TRIGGERnometry - True History of the Middle East with Simon Sebag Montefiore

00:00:00.000 One of the things we see in the moronic discourse is that Israel's a new country.

00:00:07.000 While all the Arab countries are ancient countries, this is completely untrue.

00:00:11.000 These ancient countries have actually existed for 18 months.

00:00:15.000 They are invading a country that has literally only existed for 12 hours.

00:00:19.000 The French and the British said,

00:00:21.000 we totally agree with you about the empire thing, but we'll call them mandates instead.

00:00:26.000 So mandate was just a new word for an imperial province.

00:00:29.000 until the people were ready to rule themselves.

00:00:31.580 There are 500,000 Jews there, roughly,

00:00:34.300 and they have nowhere to go.

00:00:36.540 It's either survive or die.

00:00:40.980 Many of you have commented that you're seeing too many ads in our videos.

00:00:45.940 We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of interviews.

00:00:50.340 Can we ask you a favor in return?

00:00:52.500 According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show aren't subscribed.

00:00:56.620 Please help us to continue to bring you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting like,

00:01:03.320 and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video.

00:01:06.820 Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:09.240 Lovely to be here, guys.

00:01:10.500 Thank you very much for having me.

00:01:12.000 Well, it's great to have you on.

00:01:13.460 You have written this amazing book about the history, the recent history of the Middle

00:01:17.780 East, the last 120 years or so.

00:01:20.340 And it's rather timely given everything that's going on, but it's also history, which we

00:01:24.380 love on the show.

00:01:25.480 We really enjoyed reading it.

00:01:26.480 It's great to have you on and it's great to be able to look at this complex region in the level

00:01:33.180 of detail, but also objectively, which is something that you do, which literally no one who now talks

00:01:39.020 about the Middle East does. And that's the great challenge. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote the

00:01:43.240 book is because this book didn't exist. And Benjamin Disraeli, who's one of my great heroes,

00:01:48.380 always said, when I want to read a book and I can't find it, I write it myself. So that's sort

00:01:54.620 of what I've done here. I mean, as you know, there is an industry now on the Middle East. I mean,

00:01:59.800 the sort of publishing industry that's partly historical, partly sort of moral. It's almost

00:02:04.720 a religious movement. And it's just sort of, obviously, it's virtually always partisan and

00:02:12.080 is kind of following an ideological pathway that is like so narrow and so inaccurate. And so I

00:02:21.020 wanted to avoid writing, you know, obviously a book just following the ideal, sort of a

00:02:25.420 neo-Marxist ideology of sort of decolonialization. But at the same time, I didn't want to write

00:02:30.600 a Zionist book either. I didn't want to write Martin Gilbert's books again, wonderful as they

00:02:35.880 were. I wanted to do something like you were touching on, something that was as balanced

00:02:41.680 as I could make it for all sides and without ideology. Well, you've definitely succeeded.

00:02:47.060 So let's talk about it. You basically cover the 20th century and the recent 20 years as well,

00:02:53.140 up to October 7th. And it's absolutely fascinating. I think we have to start

00:02:57.680 with something that people now don't talk about, which is the role of Turkey,

00:03:01.560 which was at that point the Ottoman Empire, which controlled pretty much all of that region at the

00:03:06.320 time. And it's collapsed following World War I that leads to much of the chaos we see today.

00:03:12.200 I mean, the Ottoman Empire is a fascinating institution. I mean, it goes on for 400 years

00:03:16.880 more. It's like all great empires, like the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire. It has many

00:03:23.540 kind of versions of itself during that period. It's not always the same institution. It's an

00:03:30.300 Islamic empire. That's the point. It's a sultanate caliphate. And the later sultans really emphasized

00:03:37.280 their roles as caliphs as well as sultans, which is, of course, very relevant today because the

00:03:43.240 caliphate, ideas of caliphates are often in the news. But the point about it was, it was, it was,

00:03:50.040 you could, it was, it was tolerant up to a point. And, you know, it's often stated, it's a huge

00:03:57.220 cliche when people say like, you know, it was so tolerant, you know, the Middle East has been

00:04:00.860 destroyed by, by America or by nationalism. And that's true up to a point. But actually,

00:04:07.340 the myth of the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire is something that you see, you read about

00:04:14.380 quite often in journalism, of course. And in fact, there was a period when after Tanzimat,

00:04:22.400 which was the series of reforms starting in 1839, going up into the 1850s, when everyone

00:04:29.600 was made citizens of the Ottoman Empire. And for about 20 or 30 years, there was a sort of period

00:04:36.680 of quite extraordinary tolerance, but it ended pretty quickly because this opening up of the

00:04:42.180 Ottoman Empire, which happened right after the Crimean War, led to a discombobulation of all

00:04:48.780 the arrangements they'd made to rule it. And so, the first thing that happened in the Middle East

00:04:52.420 was this massacre of Christians in Damascus, known as the Damascus events in 1860. And it started

00:05:01.760 in a war between the Christians and the Druze, which we made sects that are complicated and we

00:05:08.140 may get to talk about later if we have time, but we want to do a larger, more overarching

00:05:14.320 trajectory. But that led to one of the first Western interventions in 1860 when the French

00:05:21.200 and other powers sent an army there. But anyway, the point is, after that, Abdul Hamid, the Sultan,

00:05:29.900 started to impose a sort of religious Ottomanism on the empire and using various minorities like

00:05:40.420 the Kurds to crush the Christians who were restive and seeking, gradually seeking independence.

00:05:46.060 And that led to the Armenian massacres, the Bulgarian massacres, and Abdul Hamid was nicknamed

00:05:53.980 the bloody sultan. So the Ottoman Empire was a little different from the cliché.

00:06:00.400 And then one has to remember, too, that the Ottoman Empire, far from being tolerant,

00:06:06.440 it ended with the rule of the three pashas in World War I. And the Ottoman Empire was on the

00:06:14.480 side of Germany and the central powers in Austria. And the Ottoman Empire fought in a much stronger

00:06:22.720 away than the British or French or anyone expected, because it was known as the sick

00:06:27.060 man of Europe. But it ended up under this regime of the three Pashas, Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha,

00:06:34.160 and Jamal Pasha, who really brought in and imposed a sort of proto-fascism, a sort of racial,

00:06:43.260 eugenicist Islamic Turkish supremacism. And that included the massacre of the Armenians,

00:06:54.100 the killing of the Armenians of over 1.1 million Armenians, and also forgotten genocides then too,

00:07:01.240 that included the killing of the starving of Maronite Christians, and also the massacres of

00:07:08.740 Greeks in what is now Turkey, and particularly the Pontic Greeks. Pontus means the Black Sea.

00:07:15.440 So the Ottoman Empire in the end was something quite different from the way it had started.

00:07:22.620 And in many ways, we're still seeing now the consequences of, and the sort of chaos after

00:07:31.500 the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Well, right. I mean, it's often said by people who may be

00:07:36.380 ignorant, but I'm probably one of them, about the Middle East, that it seems from the outside

00:07:40.320 superficial analysis that it's hard to have control of any of those portions unless you're

00:07:46.420 really, really tough, unless you're willing to be quite brutal about it. And the Ottomans

00:07:50.400 controlled that area for 400 years. It's therefore no surprise then that once the empire collapses,

00:07:57.720 you know, it becomes as volatile as things have become. Is that fair?

00:08:02.220 That's fair. And also, the Ottomans lost control of huge parts of their empire for large periods

00:08:08.420 of time, as I explain in the book. At one time, an Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali the Great,

00:08:13.940 almost conquered the Ottoman Empire and was only stopped by the British. And it was incredibly

00:08:20.080 ruthless. And in fact, throughout its rule, there were massacres of minorities. By the early 19th

00:08:28.280 century, so in the early 1800s, much of what is now the Levant or the period that the area that

00:08:36.180 is now Israel, Syria, Jordan, was incredibly impoverished and empty. I mean, Jerusalem,

00:08:44.300 I wrote a book about Jerusalem. By the 1780s, Jerusalem was pretty much empty. It was still

00:08:52.980 run by a small group of Palestinian Arab families like the Husseinis and the Nashashibis and others

00:09:00.380 who controlled the holy places there. But basically, it was half empty. There were about

00:09:07.080 2,000 people living in Jerusalem. So it was tiny. Because nowadays in our age of CNN news,

00:09:13.740 when it's like Jerusalem, sacred to three faiths, one imagines that it's always been the center of

00:09:19.980 the world. Well, it wasn't. It was very neglected for about 200 or 300 years. But you're right that

00:09:26.540 the idea was that you had to be pretty tough to control the Middle East, and the Ottomans were

00:09:32.780 absolutely ruthless. During World War I, apart from slaughtering the Armenians,

00:09:38.140 they had to deal with a bigger problem, and the big problem was Arab nationalism.

00:09:43.680 In the beginning of the century, the 20th century,

00:09:48.300 there were three big imperial powers dominating the Middle East.

00:09:51.840 So you have the Ottomans from Constantinople who were Turks.

00:09:56.720 Everyone spoke Turkish, by the way.

00:09:58.600 If you wanted to get on, you had to speak Turkish.

00:10:01.520 It's interesting that in the dynasty that ruled Egypt,

00:10:04.680 only the last king, Farouk, spoke Arabic.

00:10:07.780 All the rest of them just spoke Turkish and didn't speak any Arabic.

00:10:10.780 Everything was done through Turkish. Everything was done in Constantinople. And basically,

00:10:18.760 they were absolutely ruthless about any kind of rebellions. And in World War I, for example,

00:10:26.780 there was restive Arab nationalism, the beginnings of Arab nationalism. The three

00:10:32.080 pashas went down there and hanged enormous numbers of Arab notables in Beirut, Damascus,

00:10:38.460 in Jerusalem. The bodies of those Arab nationalists were dangling around the walls of Jerusalem and

00:10:44.440 in the main square of Damascus. It's still called Execution Square. So yeah, they had ruled it very

00:10:51.680 toughly. Then you have World War I, when there's a sort of entire story, the entire story of World

00:10:58.120 War I is now rather neglected and forgotten and most people don't know it. It was really hard

00:11:02.780 fought. The great majority of Arabs, soldiers, fought for the Ottoman Empire and fought all the

00:11:10.280 way through the whole war without deserting or defecting or anything. But at the same time,

00:11:17.640 the British started to look for a way to organize an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. And they did

00:11:26.240 that for a family called the Hashemite family, whose story is very much part of the story of

00:11:32.680 the Middle East up to today, because Jordan is still ruled by a Hashemite king who's descended

00:11:37.820 from these people. So it's a very interesting process. At one point, the Ottomans fought so

00:11:44.880 hard, they defeated an Anglo-French army at Gallipoli, as everybody knows. At another time,

00:11:51.000 they surrounded a British army at Qut in Iraq, and that army surrendered in probably one of the

00:11:57.800 greatest disgraces of the British army during World War I. So for much of World War I, the

00:12:03.180 Ottomans actually were pretty impressive. And of course, their most important general at the

00:12:09.240 Dardanelles at Gallipoli was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became Ataturk and who created Turkey.

00:12:16.300 And the creation of Turkey is, I think, one of the most misunderstood parts of this story.

00:12:22.640 And I don't know if you like to... Tell us more.

00:12:23.980 Well, at the end of the war, the Ottomans had conducted this genocide of the Armenians,

00:12:30.600 and they'd killed 1.1 million. And we have all the orders and telegrams and so on that they sent

00:12:38.800 in order to organize this. So it's a historical fact. And at the end of it, most of the victors,

00:12:50.300 in other words, the British and the French, and the British were led by Lloyd George,

00:12:55.000 were convinced that the Ottoman Empire was a sort of should be punished. The leaders of it

00:13:00.220 should be punished and tried, but the actual empire must be broken up. And to do this,

00:13:07.160 they would support a lot of nationalisms. And those nationalisms included the Armenians,

00:13:13.080 the Kurds, and, of course, the Arabs. They also included, in a much less important factor,

00:13:21.500 the Jews. And the Balfour Declaration was a part of that. At the same time, they made promises

00:13:27.660 to each other about what they would get. And what they would get was so extraordinary.

00:13:34.800 And this is Sykes-Picot. And Sykes-Picot is totally misunderstood. It's constantly

00:13:39.260 I'm quoted by people who don't know what Sykes-Picot was. The reason is, it's come to mean

00:13:45.760 a sort of an imperial mentality where you divided up places against their will. Of course,

00:13:53.880 that's the whole idea of empires. That's what empires do. That's why they're called empires.

00:13:58.300 But in this case, Russia was really one of the big winners of Sykes-Picot, because Sykes-Picot

00:14:05.600 should be called Sykes-Piko Sazanov, who was the foreign minister of the Russian Empire.

00:14:10.080 And the Russians were going to get Constantinople, most of what is now Eastern Turkey,

00:14:18.580 where they were going to have a vassal state, the Armenians. And they were also going to have a share

00:14:26.060 in Jerusalem and Palestine. So if the Tsar hadn't been overthrown,

00:14:31.440 and if the provisional government that succeeded the Tsar in 1917 hadn't been overthrown,

00:14:38.300 Russia would rule Constantinople, Russia would rule eastern Turkey, and Russia would have played

00:14:44.660 a much bigger role in Palestine. That didn't happen because, as we know, the Russian Revolution

00:14:50.400 happened. The other powers that were going to do really well out of this were the British,

00:14:54.860 who wanted a large section that went from Haifa in Palestine all the way to Iraq. And that was

00:15:03.100 about oil. And the French who basically wanted greater Syria and the Greeks and the Italians

00:15:10.600 who'd been promised large parts of what is now Turkey. And Constantinople was going to be

00:15:16.640 international. So it would have been an entirely different Middle East. There would have been a

00:15:20.640 large Greek empire. And after the war, they started to put this into practice. So at the

00:15:28.720 treaties of Sevres and San Remo in 1920, the ruling powers agreed on this carve-up of the

00:15:35.600 Ottoman Empire. And it's so fascinating because it's San Remo and Sevres, not Sykes-Picot,

00:15:41.840 that actually happened. And the big difference was that Britain got the mandate for Palestine

00:15:48.180 because they didn't have to share it anymore with the Russians, because the Russians were now

00:15:52.820 Bolsheviks. And they themselves had liberated it, so they didn't have to share it with the French.

00:15:59.220 So they got it all. And the French got greater Syria. And greater Syria, which included Lebanon,

00:16:09.140 what's now Lebanon. By the way, their idea of what Syria should be was also very different.

