Who REALLY Made the Modern Middle East - with Simon Sebag Montefiore (Part 2)

0:00Our subscribers fund ARK Media. They help allow us to cover Israel in the Jewish world honestly and without compromise. Join us at ARK Media dot org. And to our subscribers, thank you.

0:17You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. There are no total victories. There are also no total solutions to political problems. There will always be large constituencies within the Israeli nation, but also within the Palestinian nation, that will object to the existence of the other. Even after you have the UN partition plan, which we all know about, in 1947, secretly King Abdullah of Jordan approached Golda Meir that he would take over the Arab parts of the partition, and there would have been population swaps so that there would have been great Jewish and Arab minorities in each of the states.

0:59So I think some of these earlier plans are relevant today.

1:15Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now, on to today's episode. On Monday, we published part one of my conversation with Simon Sibag Montefiore, covering the period from 1905 to 2001, and ending, fittingly, on September 11, 2001.

1:58one. For most of us, 9-11 still feels like recent memory, but next week marks its 25th anniversary, enough time for the event to begin passing from memory into history. And that distance gives us a chance to see September 11th not only as a day to change the world, but as part of the much longer history that produced the Middle East as we know it today. My conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore right after this short message. This message is sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute. Every election cycle in Israel is accompanied by the words, this is the most consequential election in history.

2:39It's become a cliche. But this time, it may actually be true. As followers of Israeli politics, you know how hard it can be to distill the issues from partisan spin to go behind the headlines to understand what's really going on. If you enjoy the kind of thoughtful, fact-based conversations we have on this podcast, I think you'll appreciate the work of the Israel Democracy Institute, IDI, a leading nonpartisan center of research and action. IDI offers practical proposals for strengthening Israeli democracy and clear, accessible analysis of the biggest challenges facing the Jewish state. They're explainers on everything from Israel's electoral system to the ultra-Orthodox draft make complex issues easier to understand, and their regular polling and public opinion research are among the best tools available for tracking where Israeli society is moving in real time.

3:31As Israel heads towards a pivotal election, regardless of where you stand politically, IDI is an essential resource for making sense of what's at stake and where the country may be headed after the votes are counted. To learn more, visit elections.idi.org.il forward slash 2026, or follow the link in the show notes.

3:59Here's part two of my conversation with Simon Sabag Montefiore. In 9-11, as you know, the al-Qaeda attacks America. America attacks Afghanistan and then Iraq. And it knocks Iraq out of the power architecture of the Middle East. And Iraq has always been the major Arab state that restrains Iran and that is always in conflict with Iran. And actually, there was no need to take out this rumped state. I think it would have been wiser. We may disagree on this, but I think it would have been wiser to leave it there, separating in its own decay. But by taking it out, America gives Iran a great opportunity, not only to back the insurgency and to back all sorts of militias in Iraq, which you know all about, but also it creates a sort of vacuum.

4:48Iraq is out of the game. It's still out of the game. It'll be a long time before Iraq is a major Middle Eastern power. And Iran, therefore, has this amazing opportunity. And what they do with it is they create this informal empire. Some people call it the Shia Crescent. Some people call it the Six Armies. And this is what General Soleimani, the sort of mastermind of this strategy. The former head of the IRGC who was killed in the first Trump administration, Qasem Soleimani, who was the architect of all of this. Correct. Who was the architect, but he was the specialist. Of this proxy system throughout the region.

5:23The proxy system. And the proxy system is kind of brilliant. And the idea is like, we get Arab people who we support because they're radicals and they support us because they're radicals and they need our support. But we use Arab fighters, Arab blood to defend Iran on Arab soil. And they are also the vanguard against Israel and America. So they have Hezbollah, which is really their prime military force. And its leader, Nasrallah, really becomes almost a member of the sort of top planning group that really run this six armies structure. And the six armies are led by Nazarela. In Gaza, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, a smaller paramilitary.

