab soil, sacred Islamic soil, as he called it. And it’s this belief that this area has been controlled by Islam since 638, when it was taken by the Arab invaders during the great Arab conquests, and that 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 there’s definitely, and there has 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 a Jewish state in the Middle East, 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, let’s negotiate with the Jewish state.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:06:53 – 01:06:54): Let’s—

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:06:54 – 01:07:25): It’s going to — 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 foreseeable 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.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:07:25 – 01:07:50): 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 2 wars — but if we head to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and what follows, the Nakba, 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

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:07:51 – 01:08:35): 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 Chamberlain, his predecessor, to create a state of Palestine. But in 1945, the election was won by the Labour Party. Attlee 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 interesting, because it wasn’t full decolonization, it was decolonization of 2 extremely awkward places. One was Palestine and the other was India, the Raj.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:08:36 – 01:08:44): And 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.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:08:44 – 01:09:51): He did. An ungrateful volcano that cost £40 million a year. 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, to invite all the parties to a negotiation in London again. And now you’re dealing with Attlee 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 Chamberlain had 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, and which is why all the institutions like the Palestine Bank, the Palestine football team, Air Palestine, and the Palestine Post were actually all Jewish.

FRANCIS FOSTER (01:09:52 – 01:09:56): So, but are you saying Jews control Palestine?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:09:56 – 01:09:58): I’m getting, I’m getting to—

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:09:59 – 01:10:17): 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?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:10:17 – 01:10:18): That’s right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:10:19 – 01:11:19): [Advertisement removed]

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:11:20 – 01:15:22): I mean, especially in the ’20s and the ’30s — if you look at the 30 years before Israeli independence, the Nakba, 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 opinion. 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. 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’d been educated as Ottomans, and they understood there could be more than one community, which Islamists like the Mufti did not understand and did not recognize.

And so there are these 2 great traditions in the Arab world, and that brings us to what’s happened now on a much wider plane. Which is, what is happening now is not just between the West 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 state should be, which recognizes all sorts of viewpoints within itself. And that tradition is as ancient as the Arab state is ancient. And you see it throughout the history of the 2 great empires, the Umayyads and the Abbasids into the Fatimids. This is constantly a presence there, and it’s one that 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, messianic, Mahdist versions of Islam. Again, we saw it in Sudan famously with the Mahdi in the 1890s, when General Gordon was killed and so on. So we see it again today in all sorts of different ways. We see it in the Islamic State, we see 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 from different sects of Islam. But the new version of this Islamism is a modern invention. And it’s really a modern invention of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s and Qutb 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 modern political inventions, and it really belongs with them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:15:22 – 01:15:27): So going back to this period, so now we’re talking about the negotiations in London.

The Partition of India, and Palestine’s Path to the UN

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:15:27 – 01:18:20): 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 of him. His delegation, which was led by members of the Husseini family — 3 of the delegates were called Husseini — rejected this offer, at 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 at the time of 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 Nehru, 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 many Indian states. Very few of them had controlled 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 would call 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 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 2 states. A two-state solution. And the two-state solution was Pakistan, which was in 2 halves, where the overwhelmingly Muslim areas were, which is now Bangladesh and now Pakistan, then called East and West Pakistan. And Burma would become an independent country, and the larger part of India would be a Hindu state ruled by Nehru.

So that was what was agreed. This led to a massive, violent spasm, and also massive transfers of population. Around 12 million people were forced to move from their homes, and there was a vast population swap between the Muslim areas and the Hindu areas of India.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:18:20 – 01:18:26): Because in each of these areas — let’s say an area was majority Muslim, there would have been a minority of Hindus, for example.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:18:26 – 01:21:46): And 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 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 tragedy of the Indian partition, and you have trains arriving with everybody in the train massacred. 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 vision. We talked about President Wilson earlier of the League of Nations. Now it’s called the United 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 cannot understand what to do and are desperate to get out of there. 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 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 7 parts. If you look at the 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, not Trans — he’d got a new name, he’d become king, and he was now, he’d got a new country, Jordan.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:21:48 – 01:21:49): So King Abdullah — he was no longer Trans.

FRANCIS FOSTER (01:21:49 – 01:21:49): No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:21:50 – 01:21:51): No longer Transjordan.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:21:52 – 01:22:14): No more Trans. No more Transjordan. Gender-neutral Jordan. This is really combustible material we’re talking about here. But the British said to 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.

FRANCIS FOSTER (01:22:15 – 01:22:25): 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.

