Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Cauldron, the community and Charles III

The period since 7 October 2023 has exposed a great many truths about our society. We live in an age where access to information has never been more open, yet ignorance flourishes. This is an era where scholarship has seemingly been vanquished by slogans; where arguments are seemingly won not by those who make the most sense but by those who shout the loudest.

The need to fight back against that has never been greater; there are few people more capable of leading that charge than Simon Sebag Montefiore. One of the UK’s pre-eminent historians, the bestselling author of works on Stalin and the Romanovs – and of course, on the city of Jerusalem itself – his latest work, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, will be published next summer. Covering the period from 1900 until the present day, its sweep is intercontinental – from the Bosphorus to the Gulf of Aden, from Tehran to Tangier. Its marketing describes it as “the essential story of how the Middle East of 1900 became the Middle East of today – and tomorrow.”

When I sit down with him, it is clear the ambitious scope of the work is designed to give people a fuller picture that has been so sorely missing.

“There are so many books on Israel-Palestine, it must be the most over-covered subject on earth”, he says.

“Some are pro, some are anti – but most are obsessively focused on the little region of south Levant – greater Syria or the Holy Land – that obsesses the West, and none of them put together the whole region with Iran and Turkey. There are lots of histories of the Arabs, but this is a history of all of it together, from Morocco to Iran and Turkey to Sudan showing how it all fits together, the interconnectivity. It will tell people lots of stuff they don’t know.”

Much of modern academic discussion of the Middle East is focused on what was imposed externally upon the region. The Cauldron moves beyond that. “This is in part a celebration of the agency of the peoples and states of the region.  Most have been independent for 80 years.  The first half of the book is set in the Imperial period but I also show that actually it’s not all about outside powers doing things to people in the Middle East. It’s also really about the agency of the peoples of the Middle East; Arab, Jewish, Turkish, Iranian. It’s very liberating writing about that and not just repeating these cliches about colonialism and imperialism.”

Jerusalem, his other work on the region, showed just how well the historian prioritises informing his audience, rather than lecturing them. (A newly published children’s version of the book focuses on key stories, showing the remarkable shared heritage of the city for so many faiths and ethnicities.)

“When it came to the modern period, I took real trouble to speak, to really research all the big Palestinian Arab families, the so called ‘notable families’. And I met someone from every family and all their family historians”, he says.

“And so that book has their histories in a way that you don’t find in any of the others. So much of the anti-Israel literature is so concentrated on blackening Israel that they have no interest in the Palestinian Arab families. If you look at most of these books, they know nothing about these people, and they’ve never bothered to find out.”

With The Cauldron, “much of the narrative is war, intolerance and fanaticism, but this is also a celebration of successes in the region – the amazing successes of the Gulf monarchies.  It’s also about openness, culture and tolerance.   One of the sad parts is the reduction of this cosmopolitan world to a bleak binary nationalism, where you have two nationalities literally fighting to the death for a small piece of land. The world which I bring out in The Cauldron, is multi-ethnic, multi sectarian, and cosmopolitan, where you had lots of identities, and we weren’t just stuck with one or other. The Khalidi mayor of Jerusalem, when he was asked what his nationality was in the 1860s, said, ‘Well, I’m first of all a Jerusalemite, I’m Islamic, I’m an Ottoman and I’m an Arab’. We should all have multiple identities. And many in the Middle East still do.  Maronite Lebanese, Copt Egyptians, Israeli Arabs, Syrian Kurds, Iraqi Chaldeans. And so on.”

Sebag himself certainly has multiple identities; he’s part of the Jewish community, certainly – his ancestor, Sir Moses Montefiore, remains one of the most famous of all British Jews. But he is also part of the literary world, as well as the aristocratic set – the King himself is a longstanding friend. I ask what his impression has been since 7 October 2023.

“I found massive support from all over society, both high and low… almost unanimity in sympathy for Jews and much more understanding of what’s really at stake here”, he tells me.

That lies in sharp contrast to “those in the most privileged higher echelons of media and academia, where the taboo against anti-Jewish racism has truly vanished. Many news anchors and reporters have become ideological activists who arrogantly disdain facts in place of a simplistic unrealistic Manichaean world pantomime in which Israel and Jews have dark sinister roles.”

He goes further. “This kind of darkness is really at its most intense in these news organisations and so-called humanitarian organisations, and in academia too… The bias leads them to make repeated mistakes, that they resist correcting. They only correct mistakes when forced by public outcry. But mistakes have to be called out.

“I have noticed, when you look at these big TV presenters, they’re also enormous sheep. As soon as there’s a slight change, they desperately change too. So we are not dealing, in most cases, with people of great integrity.”

Despite the support he has seen in some circles, he is in little doubt that for Jews, “the golden age is over – it was a sort of Age of Miracles, almost, and we were all lucky to have lived through any part of it. There are lot of exceptional things about the period from, say, 1948-2022. Astonishing peace, liberal advances in all directions. And that’s clearly over.”

Reflecting on it more, he says that “It did turn out that there was a latent racism against Jews and Israel that was growing, that no one had noticed for a long time.