6:12The Houthis in Yemen and the Assad's are the only state, actual state in Syria. And then you've got a variety of about three or four really powerful Shiite militias in Iraq that are really more powerful at times in the state. And Hezbollah is so successful that it gradually captures Lebanon and takes control of Lebanon. So you have this amazing structure. And it's really an astonishing thing that Iran, from being this kind of revolutionary state trying to survive, suddenly becomes, thanks to Iraq 2003, becomes this kind of proto-empire. And that lasts right through to our period. And of course, when the Asads are threatened after the Arab Spring, after 2011, the Asads look like they're going to fall.

7:02And the Iranians say, like, no way are we going to let this ally fall. And so the Russians join in, Hezbollah joins in, the Iranians join in, and they save the Asads. So they hold together this sort of proto-empire until October the 7th, 2023. And the problem with proxy strategies is that proxies don't always do what you say. And when they light the touch paper, the fuse can burn all the way back to the patron. And that is essentially what happened with the October 7th attacks. As far as we know, the Hamas leadership under the Sinwar brothers had consulted the Iranians and Hezbollah about the plan, but they haven't agreed on a date.

7:46But Hezbollah, Nasrallah and the Iranians had said, you absolutely cannot launch this without pre-warning us, without coordination with us. We will give permission. And the Sinwar brothers decided, no, we don't trust the Iranians or Hezbollah because we believe probably that the Israeli security service Mossad has infiltrated them. And therefore, we will launch our own operation when we're ready, with all the help they've given us. But we won't warn them. But they'll find out soon enough, and then no doubt they'll join in. But when it happened, Hezbollah sat on their hands. They didn't fully intervene.

8:27They weren't prepared. And they instead started to bombard Galilee. As we know, this is very recent history. And I think it's true to say that if Hezbollah, with its 50 ,000 men and its huge missile arsenal, had intervened on October the 8th, Israel really would have been in jeopardy. But that didn't happen. And so Israel was able to defeat each of these powers, or at least severely hobble them, one in turn after another. But the thing to understand about the Islamic Republic is, it has an extreme radical but also apocalyptic Mardist strategy and ideology and theology, which means that they're not afraid of apocalyptic wars, first of all, in a general sense.

9:14Some parts of the regime actually think this could be a good thing. But secondly, they've studied how to defeat conventional powers. The Iran-Iraq war was really a study of how to defeat a power with lots of tanks. Iraq had lots of tanks and aircraft, But actually, if you throw enough waves of people, children running at you, the tanks don't work and they can't break through. And in the end, you can undermine them. Again, with America, all the shock and awe and the grandeur of America, the greatest military power in history, could be threatened by a few IEDs and by an insurgency. because America, like all Western democracies, is extremely inconsistent, is always erratic, even when it doesn't have an erratic president, and also has very little endurance for casualties, even when wildly provoked, as it was on 9-11.

10:07So they learned that. The third thing they learned from Soleimani was that actually, you can take out the leaders, but if you have a mosaic, what they call a mosaic leadership is much harder to take out. And the last thing to understand is that they understood always that the Straits of Hormuz was something, not just an asset, but something they'd always wanted. The Shah had wanted it. And the last thing to understand about Iran today is that though everyone says this is a sort of new regime, the military have taken control, these guys have always been at the top since the 80s. They started in the early 80s in that war against Iraq as junior officers, some of them like Soleimani, actually raised their own brigades and took them to the front.

10:50And the generals today who are in their 60s have been at the top of the regime forever in the revolutionary gods, in the Quds force, around the supreme leader and his son Mochtaba, whether or not he's alive, dead, occluded, vanished, comatose. This group has been at the top and they appear at various times. Every time there's an uprising or there's kind of an opposition. These are the generals who write to the leadership to say, you've got to crush these people. Back in 2009, back in the 90s, back in 2019. So they are always there and they are always ruthless followers of the regime. And the leaders of today, Vahidi and Jafari, have always been there and they're there now.