Monarchies, Extremism, and the Road to Partition

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:22:25 – 01:25:22): 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 a democracy. But the best governed states in the Middle East have often been absolute monarchies. And this 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 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 they’ve been assigned, which 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 is, it’s a tragedy this didn’t work, because again, this would’ve 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 are 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. Others just wanted farming communities where they would rule themselves, but be part of a larger Palestine state. Others had much more nationalistic viewpoints, like Jabotinsky. And Jabotinsky created a militia, the Irgun, which was about to become part of this story. And 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 safe, 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 whatever Zionism meant is completely different from the view now being propagated in demonstrations and by activists in Britain. It was not—

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:25:22 – 01:25:48): Yeah, not to sidetrack you again, but reading the book, it — 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 kill some of the civilians on the other side, and then they go, this is what they’re all like. And that’s been going on the entire time.

The 1948 War and the Nakba

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:25:48 – 01:34:14): That’s right. Yeah, it is. And actually it does make you wish for a responsible imperial power or responsible supranational organization that actually could have managed this. Because the tragedy of 1947, ’48, which we are getting to, actually is relevant to this. The United Nations agrees control of this. Britain completely abdicates any responsibility. Appalling act, by the way. And the plan that’s offered and 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. And, as I said, there are 7 different segments, all of them, half of them not properly joined. And there’s no oversight, no one to oversee how this would happen.

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’ve been ideal, he is under massive pressure from the Arab League, which is a new organization 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’ve solved the crisis. It would’ve 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. The Arab militias 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, the 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 and prevent a Jewish state. And that immediately started to militarize the situation. One’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-Gurion had rushed to Britain, to London and to Liverpool, where I think the Labour conference was taking place. And he’d rushed 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 — 2 main militias, the Haganah and the Irgun — was in military, desperate straits. And it was not a done deal that the Palestinian Arab militias would win. They seized large areas of Palestine, the whole of Galilee in effect. And other militias under the command of the Mufti attacked the Jewish communities around Jerusalem under the command of the Mufti’s cousin, Abd al-Qadir Husseini.

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 are 2 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 or 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 the actual quotes are, you know, we will drive them into the sea, we will massacre them, there will be a massacre like the Mongol massacres, and so on and so forth. And though all the quotes in this story 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 — we’ll come to that in a minute. But at this stage, no one is 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 Nakba — 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 at least encouraged by much of the Arab leadership.

And in places like Haifa, Safed, Tiberias, Jaffa, and Haifa, big mixed cities, the Jewish Agency and the Jews begged the Arabs to stay. And if you read the memoirs and diaries of Palestinian Arabs, there’s a very famous one by Wasif Jawhariyyeh, called The Storyteller of Jerusalem. Everyone should read it. It’s a must-read. He describes how 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 Palestinian Arab, talking about the Nakba, recounts how he was brought up in Safed, and he said that the Arab Liberation Army in the end moved out, and we, me and my family — I was just a boy — we left Safed and we fled because we were afraid that the Jews would take revenge for the massacres of 1929, which was more than 10, 20 years before. The name of that boy was Mahmoud Abbas, now president of the Palestinian Authority.

In other words, half the Arab population that were made refugees in 1947, ’48 in the Nakba 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 Nakba is missed.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (01:34:14 – 01:34:17): Why would so many of them leave if there was no violence being committed?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:34:17 – 01:46:07): There was violence. I mean, 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, anybody who’s got cousins in Beirut or Alexandria has left us, and only kind of the ordinary people are left. So there were all sorts of things happening in this period. And, you know, it’s a tragedy for the Palestinian Arab people that this happened.

But the next stage is interesting. Ben-Gurion declares an independent state on the 14th of May, 1948. And almost immediately, the Arab states — 5 Arab states — invade to crush the new Jewish state. Why didn’t the plan of King Abdullah, just to take control of the Arab sectors, 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 into Deir Yassin, a village on the edge of Jerusalem, and massacres some of the people there. 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, 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 5 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 hoped 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, as do 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’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 moronic discourse about this subject is that Israel’s a new country that had never existed before, while all the Arab countries are ancient countries. Well, this is completely untrue. And one of the interesting parts of this — all these countries had just been created. So, you know, 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 had actually existed for 18 months, and they’re invading a country that has literally only existed for 12 hours.

So war is joined, and it’s now that the Israeli forces do a counteroffensive. 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 Jenin 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 counterattacked. It’s a very messy war. There are massacres on all sides. And, you know, I think it’s a waste of time to try to say who 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 Dalet Offensive, Plan D. And in this offensive, again, it’s notorious in the anti-Zionist discourse, but in fact it was, A, an essential and desperate struggle to seize the roads, the key roads in Palestine, and to try to recover from the initial attack. And B, it gives local commanders the orders that if in villages there is resistance by Palestinian Arab or Arab forces, they can attack that village and 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 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 Tiberias and in Safed. In other places, mainly in the middle, where the width of the Jewish territory is tiny, there are apparently allegedly verbal orders given by Ben-Gurion to drive out the Arab populations of Ramla and Lydda. 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, I would say, for strategic reasons, in that the shape 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 9 miles wide there. So you can see why they did it strategically. But in terms of humanitarian standards, it would also be regarded as a war crime now.