00:16:14.420 they were actually going to divide it into five or six states. And there was going to be a state

00:16:19.120 for the Christians, that would be Lebanon, a state for the Druze, a state for the Alawites,

00:16:24.780 who the Alawites later provided us with the Assad family that ruled until recently.

00:16:30.820 Great guys.

00:16:31.400 Yeah, great guys. And then two Sunni states. But they didn't do that. But for Turkey,

00:16:36.900 it all went wrong because the Greeks started to invade Turkey. And Kemal Pasha,

00:16:42.960 Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk, said, I'm going to take control of this. I'm going to stop this.

00:16:50.260 And the Turks had been assigned a small square around Ankara, what is now Ankara.

00:16:58.640 And he based himself there, created a national pact, was appointed commander,

00:17:04.780 took control of the main surviving Ottoman army, and started to resist.

00:17:12.960 first he defeated the Armenians who were trying to set up a state. Then he defeated the French

00:17:18.600 in the Franco-Turkish war, completely forgotten story. He threw them out back into Syria.

00:17:25.720 And then he turned around and he took on the Greeks. And the Greeks were advancing towards

00:17:30.180 Ankara. And he defeated them. And out of this defeat, he faced down Britain and France and

00:17:38.580 overturned the whole plan. And in that plan, he also overthrew the Lloyd George government. That's

00:17:45.580 how Lloyd George fell from being prime minister, thanks to this story. So in the end, there was

00:17:51.800 another treaty called the Treaty of Lausanne, which created what is now modern Turkey. And

00:17:56.740 with Atatürk as prime minister and a new nation, the Turks, created basically the Muslim

00:18:04.960 inhabitants became Turks, the Christian inhabitants became Greeks. And there was a huge population

00:18:11.840 swap in which a million people basically moved between the two countries. So out of this

00:18:19.680 sort of imperial, a counter-imperial rebellion of a brutal ethnic war in which Smyrna,

00:18:29.400 That was including the burning of the Greek town of Smyrna, now Izmir.

00:18:36.020 And then a sort of new kind of religious nationalism.

00:18:39.520 And then the creation of a new state that had never existed before.

00:18:43.080 Again, it sounds very like Israel.

00:18:45.620 And it is very similar to Israel, but on a much bigger scale.

00:18:49.560 And out of that came the Turkish state.

00:18:51.940 Now, it's very relevant today because of what Erdogan is doing now.

00:18:56.000 And what is he doing now?

00:18:56.840 well. Let's be honest about modern life for a second. Processed food, stress, not enough sleep

00:19:02.900 and whatever we're calling a good night out these days. Your liver sits there quietly dealing with

00:19:07.660 all of it while you carry on like nothing's happened. Here's the thing, your liver is running

00:19:12.940 about 500 jobs a day. Energy, digestion, fat metabolism, storing vitamins, filtering everything

00:19:19.100 you put into your body and you never hear about it until something's off. That's where Dose for

00:19:24.460 your liver comes in. It's a clinically backed liver health supplement, but it's a liquid,

00:19:29.240 not a capsule or a powder. A two ounce shot once a day, and it actually tastes like fresh squeezed

00:19:35.580 orange juice. It helps clear out unwanted elements, slowing your liver down and supports it doing its

00:19:41.840 job. Zero sugar, zero junk, zero calories. Drink it daily and you should notice less sluggishness.

00:19:48.040 Fewer mid afternoon crashes, better support for your metabolism and digestion. And it's backed

00:19:53.140 by two double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing a genuine positive impact on liver

00:19:59.080 enzyme levels. I've been doing the shot most mornings for a couple of weeks, and I actually

00:20:03.880 look forward to it, which is more than I can say for my vitamins. Ready to give your liver the

00:20:08.580 support it deserves? Head to Dosedaily.co slash trig or enter trig to get 35% off your first

00:20:15.920 subscription. Your body does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y

00:20:24.200 dot co slash trig for 35% off your first month subscription.

00:20:30.140 What Erdogan is doing now is promoting what is usually called neo-Ottomanism, which just means

00:20:37.120 that he's looking back before, before Ataturk to the Sultanate, the great Ottoman Sultanate,

00:20:44.200 which is an extraordinary institution which ruled the whole Middle East from Algiers to the borders

00:20:52.300 of Iran and to Baghdad, let's say, all the way from Yemen, all the way to the Black Sea,

00:20:58.100 to Crimea at its greatest. And of course, into Europe, to Budapest, as far as Budapest,

00:21:05.020 just a huge institution. But what he's interested in is the Muslim part of it.

00:21:10.820 And he's now saying, Turkey has the biggest army in NATO after America.

00:21:18.220 We now make our own weapons.

00:21:20.300 It's a very impressive, sophisticated society.

00:21:23.640 It's got mass, which is still important in our era.

00:21:27.200 And he's saying now, it's natural.

00:21:31.000 Iran has been somewhat diminished.

00:21:33.300 And we now need to take our place in the Middle East.

00:21:37.180 and we can control or regain control of some of the areas that we once controlled as Ottomans.

00:21:44.200 And so he's challenging the Treaty of Lausanne, I agreed earlier. And people often say, well,

00:21:49.960 did Ataturk, I mean, is this totally new? It's not totally new. Even at the time,

00:21:56.220 Ataturk wanted to get control of Mosul, which is now part of Iraq. But in the end, that was

00:22:03.580 stopped and he didn't get control of Mosul, that went to Iraq, which was then a British mandate.

00:22:09.540 So interestingly, he's now talking openly about Ottoman cities, Turkish cities, Beirut, Damascus,

00:22:18.660 and Jerusalem. And the government is fanning flames of war potentially with Israel. I mean,

00:22:28.260 one of the interesting things about the area now is that it's the Arab world, but the three most

00:22:36.180 powerful countries in it are non-Arab speaking even, which is the three preeminent military

00:22:40.960 powers, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. And so a book like mine, The Cauldron, has to be also a history,

00:22:50.160 not only of the Arab world, but also of the Jewish, Persian, and Turkish worlds too.

00:22:55.640 But that was how they created Turkey, and that's why it's very relevant now.

00:23:00.600 What's happened is Erdogan has managed to achieve some influence in Washington,

00:23:07.400 basically through his relationship with Trump. He's established Turkey as a really powerful

00:23:16.020 drone manufacturer, which has been incredibly influential. And he's also really engineered

00:23:24.660 the fall of the Assads in Syria. And that has meant that Turkey is now incredibly powerful

00:23:29.700 in Syria. It's not often realized, because we often hear about occupations in the Middle East,

00:23:35.680 and we often hear about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, for example.

00:23:39.680 In 2016, the Turks occupied a large strip of northern Syria, which they still occupy.

00:23:46.920 And he is now the preeminent power. Erdogan is now the preeminent power in Syria.

00:23:52.260 um they're very involved in libya they're very involved um in somalia in somalia um so you know

00:24:01.680 actually we're seeing a real turkish ascendancy and to understand it you have to go back to the

00:24:07.460 creation of turkey in 1922 which which is why it's worth telling the story they also played

00:24:13.060 an integral part in the october 7th peace deal ceasefire deal i should say they did they did and

00:24:18.740 they are playing an increasing part. And one of the ways that these powers are placing themselves

00:24:26.140 in the Middle East is by mediating with the West, particularly with the West that is struggling to

00:24:33.620 control these factions. And you're absolutely right, because Erdogan comes from the Muslim

00:24:41.560 Brotherhood, or Muslim Brotherhood Aligned Party. And so he had a special relationship with the

00:24:48.420 Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood plays a big part in this book. And in this story

00:24:52.880 is something, again, that anyone who's interested in the Middle East needs to know about.

00:24:56.980 It was founded in the late 20s in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, a teacher, an Islamic teacher.

00:25:04.220 And the idea was that Islam is completely central to all political and national life.

00:25:10.560 And it's also supranational. It's not just in Egypt, it's outside. And it became a challenge

00:25:17.980 to the people who were ruling the caste that had long ruled Egypt from Ottoman times,

00:25:25.260 from Mamluk times, and that is the Turco-Sarcassian elite. And it's a great word,

00:25:32.940 Turco-Sarcassian. No one knows what it means. But basically, it means that the people who

00:25:38.660 set up the Ottoman Empire and the empires before it were slaves who had been stolen from their

00:25:46.440 from their families by Muslim warlords like the Ottomans or the different dynasties.

00:25:54.720 They'd been taken as tribute. They'd been enslaved. The women had been put to work in

00:26:02.420 households, in harems, all become wives. And the boys had become the administrators and soldiers

00:26:09.340 of these empires. And the idea was that as they grew up, they were brought up as Muslims. They

00:26:15.420 learned the language, and they forgot their childhoods in Circassia. In other words, in

00:26:22.340 Ukraine, in South Russia, in the Caucasus, or in the Balkans, Bosnia or Serbia. And they became

00:26:29.060 Turks. And these Turks were the rulers of the empire. They married into the Ottoman family.

00:26:36.180 they became viziers and generals and so on. And in Egypt, that class was known as the

00:26:45.380 Turkish Circassian class, descended from these slave generals. And by the way, it is an amazing

00:26:50.760 story because many of these slave generals started as slaves, started as boy, Christian boys,

00:26:56.240 became Islamic converts, then officers, then generals, and then kings. So the stories that,

00:27:03.940 some of them became sultans. So there's a meteoric rise, talk about a meteoric rise,

00:27:08.600 literally from slave to king. But anyway, so the Turkish-Sacassians still ruled Egypt all

00:27:15.600 these centuries later. And in Egypt in the 20s, they were increasingly associated with the British

00:27:23.240 who dominated, who ruled Egypt in what was called the Veiled Protectorate, for obvious reasons.

00:27:30.580 They pretended that the royal family were ruling Egypt, but in fact, they dominated Egypt.

00:27:38.220 And so the Muslim Brotherhood got more and more popular.

00:27:42.360 It had hundreds of thousands of members.

00:27:44.460 It was growing, but it also has a terrorist wing and also had youth, kind of armed youth

00:27:51.280 wings.

00:27:51.880 But then so did everybody in the 1930s.

00:27:53.980 It was the time of fascism.

00:27:55.140 But over time, it came increasingly to threaten, first of all, the kings of Egypt. And then after

00:28:03.320 the coup by Nasser, it threatened him. So he arrested all of them, hanged many of them

00:28:09.020 and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood. Jump ahead to 2011, the fall of Mubarak, the Arab Spring.

00:28:19.000 And you have an election in which one of the Muslim Brotherhood is elected, Morsi.

00:28:24.960 So this was a moment of great opportunity for President Erdogan of Turkey, because this is an

00:28:30.540 ally from the same movement as himself. But that didn't last long. The generals retook control,

00:28:37.500 crushed the Muslim Brotherhood presidency, and President al-Sisi is still ruling Egypt.

00:28:45.020 But another offspring or branch or offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood was Hamas in Gaza.

00:28:55.400 And Hamas was a Muslim Brotherhood faction that gradually declared its separation from the Egyptian

00:29:04.360 mothership and became the leading terrorist faction that destroyed the Oslo Peace Accords.

00:29:12.660 and really the idea of a two-state solution, of that more later.

00:29:17.620 So that's why, as you're right, that Turkey had special influence of Hamas

00:29:22.320 and Turkey and Qatar are the two big Sunni backers of Hamas

00:29:28.820 alongside the Iran, which is the Shia, but still also backs Hamas.

00:29:33.280 So everything in the Middle East is kind of complicated, but fascinating.

00:29:37.520 I mean, when you come to regions, it doesn't get more fascinating, really.

00:29:41.420 But let's go back now to, so the British had a mandate for Palestine in that area at the time.

00:29:47.680 What does that mean, a mandate?

00:29:49.580 Well, it was such a good question.

00:29:51.240 The British and the French invented a new word for empire because they had to deal with President Woodrow Wilson.

00:30:00.360 And President Woodrow Wilson, who created Wilsonian foreign policy, which is that everyone should have self-determination

00:30:07.280 and that American foreign policy should be essentially a kind of moral,

00:30:12.300 it should support human rights, it should be moral,

00:30:14.480 it should support self-determination for everybody.

00:30:17.200 As soon as President Wilson, who was a tremendous hypocrite,

00:30:20.560 he was a Democrat, he went from the head of a university to president

00:30:26.140 in literally two years, extraordinary rise.

00:30:29.340 And he was highly intelligent, but he actually had a higher conception

00:30:36.780 of his genius than everybody else did. And when he came to Europe, he found out that it was

00:30:42.420 actually incredibly hard to manage the Middle East and Europe. And he had to deal with Lloyd

00:30:48.780 George and Clemenceau, who was the French leader, who were determined to get empires in the Middle

00:30:55.520 East out of the Ottoman Empire. And dealing with Clemenceau and Wilson, Lloyd George said it was

00:31:04.460 like sitting between Jesus and Napoleon, which is quite funny. So when he got there, he said

00:31:12.240 everyone has to have self-denomination. But what does that mean? So out of this, the French and

00:31:18.140 the British said, well, we totally agree with you about the empire thing, but we'll call them

00:31:22.080 mandates instead. So mandate was just a new word for an imperial province until the people were

00:31:27.460 ready to rule themselves. It actually says that in the League of Nations, in the clauses about

00:31:31.980 the mandates. So, the French got mandate for Greater Syria, which we discussed a little bit

00:31:37.540 earlier, and the British got a mandate for Iraq, which was originally called Mesopotamia, just to

00:31:42.380 confuse your listeners, which means the land between the rivers. They renamed it Iraq,

00:31:48.620 and they also got Palestine. And Palestine included what is today Israel and the West Bank

00:31:55.760 and Jordan. And this was a completely invented entity. It wasn't that the word Palestine wasn't

00:32:03.180 ancient. Palestine is a very ancient name that goes all the way back to Philistia and the

00:32:08.960 Philistines and was used at various times by the Romans as a net provincial name.

00:32:17.080 they had Palestina Prima, Seconda, and so on. But in modern times, the Ottomans for 400 years

00:32:26.600 had ruled this region, and they divided into provinces that they called Viliyets,

00:32:32.420 ruled by a valley. And each one, you know, ruled from a certain city, ruled a certain area.

00:32:39.360 So what is now Palestine, Israel, Jordan, was then ruled from Damascus and from Beirut.