11:37Okay, here we are in the 2020s and something remarkable has happened, which is the dominant military powers. And I'm talking about Iran now. Dominant military power in the region. We talked before about Turkey. Dominant military power in the region today. We're obviously talking a lot about Israel. Dominant military power in the region. None of these are Arab countries. And there's Saudi Arabia, obviously, which you argue has effectively replaced Egypt as leader of the Sunni Arab world. So we tend to think of the Middle East and talk about the Middle East in the frame of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

12:09But three of the four countries I just mentioned, Israel, Iran, and Turkey, the dominant military powers in the region, none of them are Arab. So what is the significance of that? How fundamental is that realignment? Well, it's fundamental because it really shows how Israel Palestine isn't really the center of the region. But obviously, it's a separating saw and a major issue. You only have to look at the major powers to see that these powers, except for Israel itself, are not part of the Arab world, in fact. But they are very significant Middle Eastern powers. And the reason why they're so important is because of their histories.

12:44And the Arab power, the Arab states at the centre of what we think of as the sort of fulcrum of the Middle East, you know, the Levant, which is sort of Syria and that, they were all invented by British and French statesmen sitting in conferences in San Remo and Seve in the 1920s. And so they have all the problems of contrived states. But Turkey became the successor of a powerful empire. And the reason why, in 1922, Turkey was able to assert its independence under the future Ataturk, one of the great nation builders of the period and of my book, was because he had control of a major army group that was left intact, an Ottoman army group.

13:27He was able to defeat the Greeks, defeat the Armenians, throw out the French, and in the end challenge the British. And out of that came a brutal war, an ethnic war, a huge deportation, massacres, ethnic conflict, and a swap of populations. And out of it came the Turkish Republic. So the reason why Turkey is such, Turkey is an impressive state because it is a successor state to the Ottoman Empire. And it is also born out of military dynamism from 1922. It was born as a military state. And because of that, its new nationalism is tempered by struggle. In that way, it's very like Israel. The foundation of Turkey really does resemble Israel in many ways.

14:13And it's very unfashionable to say this. I remember when you're working on this book, we were sitting together in my apartment and you made this point of all the things you talked about in your book. This really struck me as a very, very original thought in the swirl of Middle East history and all the academia. This very specific insight of yours kind of knocked me off my feet. So I do want to spend a minute on it. Can you explain what you mean by that? You know, Turkey was, what happened at the end, you know, to look at, to understand Erdogan today and why Turkey is thriving at this minute, you have to go back to its creation, 1922.

14:45What happens is at the end of the war, we've already talked about what happened to all, what the Western allies, what the plans they had for the Middle Eastern states, which we've talked about Syria, etc., Palestine. But they had another plan for Turkey itself, what we now call Turkey. And what they decided to do with that was at Severance and Remo, they decided they were going to carve up the heartland of Anatolia. Now, there was an ancient Greek population in Anatolia, Christian, that had lived for 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000 years. I mean, since the Trojan War, literally, on what is now Western Turkey, places like Izmir, that was then called Smyrna.

15:28So what they decided was that the Ottoman Empire had discredited itself and shamed itself by its genocidal massacres. So they were going to carve it up, and the Turks were going to get a very small part of this. So they decided that they would give the new Greek kingdom, which had broken away from the Ottomans in the 1820s, they decided they were going to give a new empire, a sort of Byzantine empire, really. And so in 1920, Turkish troops start to move into what is now Turkey, and they advance slowly across Turkey, across Anatolia towards Ankara. The Western allies were going to keep Constantinople for themselves, so they were considering whether to give it to the Greeks as well.

16:12And in Eastern Turkey, they were going to give states to the Kurds and the Armenians in various forms. Only in the middle was there going to be a rump that was going to be Turkish. And you've got to remember that this was still the Ottoman Sultanate, but it was going to be very small. At this point, the most successful Ottoman general of World War I, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, extraordinary figure, brilliant figure in many ways, leads a rebellion against the British imperial interests and orders and designs. He gets control of an Ottoman army and he leads this war And first of all, he defeats the Armenians, so they don't get a state.