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 military operations.

So by the end of 1948, the Israelis have secured a single 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 Jerusalem and the Old City of Jerusalem. 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 Lydda and Ramla, 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, which they called the West Bank. And the Egyptians, who’d hoped to conquer as much of Palestine as they could get, 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 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 the West Bank and Gaza. And essentially, that is the situation that endured right into very recent times.

FRANCIS FOSTER (01:46:08 – 01:46:18): So Simon, there’s going to be people listening to this podcast who, let’s just say, don’t have a favorable view of the British, who are listening to this and going, well, isn’t this all the Brits’ fault?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:46:18 – 01:46:53): 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 abdicated all power and took no responsibility whatsoever for what had happened. Admittedly, Britain was kind of out of money. 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.

Iran: From the Shahs to the Islamic Revolution

FRANCIS FOSTER (01:46:55 – 01:47:17): And moving on now, one of 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.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (01:47:17 – 02:07:09): Well, Iran, Persia, is a fascinating country. It plays a huge role in this book. And if anyone wants to understand how Iran ended up where it is, I go into immense detail in The Cauldron, because it’s so important.

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 6’6″, a terrifying martinet who regularly whipped his generals with the 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. Persians had always called their country both Iran and Persia. So he created a monarchy there.

But in 1941, he tried to keep Iran neutral between 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 really the 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 3 in 1943, because they controlled it.

But at the end of the war, his son had succeeded to the throne. And Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known to us as the Shah, because he’s the only Shah we’ve known, which is just the Persian for king, 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 for the Soviet Union. And therefore he set up 2 independent, 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 the 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 total control of Iranian oil. And he had made Iran really 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 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 a one-man 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 of 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 Ruhollah Khomeini, 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 crushed 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 Iranian opinion that were religious, even Islamist, but would’ve 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, who again would’ve accepted a more constitutional monarchy, maybe not a fully constitutional liberal democracy, the way we understand it. But the way the Shah ruled was no opposition at all. And so there was nowhere for opinion to go. This is the terrible flaw of rigid autocracies. And so he was being hoisted by his own petard. 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.

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 3 times. And the Shah said, we don’t do that sort of thing, though 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 question that decision. There was also a certain snobbery in it — that we don’t deal with people like Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein is also a major character in this book. And the Shah had met Saddam Hussein and made a deal with him in 1975, which was one of the Shah’s triumphs, and got him control of the Shatt al-Arab and much of the Straits of Hormuz, which is very relevant today. It was his taking 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 Saddam Hussein, who 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, Giscard d’Estaing, asked Iran if it was okay. And the Shah mistakenly 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 minds seems to belong in the 6th, 7th century of Islamic history. And he dressed in robes and turban. He projected incorruptible authority and legitimacy. But in 1970, he had done an extraordinary thing. He was an innovator, and he had 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 Islamic history — 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 means hidden — who the Shiites expect to return one day in a messianic, apocalyptic glory, in the absence of him, this clergyman could rule as supreme ruler of Iran.

Now, 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 the entire Iranian opposition coalesces around him. Now, this opposition goes from the few people who believed in this idea of an Islamic clergyman and 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 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 the extreme clergymen around him in 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’ll only exclude Israel. Though if you read his writings, he regards the Jews as an inherently evil people. And 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, actually by Islamist terrorists, but the Shah is blamed. And the Shah is incapable of regaining the initiative, the control of the narrative, 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 sacks him 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, Ayatollah Khomeini 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 — if you make yourself a bloody ruler, 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. There’s a narrative of the Shah as the brutal autocrat. He was certainly an autocrat. He was certainly vain. There was certainly corruption. He clearly made a lot of mistakes. But the numbers of people killed are actually tiny. It’s something like a little over 2,000 people who died 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 were killed in the buildup 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 an extraordinary figure. The Islamic Republic itself admitted to killing 6,000 people between the 7th and 8th of January. It was a vast understatement. The real numbers are something like 42,000. But that’s 6,000 on that one day, which even the Iranians — the completely mendacious Iranian Republic — have admitted is 3 times as much as were killed under the Shah, under 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 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, I am the authority, and we are just going to punch in the mouth the present government. And what happens between now, 1979, and about the next 2 years, between now and 1981, is a sort of masterclass in how to assemble absolute power. And he’s helped by events. But what he gradually does is he appoints a prime minister, Bazargan, who is a sort of suit-wearing, tie-wearing moderate Islamist. And by the way, from one of the Islamist parties that in the ’60s would’ve been happy to work under the Shah, but was alienated by the Shah. So he appoints him prime minister, but at the same time, he appoints a shadow government, an Islamic committee, 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 a school, which becomes the real government of Iran, that undermines 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 with 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 Shatt al-Arab, and the borderlands, and to conquer the oil fields of the mainly Arab areas of western Iran. And that enables 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 Marxist militias. And they kill all of them in an astonishing blood purge.