00:32:47.080 or, you know, and so that's how they called it. But Westerners had always used the word

00:32:53.720 Syria and Palestine, which were nice, good old Roman names. And so Britain got Palestine and

00:33:01.320 Jordan, but almost immediately, they faced a problem because in World War I, they had promised

00:33:06.840 this one family, the Hashemite family, that they would support their independence in the Middle

00:33:12.360 East. And we were talking earlier about the promises that everybody made in World War I.

00:33:17.680 The key thing about these promises are they made promises to everybody, not just the Arabs and the

00:33:22.340 Jews in this sort of cliche history version, but also as we saw the Greeks, the Italians,

00:33:26.660 the French, the Russians, I could go on, the Kurds, the Armenians. They made promises to

00:33:31.920 everybody because they were desperate to win the war. They wouldn't have made these promises at

00:33:35.960 any other time in the whole of human history, but they made them then because they were losing

00:33:41.160 hundreds of thousands of men on the Western Front. Anything to try and get away to stop

00:33:47.820 the slaughter on the Western Front. And so they made these promises. As we've seen,

00:33:54.600 the Armenians and the Kurds didn't get theirs. The Turks destroyed the promises made to the

00:34:00.740 Greeks and the Italians. And then, so now the British have to deal with the Arab and the Jewish

00:34:06.260 promises. Well, the Jewish promise was easy initially, because it was just like a homeland,

00:34:12.800 you know, in Palestine, not of Palestine. So whatever, it just meant we can allow more Jews

00:34:18.180 into this province, basically. Simon, may I interrupt you just there, because I think it's

00:34:23.820 really crucial. How are the Jews there at this point? The history of the Jews is inextricably

00:34:32.520 linked with Judea. And it's always important to realize that the word Jew comes from Judea,

00:34:40.980 which is the kingdoms of Judea which ruled what is now Israel, also known as Palestine.

00:34:49.260 And so it's often said that Zionism was invented in the 1890s and it had never existed before.

00:34:57.520 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 years ancient belief that the Jews were linked to Judea, hence the name, and that they were linked to Jerusalem.

00:35:24.900 and they were virtually always Jews living in Judea, Palestine, whatever you want to call it.

00:35:34.220 And even when they were expelled from Judea in 586 BC, in other words, 2,500 years ago,

00:35:45.640 they were taken to Babylon and they dreamed of getting back to Judea, hence the famous song

00:35:51.820 by the rivers of Babylon, beautifully performed by Boney M, among others.

00:35:58.560 So that went right through the history. And there were other times they went back. In the Roman

00:36:04.340 times, there'd been the Maccabean kingdom and the Herodian kingdoms of Judea. And King Herod,

00:36:11.700 a Judean Jewish king, had built the second temple in all its glory. And that was the building

00:36:17.360 that was seen by jesus when jesus threw out the money changes etc that was the building that was

00:36:23.600 the place he prayed in as a young jewish a young jewish man from from galilee the people who watch

00:36:31.520 this show have generally done more thinking about how governments operate the most but there's a

00:36:36.580 difference between understanding the problem and having actually built insulation against it that's

00:36:42.600 world Mikel Thorup operates in. He's been living as an expat for over 25 years, visiting more than

00:36:47.520 110 countries and calling nine of them home. He founded Expat Money nearly a decade ago to help

00:36:53.540 others do the same. When he helped someone build an international plan B, the knowledge he brings

00:36:58.180 is entirely firsthand. Every recommendation comes from something he has already done himself.

00:37:04.100 Expat Money works specifically with freedom-minded families and investors who want to reduce their

00:37:09.700 exposure on any one government or any one system. Second residencies, second citizenships, offshore

00:37:15.700 banking, international real estate, legal structures that spread your life across borders.

00:37:20.720 Mikkel has put together a free report called Plan B Residencies and Instant Citizenships. It covers

00:37:26.660 five routes to a second passport, including one that almost never gets discussed. How a foreign

00:37:31.820 residency functions as genuine political insurance, which countries actually make sense depending on

00:37:37.460 what you're trying to protect and what it realistically costs. Go to expatmoney.com

00:37:42.780 slash trigger or click the link in the description of this episode to download the report.

00:37:47.480 There's no charge, no catch. That's expatmoney.com slash trigger.

00:37:53.280 So it remained the home of the Judean people, all the Jewish people, and Judean and Jewish

00:37:59.380 are entirely interchangeable. But Judea is useful because it reminds us of the land where they came

00:38:06.640 from. And in 66 AD, the Jews rebelled against Emperor Nero, the Romans. There was a huge Jewish

00:38:15.780 revolt. It was crushed by the new Roman emperors, Vespasian and Titus. And they crushed the Jews,

00:38:22.900 they crushed Jerusalem, and they destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. And

00:38:28.860 the money was so vast that they got from the temple that they were able to build a Colosseum,

00:38:34.600 which you can still see. That is the prizes. That's the prizes of the conquest of the temple.

00:38:41.760 And you can see the picture of the triumph on Titus's arch, if you've been to Rome.

00:38:46.800 And if you haven't, you should go and see it. But there was one more Jewish revolt, again,

00:38:52.920 in about 130 to 35. And that was the revolt of Simon Bar-Copper, Prince of Israel. And he

00:39:02.280 they again defeated the Romans under Hadrian. Hadrian sent an army, and this time they really

00:39:08.460 destroyed. They killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, and they changed the name of the land

00:39:14.780 from Judea to Palestina, which was also an ancient name, but the point was it was no longer

00:39:21.420 belonged to the Jews. And it was then that the Judeans became Jews, and many, many hundreds of

00:39:28.260 thousand started to live around, dispersed around the Roman Empire and in Persia and what is now

00:39:35.080 Iraq. And many communities started them. And the ones that lived in the Arab world were known as

00:39:41.340 Sephardics or Mizrahi. And the ones that lived in Europe became known as Ashkenazi mainly. And

00:39:48.960 the Jews that lived in the Arab world or the Islamic world, the Mizrahi, I mean, my family's

00:39:57.460 descended from them, the Seabags and the Montefiores. And, you know, they had multiple

00:40:03.540 identities. And one of the themes of the cauldron is understanding that the Middle East is full of

00:40:09.440 multiple identities. We think everybody is a, you know, is a Palestinian or Israeli. No,

00:40:15.280 it's actually very complicated. And, you know, you've got Syrian Druze, you've got Iraqi Kurds,

00:40:21.340 you've got, you know, you've got Mizrahi Israelis, you've got Palestinian Israelis. Okay,

00:40:26.160 So it's complicated and much more interesting and nuanced than we're expected to believe.

00:40:31.840 So all this time throughout these centuries, the Jews craved returning to Judea, to the Middle East.

00:40:40.340 And Zionism in the 1890s was a new movement that grew up,

00:40:47.300 but a new, a reheating of an old movement

00:40:51.860 that had existed without interruption for 2,000 years.

00:40:57.760 And it was recognized by the rulers of the British Empire

00:41:03.400 and the rulers of the French Empire and the Americans.

00:41:06.740 So it's always blamed just on Britain,

00:41:08.640 but actually it was the three kind of leading allied powers

00:41:12.120 all for very similar reasons

00:41:15.540 decided to embrace Zionism. And by the way, there was also a Zionist movement in the Ottoman Empire

00:41:21.440 and in Berlin, in other words, with the central powers. And it's possible that they would have

00:41:27.720 recognized a Jewish homeland as well. And they were considering it and discussing it, which is

00:41:32.780 often forgotten. But in 1917, when Balfour and Lloyd George, it's always called the Balfour

00:41:40.500 it a declaration, but it really should be called the Lloyd George Declaration. But when they

00:41:44.900 recognized the Jewish idea of a homeland, they were partly reflecting the fact that the Jewish

00:41:55.260 Bible, because of Christianity, was so much part of the education and culture of Western Christendom

00:42:03.260 that they were very familiar. And Lloyd George said, you know, the place names in Judea are more

00:42:08.580 familiar to me than the names of the battles on the Western Front. And so that was partly what

00:42:16.180 they were doing. They were partly recognizing something they'd been brought up on, but also

00:42:20.500 they were recognizing what they thought was an injustice, that the Jews had faced great

00:42:26.140 antisemitism over centuries, had never had their own land. And why not, now that the Ottoman

00:42:32.220 empires breaking up, facilitate this small group along with other groups. And the other groups that

00:42:39.480 were promised homelands were the Armenians, the Kurds, and of course, the Arabs already were there

00:42:45.820 in their homeland. And the Arabs also wanted states. So the Arabs were represented by the

00:42:53.140 family called the Hashemites. And the old emir of Mecca was called Hussein. And he was one of

00:43:03.220 the Hashemites. And he negotiated with the British as well. So while all these other negotiations

00:43:08.820 were going on, he was negotiating. And he said, I'm a family descended, I'm the Hashemite family

00:43:14.600 descended from the Prophet Muhammad. They were directly descended. They are directly descended

00:43:19.440 from the Prophet Muhammad. So they literally have the most kind of kudos of any family,

00:43:25.680 though there are a hell of a lot of people in the Arab and Muslim world descended from Muhammad,

00:43:31.220 including much of the leaders today. I mean, you know, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is also,

00:43:35.840 it was a Syed, he was also descended from the Prophet. And descent from the Prophet

00:43:40.500 is probably accurate in many cases. It's probably been handed down. But the Hashemite family,

00:43:46.480 They were this Arab family who were traditionally ruled Mecca and Medina, the holy cities.

00:43:53.420 And they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

00:43:55.440 So they were also in the Ottoman Empire.

00:43:57.040 And when World War I started, they, among many other people, started to negotiate.

00:44:01.920 And they said, we Hashemites can lead a huge Arab revolt and we can bring down the Ottomans.

00:44:08.440 But to do that, you've got to promise us that we, the Hashemite family, me and my sons,

00:44:13.580 can rule an empire that will include all of Arabia, all of Jordan, all of Israel,

00:44:20.220 and all of Iraq, and all of Syria. So in other words, just the whole map. And you've got to

00:44:26.200 realize that the Hashemites had at most under their command at this point about a thousand men,

00:44:32.280 and they'd only ever ruled Mecca, which is of immense importance. It's the holy city,

00:44:37.780 but it's very small and far away from all those other places.

00:44:42.700 So the British understandably negotiated a slightly blurred agreement that deliberately

00:44:50.100 didn't quite promise anything. And it said, you can have things to the sort of east of this line,

00:44:57.020 west of this line. And also, this is all dependent on what we've promised the French.

00:45:01.800 And they did this knowing that they were promising the French, the whole of Syria,

00:45:05.920 and other things.

00:45:07.780 And they themselves wanted Iraq and Palestine.

00:45:10.780 So they were double-crossing them.

00:45:13.100 But the Arab family, the Ashmaqs,

00:45:14.880 were also double-crossing the British

00:45:16.180 because they were asking for everything,

00:45:18.300 understanding that they were unlikely to get it all.

00:45:21.900 And on both sides,

00:45:23.240 when you look into the correspondence of both sides,

00:45:25.480 you see that both say,

00:45:26.360 like, you know, ask for more

00:45:27.320 and we'll sort of manage to sort of blur that.

00:45:30.760 And so in the end, they agreed.

00:45:33.200 Vast amounts of money descended on the Arab desert.

00:45:35.920 delivered by people like Lawrence of Arabia, who joined them. And they launched this rebellion

00:45:40.620 in 1916. And fairly small armies of about 6,000 people started to fight their way along the

00:45:50.080 railway line, the Ottoman railway line in Arabia, and then into Jordan. But they couldn't really

00:45:56.340 defeat the major Ottoman armies. So it was a British army with lots of Australians that then

00:46:01.420 invaded what is now Palestine, fought their way up Palestine, which took a year. They took

00:46:08.080 Jerusalem. And Lloyd George said, I want to give a Christmas present to the British nation. And

00:46:16.400 the Christmas present is Jerusalem. So in December 1917, the British people got a Christmas present,

00:46:22.400 the Holy City. And so they got the Holy City. And then the British and French, as we were saying,

00:46:29.460 had to decide what nerve to do with these promises. So they set up the mandates. And the

00:46:34.980 mandates, as we said, were kind of imperial provinces under a different name. The League

00:46:39.240 of Nations, a new international organization, included these in its charter and recognized it.

00:46:47.340 So it was recognized by international law, whatever that means. And they started to rule.

00:46:52.780 But of course, they then found these places incredibly hard to rule. So they renamed

00:46:58.820 Mesopotamia, Iraq. So they ruled Iraq. The French tried to rule Syria and tried all sorts of

00:47:04.580 different ways to rule it. And the British had Palestine. And they really enjoyed having

00:47:10.760 Jerusalem. But almost immediately, one of the sons of the Hashemite emir, Abdullah, galloped up from

00:47:18.320 Arabia and conquered Amman and said, I want this to be my little kingdom since we haven't got

00:47:24.540 the other places we've been promised. And so the British said, okay, you can have that. We'll

00:47:29.700 create Jordan out of that bit of Palestine. So half of Palestine was given to a new emirate,

00:47:35.240 which was called Transjordan. At the same time, his brother Faisal, it's a bit of family politics

00:47:43.460 here, but his brother Faisal was declared king of Syria. There was a problem there because the

00:47:49.800 French had been promised Syria. And so the French invaded and threw him out. So then the British

00:47:56.740 have another problem, what to do with former King Faisal of Syria. And they decided to give him

00:48:02.880 Iraq. So they made him King of Iraq. And the Kingdom of Iraq lasted from 1920 to 1958. So we

00:48:12.480 may come to that later because there's a horrible massacre in 1958. But so the British tried to

00:48:20.060 create Iraq into a sort of stable mandate under this king. And there was a huge revolt against

00:48:27.300 the British, an intifada, which the British crushed ruthlessly with the new RAF. And then

00:48:34.140 in Syria, there was a huge revolt against the Syrian mandate in 1925. And the French crushed

00:48:39.880 that brutally bombarded Damascus. And they realized that that was going to be harder to rule

00:48:46.160 than they expect. And then in Palestine, the British hoped that they would rule Palestine

00:48:52.760 for a while. And ultimately, they would create a state of Palestine that would be a joint Jewish

00:49:01.900 and Arab state. And Churchill published a white paper explaining this. And Jews started to

00:49:09.740 immigrate, to join their compatriots who had already been there for centuries. And so the

00:49:15.760 population started to rise. But at the same time, the Arab population of Palestine rejected British

00:49:22.780 rule. But they didn't quite revolt. They could have done as the Syrians had done, as the Iraqis

00:49:30.340 had done, as the Egyptians had just done too. So everybody revolted against this system of mandates.