16:51Then he defeats the Kurds, they don't get a state. Then he throws the French out of what is now sort of northern Syria. And then he turns around and he fights these huge battles, which are completely forgotten now. The armies were like 150 ,000 people, so much bigger than anything else taking place in anywhere in the Middle East at this time. He fights them and he defeats them. And in the end, he drives out the Greeks in these massive cleansing, ethnic deportations, massacres. Smyrna the city is burnt. There are apocalyptic scenes. And all of this is taking place in a war that is really an incredibly brutal war, but is also an anti-imperialistic war.

17:33And Kemal Passion wins it. Mustafa Kemal Passion wins the war. And when he comes up against the British, he faces them down and the British retreat. And he gets Constantinople as well. And the Lloyd George government, Lloyd George's British prime minister, who's in charge of all of this stuff that's happening, resigns. And the Turkish Republic is agreed at that point in 1923. Kemal becomes Atatürk. He assumes a new name, Atatürk, father of Turks. And he creates a new nationality to go with the new Turkish Republic. And this new nationality is an ethno-sectarian religious identity to be a Turk.

18:12And he says it's a wonderful thing to be a Turk. He creates this new nationality out of ancient history, out of modern history, out of Ottoman history. But the Turkish Republic, the borders of the Turkish Republic are limited. He wants them to be much bigger. He wants Mosul, which is a third of Iraq too, but he doesn't get it. He wants more of northern Syria, but he doesn't get it. So out of all of this comes a Turkish Republic that has a new nationalism based on an ancient history, going back to the Seljuk Turks, based on a language, Turkish, based on a religion, Islam. So you see, it's based on a military ethos.

18:52He is the Grand Marshal Ataturk, and he becomes the new president. And this is a new nationality, a new republic, throwing back to ancient glories, but also new. It's based on an ethnic conflict in which huge numbers of ethnic minorities are driven out. The numbers are colossal. If you look at the whole picture, Armenians, they've been liquidated. Greeks, they are totally driven out, except for a few in Istanbul who survive and remain. The numbers are eye-watering. They are inexact, but There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks driven out. There are millions of Greeks driven out altogether in the longer part of this part of the 20th century.

19:34Turks and Muslims are also driven out of Europe, by the way, and that's part of this story. And out of it comes this new republic. There are great similarities with the creation of Israel. The creation of Israel in 1948 is, in fact, much smaller. The armies are much smaller. You know, the armies are tiny in that. There are new armies. They're also new countries. And in 1948, there are also ethnic deportations. Some Palestinian Arabs are driven out, but many leave as well and escape. We know the figure 700 to 750 ,000 leave. So also there's a new kind of ethnic religious nationality is created by this to be an Israeli, the Israeli nation and the Israeli state.

20:20And it also is created with a military ethos with a nationalistic ethos linked to ethnicity and religion. So there are other similarities too. Both are created in an anti-British rebellion, effectively, against British interests, against British arms. So there are major parallels between the two. When I think about the contemporary criticism of Israel, one of the criticisms I hear, which I think is disingenuous, but be that as it may, you know, when I talk to American critics of Israel and they say, well, the reason I'm, and I point out there's all these other countries and governments and policies around the world, including the Middle East, that they're not critical of.

21:01They point out, yes, but America has this deep strategic relationship with Israel and our taxpayer dollars are funding the quote unquote genocide or quote unquote these policies that we so strongly disagree with. So that's why we're focused on Israel. The irony is Turkey is, is a member of NATO. Unlike Israel, we actually have a treaty obligation to deploy American forces to defend Turkey. And if I can just jump in there, it's very interesting because Turkey faced successive rebellions by its Kurdish minority. It used poison gas against them in the 20s and 30s, in fact. It massacred huge numbers of them.