“It was indulged in our civic institutions, academia and civil service …our politicians and our leaders indulged it. But October the eighth, the day after, showed us that this is a struggle that we now have to fight. Really, it’s the same old fight against authoritarianism, against intolerance, that we’ve always been fighting. It is a battle for the liberal part of our democracies.”

He believes that “the lesson of recent years is that liberals and British Jews need to call out and expose egregious cases of bigotry and racism, because it turns out most decent people support tolerance and despise intolerance and bigotry.

“We Jews always have our metaphorical bags packed but we must also avoid a tendency to panic and be oversensitive and overreact to every tiny slight… I don’t think we really need to panic, not yet. We have a lot of enemies, but we have a lot of friends as Jews. But though we shouldn’t panic, I also believe we shouldn’t be quiet. My parents came from that generation. They were so grateful to be in England…they were always telling me ‘don’t say anything, because you’ll draw attention to yourself’. But today, we realize that doesn’t work anymore, we have to fearlessly stand up for ourselves and appeal to people who are sympathetic to us. And importantly, win back decent people who were swept along with the malign mob spirit of a wild moment.”

He fully acknowledges that there are those, however, who have moved well beyond that:

“On the other hand there are people whose words and thoughts, now so popular with a vicious, malignant, delirious squad of left/Islamist activists on the streets and social media – will not age well. Indeed, they will be regarded as a mix of moronic absurdity and malice, that should ultimately embarrass them deeply.”

As we talk, two hundred miles to our north, King Charles is visiting the Jewish community in Crumpsall, to pay his respects after the terror attack on Heaton Park Synagogue. Sebag describes His Majesty as “a wonderful person and a great friend.  We are lucky to have such a king at this time.  He is guided by duty, tempered by vast experience  – a superb diplomat and our greatest national asset in a turbulent time. Almost the ideal definition of a constitutional monarch.”

The reaction the King received from the Jewish community in the area was completely different to that which politicians met when they came the week before.

“It’s so touching to see him there”, Sebag says.

“I think that sort of visit is so important… I think that when Jews came here as immigrants, they really looked to the royal family as the guardians of their rights and their protections – the politicians might change but the sovereigns go on. I think the Jewish community is very monarchist, and rightly so, because, because decent monarchs such as Charles the Third have been great champions of Jews and all minorities.”

Returning to politics, it is clear in our conversation that we do not believe that Israel itself has been immune from a rise in anti-liberal attitudes which has swept the Western world. As we talk, Tommy Robinson, a far-right British activist, is on a visit to Israel, having been personally invited by the country’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli.

“Inviting Tommy Robinson is as iniquitous as it is idiotic”, he says, describing certain members of the current Israeli government as “in some ways utterly divided from the values of the founding of Israel, the values of the diaspora…deeply destructive and dangerous to the State of Israel itself. Were that small but militant minority to get control and capture the Jewish republic, its future would be in real peril.

“That’s a matter for the Israeli electorate, but certainly in the Diaspora, we just have to be clear about our own values, stick to them and say what we think.”

As we converse in a bistro which just happens to be a few hundred feet away from the Israeli embassy – scenes of so many protests over the last two years – the living hostages have finally been returned home from captivity and a ceasefire, though shaky, is holding. Though predicting the future – particularly when it comes to the Middle East – is a fool’s errand, I ask whether there is anything he has come across in his research for The Cauldron which points to potential pitfalls that could be avoided.

“My new book and the old one, Jerusalem, that I have updated, chronicles how from 1918 – where it looks at the Israel-Palestine story – is filled with deals which could and should worked”, he answers.

“Because the land itself is so tiny, all the ones that were really going to be successful involved outside powers – particularly Jordan and King Abdullah – they were the ones that were most realistic.   Israeli statesmen would be unwise to alienate friendly Arab powers all around. Pretty obvious, you would think, but Israel actually also has a tendency to display unwise arrogance at times, and it’s got to restrain that tendency. It’s actually won astonishing victories since the disaster of 7 October, which was nearly catastrophic, but equally it has made colossal errors.”

How should Israel be conducting itself?

“If Israel shows itself able to integrate into the region, which means, by the way, showing real respect to countries around them, like Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and also showing new sensitivity towards countries like Syria and Lebanon, where the jury’s out on both, but in both there is a possibility of building relationships that would have been unthinkable since 1949 – Israel needs to show sensitivity.”

When he says sensitivity, I ask, does he mean ‘not bombing them every two minutes’? He concurs, although he does point out that the strikes on Hezbollah “have actually given Lebanon a chance to remake itself.

“But the bombing of Qatar alarmed everybody. It may have had consequences that no-one believed possible at the time – that’s the nature of world events – but now Israel has won huge geo-strategic space. But it has to turn that credit into gains, and that will take some generosity of spirit which has been often been lacking.”

His ultimate viewpoint is cautious – very cautious – optimism.

“The Trump peace deal is a huge achievement by Trump and Kusher and Witkoff.  It will very hard to maintain.  Many are the snares and traps ahead.  It may collapse. In the West nothing so exposes the malignant humbug of those elite British saviour activists as their opposition to the ceasefire and their presumption to know better than the Palestinians themselves.

“But let’s hold our breath. This is a moment of hope and opportunity.  Out of the abyss of death and despair, something new and exciting could emerge.”

The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East will be published in August 2026 by W&N.