00:49:36.040 but they decided just to protest and to refuse to take part in the British schemes for the

00:49:43.240 Palestine mandate. And the Jewish idea for Palestine was pretty different from the image

00:49:53.760 you now see in sort of the ideological decolonization picture. In fact, completely

00:50:00.700 different. Most of the Jewish immigrants were from the Russian empire. They were socialists

00:50:09.860 of various kinds. And they wanted to create little farming communities, which were called

00:50:17.420 moshavim, or actual communist communities, which were called kibbutzim. And to do this,

00:50:23.540 they just wanted to labor the land. And a lot of the time, they labored the land with

00:50:29.460 Arab workers. And sometimes they didn't want to seem like Western landlords, so they worked the

00:50:41.400 land themselves. And they bought farmland. And some of this farmland was from money they raised

00:50:47.340 themselves, and some of it was from philanthropists like the Rothschild family. And so that's what

00:50:53.580 happened in the 20s. And actually, there were spasms of violence, but actually,

00:51:00.500 the British mandate of Palestine was relatively successful until 1929, when stories that the

00:51:09.280 Jews hoped to destroy the Arab shrines and mosque on the Al-Aqsa Kampan, the former temple site of

00:51:17.380 the Jewish temple created an event that was very like October 7th in our own time, when an Arab

00:51:27.000 mob attacked the Jews in Jerusalem, but especially in Hebron, where the Jewish population had been

00:51:36.400 there for centuries. Hebron is one of the holy cities of Judaism, and also in Sfat, which is

00:51:43.280 another of the holy cities of Jerusalem. And in those attacks, there were mass rapes,

00:51:48.960 there were beheadings, there were children killed and so on. And so then the British started to

00:51:55.360 realize that they had a bit of a problem. But at that point, there were actually relatively few

00:52:02.140 Jews had immigrated. What changed everything, of course, was Hitler. And the rise of Hitler

00:52:10.300 enormously raised, again, the Jewish immigration. And that led to the crisis in the mid-30s,

00:52:19.940 which led to an Arab revolt. It's crushing. And the idea, the conviction that the Jews in

00:52:27.720 Palestine could only be safe if they had a state. And this is, I think, the perfect moment to talk

00:52:32.820 about the Grand Mufti, because he was a fascinating character at that time. Particularly his views,

00:52:38.480 which, you know, you look at now and you go, they're kind of on brand for some people.

00:52:43.400 Yeah. And also his relationship with Hitler.

00:52:47.320 Right. Let's talk underwear. Admittedly, not the topic I expected to be discussing when we

00:52:53.300 started this show. But here we are. Turns out most men are wearing genuinely bad underwear

00:52:57.620 and have just decided that's fine. It's not fine. That's why I want to talk about sheath.

00:53:02.920 S-H-E-A-T-H. Sheath.com. It's underwear built around a dual pouch system. What that means in

00:53:10.500 plain English, everything stays where it should be. No sticking, no chafing, no shifting around

00:53:15.220 mid-sentence whilst trying to maintain an air of gravitas. The fabric breathes, the design

00:53:20.580 separates. There is apparently a technical term for what this creates and that term is

00:53:25.380 zen-like separation, which sounds ridiculous but is also completely accurate. It was developed by

00:53:31.100 veteran on his second tour, which means it was designed under conditions where comfort was not

00:53:36.240 a luxury. Over 10,000 five-star reviews from people who aren't messing about. I've been wearing

00:53:41.260 them for a few months, and the difference to my day-to-day comfort is bigger than I'm comfortable

00:53:45.880 telling you about on a politics podcast. If you know, you know. Go to sheath.com. That's S-H-E-A-T-H.com.

00:53:53.400 Use code trigonometry at checkout for 20% off. First pair comes with a full money-back guarantee,

00:53:59.020 so there's no reason not to try them. Sheaf.com. Once you go sheaf, you won't go back. Sheaf.com.

00:54:07.260 Well, the Grand Mufti was a fascinating character. He was the ultimate aristocrat of Jerusalem.

00:54:13.780 The Husseini family had basically run Jerusalem or run the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif in

00:54:19.320 Jerusalem for hundreds of years. And they were the grandest of the families, but they were also

00:54:25.620 the most Islamic of the families. And they normally acted as one of the major, they held

00:54:33.980 one of the major roles, the major jobs by hereditary right on the Temple Mount. And different

00:54:40.160 of these families all controlled different places in Jerusalem. And the Grand Mufti was actually

00:54:48.580 created by the British. There hadn't been a Grand Mufti really before. The British, in all the

00:54:53.860 thinking, and again, you see this so often in our own society here, and it's still going on,

00:54:59.680 where the British, there's a huge British tendency to think like, let's find the most extreme

00:55:03.720 Islamic organization, and we'll make that the official Islamic organization, and then they'll

00:55:08.960 become moderates. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened with the Grand Mufti. They literally

00:55:14.020 said like, Grand Mufti, we'll hold an election for the Grand Mufti. They held an election,

00:55:19.800 but a moderate won the election. So the British typically said like, well, but we'll scrap the

00:55:24.560 election then. What we'll do is appoint the most extreme young national, Islamic Islamist

00:55:31.700 nationalist, who is this young member of the Husseini family. And this is Amin al-Husseini.

00:55:38.440 We'll appoint him. And we'll not only call him Mufti, we'll call him Grand Mufti. So he's the

00:55:42.600 leader of the whole Islamic community in Palestine, because that will be much easier to deal with.

00:55:47.800 And if we give him all this power, he'll become more moderate.

00:55:51.320 And not only did they do that, but they also gave him the entire economic organization,

00:55:57.700 which was called the Supreme Muslim Council, which owned everything and, you know, owned

00:56:02.860 all the institutions, the mosques, and controlled the budget of the entire Islamic.

00:56:08.280 So they said, like, so they made him not just the religious leader, but the political leader

00:56:11.780 and the economic leader.

00:56:12.880 And they gave him everything.

00:56:13.740 And he was in his 20s.

00:56:14.800 But they thought, this guy, he'll be able to control that side of things.

00:56:19.920 And of course, we have the Jewish agency, which was under Weizmann or under Ben-Gurin,

00:56:27.760 who were the Zionist leaders, and they control their little community.

00:56:32.120 And together, then we can simply deal with these two communities.

00:56:34.620 But it didn't turn out like that, because he gradually turned against the British.

00:56:39.420 and then when Hitler came to power,

00:56:43.780 he immediately sought out the German consul

00:56:46.560 and what he said to the German consul was that,

00:56:49.560 he didn't just say,

00:56:51.080 I'd like you, I'm an Arab nationalist

00:56:52.740 and I'd like you to back us

00:56:55.900 against the evil British empire,

00:56:58.280 which would have been understandable

00:57:00.260 and lots of other people did that, in fact, in Egypt

00:57:02.760 and while Sadat did that in Egypt,

00:57:04.500 the future of the president, for example.

00:57:05.880 No, he said,

00:57:06.740 I actually, I actually, I'm a convert almost to Nazism. And I embrace your racial view of the

00:57:14.720 world. And I embrace your war on the Jews. And during the early 30s, there were actually

00:57:24.100 negotiations, interesting negotiations between the Muftiz people and Ben-Gurri and the Jewish

00:57:31.900 leaders. And they really did get, they did actually come up close to ideas that could

00:57:38.920 have worked, actually. Then in 1936, a rebellion began. This was the Arab Revolt of Palestine.

00:57:49.060 And out of it, first, the British came up with an idea. And they came up with the first idea,

00:57:54.700 what the hell do we do with this problem? We're going to divide it up. We're going to partition

00:58:00.380 it. And so they offered a very small Jewish bit and a large Arab bit, and they offered it to the

00:58:11.460 Arabs. And they said that the Arab bit could be ruled by King Abdullah, who we met earlier,

00:58:15.900 creating his own kingdom next door in Transjordan. This was actually an extremely good idea,

00:58:22.680 and it could have worked. And they even had the great rival of the Husseinis is the Nashashibi

00:58:30.120 family, very distinguished and wealthy Arab land-owning family. And the leader of that

00:58:36.260 family, Ragebal al-Ashashibi, said, I'll be the prime minister of this new state. And the new state

00:58:41.940 would have been Jordan and the Arab areas of Pasadena. That was always the best idea. And it

00:58:46.840 was doable. And the Jews would have got a small area. But the Mufti said, absolutely, we will

00:58:54.640 reject it. Why did he reject it? And this is where this explains much of the history subsequently.

00:59:00.120 and it really explains what's happening today. He said, we reject that because Palestine

00:59:06.580 is sacred Islamic land. And therefore, though we could tolerate the small Jewish population before

00:59:15.100 World War I, we cannot tolerate this Jewish population. And so he restarted the revolt,

00:59:21.540 rejected the plan, killed as many as he could of the Nashashibi supporters, who were the moderates

00:59:26.900 in the Palestinian Arab community, and led this massive armed uprising, which the British

00:59:33.800 crushed with absolute brutality, using many of the methods that were later used by the Israelis,

00:59:41.380 blowing up villages and so on. And also, they were commanded by a General Montgomery

00:59:46.080 of El Alamein fame, who we've all heard of. And they also trained Jewish commandos.

00:59:52.180 And among those commandos they trained was Moshe Dayan and all the other kind of leading Jewish

00:59:57.900 generals were trained by the British. And at the end of this period, the Palestinian community was

01:00:05.920 devastated and the Mufti had escaped. And he went to Iraq. This is the bit that's often missing from

01:00:14.140 the story. He went to Iraq and led an anti-British revolt in Iraq and became the chief advisor,

01:00:20.000 almost a sort of cabinet minister. He sat with the cabinet of this rebel government in Iraq

01:00:27.960 that was anti-British and was calling in Hitler. And so Churchill ordered the invasion of Iraq,

01:00:35.280 the first Iraq war forgotten now in 1941. They took Iraq, they threw out the Mufti,

01:00:41.160 and the Mufti escaped. And Churchill was toying with the idea of assassinating the Mufti.

01:00:46.160 King Abdullah said, please assassinate the Mufti. Even the new king of Saudi Arabia,

01:00:53.160 which we may discuss somewhere in this before we run out of time.

01:00:56.440 We've got lots of time.

01:00:58.560 Even the king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, said, please, can we just,

01:01:05.240 can we eliminate this character? So he was hated by all the reasonable people in the Middle East,

01:01:10.040 But he escaped. And he went to Rome. And through Rome, he went to Berlin. And in Berlin, he was

01:01:17.300 received by Hitler, who incidentally said to him, you're very blonde. You're obviously of Aryan

01:01:22.960 descent. Because the Mufti was fair hair, with sort of reddy hair and freckled features. So

01:01:29.700 Hitler thought like, this is the sort of Arab leader I can deal with. And he also promised him

01:01:36.000 that there'd be a liberation of the British and French power in the Middle East, and that

01:01:43.120 the Jewish community in Palestine, which was now about 400,000 people, would be eliminated.

01:01:49.640 And they actually assigned an Isaacson group, and in other words, an SS, an extermination

01:01:56.300 squad in Greece, which was ready to join the Mufti's people in Palestine to exterminate the

01:02:06.580 entire Jewish community there. The Mufti completely embraced the Holocaust. He was told about the

01:02:11.760 Holocaust by Hitler and by Himmler, and he completely supported the elimination of the Jews

01:02:17.700 in Europe and in the Arab world in Palestine. And this was regarded ultimately as a disastrous

01:02:26.560 mistake for the Palestinian side. And the Mufti kind of just made one mistake after another.

01:02:33.260 And, you know, when one looks at the leaderships of the Palestine-Israel, both sides, I mean,

01:02:39.860 the Israelis always said the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

01:02:44.120 Same also, I'm afraid, is true of the Israeli side, but the Mufti made just colossal errors,

01:02:50.680 and this was the biggest one. He spent the war in Berlin, and frankly, afterwards,

01:02:55.620 he was lucky not to be prosecuted and hanged as a war criminal. But at the end of the war,

01:03:02.880 he made it back to Egypt, and the king of Egypt gave him, who was trying desperately

01:03:10.740 to project Arab nationalist vibes, gave him sanctuary. But just to jump back one step,

01:03:22.060 which is important, after the Arab revolt, after they'd crushed these Arabs and the Mufti had gone

01:03:26.740 into exile, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in Britain. And Neville Chamberlain

01:03:32.020 said, if we have to offend one side, if we have to offend the Arabs or the Jews,

01:03:38.600 we really need to offend the Jews because there are more Arabs. So we are going to reverse

01:03:44.640 entirely our pro-Jewish policy. So he does a complete U-turn and decides to rescind the

01:03:53.080 offer of a partition and a small Jewish entity. And instead, he holds a conference in London

01:03:59.920 called the St. James' Conference, and he invites the Mufti to send delegates. The Mufti is now in

01:04:05.720 Iraq, as I said. And these delegates start to negotiate with the Jews. And what the British say

01:04:13.060 is, we offer you a single Palestine state. A state of Palestine is what you always wanted,

01:04:20.560 a Palestine state. And the only kind of problem with the Palestine state is that there are 400,000

01:04:28.260 Jews in it. And, you know, they are going to have to have some kind of community relations.

01:04:34.780 you know, some kind of entity to ensure defense, but also some sort of self-government,

01:04:40.980 some sort of autonomy. The Mufti rejected this completely. And of course, this was another act

01:04:46.920 of madness because, you know, I mean, this wouldn't have been a great thing to happen,

01:04:55.460 but inevitably the Arabs were the majority in Palestine and they would have taken control of

01:04:59.860 the state of Palestine. And if they were controlled by moderates like King Abdullah,

01:05:05.400 the Jews would have stayed as a sort of protected entity within a community. If the Mufti had taken

01:05:11.800 control, they would have no doubt been driven out in a brutal civil war. But things would have been

01:05:17.240 different and there would have been a Palestine state. The Mufti turned this down. For the same

01:05:23.680 reason that even white Jews, too many to deliver? Yes, basically he would not recognize a Jewish

01:05:30.620 community on this sacred Arab soil, sacred Islamic soil, as he called it. And it's this belief that

01:05:37.040 this area has been controlled by Islam since 638, when it was taken by the Arab invaders in 638,

01:05:47.060 during the great Arab conquests, and that it had to remain completely Arab and Islamic ever since.