21:39In the most recent Turkish insurgency by the PKK against the Turks, 40 ,000 Kurds were killed, and parts of eastern Turkey were highly militarized and repressive zones. On top of that, you have the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, when their half of Cyprus was completely cleansed of Greeks. And then you have the fact that, ironically, people often say to me, what do you say to the fact that Israel is occupied as a very small part of Syria. And I'm like, well, I mean, during the Syrian civil war, there were many, many kind of foreign powers in Syria, including the Russians, the Iranians. But of course, there was also, you may not know, but since 2016 and for 10 years, there's been a Turkish zone of occupation in northern Syria.

22:31And it still has troops there, which no one has mentioned. Plus, Turkey always reserves the right to follow Kurdish guerrillas into northern and eastern Iraq, where there are also Turkish troops right now. So there are, in fact, three zones of occupation. And I don't say this in any way to justify what is happening in the West Bank, what is happening in Gaza or anything else. These are just facts that you need to know. The whole point of my book is not to follow any ideology or any purpose other than know the facts. You have to understand the Middle East, know the facts. If you have the facts at your fingertips, you can argue whatever you want to argue.

23:11But this book simply tells you what there is. It doesn't favouritise. It doesn't have a favourite victim, a favourite grievance, a favourite hero people. It doesn't have goodies and baddies. It has greys and the reality of human life. And that's what I'm trying to do in this book. That's The Cauldron. We'll be right back.

23:35One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of years is how many people in my own circle have started learning Hebrew again, and a lot of them found their way to today's sponsor, Citizen Cafe. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about learning a language as an adult. It's not that you can't learn it, it's that most classes teach you the theory of the language instead of how to speak it. That's the part Citizen Cafe change. You're not memorizing conjugations for a test that never comes. You're in a conversation from day one and the language starts to feel like something that belongs to you.

24:07Their teachers are Israeli, all their classes are online, and they work with students in over 25 countries. But what actually struck me is the community around it. Thousands of people learning together, showing up for each other, not just logging into an app on their own. In an industry that's all about automating everything, Citizen Cafe went the other way. This is the moment Hebrew stops being something you study and starts being something you're part of. To schedule your free intro session with Citizen Cafe, head now to the link in the show description or go to citizencafetlv.com.

24:49Okay, so Simon, earlier in this conversation, I was struck by you used the term one state solution, which, as you can imagine, is like jostling, because we hear that so much now in another context. You used it to describe the mess that is Lebanon today. Now, you've just written one of the most expansive books about the trajectory of the Middle East and the conflicts that shaped it. In your writing process, did any insights emerge about a possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Is the framing of a one-state or two-state solution still even relevant in terms of framing? I mean, it's very interesting because to go back to the beginning of Zionism and to early in the 20th century, I have to do this, I'm a historian.

25:30But it's very interesting to see that until 1942, from early the 20th century, official Zionist policy was not a Jewish state partitioned from the Arab state. It was a single binational state. And that remained the aim of David Ben-Gurion well into the 1930s. And various events changed his mind. The biggest one was the Arab revolt of Palestine, 1936 to 1939. But it's interesting that the early Zionists, all of them followed various concepts of this theory, of this idea of how Palestine could be organised. And in 1919, 1920, you have Zionist delegates going to Damascus to see King Faisal, the Hashemite king then of Syria, later of Iraq.

26:21Weizmann meets with him also. And there are at that point all sorts of different definitions of how these could be settled. And one of them was federal, a federal a Jewish canton within an Arab state or an Arab kingdom, I think that the basic presupposition, precondition for that to work is it's got to be bigger than just what was then Palestine and is now Israel-Palestine, because the way the two states would be divided, or the way the two entities would be divided, are really too small to function on their own. And that's why with the The Peel Commission, 1936. Yeah. And the key thing about it was, this was not a Jewish idea.