And out of this emerges something that no one had taken seriously. The Americans had said he’s a Gandhi-like figure. There’s a famous, very ultra-liberal decolonialist professor, Professor Falk, who typically in the New York Times — nothing has changed — writes an article saying that Khomeini is going to be the great liberal humanist, humanitarian of our time. And you can read that. No, we can all make simple mistakes.

FRANCIS FOSTER (02:07:10 – 02:07:10): Yeah, simple mistakes.

The Islamic Republic’s Rise and the “Six Armies” Strategy

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (02:07:11 – 02:14:17): So he has pulled off this amazing confidence trick and this brilliant sleight of hand 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 Majlis elected, but actually they are all under a supreme leader, this jurist in power — jurist in law. And that is what we call the Supreme Leader, but it is in fact much more than that name gives. It is basically a sacred monarch for life, appointed 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 multiples. And he dismissed him and had him arrested. He couldn’t quite execute him. And he appointed Ali Khamenei as his successor. And Ali Khamenei succeeded him after 10 years in 1989. And he ruled for almost 40 years, almost as long as the Shah. And he plied a very radical path. He made a few concessions, mainly the deal with the Obama nuclear deal, which was a concession. But basically he stuck to Khomeini’s ideology and path, which was to ensure absolute Islamist control and theocratic 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 6 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, America’s Iraq War. Because in 2003, President Bush knocked Iraq out of the power structure of the Middle East. And in doing that, he removed the main counterbalance to Iran.

Iraq is a massively powerful country, and it’s been removed from power there ever since. So for the last 24 years or so, Iraq 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 23, 24 years, and then Syria under the Assads — which, by the way, is the slaughterhouse of Syrians, 600,000 people killed under that regime — and Lebanon through the paramilitary Hezbollah, and Hamas in Gaza through Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is their other faction there that they control.

And so that actually created a sort of informal Iranian empire that was really the most powerful Iran had been since Nadir Shah in the 18th century. Nadir Shah was the Shah who actually took Delhi. So he was a pretty effective conqueror. And before that, the most powerful since the Sassanid Empire in the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries. So, I mean, in a way, an amazing achievement.

But all the time, they were also preparing, A, to try to get nuclear weapons, which so far, only in the Islamic world and the Arab world, only Pakistan had achieved nuclear weapons, 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 Vahidi, Soleimani, had created an idea which was of defense, which they called mosaic defense — which is that if they ever went to war with America, they would divide up the country, and everyone, according to a preordained 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 they hated them — obviously they’re Sunni, the Iranians are Shia — but the big reason they hated them was that the lifestyle in places like Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or Dubai is a sort of living reproach to the 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 repeatedly, and their generals had said repeatedly, I quote them in the book, 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 that 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.

Closing: Arab Poetry and the Culture of the Middle East

KONSTANTIN KISIN (02:14:18 – 02:14:23): It’s that saying that I think is very popular in the Middle East. In the West, you have all the watches. In the East, we have all the time.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (02:14:24 – 02:14:24): Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (02:14:24 – 02:14:42): Which brings us sadly to the end of our conversation, because we have, unlike the Iranians, run out of time. We’ve talked for over 2 hours, barely scratched the surface, it feels like to me, even though you’ve done a fantastic job laying it 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.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (02:14:43 – 02:14:48): I’d love that. And thanks for giving my book a bit of a moment in the sun. And thanks for having me. It’s been really interesting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN (02:14:48 – 02:14:55): 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?

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (02:14:55 – 02:16:09): 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. I also wanted to celebrate the culture of the Middle East. And by that, I mean, in history books, there’s a real tendency to just 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, tells you how the modern Middle East was made. But I also wanted some feel of how people 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.

FRANCIS FOSTER (02:16:10 – 02:16:15): What a pleasure, Simon! Can’t wait to have you back for round two. Thank you so much.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE (02:16:15 – 02:16:16): Thanks for having me.

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