01:05:55.120 And, you know, much of this viewpoint is the viewpoint we see today. And I think it is in

01:06:00.360 some ways, there's definitely, and there has always been definitely, large constituencies

01:06:08.520 within the Palestinian community and within the wider Arab community who are willing to make

01:06:14.940 peace with Israel, to recognize Israel, to compromise. And of course, that was what the

01:06:22.100 Oslo Peace Accords were about. But there's also another large constituency that really has always

01:06:29.040 rejected any compromise with the Jewish state in the Middle East, but was willing to make some

01:06:36.860 sort of settlement, some sort of compromise as a sort of middle stage, perhaps, in the dismantling

01:06:45.560 of the Jewish Republic. And there's another section that would say, let's negotiate with

01:06:52.920 the Jewish state. It's here. We may not have liked the way it was created. We didn't like 1948, but

01:07:00.820 it's there. It's going to be there for the sociable future. We need to negotiate with them

01:07:06.100 and work out a deal that also includes autonomy for the Palestinians.

01:07:10.620 So some of the more extreme view now represented by people like Hamas

01:07:17.200 and some of their supporters in the West is exactly that of the Grand Mufti.

01:07:23.180 The sort of maximalist position.

01:07:24.720 The maximalist position.

01:07:25.920 And there's so many questions to open up here,

01:07:28.500 but I think because we want to keep this relatively concise,

01:07:33.260 we should probably skip over, you know, there's a long period between the two wars. But

01:07:38.480 if we head to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and what follows the Nagba,

01:07:44.020 as the Arabs call it, tell us about that. How is the State of Israel ultimately created,

01:07:49.300 and what is the reaction to it? The creation of the State of Israel

01:07:52.640 actually was very like the creation of Turkey, which was only 25 years earlier. And what happened

01:07:59.040 was at the end of World War II, Churchill had put aside the offer from Neville Chamberlain,

01:08:05.460 his predecessor, to create a state of Palestine. But in 1945, the election was won by the Labour

01:08:12.140 Party. Attlee came to power. And he came to power with a plan to get out of many of the big problems

01:08:19.420 that the British Empire faced. This was interesting because it wasn't full decolonization.

01:08:25.020 It was decolonization of two extremely awkward places.

01:08:30.480 One was Palestine, and the other was India, the Raj.

01:08:37.340 Churchill, by the way, from your book, famously, I think,

01:08:40.320 described having to have control of the Middle East

01:08:43.020 as sitting on an ungrateful volcano.

01:08:44.940 He did, an ungrateful volcano that cost $40 million a year.

01:08:48.900 So Churchill and Attlee were both very sympathetic to Zionism.

01:08:55.020 But the challenge was how to solve the impossible problem of the Middle East.

01:09:03.000 And so the first thing they did was to negotiate, was to invite all the parties to a negotiation

01:09:10.640 in London again.

01:09:12.400 And now you're dealing with Attlee and the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

01:09:16.160 And they invited everyone to London and they said to them, basically, again, you can have

01:09:22.600 a state of Palestine, a full state of Palestine, which they'd offered, which Chamberlain had

01:09:28.740 offered in 1939. And they said, but again, there's a large Jewish community in, in Palestine now.

01:09:36.560 By the way, the Jewish community in Palestine called themselves the Palestinian Jewish community.

01:09:41.820 And, um, which is why all the, all the institutions like the Palestine Bank, the Palestine football

01:09:47.880 tea in the air Palestine and the Palestine post were actually all Jewish.

01:09:53.660 Are you saying Jews control Palestine?

01:09:57.100 I'm getting to...

01:09:59.020 Am I right that at that point, my reading, certainly from your book and elsewhere, is

01:10:03.200 that the vast majority of the Jews who were living in that part of the world at the time

01:10:07.420 wanted to be part of a state that wasn't just them.

01:10:12.720 They were happy to share in a broader entity in which they would be allowed to live, right?

01:10:17.520 The fact that you're with us this deep into an episode about the history of the Middle East

01:10:23.280 says something about you. You don't do shortcuts when it comes to understanding a topic properly.

01:10:28.080 That is exactly the audience a show called Unpacking Israeli History is built for.

01:10:32.380 It's hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman, an educator who spent his entire career studying and teaching

01:10:37.200 Israeli history. Each episode walks through the people, events, and decisions that shaped modern

01:10:42.180 Israel from the earliest roots of Zionism through to today. What makes it work is that Weissman

01:10:46.600 isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ and he

01:10:51.160 brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him. From journalist Haviv Retic

01:10:55.720 Guh to Palestinian activist Ahmed Ferd Al-Khatib. It's built for people who want to understand the

01:11:01.000 place properly, not just have what they already believe confirmed back to them. We all know

01:11:05.720 podcasts can go either way. This one held our attention. It doesn't rush the story to get to

01:11:10.200 a neat conclusion and that's rarer than it should be. Search unpacking Israeli history on Spotify,

01:11:15.480 YouTube or Apple Podcasts, or click the link in the description to start listening.

01:11:20.600 I mean, especially in the 20s and the 30s, if you look at the 30 years before

01:11:25.940 the Israeli independence, the Nakba and the Israeli War of Independence,

01:11:29.880 Zionism just means that they believe that they should live in the Holy Land. And there was a

01:11:36.700 huge span of opinions. On one side, you had people who actually believed that they should

01:11:41.960 be in an Arab kingdom, living as an independent entity. And that was what King Faisal had

01:11:48.920 discussed. King Faisal of Iraq and Syria had discussed. That was what his brother King Abdullah

01:11:53.580 had discussed. And actually, that was one road that could have worked if they had been provided

01:12:00.680 with safety and if they'd been recognized. And it might have worked in a system under these

01:12:05.680 Hashemite kings because they grew up in an Ottoman world. They'd grown,

01:12:11.960 up, they'd been educated as Ottomans, and they understood that there could be more than one

01:12:17.240 community, which Islamists like the Mufti did not understand and did not recognize.

01:12:24.180 And so there are these two great traditions in the Arab world. And that again brings us

01:12:29.340 to what's happened now in a much wider plane, which is what is happening now is not just

01:12:35.800 between kind of the West and a resistant axis of Iran

01:12:42.060 and its allies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

01:12:44.140 No, what's really happening today is a debate

01:12:47.960 and a war within Islam about which road of Islam

01:12:53.460 they should follow.

01:12:55.500 And there is a huge tradition, a huge tradition,

01:12:58.760 one that I love within Islam, which is open to others,

01:13:02.680 which is always negotiating how the relationship between Sharia law and society and state should be,

01:13:11.320 which recognizes all sorts of viewpoints within itself.

01:13:17.520 And that tradition is as ancient as the Arab state is ancient.

01:13:24.880 And you see it throughout the history of the two great empires,

01:13:29.100 the Umayyads and the Abbasids into the Fatimids. This is constantly a presence there. And it's

01:13:38.240 one that we recognize and we would welcome. The other one is actually a much more modern

01:13:45.040 invention. Of course, Islam has often seen extraordinary revivalist, puritanical

01:13:53.180 explosions, such as the al-Moravids and the al-Mahads who burst out of the Moroccan deserts

01:14:01.840 with these kind of extremist, messianic, Mardist versions of Islam. Again, we saw it in Sudan,

01:14:09.340 famously, with the Mardi in the 1890s when General Gordon was killed, and so on. And we see it again

01:14:16.980 today in all sorts of different ways. We see it in the Islamic State. We see it in another version

01:14:21.660 of it in the Iranian state, a Shia version of it. We see it in organizations like Hamas and

01:14:28.380 Hezbollah, even though they're both from different sects of Islam. But the new version of this,

01:14:36.480 of Islamism, is a modern invention. And it's really a modern invention of the Islamic Brotherhood

01:14:44.000 in the 1820s and cooked in the 1950s in Egypt, and then it's developed through to what we see

01:14:52.620 today. It's called political Islam, but it's a modern invention. It pretends to be a return to

01:15:03.700 the ancient purities of the 7th century, but actually it's as modern an invention as American

01:15:12.080 Christian evangelism or modern military religious Zionism are, are modern political inventions,

01:15:20.100 and it really belongs with them. So, going back to this period, so now...

01:15:25.460 We were talking about the negotiations in London.

01:15:27.580 So, they had the negotiations in London, and in these negotiations, again, the British offered

01:15:32.620 a state of Palestine. And again, the Mufti turned it down. The Mufti was in exile and in disgrace,

01:15:39.240 but still controlled with a ruthless iron hand, by the way. He had everyone assassinated who

01:15:45.520 disapproved of his delegation, which was led by members of the Hosseini family.

01:15:50.640 Three of the delegates were called Hosseini, and they rejected this offer, at which point

01:15:56.400 the British were now in despair. And at the same time, they were dealing with an even bigger

01:16:03.420 problem, which was India. And exactly at the time in these negotiations, they were facing the

01:16:09.780 problem that India, which they'd hoped to hand over as a single entity, this is relevant by the

01:16:16.280 way, to hand over to a single entity to the Congress party led by Nehru, who had very good

01:16:22.680 relations with the British. And they had hoped to hand over independence and create a new entity

01:16:28.520 which had never existed before. There'd been many Indian states. Very few of them had controlled

01:16:33.860 all of what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and Burma, which were all parts of the Raj.

01:16:42.180 They hoped to hand this vast territory over to a single state that they would call India.

01:16:49.300 But there was a problem. And the problem was the Islamic community, led by Jinnah,

01:16:54.800 who wanted an independent Islamic state and to carve out an independent Islamic state regarding

01:17:02.860 the Congress party as overwhelmingly a Hindu party. And the British had hoped to avoid this

01:17:09.620 because all imperial powers want to keep things as neat as possible and find neat leaderships,

01:17:15.680 neat ways to package, neat administrations. And so they knew this would be deeply complicated.

01:17:21.580 But Mountbatten, the last viceroy, suddenly realized that there was no other way but to do

01:17:27.380 this. And so he agreed that they would divide the Indian Raj into two states, a two-state solution.

01:17:35.900 And the two-state solution was Pakistan, which was in two halves where the overwhelmingly Muslim

01:17:40.920 areas were, which is now Bangladesh and now Pakistan, then called East and West Pakistan.

01:17:46.200 and the larger part of India. Burma would become an independent country and the larger part of

01:17:53.600 India would be a Hindu state ruled by Nehru. So that was what was agreed. This led to a massive,

01:18:00.800 massive violent spasm and also massive transfers of population. Around 12 million people

01:18:10.320 were forced to move from their homes.

01:18:14.260 And there was a vast population swap

01:18:16.160 between the Muslim areas and the Hindu areas of India.

01:18:20.260 Because in each of these areas,

01:18:21.680 let's say an era was majority Muslim,

01:18:23.980 there would have been a minority of Hindus, for example.

01:18:26.500 Yeah, and because it was India, it was huge.

01:18:28.440 The numbers are huge.

01:18:30.220 So in each of those places,

01:18:32.140 there was a massive population transfer.

01:18:34.240 Just as in the creation of Turkey and Greece,

01:18:37.460 over several wars and many decades, millions of people were swapped in desperate circumstances as

01:18:46.000 refugees. And in this case, 12 million people, they estimate, moved as refugees, and a million

01:18:56.020 people were killed. And you have the tragedy of the Indian partition, and you have trains arriving

01:19:02.400 with everybody in the train massacre. You have these extraordinary scenes. So the British

01:19:07.320 give independence to India, and then they turn back to the next problem. And they've now tried

01:19:15.800 to solve the problem of Palestine. And so they've offered the state, the state has been rejected,

01:19:22.500 and now they turn back to a new supranational organization, which is a new version of the

01:19:28.500 Wilsonian version. We talked about President Wilson earlier of the League of Nations. That's

01:19:32.880 called the United Nations, and it's created by President Wilson's Secretary of the Navy,

01:19:39.180 Deputy Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt. So the United Nations

01:19:47.260 is handed Palestine by a desperate British government who just kind of understand what to do

01:19:53.340 and are desperate to get out of there. By the way, as I said, they were decolonizing these places,

01:19:58.780 but their presence was totally important to Britain. Their military presence in Egypt,

01:20:04.880 their military presence controlling the Suez Canal, and their military presence in Iraq

01:20:10.240 because of the oil, the supply of oil. In Persia, the British and the Russians were

01:20:17.320 occupying large parts of Persia. We'll come to that in a minute. So in this frantic debate about

01:20:24.520 what to do with Palestine. The United Nations, the new organization, appoints a United Nations

01:20:32.420 Palestine Committee, and this committee decides to partition Palestine. And they do it in an

01:20:43.000 appallingly bad way, just as the civil servants who designed Pakistan and India just months earlier

01:20:50.940 had done in India with disastrous consequences. Same happened here. Palestine is actually divided

01:20:57.100 into seven parts. If you look at the maps, you may show one while we're talking, you'll see that

01:21:03.780 not one part of this was defensible. Every part of it was militarily and economically

01:21:10.740 unsustainable, politically unsustainable. And the British kept a large section of South Judea

01:21:17.420 around Jerusalem, which they called in the document, by the way, South Judea.

01:21:25.540 And so the Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion accepted this, and the Palestinian Arab

01:21:32.500 leadership, still under the Mufti, rejected it. However, the King of Jordan, he was now King of

01:21:40.720 Jordan, he'd got a new name. He'd become king, and he'd got a new country, Jordan.

01:21:47.420 He's no longer trans.

01:21:49.700 No more trans.

01:21:53.180 No more trans Jordan.

01:21:54.220 Gender neutral Jordan.

01:21:55.320 This is really combustible material.

01:22:01.200 But the British said to the king of Jordan, Abdullah,

01:22:05.940 who, by the way, is one of the heroes of these stories

01:22:08.420 because he risked everything to make a settlement

01:22:12.740 and it cost him a lot.

01:22:15.180 Sorry, just to interrupt.

01:22:16.140 But you actually make that point in the book

01:22:18.060 that actually some of the best rulers in the Middle East

01:22:21.200 were these kings who served their country

01:22:24.160 for a long period of time.

01:22:25.560 Yes, I mean, some of the best government,

01:22:28.040 and this is ironic to our ears

01:22:29.640 because we're so used to hearing

01:22:30.780 everything has to be democracy,

01:22:32.900 but the best governed states in the Middle East

01:22:36.540 have often been absolute monarchies.

01:22:40.680 And that is counterintuitive to us,

01:22:43.020 but it's just a fact.