27:04This was a British idea. But the Jews accepted it. Because even though the Jewish entity in it was small, it was the first offer they'd ever had for a Jewish state or a Jewish entity for 2 ,000 years, so they accepted it. What was interesting was the Arab territories, which were much larger, because the Arab population was larger, they were going to be joined to King Abdullah's Transjordan or Kingdom of Jordan, as it became. And their prime minister was going to be Ragebel Nashashibi, who was one of the great Palestinian Arab aristocratic families who led the other party opposed to the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Hasani, that we've all heard of.

27:45And so that was actually a very feasible idea. And many parts in the Arab world and other parties in the Arab world, in Syria and Lebanon, for example, actually welcomed this arrangement. And so that was one of those moments where you just wish that this had worked, because that would have given the Palestinian Arabs, they would have been part of a larger state that would have probably worked. And the Jews would have got a state as well. And there would have been population swaps so that there would have been great Jewish and Arab minorities in each of the states. That is a vision of another way that this could have worked.

28:19And again, this came up again in 1947, where even after you have the UN partition plan, which we all know about in 1947, secretly King Abdullah of Jordan again approached the Jews and he met with Golda Meir several times. And the British approved this plan that secretly he would take over the Arab parts of the partition and they would be ruled with the Kingdom of Jordan. That, again, is one of those glimpses. So I think some of these earlier plans are relevant today. I deliberately never use the expression two-state solution. I don't like it. And I also think it's a false promise because there are always going to be huge differences and different constituencies in the wider Middle East.

29:09There are no total victories. And so there are also no total solutions to political problems. I believe that there will always be large constituencies within the Israeli nation, but also within the Palestinian nation, that will object to the existence of the other to some extent or other. But you've also seen between, say, 1985 and 2010, you've seen for over 20 years that there were majorities in both peoples, in both nations, for some sort of settlement, and some sort of compromise. And that can return. These deals can still be done, and they will be done at some point. But what is required is, A, both sides have to wish better for the other side than their total destruction.

29:57It's going to be extremely difficult to do anything right now when millions of Palestinians are living in tents in Gaza, when both sides, the Israelis and the Palestinians, are deeply traumatized and still bleeding from the nightmare scenarios of October 7th and the Gaza War. But in the end, somehow, one of these structures could work. And one day, it will work. You know, there were many Jordanian plans to link up the West Bank with Gaza, and even join it up contiguously, which now would be unthinkable, but across the Negev, across the South Negev. And these plans were actually quite feasible.

30:38These were the plans that King Abdullah was discussing when he was assassinated in 1951. But Simon, even if you had these plans, had they been successful, in the context of this conversation, when you look at the plays that the Turkey is playing or the Iranian regime is playing in the region, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being resolved is not really what they're solving for. And so you still would have chaos and bloodshed. And the reason, I'm not saying it's not a reason to pursue some of these, but I'm just saying it's almost like, as we're talking, it's what I felt, but your book reinforces it.

31:11It's a sideshow. Yeah, it's a sideshow, but it's a very useful banner and cause for all sorts of reasons. And it really justifies all sorts of things about the internal politics of these states as well. But you can see, and that's the theme of the book, is that the big competition in this region is, in fact, if you step back from all of our contemporary ideological obsessions in the West, the big picture is massive, newly ever more active and ambitious and aspiring states fighting for power. Behind them, there are other ideological struggles too. All of this is part of a much bigger struggle within Islam itself about the nature of Islam and what sort of Islam you're going to have.

31:52And what you have is on one side, you have the Iranians, yes, with their proxy militia allies, but what their promoting is a vision of Islam that is Islamist, first of all. So the Islamic religion dominates the state, not versa versa. But also, it's an anti-Western, closed version of Islam that fights the West, that rejects Western moderation and openness. And on the other side, you have Islamic powers that can do business with the West, that are interested in the West, that are open to Western ideas and also influencing the West themselves. Those are all the monarchies, basically, and places like Egypt as well, and places like Turkey to a certain extent.

