How the modern Middle East was made

If he never puts another word on paper, Simon Sebag Montefiore can relax, secure in the knowledge that The Cauldron, his gigantic overview of the making of the Middle East, is a masterwork. For me, it is destined to be the go-to handbook to understand the tortured politics of the region.

Sebag Montefiore is a lively raconteur, with a keen eye for the ridiculous alongside the thrumming serious history he recounts. Here — and right up into the 20th century — are galloping cameleers, Lord Kitchener using the head of a dead Sudanese leader as an inkwell, the Jews of Baghdad and Syria who spoke Arabic, Ladino, Turkish and Hebrew, the warrior-poet sheikh who fathered an astonishing 56 children, and so on, like a kind of demented panorama light show, with a cast of characters who are almost unbelievable. 

Endless figures meet untimely deaths: there is the young King Alexander of Greece, for example, who, in 1920, “intervened in a fight between his dog and a monkey; he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis two weeks later, leading to the return of his father, Constantine”, whose battles with the Greek premier led to exile for the politician and “disastrous consequences’.

As a master storyteller, Sebag Montefiore really gets into his stride with the beginning of the 20th century, and the genius of this book is that he sets the history in the Middle East of countries with which we are probably less familiar, from Turkey to the beginnings of what became Saudi Arabia, from Egyptian power bids to the parcelling out of favours owed after the First World War and the allotting of mandates.

It allows the reader, for the first time, to understand the source of what became the modern state of Israel in context. And what is fascinating is the unlikely alliances which sprang up, from Ben-Gurion studying Turkish and heading to Constantinople, to the many conversations Chaim Weizmann had with local sheikhs.

He shows how the wily “Welsh wizard,” Prime Minister Lloyd George, and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, began “negotiating a plan for a Jewish home in Palestine,” before the 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration, and observes: “Empires rarely act for humanitarian reasons, virtually always out of self-interest, and usually for contingent expediency in which timing is all.” 

We learn how on the eve of the Second World War, “the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, exhausted by the [Arab] Revolt and preparing for world war against Germany, reversed the Balfour Declaration. “If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs”, he told a London conference he had convened. Shades of the current political situation.

He describes why Ben-Gurion switched allegiance to support the British in the First World War, and reminds us that “when the world war started, the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism was based in Germany” — so there could easily have been a different outcome.

And he unearths some startling and previously obscure information about a long-forgotten 1920s Zionist official, Chaim Kalvarisky, who “believed that the Yishuv [the Jewish pre-state administration] should exist within an Arab kingdom, created school for Jews to learn Arabic and travelled to Damascus to meet [ruler] Faisal to discuss Jewish life under an Arab king.” Kalvarisky was in charge of buying farmland from local Arabs. At much the same time, Sebag Montefiore tells us, “a Jewish group called Brit Shalom proposed an Arab-Jewish bi-national state”.

Sebag Montefiore, who has combed the archives of 19 countries to produce The Cauldron, is excellent on the carve-up by the victorious Western allies at the San Remo conference in 1920,  where states were created and lobbying rewarded. Jordan was created but it would be another almost three decades before the Jews finally got their state — what Sebag Montefiore calls “the Judaic republic”.

The book is as bang up-to-date as it could possibly be, taking in the horror of 7 October 2023 and looking forward to the convulsions of the 2026 elections. He writes: “Israel is even more contradictory, both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy. However superior its military, its way of war has become bombastic and bloody, yet — overdependent on its peerless sophisticated air force and secret agency Mossad — inconclusive. 

“Whoever leads it, Israel has no choice but to defend itself against Iran, its belligerent satraps and thriller destructive mission. For all its power, eclecticism and ingenuity, it is possible the Judaic republic could be wrecked by an intra-Jewish civil war, perhaps triggered by its religious-fascist politicians and overnight paramilitaries that deliberately aim to isolate the state by launching regular pogroms against Palestinian civilians in a campaign to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank.”

The Cauldron, the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson at £25