01:22:44.300 It may be something to do with the fact

01:22:45.820 that many of the monarchies were created by generically, organically, such as Saudi Arabia

01:22:53.520 and the Gulf States and Morocco, rather than created by Britain and France. But that's an

01:23:01.160 interesting debate. But anyway, the British said to King Abdullah, why don't you just take the

01:23:08.100 Arab bits of Palestine? The Jews will take the Jewish bits that they've been assigned, which

01:23:13.580 they've accepted. And you can take that and you can rule it and make a much bigger kingdom of

01:23:19.040 Jordan. And he agreed to this. And there were many meetings with the Jewish leaders.

01:23:25.740 And this actually, it's a tragedy this didn't work, because again, this would have worked.

01:23:31.280 He also said to the Jewish leaders, don't declare independence, because I'd love to create a big

01:23:37.260 Jordanian, Palestinian, Jewish state. And I will make sure you're safe within it. And by this point,

01:23:47.800 the Jews had been through the Holocaust. They'd been through the Arab revolt. And they were

01:23:52.840 convinced that they needed an independent state. A view they'd come to later, come to quite late.

01:23:59.400 We were talking earlier about what did Zionists want? Well, some of the Zionists wanted to be

01:24:03.420 part of an Arab state and learned Arabic and went to see King Faisal and King Abdullah to discuss it.

01:24:09.500 Other ones just wanted farming communities where they would rule themselves, but be part of a

01:24:16.980 larger sort of Palestine state. Other of them had much more, like Jabotinsky, had much more

01:24:22.940 nationalistic viewpoints. And Jabotinsky created a militia, the Irgun, which was about to become

01:24:32.440 part of this story. But even their views were surprising. I mean, Jabotinsky is now regarded

01:24:39.260 as the precursor of Netanyahu and Likud. But he was an interesting character. And he said,

01:24:46.160 what I want is not one Arab should be removed from Palestine. And I want to create a state

01:24:53.460 where the Jews are safe, but no Palestinian Arabs are removed. And in fact, I want a state where

01:24:59.780 when the Prime Minister's Jewish, the Deputy Prime Minister should be Arab. And when the

01:25:03.680 Arab's Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister should be Jewish. In other words, in many ways,

01:25:09.240 a one-state solution, but one where there was real coexistence. So what Zionism meant is

01:25:15.880 completely different from the view now being propagated in demonstrations by activists in

01:25:21.700 Britain. Yeah, not to sidetrack you again, but reading the book, I kind of... Correct me if

01:25:29.120 this is wrong, because you're the expert here, but it sort of felt like there's a process of

01:25:33.320 mutual radicalization going on. Of course. Where the extremists on both sides always win out. At

01:25:39.620 every juncture, it's the extremists that kill some of the civilians on the other side, and then they

01:25:44.820 go, this is what they're all like. And it just, that's been going on the entire time. That's right.

01:25:49.160 Yeah, it is. And actually, it does make you, you know, it makes you wish for a responsible

01:25:54.580 imperial power or responsible supranational organization that actually could have managed

01:26:00.320 this. Because the tragedy of 1947-48, which we're getting to, actually is relevant to this. It's

01:26:06.920 like, United Nations agrees control of this. Britain completely abdicates any responsibility.

01:26:14.100 An appalling act, by the way. And the plan that's offered and agreed by the United Nations,

01:26:20.360 Yes, it offers a Jewish state for the first time,

01:26:23.420 and it specifies this is a Jewish state, this is an Arab state.

01:26:27.300 And the problem is that it's absolutely unworkable, unworkable.

01:26:32.460 And that, as I said, there are seven different kind of segments,

01:26:36.600 all of them, half of them not properly joined.

01:26:39.920 And there's no one to oversee how this would happen.

01:26:45.200 So, of course, what happens is a drive to violence.

01:26:49.820 And almost immediately, even though King Abdullah had secretly agreed with the British and the Jews that he would take over the Arab vets, which, as I said, would have been ideal, he is under massive pressure from the Arab League, which is a new organization just formed in Egypt.

01:27:13.380 and he's under massive pressure not to do this deal.

01:27:17.960 But if the deal had gone according to plan,

01:27:21.080 it would have solved the entire Israel-Palestine problem.

01:27:27.820 But instead, what happened was that militias,

01:27:31.860 Palestinian Arab militias,

01:27:33.360 immediately started attacking the Jewish community.

01:27:35.620 The Jewish community had celebrated

01:27:36.920 the announcement of this plan and accepted it.

01:27:39.800 they immediately started to attack Jewish farms and boroughs in the cities. And at the same time,

01:27:51.980 the Arab League, namely the newly independent countries of Syria and Iraq, and Egypt as well,

01:28:01.720 started to put together a new organization, Arab Liberation Army, which they hoped would avoid them

01:28:07.040 having to do anything, but they could fund it. And it would somehow back their Palestinian

01:28:11.340 Arab brothers and prevent a Jewish state. And that immediately started to militarize the

01:28:21.980 situation. Well, it's got to realize that it was not a done deal. It was not a certainty at all

01:28:30.840 that the Jewish community in Palestine would survive at all. And in fact, in 1947, Ben-Gurion

01:28:38.780 had rushed to Britain, to London, and to Liverpool, where there was, I think, the Labour Conference

01:28:43.900 was taking place. And he'd rushed there and said, please stay another 10 years. We won't declare

01:28:49.500 independence, we promise. He thought that the Jews would be wiped out by this attack. And indeed,

01:28:58.600 the Jewish community, which had its own militias, had two main militias, the Haganah and the Urgun.

01:29:04.960 But the Jewish community was in military desperate straits. And it was not a done deal that the

01:29:13.880 Palestinian Arab militias would win. They seized large areas of Palestine, the whole of Galilee,

01:29:21.880 in effect. And they also, other militias under the control of the Mufti, attacked the Jewish

01:29:30.840 communities around Jerusalem under the command of the Mufti's cousin, Abdel Qadir Husseini.

01:29:38.180 So this is happening. And when you look at the documentation, there is huge panic in the Jewish

01:29:46.280 community there, whether they will be completely wiped out. But there's two things. One is,

01:29:52.820 they literally have no choice. They have nowhere to go. There are 500,000 Jews there, roughly,

01:30:00.420 and they have nowhere to go. It's either survive or die. And the rhetoric of the Palestinian Arab

01:30:09.380 side and the Arab powers is entirely genocidal. It is literally, you could analyze these things

01:30:17.260 any way you like, but the actual quotes are, we will drive them into the sea, we will massacre

01:30:23.560 them, there will be a massacre like the Mongol massacres, and so on and so forth. And though

01:30:27.940 they've all been, like all the quotes in this story, all of them have been kind of manipulated

01:30:33.520 by both sides and misused and put on X and TikTok and stuff. The fact is, these quotes are pretty

01:30:40.040 clear what they mean. And so the war begins. But the British are still there in their barracks,

01:30:47.740 and there's fighting all over Palestine. And in the end, the day comes when the British are

01:30:54.380 leaving, and Ben-Gurion declares an independent state of Israel. He looks at other names, by the

01:31:01.900 way. Because the obvious name is Judea, to call it. But they weren't clear that they would ever

01:31:06.800 get the southern part around Jerusalem, which is Judea. And they weren't clear that they would

01:31:13.380 secure that. But they were more likely to secure the northern bit, which is the historic kingdom

01:31:19.480 of Israel. Hence, they call it Israel. But also, Jewish people had always called it Eretz Israel,

01:31:26.260 the land of Israel, for 2,000 years. So that's why they named it Israel, rather than other names.

01:31:30.900 And so they declare independence at that moment. Something interesting and terrible is happening

01:31:38.860 at this moment. Huge communities of Palestinian Arab population is leaving and fleeing their

01:31:48.560 towns and cities. They are not being driven out. Yes, there are cases where the Israelis would

01:31:56.400 drive out people. We'll come to that in a minute. But at this stage, no one is being driven out.

01:32:02.100 No one's being driven out. But hundreds of thousands, and it's estimated, I think,

01:32:06.400 something like 300,000, which is half the entire refugee number of the Nakba, is happening now

01:32:14.160 out of fear of the coming war or what the Jews would do when they got control.

01:32:22.900 But they are not being driven out. They are leaving, a move which was at least encouraged

01:32:29.380 by much of the Arab leadership. And in places like Haifa, Sfat, Safed, Tiberias, Jaffa and Haifa,

01:32:40.180 big cities, big mixed cities, the Jewish agency and the Jews begged the Arabs to stay.

01:32:48.140 And if you read the memoirs and diaries of Palestinian Arabs, there's a very famous one

01:32:54.460 by Wasif Jowia, who's called The Lute Play of Jerusalem. Everyone should read it. It's a must

01:32:59.680 read. He describes how they left, they were very frightened, and they left and they had every plan

01:33:05.620 to come back, but they weren't driven out. Similarly, a certain Arab, a Palestinian Arab

01:33:12.440 talking about the Nakba, recounts how he was brought up in Safed, pronounced Sfat,

01:33:19.440 where he said that the Arab Liberation Army in the end moved out. And me and my family,

01:33:28.360 I was just a boy, we left Sfat and we fled because we were afraid that the Jews would

01:33:33.700 take revenge for the massacres of 1929, which was more than 10 years before, 20 years before.

01:33:40.320 The name of that boy was Mahmoud Abbas, now president of the Palestine Authority.

01:33:46.700 In other words, half the Arab population that were made refugees in 1947-48 in the Nakba

01:33:56.180 had left before Israel was declared and before Israel launched any kind of offensives and before

01:34:03.800 anybody was driven out of anywhere, which is a very important detail. So in other words,

01:34:09.640 Much of the history of the Nakba is mistold.

01:34:14.540 Why would so many of them leave if there was no violence being committed?

01:34:17.340 There was violence.

01:34:18.360 I mean, there was violence.

01:34:19.680 There was a sort of asymmetric war going on between the Arab militias and the Jewish militias.

01:34:27.320 And so it was violent.

01:34:28.520 And they left because they were afraid of the war.

01:34:30.740 but they also knew that the Arab states would invade if the Arab militias failed. And that

01:34:40.720 would be a major conventional war. And they felt that they wanted to get their families out.

01:34:47.060 But there are lots of records of leaders saying, like, anybody who's got cousins in Beirut or

01:34:53.080 Alexandria has left us, and only kind of the ordinary people are left. So there was a kind of,

01:34:57.640 there were all sorts of things happening in this period. And, you know, it's a tragedy for the

01:35:03.020 Palestinian Arab people that this happened. But the next stage is interesting. Ben-Gurion declares

01:35:11.020 an independent state on the 14th of May, 1948. And almost immediately, the Arab states,

01:35:20.700 five Arab states invade to crush the new Jewish state. Why didn't the plan of King Abdullah

01:35:28.320 just to take control of the Arab sector's work? Well, that comes to your point about extremists

01:35:36.780 continually pushing and sabotaging schemes to make it work. And so what happens is a Jewish

01:35:49.380 militia goes into Dayasin, a village on the edge of Jerusalem, and massacre some of the people

01:35:55.860 there. There was also fighting in Dayasin, and it's unclear how many were fighters, how many

01:36:04.620 were civilians, but it's totally clear that it was a Jewish massacre that included massacre of

01:36:11.480 Palestinian Arab civilians. And the news of this massacre radicalized the Arab world in the news.

01:36:19.380 and it forced King Abdullah to change his plan. And rather than fulfilling his secret plan,

01:36:27.220 he was forced to take command of the Arab League forces, which were five countries,

01:36:34.020 and now they invade. And now this becomes a full-scale war. And again, all of these Arab

01:36:43.920 leaders are hoping to steal, to annex, to carve up Palestine. The Egyptians hope to get the Negev

01:36:53.360 and South Palestine. They are very keen to add territory to the Kingdom of Egypt.

01:37:00.380 The Jordanians want to get as much of it as they can, and the Syrians want to get more of the

01:37:07.260 north, add to the Lebanese. But the Arab side is hopelessly misled, badly commanded, and divided

01:37:17.220 amongst itself. Even before the invasion started, the Arab Liberation Army was basically at war,

01:37:24.160 not just with the Jews, but with the Mufti's forces. And so the Arab situation was hopelessly

01:37:31.340 divided, and the leadership was appalling. The most efficient army on the Arab side was the King

01:37:37.620 of Jordan, King Abdullah's Arab Legion, which was British-officered, British-led, British-armed,

01:37:43.560 and was incredibly more efficient than any of the others. There's one point that's very important

01:37:49.460 to make here. One of the things we see in the moronic discourse about this subject is that

01:37:57.180 Israel's a new country that had never existed before, while all the Arab countries are ancient

01:38:03.960 countries. This is completely untrue. One of the interesting parts of this, all these countries

01:38:09.980 had just been created. So this is a war of totally new countries with new armies that had

01:38:19.320 only existed for a matter of months fighting each other. Syria and Lebanon had just been invented

01:38:26.940 and created by the French. Jordan was only 20 years old. Egypt had just become independent of

01:38:35.440 Britain. And of course, Iraq was a newly invented country that had never existed before, ever.

01:38:45.360 So all of these countries had just become independent in 1945 or 46. So these ancient

01:38:53.620 countries had actually existed for 18 months. And they're invading a country that has literally

01:38:59.520 only existed for 12 hours. So war has joined. And it's now that the Jewish forces do,

01:39:09.640 the Israeli forces do a counter-offensive. At first, they could have been crushed by these

01:39:14.660 invasions. This is what they'd most feared. But there was great chaos, and there was no

01:39:19.260 coordination between the Arab forces. And the Egyptians sent one force straight up the coast

01:39:25.640 to take Tel Aviv and another towards Jerusalem to try to get there before the Jordanians got there.

01:39:32.560 The Iraqis moved through Jordan and invaded and took Janine and northern West Bank.

01:39:39.760 And the Jordanians took the south and fought for Jerusalem. And the northern powers invaded

01:39:47.120 from the north. Finally, when they had survived this initial attack, the Israelis counterattacked.

01:39:55.600 It's a very messy war. There are massacres on all sides. And I think it's a waste of time to try and

01:40:06.740 say who's massacred who first and which ethnic group massacred the other. But there were massacres

01:40:16.020 on both sides of civilians. There were many massacres by the Arab side. There were many

01:40:20.300 massacres by the Jewish side. And ultimately, the Jews counterattacked. And this was the

01:40:25.660 Israeli offensive known as the Dalit offensive, Plan D. And in this offensive, again, it's

01:40:32.820 notorious in the anti-Zionist discourse. But in fact, it was, A, an essential and desperate

01:40:42.220 struggle to seize the roads, the key roads in Palestine, and to try and recover from the initial

01:40:52.860 attack. And B, it gives local powers the orders that if in villages there is resistance by

01:41:05.720 Palestinian Arab or Arab forces, they can attack that village and drive out the people.