32:35These powers are promoting a different version of Islam. And Turkey has always had a sort of Janus-like, almost like in Terribang attitude, where it's two things at the same time. It is an Islamist country, now increasingly dominated by Islamism, but it's also a highly sophisticated NATO member that can look openly towards the West. So part of this interstate competition is this argument, this battle for the nature of Islam itself. But in other ways, it's just a competition between major states, all of which have major ethnic and sectarian problems within their countries. So in that way, Israel is exactly like the others.

33:16All of these countries are also major military powers in the Middle East, looking to promote themselves abroad if they can, with international interests, with intercontinental interests. They now all have interests in Africa, for example. They have interests in Europe. They have interests in West Asia. Pakistan has now joined this game. It has always wanted to. And its creation is very similar to the creation of Turkey and of Israel, for that matter. Pakistan is important. It has always aspired since 1947 to play a role as the Islamic power with the Islamic bomb. It's the only Islamic power to have a nuclear weapon.

33:55Now, thanks to really artful lobbying with the Trump administration, however that has been achieved, it has also managed to place itself, thanks to the dilemma, the conundrum that America has found itself in with Iran, it has found a way to become a Middle Eastern power. And also because of the problem that Saudi Arabia finds, it now feels extremely exposed. And in its quest for security, it doesn't mean it would never join the Abraham Accords. It doesn't mean it won't always want American alliance and security and protection, but it's looking for more protections as well. Pakistan has an army of 600 ,000.

34:36It has nuclear weapons. Now it is part of this game. And because Pakistan is part of the game, that means India is part of the game. Simon, you end this enormous history on a surprisingly hopeful note, which I found disorienting, which is after all the empires, massacres, revolutions, betrayals, you write that peace becomes possible when people can hear and accept the narrative of the other, which I feel like sometimes is like an over-romantic. If we just understand the other side, you know, there's just a kind of overly maybe idealistic take on what's necessary. So having spent years immersed in everything this region has done to itself, what gives you reason to believe that its peoples might someday choose what you call blood or honey, that they actually may choose honey?

35:21Blood or honey. That's a great question. I'll tell you what, I think that in this book, I always have tried in writing it to show not just the Middle East of massacre, extremism, bigotry, war, but also to show the other Middle East, which is one that has always traded with other societies, that has always taken in other philosophies, one that is always a society that is rich in poetry and music and a whole sort of lifestyle that is not necessarily the lifestyle that we think of. when we think of the cauldron and the intolerance of the Middle East. So, so much attention in this book and in the news is about the Islamist regime, the slaughter of its protesters, the massacre by Hamas of Israeli citizens, the tragedy of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

36:11But actually, there's always present another Middle East, another Islam, another Arab world, another side of Israel and Turkey and all these countries, which is one that is open to outside influences, that is interested in literature and philosophy, and is also extremely pragmatic in foreign affairs and in making money. And that was the tradition of the truchel states, the Gulf monarchies along the Gulf Coast. Historically, they always traded with India, they traded with Egypt, Egypt traded with Western powers like Venice. The Mamalik Egypt was the biggest, traded overwhelmingly with Western Europe and Southern Europe.

36:50So all of this is as much part of the Middle East and as much part of Middle Eastern history as the realm of intolerance and proxies and militias, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Ayatollahs. And that's why I quote poetry and sages and great learning from Arab and Iranian and Turkish and Hebrew scholars and poets and singers throughout the book. Because this is a book not just about the Middle East of war and death, but also of the Middle East of openness and of philosophy and of a relationship, an ancient relationship between realms and worlds and theatres beyond the Middle East with India in the East, with Europe and America in the West.

37:32If that idea triumphs, then we will be living in a very different world. For the moment, though, the conflict goes on. Simon, this is the book now when people want to understand the history of the Middle East this is the book I am going to tell them to read I feel like we could talk for hours thank you for doing this thank you, thanks for having me, it's great to be on

38:10I'm Debra Pardes, the host of ARC News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters. But it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started ARC News Daily. Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything, and I don't waste your time. On most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes.

38:48I hope to see you tomorrow.