"Don't Let the Lie Pass"

 

"Don't let the lie pass." So said Simon Seebag Montefiore on a recent podcast discussion, about. his new book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East (NY: Knopf, 2026). The "lie" to which he referred was the increasingly prominent anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish line promoted and perpetuated by pro-Palestinian, leftist elites, especially now and especially here in the great Western imperial and colonial powers. Setting straight the historical record about the founding and the subsequent survival of Israel is one, but only one, aspect of The Cauldron, which is in fact an incredibly detailed history of the wider Middle East (19 countries in all) from 1900 until now.

A bestselling author of Catherine the Great & Potemkin, Stalin, Young Stalin, The Romanovs, and Jerusalem, Montefiore is a British-born descendent of the prominent Sephardic Sebag-Montefiore Jewish family. Here he guides the reader through the multiple twists and turns of one of the world's most complicated regions. While we in the West may be primarily preoccupied with Israel, because of a shared religious history, Montefiore convinces the reader that one must understand the wider story of the entire region from Iran to Morocco, from the Ottoman sultanate to today's multiplicity of (largely artificial) nation states. Hence, his account begins, not in Jerusalem or Constantinople or in one of the Western capitals destined soon to redraw the region's borders, but in Arabia where in 1902 the future Ibn Saud conquered Ryadh and began what we now know as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Prior to the transformations forced upon them by the 20th century, most people lived under empires of some sort or other. In what we call the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, that was the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered Constantinople and ended the Christian Byzantine Roman Empire five centuries earlier. To the West was Europe with its mix of empires and nation states. To the east was the ancient nation of Iran, the modern continuation of the ancient Persian Empire. Besides Iran, the only other authentic ancient national state in the region was Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire but in practice a British protectorate. 

Montefiore recounts in intensive detail the military and political processes by which this sprawling area, populated by a multiplicity of ancient peoples, coexisting as neighbors often peacefully, but sometimes not, was divided into a set of new national states, most of which had never existed before in any form, however ancient the names they adopted (e.g., Lebanon, Syria). One of those new states (although by now means the newest), Israel, represented an ancient people recently restored to their ancient land and restoring its ancient name.

"One of the depressing threads is the grinding reduction of this gleaming mosaic to a bleaker binary of nationalisms." This is a prolonged account of how the Middle East today has become "less and less diverse and tolerant." Nasser expelled Egypt's Jews, Westerners, Turco-Circassians, Greeks, and Armenians, and in the process "impoverished Egypt and ended two millennia of cosmopolitanism." In the one undoubted genuine genocide to take place in the region during this period, the Ottomans "erased" the Armenians. To create modern Turkey, "hundreds of thousands of Greeks" were expelled from lands where Greeks had lived almost since the Trojan War. "But one of the greatest tragedies has been the decades-long purge of Christians: thanks to Arab nationalism and islamist terror, Middle Eastern Christians have declined from 20 percent in 1900 to 4 per cent today. In 1900, Christinas were 14 per cent of Iraq's population; now they are 0.4 percent; in 1990 a million Christians, today 150,000."

The author also considers "the messy interventions of outsiders." The first part of the book examines "the end of the Ottoman Empire and the thirty-year rule by French, British, Italians, and briefly Greeks, which was followed by the U.S. and Soviet interventions of the Cold War." The rest chronicles the multiplicity of new states and their eighty or so years of independence and internal and mutual conflicts.

The entire account is somewhat daunting. The transformation (mostly for the worse) of ancient societies like Egypt and Iran is described in detail. Likewise described are the self-creation of Saudi Arabia and the artificial creations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan by France and Britain. And, of corse, the complicated story of Israel's founding and the many missed opportunities for the creation of an Arab Palestinian state alongside it. The familiar adage about how the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity is abundantly confirmed.

The account also includes often overlooked areas and contemporary conflicts in the region - for example, the Third Sudanese Civil War, which "is by far the greatest civilian massacre in the Middle East in modern times." In that league, of course, is Iran, which massacred its civilian population in two infamous days in January of this year, "an event so colossal that it may be the largest single event massacre in the entire Middle East since 1900."

Concluding with the recent conflict in and with Iran is not accidental. Montefiore considers the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran "a world-changing epochal moment as significant as 1789 and 1917." He suggests "it was not so much Islam that was radicalized after 1979, but revolutionism that was Islamised." Meanwhile, some "Arab monarchies have become citadels of the open version of Islam. But this is a recent, fragile achievement, dependent on particularly inspired leaders in the Kingdom and Emirates - and a period of safety under American protection between 1991 and 2026 that could already be over."

Israel, meanwhile, he believes, has become "both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy." To thrive, he believes "it needs to convert military success into creative coexistence and regional alliance."

The Cauldron contains more historical information than many readers may be looking for and more than most may be prepared to assimilate. Beneath all the details, however, is a coherent analysis of one of the world's most consistently contentious regions, which may be indispensable for understanding whatever ways forward may yet be findable.