01:41:14.480 If the villages accept Jewish rule, they are to appoint Arab leaders for the village and move on.

01:41:25.580 So much is left to local officers. There's also another situation, which is that

01:41:34.440 two things happen, and it's different in different places. On one side, Israeli leaders and officers

01:41:41.540 rush to places like Haifa and beg the Arab population to stay, and in Jaffa, and in Tiberias,

01:41:49.220 and in Safa. In other places, mainly in the middle, where the waste of the Jewish territory

01:41:57.440 is tiny. There are apparently, allegedly verbal orders given by Ben-Gurion to drive out the Arab

01:42:07.640 populations of Ramla and Lydda. And this is the notorious driving out of over 40,000 Palestinian

01:42:17.860 Arabs from their towns in an unforgivable atrocity, which we now call cleansing. And

01:42:25.760 that is an undeniable truth. And it was done for, I would say, strategic reasons in that

01:42:36.200 the form of these segments of the Jewish and Arab state was so unsustainable that they were

01:42:43.700 indefensible. And therefore, they wanted to secure this middle area. And by the end of the war,

01:42:50.620 by the way, Israel was nine miles wide there. So you can see why they did it strategically,

01:42:58.400 but in terms of humanitarian standards, it also would be regarded as a war crime now.

01:43:09.440 So it was different in all sorts of places. And so that's what happened. In the Israeli

01:43:18.240 counter-offensive, all of these forces were defeated one by one by brilliant Israeli commanders

01:43:26.820 who were fighting with their backs against the wall. But they had central command, which the

01:43:32.180 Arab forces didn't. And that always gives a certain cohesion and coherence to the military

01:43:38.280 operations. So by the end of 1948, the Israelis have secured a single sort of area under their

01:43:48.800 control. And the Egyptians are besieged in the Gaza Strip. The only people who had any success

01:43:56.540 against the Israelis were the Arab Legion of the Kingdom of Jordan, which had defeated the Jews

01:44:04.060 and had taken the whole West Bank and kept the whole West Bank and Jerusalem and the old city

01:44:11.780 Jerusalem. Jerusalem itself, the Jewish community had been ethnically cleansed from all of that

01:44:18.460 territory. So at the same time as the Israelis have driven out 40,000 Arabs from Lydia and Ramla,

01:44:29.400 at the same time, the Egyptians and the Jordanians have equally cleansed all the Jewish settlements

01:44:39.540 and farms from their areas. And some of these, by the way, some of these communities, like Hebron,

01:44:44.520 for example, had been Jewish communities for 2,000 years. So that's how 1948 ended. 700,000

01:44:52.840 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes. Israel was independent. And Jordan had taken

01:44:59.220 control of Jerusalem and the West Bank, what they called the West Bank. And the Egyptians who'd hoped

01:45:06.400 to conquer as much of Palestine as they got were left with nothing but the Gaza Strip, which they'd

01:45:12.820 named the All-Palestine Protectorate, but they were only left with that. And that's the way it

01:45:18.500 remained. All sorts of peace plans were attempted by King Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1951

01:45:24.460 for trying to make peace with Israel and for taking the West Bank. For 17 years,

01:45:31.580 the Jordanian Arabs, Arab kingdom, controlled the West Bank, and the Egyptians controlled

01:45:38.980 the Gaza Strip. During that period, no attempt was made to form a Palestinian state. In 1967,

01:45:46.480 Israel was on the verge of being attacked by all the Arab powers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser,

01:45:52.280 the president of Egypt, and they launched a preemptive strike and took control of West Bank

01:45:57.840 and Gaza. And essentially, that is the situation that endured right into very recent times.

01:46:08.580 So Simon, there's going to be people listening to this podcast who, let's just say, don't have

01:46:13.540 a favourable view of the British, who are listening to this and going, well, isn't this all the Brits

01:46:18.340 fault. I think a lot of it is the British fault. I think you're right. Because just as they had in

01:46:23.740 India, just as they had at Chanak in Turkey, the British just literally just abdicated all power

01:46:32.300 and took no responsibility whatsoever for what had happened. Admittedly, Britain was

01:46:37.260 kind of out of money. It was overstretched in India and the Middle East. But they literally

01:46:45.740 just abdicated power. No one took responsibility for what happened in Palestine. And yeah,

01:46:52.040 the British have a lot to answer for. And moving on now, one of the areas or the

01:46:58.580 countries that you deal with in the book that is really interesting towards the end is the

01:47:03.600 nation of Iran, particularly the revolution of 1979. So let's talk about that. And let's talk

01:47:10.560 about how the Ayatollah was underestimated by pretty much everyone until he got to power

01:47:15.640 and showed his true colours.

01:47:17.500 Well, you know, Iran-Persia is a fascinating country.

01:47:21.060 It plays a huge role in this book.

01:47:23.040 And if anyone wants to understand how Iran ended up where it is,

01:47:27.720 I go into immense detail in the cauldron because it's so important.

01:47:31.980 And Iran, modern Iran, had really been created by the Shah's father.

01:47:37.200 And he's a fascinating character called Reza Shah,

01:47:39.800 who had literally been a Cossack groom and was a peasant soldier.

01:47:45.640 who made it in 1925 to become king of Persia. An amazing, almost Napoleonic trajectory.

01:47:54.600 And he was an extraordinary character. He was six foot six, terrifying Martinet,

01:48:00.220 who regularly whipped his generals with the riding whip he walked around with,

01:48:06.760 and a walking stick. So he was a sort of Iranian Peter the Great, really.

01:48:11.460 And he created the modern state of what he called and renamed Iran. And Persians had always called

01:48:19.740 their country both Iran and Persia. So he created a monarchy there. But in 1941,

01:48:29.720 he tried to keep Iran neutral between the Nazi Germany and the British. And this was a fatal

01:48:36.780 mistake. The British and the Soviets, Churchill and Stalin, agreed to partition Iran between them,

01:48:43.880 and they invaded Iran. And this was the first, really kind of a first Gulf War, if you like.

01:48:48.680 They invaded Iran, and they divided it between North and South, and they controlled it. And

01:48:53.860 that's why they held the Tehran Conference there for the Big Three in 1943, because they controlled

01:48:59.200 it. But at the end of the war, his son had succeeded to the throne, and Muhammad Reza

01:49:09.900 Pahlavi, known to us as the Shah, because he's the only Shah we've known, which is just the

01:49:16.240 Persian for king. And he was literally in his 20s, and he inherited a country that was occupied

01:49:24.100 partly by the Soviets, partly by the British. And his whole dream was to restore the autocracy

01:49:30.340 that had been created by his father, but also to create a nationalistic monarchy

01:49:37.860 that would be a power in the Middle East. And so that was the Shah. But first of all,

01:49:46.100 He had to get the Soviets out. Stalin really wanted to keep northern Iran for himself to get

01:49:54.920 more oil for the Soviet Union. And therefore, he set up two republics, semi-independent Soviet

01:50:02.040 vassal republics in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, which he was forced to give up by the Americans.

01:50:08.600 And so the Shah started his road to power in Iran. And the Shah is another fascinating character.

01:50:19.940 He's regarded as a tragic figure because his rule ended in such disaster with his downfall.

01:50:25.620 And his autocracy reflected many of his characteristics. It was brittle, it was vain,

01:50:32.300 It was majestic. But at the same time, he was an extremely capable politician and reformer,

01:50:39.300 and a radical reformer in a way that his father had been too. So he's a very complex figure.

01:50:46.240 By the 1970s, because we're jumping ahead here, because we've got a lot to cover.

01:50:51.640 By the 1970s, the Shah of Iran had successfully reformed Iran, and he had made Iran

01:50:59.560 highly educated. He had created an education system. He had emancipated women. And at the

01:51:07.360 same time, he had taken control, total control of Iranian oil. And he had made Iran really the sort

01:51:14.940 of the great power of the Middle East, the most important power. He had good relations with Israel.

01:51:20.880 He had good relations with Saudi Arabia, and he was always opposed to any religious extremism.

01:51:31.420 But at the same time, there is a great tradition in Iranian and Persian history of rebellion and

01:51:38.320 rejection of state and of state corruption. And the Iranian state was corrupt. It was also

01:51:46.240 inefficient. And the Shah had created a system where everything was decided by one person.

01:51:54.320 And the trouble with a one-man state is that when that man takes his eye off the ball,

01:51:59.400 becomes exhausted, as all politicians do. After all, most politicians are mad after 10 years in

01:52:04.900 power. He'd been Shah in Iran for 40 years. And so he began to lose control of Iran and how to rule

01:52:14.920 it. And over time, the different oppositions against his autocracy began to coalesce around

01:52:26.520 the figure of Ayatollah Rouhala Khomeini, who had resisted the Shah all along since the 60s.

01:52:36.900 In 1963, he led a rebellion against the Shah's reforms, and that was ruthlessly crushed by the

01:52:43.280 Shah. But by 1978, the Shah had cancer, which no one knew about, by the way. It was a secret. But

01:52:50.380 he was losing his grip. He was losing his concentration. He wasn't really sure where to go

01:52:55.400 next. And meanwhile, the decision to create a rigid autocracy had been a terrific mistake,

01:53:03.340 because there were many parts of the Iranian opinion that were religious, even Islamist,

01:53:10.580 but would have accepted the monarchy as a guarantor of stability and even a respecter

01:53:18.040 of Shia Islam. And the Shah had rejected all these parts of opinion. There was another part

01:53:26.420 that were really liberal Democrats that, again, would have accepted a more constitutional monarchy.

01:53:32.220 Maybe not a fully constitutional liberal democracy, the way we understand it,

01:53:36.760 But the way the Shah ruled was no opposition at all. And so there was nowhere to go for opinion.

01:53:43.680 This is the terrible flaw of rigid autocracies. And so he was being hoisted by his own petard.

01:53:51.660 Now everything was blamed on him. And things had gone wrong. Part of his economic success

01:53:58.360 had been industrializing Iran. But the problem was that millions of peasants from the countryside

01:54:05.400 had moved to the towns, inspired by his reforms. But when they got there, they found only slums.

01:54:12.280 And in fact, the state was extremely inefficient. Inflation was rising. State spending was corrupt.

01:54:17.640 Massive amounts were stolen. And so they found themselves at a loss, and they turned to the

01:54:25.840 mosques. And they turned to the mosques. Meanwhile, in Iraq, in exile, was Ayatollah Khomeini.

01:54:31.900 Again, a very complex and interesting character. He was part of a tradition of increasingly

01:54:39.600 political ayatollahs and clerics in Iran. And he had managed to make himself,

01:54:49.420 often thanks to the Shah's mistakes in handling these oppositions, the focal person of the

01:54:56.100 opposition. He was recording cassettes which were smuggled back into Iran that denounced the Shah's

01:55:02.140 corruption, his relationship with the Americans, his relationship with the Israelis, and blaming

01:55:07.060 him for everything. And in 1978, Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, rang the Shah several times

01:55:17.320 and said, what do you want me to do about Ayatollah Khomeini? Can I kill him for you?

01:55:26.100 He literally made this offer three times.

01:55:27.800 And the Shah said, we don't do that sort of thing.

01:55:30.040 Though, of course, that wasn't quite true.

01:55:32.180 The Shah had actually assassinated quite a lot of people.

01:55:34.960 But they obviously discussed it

01:55:36.560 because they decided that it would make him into a martyr

01:55:39.220 and he could be more dangerous dead than alive.

01:55:41.780 I questioned that decision.

01:55:43.460 There was also certain snobbery in it

01:55:45.260 is that we don't deal with people like Saddam Hussein.

01:55:48.780 Saddam Hussein is also a major character in this book.

01:55:51.700 And the Shah had met Saddam Hussein

01:55:53.780 and made a deal with him in 1975.

01:55:56.100 which was one of the Shah's triumphs and got him control of the Shat al-Arab and much of the

01:56:02.040 Straits of Hormuz, which is very relevant today. It was his taking of the Straits of control of

01:56:07.440 the Straits of Hormuz that the Iranians are manipulating right now. So they owe a lot to

01:56:13.140 the Shah who came before them. But anyway, when he met Saddam Hussein, he was then in his 20s or

01:56:18.660 early 30s, he said, I think he's a very well-dressed young man, very polite and intelligent young man.

01:56:24.380 Anyway, he didn't want to take any favours from Saddam Hussein.

01:56:29.120 So, Saddam Hussein, who was facing his own problems with his own Shia majority in Iraq,

01:56:35.400 expelled Khomeini.

01:56:37.820 And Khomeini wondered where to go and asked the French if he could go there.

01:56:43.700 And the French president, just kind of asked Iran if it was okay.

01:56:47.680 And the Shah thought, mistakenly, said, fine, take him.

01:56:51.580 And Khomeini was actually, I would say, a brilliant politician.

01:56:57.600 And this is strange because our image of him is of this kind of bearded firebrand

01:57:02.500 who, in our westernized minds, seems to belong in the 6th, 7th century of Islamic history.

01:57:11.340 And he dressed in robes and turban.

01:57:16.580 and he projected incorruptible authority and legitimacy. But in 1970, he had done an

01:57:26.660 extraordinary thing. He was an innovator, and he'd come up with an idea that no one took seriously.

01:57:33.140 And the idea was that of a supreme leader who would be a religious judge, a religious scholar,

01:57:45.800 the jurist in power, it was called. And the jurist in power sounded like a mad idea from

01:57:53.100 distant, distant Islamic sort of ancient history, was that a cleric would have supreme power in the

01:58:00.400 state. And in the absence of the occulted 12th imam, who the Shiites expected to return,

01:58:08.300 occulted means hidden, who the Shiites expect to return one day in a messianic,

01:58:15.340 modest, glorious apocalypse. In the absence of him, this clergyman could rule as supreme ruler

01:58:24.160 of Iran. He wrote this in 1970. No one took it seriously. And no one even expected, A,

01:58:32.600 it would ever happen. But B, most people didn't really think he believed it either.

01:58:37.140 Now in Paris in 1978, outside Paris, he's sitting in his garden and suddenly coalesces around him

01:58:44.020 is the entire Iranian opposition. Now, this opposition goes from the few people that

01:58:51.540 believed in this idea of an Islamic clergyman and a theocracy to people who are literally

01:58:58.440 liberal Democrats like you and I, who wanted a liberal democracy in Iran. And in between are

01:59:04.480 all sorts of Islamist Marxists, Leninist Stalinist Marxists, Democrats, liberals, conservatives,

01:59:13.720 all of them. And because the Shah has alienated all of this rainbow of opinion, they all coalesce

01:59:20.560 around Ayatollah Khomeini. So of course, what do the liberal Democrats think? They think that he's

01:59:25.620 really just going to be a kind of constitutional monarch, maybe like a Pope. And then there's

01:59:32.140 the people, the extreme clergymen around in his inner circle, they hope that he will somehow rule.

01:59:40.580 And in between, there are all these Marxists and liberals and socialists, and they all have

01:59:44.680 different views. But Khomeini offends none of them. He remains entirely enigmatic. All he says

01:59:51.920 is he wants to restore the constitution. What constitution? What does he mean by that? No one

01:59:57.180 knows. He meets with the Americans. He tells them that he won't persecute the Jews in Iran and he

02:00:03.840 won't exclude America. He'll still sell oil to America. He only will exclude Israel. Though if

02:00:08.980 you read his writings, he regards the Jews as an inherently evil people. And I quote what he wrote

02:00:16.060 in the book. But the point is, he plays this brilliantly and it gets better because crowds

02:00:24.240 are now gathering in Iran in a momentum that becomes millions of people protesting. And

02:00:31.280 constantly, things go so wrong and the Shah is blamed. There's the famous cinema that is lit on

02:00:39.840 fire actually by Islamist terrorists, but the Shah is blamed. And the Shah is incapable of regaining

02:00:48.800 the initiative, the control of the narrative of what we would now call.

02:00:54.480 And he's just unsure what to do. He sacks his prime minister and then appoints another one.

02:00:59.960 That's a disaster. He sacks and then finds another one. Soon he can't find any prime

02:01:03.920 ministers and he's unclear what to do. The crowds get bigger and bigger. The police and military

02:01:09.520 fire into the crowds. There are funerals. And all the time, Ayah Khaled Khamenei is waiting.

02:01:14.300 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.

02:01:36.680 And of course, this is one of the problems of being a monarch. If you make yourself a bloody

02:01:42.400 ruler, your son, you may destroy the throne for your son. And he wants his son to succeed ultimately.

02:01:48.580 But it's important to realize how few people have been killed by the Shah. The Shah, again,

02:01:56.360 there's a narrative of the Shah as the brutal autocrat. He was certainly an autocrat. He was

02:02:02.280 certainly vain. There was certainly corruption. Clearly, he made a lot of mistakes. But the

02:02:10.600 numbers of people killed are actually tiny. It's something like a little over 2,000 people

02:02:18.440 die violently at the hands of the state during a 40-year rule. I'll repeat that, during a 40-year

02:02:26.380 rule. And the great majority of those 2,000 are killed in the build-up to the revolution.

02:02:33.800 And so, yes, the Shah had a secret police, the SAVAC. Yes, they tortured hundreds of people.

02:02:40.320 Yes, terrorists were killed in shootouts. And yes, they did fire into crowds at various times.

02:02:46.380 But the numbers compared to the Islamic Republic are literally tiny. In one day in January this

02:02:55.000 year, one day, which is the 8th of January, they killed thousands more people than the Shah killed

02:03:04.860 in 40 years. Now, that's an extraordinary figure. The Islamic Republic itself admitted to killing

02:03:14.620 6,000 people between the 7th and 8th of January, 6,000. That is a vast understatement. The real

02:03:23.320 numbers are something like 42,000. But that's 6,000 on that one day, which even the Iranians

02:03:30.920 lying in the completely mendacious Iranian Republic has admitted, is three times as much

02:03:37.680 as were killed under the Shah, under the autocracy of the Shah during 40 years. And by the way,

02:03:44.760 you know, this was the Shah that people were demonstrating all over the West about the evil

02:03:49.400 of this man. So the story of the Shah is a fascinating one. But now the Shah has left,

02:03:57.760 and now there's this amazing moment when Ayatollah Khomeini flies back in. And when he gives a

02:04:04.160 speech in chaotic scenes, he says, you know, I am the authority, and we are just going to punch in

02:04:11.160 the mouth, the present government. And what happens between now, 1979, and about in the next

02:04:20.440 two years, between now and 1981, is a sort of masterclass in how to assemble absolute power.

02:04:28.780 And he's helped by events. But what he gradually does is he appoints a prime minister,

02:04:35.180 Bazargan, who is a sort of a suit-wearing, tie-wearing, a moderate Islamist. And by the

02:04:42.460 way, the sort of Islamist from one of the Islamist parties that in the 60s would have been happy to

02:04:47.900 work under the Shah, but was alienated by the Shah. So he appoints him prime minister, but at the same

02:04:56.520 time, he appoints a shadow government, an Islamic committee, which is run by his top people, who

02:05:02.360 include Ali Khamenei, who became the supreme leader who was assassinated this year. And they

02:05:08.740 set up a sort of committee in the school, in a school which becomes the real government of Iran

02:05:14.800 that undermine the prime minister's government. And gradually, because a series of things happen,

02:05:21.880 there's a rebellion by the Marxist opposition militias, and they put that down. They start

02:05:31.400 to execute all the Shah's ministers and anyone they can find who's been involved in the Shah,

02:05:36.200 they start to execute. Then Saddam Hussein invades. And this is the key moment because

02:05:43.000 Saddam Hussein invades, hoping to reverse everything that the Shah had achieved in the

02:05:48.280 Straits of Hormuz, the Shat al-Arab, and the borderlands, and to conquer the oil fields

02:05:55.520 of the mainly Arab areas of Western Iran. And that enables Ayatollah Khomeini and his people

02:06:07.320 to create the Revolutionary Guards Corps, to absolutely radicalize the regime,

02:06:16.980 to crush all the national peoples, like the Kurds, who had hoped to achieve autonomy,

02:06:23.060 and to destroy all the factions and militias that had helped them make the revolution,

02:06:30.560 including all these Marxist militias. And they kill all of them in astonishing kind of blood

02:06:38.180 purge. And out of this emerges something that no one had taken seriously. And the Americans

02:06:44.660 had said, like, the Americans had said, he's a Gandhi-like figure. There's a famous, there's a

02:06:49.680 famous, um, very ultra-liberal, um, sort of decolonialist professor, Professor Falk, who

02:06:56.560 typically in the New York Times, nothing has changed, writes an article saying that, you know,

02:07:02.080 Khomeini is going to be the great liberal humanist, humanitarian of our time. And you can read that

02:07:07.880 article. We can all make simple mistakes. Yeah, simple mistakes. So, so he has pulled off this

02:07:13.360 amazing confidence trick and this brilliant leger de main of political, I mean, almost

02:07:20.140 political genius. And out of it, he creates a new constitution in which there is a president

02:07:25.760 elected, there is a parliament, a magistrate elected, but actually they are all under a

02:07:33.240 supreme leader, this jurist in power, a jurist in law. And that is which we call the supreme

02:07:41.480 leader, but is in fact much more than that name gives. And it is basically a sacred monarch for

02:07:48.380 life, pointed for life, and with absolute authority. And that is the system that we've

02:07:55.540 inherited today. When he was dying, his own chosen heir, another very senior ayatollah,

02:08:05.520 denounced his massacre of the opposition and said that he was much worse than the Shah,

02:08:09.920 by the way, which he was by many, many, many multiples. And he dismissed him and had him

02:08:16.040 arrested. He couldn't quite execute him. And he appointed Ali Khamenei as his successor.

02:08:23.560 And Ali Khamenei succeeded him after 10 years in 1989. And he ruled for almost 40 years,

02:08:31.980 was almost as long as the Shah. And he plied a very radical path. He made a few concessions,

02:08:42.180 mainly the deal with the Obama deal, nuclear deal, which was a concession. But basically,

02:08:50.120 he stuck to Khomeini's ideology and path, which was to ensure absolute Islamist control and

02:09:00.260 theatric control of the people of Iran. But at the same time, he added a new idea, which Khomeini

02:09:07.480 had also fostered, which was to exploit weakness in the rest of the Middle East and to create

02:09:15.380 a web of militias that would take control of states and which would be what one of his top

02:09:23.520 Generals, General Soleimani called the six armies so that Iran could be defended against America or

02:09:32.620 whoever threatened it with Arab blood, with Arab militias, and without having to fight on Iranian

02:09:39.500 soil. And this is the system that he was able to create thanks to the mistake possibly of the

02:09:46.920 Iraq War, the America's Iraq War. Because in 2003, President Bush knocked out Iraq out of the

02:09:56.720 power structure of the Middle East. And in doing that, he just removed the main counterbalance to

02:10:03.160 Iran. Iraq is a sort of massively powerful country, and it's been removed from power there

02:10:09.720 ever since. So for the next 25 years, or whatever we are, 24 years, Iran is removed as a power.

02:10:16.920 And Iran, Iraq is a rule of power, and Iran succeeds and is able to create what I call the

02:10:23.380 informal empire or the six armies empire. And this enables them to control essentially Iraq

02:10:30.560 for the last 24 years, 23 years. And then Syria under the assads, which by the way,

02:10:38.260 is the slaughterhouse of Syria. And I mean, 600,000 people were killed under that regime.

02:10:42.740 and Lebanon through the paramilitary Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza through Hamas and Palestine

02:10:52.100 and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is their other little entity there, their faction that

02:10:58.340 they control. And so that actually created a sort of informal Iranian empire that was really the

02:11:06.320 most powerful Iran had been, you know, since Nadir Shah in the 18th century. Nadir Shah was the Shah

02:11:12.500 who actually took Delhi. So he was a pretty effective conqueror. And before that, the most

02:11:20.200 powerful since the Sassanid Empire in the 4th, 5th centuries, 6th centuries. So, I mean, in a way,

02:11:29.960 an amazing achievement. But all the time, they were also preparing, A, to try and get nuclear

02:11:36.120 weapons, which so far, in the Islamic world and the Arab world, only Pakistan had achieved nuclear

02:11:44.560 weapons, which they called the Islamic bomb. Iran also sought one, as we now know. And at the same

02:11:53.180 time, the top commanders there, people like Vahadi, Soleimani, had created an idea which was

02:12:01.700 of defense, which they called mosaic defense, which is that if they ever went to war with

02:12:08.620 America, they would sort of divide up the country and everyone, according to a preordained plan,

02:12:16.880 would defend their parts separately. So that if the command structure, the leadership was knocked

02:12:22.560 out, the war could go on even more effectively in some ways. And at the same time, the other part

02:12:29.280 of it was to destroy the hated Arab kingdoms, which they hated, and the moderate kingdoms in

02:12:35.560 the Gulf. And one of the reasons that the big reason they hated them, when obviously they're

02:12:40.740 Sunni, the Iranians are Shia, but the big reason they hated them was that the lifestyle in places

02:12:46.180 like Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or Dubai is a sort of living reproach to the sort of economic disaster

02:12:53.980 and the dictatorship of Iran. But they would also take control of the Straits of Hormuz,

02:13:00.020 which is exactly what's happened. And they'd practiced that during the Iran-Iraq war in the

02:13:05.320 80s. And so that's exactly what's happened. And so we reach where we are today, which is that in

02:13:16.280 the end, they had said repeatedly, and their generals have said repeatedly, I quote them in

02:13:21.140 the book, their big dream is a sort of apocalyptic war with America. Because in the 80s against

02:13:28.880 the conventional army of Iraq, and also even more during the Iraq war where they organized

02:13:38.540 the insurgency against the Americans, they had worked out how Americans so strong in technology,

02:13:45.480 so vast in their grandeur and their majesty and their forces had this great weakness that they

02:13:51.340 hated to lose men, and that their attention span was incredibly short, and that their political

02:13:57.840 system was incredibly inconsistent and constantly changing. They could never have imagined they'd

02:14:03.720 have such an erratic president as they have today. But all of these things convinced them

02:14:10.020 that in an apocalyptic struggle, they could beat America in this way. And that's exactly what

02:14:15.600 they're trying to do now. It's that saying that I think is very popular in the Middle East. In

02:14:21.200 the West, you have all the watches. In the East, we have all the time. Yes. Which brings us sadly

02:14:26.600 to the end of our conversation, because we have, unlike the Iranians, run out of time. We have.

02:14:31.160 We've talked for over two hours, barely scratched the surface, it feels like to me,

02:14:35.820 even though you've done a fantastic job laying it all out. So it means we must have you back

02:14:39.860 to talk about this in more depth again at some point. I hope you'll come back. I'd love that.

02:14:43.780 And thanks for giving my book a bit of a moment in the sun. And thanks for having me. It's been

02:14:48.460 really interesting. For the listeners, it's called The Cauldron. Before we wrap up, Simon,

02:14:52.460 what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be?

02:14:55.600 The one thing that we aren't talking about is something which I feature a lot in the book.

02:15:00.840 And that is the beauty of Arab poetry. And what I wanted to do in the book,

02:15:07.240 The Cauldron, was make sure that it wasn't just a book about endless wars and dictators.

02:15:15.500 And I also wanted to celebrate the culture of the Middle East. And by that, I mean

02:15:19.400 in history books, there's a real tendency just to have one bloody thing after another.

02:15:25.200 And you don't get a feel of life passing. So this book, The Cauldron, the making of the modern

02:15:31.400 Middle East, it tells you how the modern Middle East was made. But I also wanted some feel of

02:15:36.000 how people live and have lived and will live in the Middle East. And the way I've done that is to

02:15:41.700 use all sorts of Arab poetry, Iranian poetry, Hebrew poetry in the book. And I think the most

02:15:49.580 moving to me are the famous suspended odes of pre-Islamic Arabia. And I've quoted them a lot

02:15:57.300 in the book. And I just hope people enjoy them and understand that this should give a feel

02:16:02.920 for the Middle East that isn't just wars.

02:16:07.060 Poetry is all-important.

02:16:10.240 What a pleasure.

02:16:11.540 Simon, can't wait to have you back for round two.

02:16:14.040 Thank you so much.

02:16:15.020 Thanks for having me.

02:16:33.100 Cent Sith thousand ancestors had found my own

02:16:33.940 hundred thousand.

02:16:37.340 Wasn't beans of何ege of anything.

02:16:40.600 And elibon riche started thousand thousand.

02:16:45.800 Riche had touched in my often times.

TRIGGERnometry - August 22, 2026

True History of the Middle East with Simon Sebag Montefiore

Episode Stats

Transcript