48. Simon Sebag Montefiore: The impact of conflicting histories in the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars

0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation. So today we have the great privilege of interviewing Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is many things. He is though primarily an historian, he's written great works on Russia, on everything from the era of Catherine the Great and Potemkin through to some wonderful books on Stalin. But he also wrote a very fundamental history of Jerusalem. He is from a Jewish family, very influential Jewish family in British history in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I think has also been in the last few weeks a very important commentator on events in Israel.

1:16So there are many things that we want to talk about. We want to talk about Israel and Gaza. We want to talk about Russia. But I wonder whether I could perhaps begin with a little bit of history and to try to get you to explain a little bit about what led up to this idea of Israel, the creation of a Jewish homeland, what part the British played in it, what the British thought they were doing, why they committed to this thing, and where this came from in the 19th century. That's a giant question. And I think one has to go away and write a book. I think I might go away and write a book about it. I did write a book about it, which is the Jerusalem book.

1:52But perhaps we should just start by saying that one can't think of anything other at the moment than the nightmare we're going through in the Middle East, and one just can't deplore enough the images of civilians and children and women being killed in Gaza, just as we can't deplore enough the killing of civilians on October 7th in Israel. And one always has to start by just saying, I just crave the moment when there is a Palestinian state next to an Israeli state, when the occupation is over, when this dreadful Netanyahu government is gone, but also when Hamas is scattered and taken out, we pray out of the political game in the Middle East.

2:36So I think one has to start from that point. But on the other hand, I believe that the history of Israel is an authentic one, just as the history of the Palestinians is got two just causes, two just peoples, and we've got to find a way for them to live together. Slaughter is not the answer. So to answer Rory's point, to go back to the beginning, one has to start from the fact that the Jewish people in exile since 17 AD have always longed to have a life in the Holy Land, to return to Jerusalem, to return to what later became Palestine. That has been something they've worked on throughout history.

3:17There was a moment in the 17th century when Solomon the Magnificent and Salim the Grim, his son, were both backing Jewish settlement in the Middle East, in what is now Palestine. There have been many such schemes throughout history. In the 19th century, many, many Jewish people started to dream that this was possible. My ancestor, Moses Montefiore, is one of those people. He first went there in the 1820s. In the 1860s, he was one of the first to build a small suburb outside the walls of Jerusalem at exactly the same time as the great Hosseini family, the great Palestinian family, started to build an Arab suburb outside the walls of Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah.

4:00Both those began at exactly the same time. Just again to remind listeners to bring something. In the 19th century, the Jewish population of Palestine was pretty small and the Muslim population was much, much larger, maybe 10 times larger by the end of the 19th century. And the Christian population actually was relatively similar to the size of the Jewish population by the end of the 19th century. And many of those were Palestinian Arab Christians. But by the end of the 1880s, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. And of course, this is long before World War I, World War II, the Holocaust or anything else.

4:33So from sort of 1800 up to then, the Jewish population grows in Jerusalem, the city, But across the broader Palestinian region, 1890, maybe census suggests maybe 43 ,000 Jews, 432 ,000 Muslims in that territory. Absolutely right. And of course, immigration was going to change that. And the immigration really started in the 1860s, 70s, 80s. And so, just a reminder of the fact that when you look at Israelis today, there are many families that have been living in there for close to 200 years, which is many generations, which is quite long enough to count as indigenous. Even if you reject the whole of the ancient narrative that the Jews ruled and lived in what was then Judea for a thousand years before the birth of Christ, which, by the way, all historians accept, except those with a very political bias, of course.

5:28So, 1880s, immigration starts from different places. Then in World War I, the British Empire is aspiring to take over the Ottoman Empire. The war on the Western Front is going very badly. And creative thinkers, including Winston Churchill and the British and French side are looking for a way to break the central powers from the east and also planning for the fall of the Ottoman Empire which has ruled the Middle East since 1517 when Selim the Grim takes it. That's a great name. Yeah Selim the Grim. Well he did kill all his brothers and their children and probably most of his own sons except the chosen heir Suleiman the Magnificent.

6:09So he deserved his name? He was grim. He was grim but he was also great. And it's worth remembering, by the way, I'm glad you asked about him because from 1517 to 1918, the Ottomans, essentially the Turkish Empire, ruled the Arab world in its entirety. They threw out the Mamalouks who'd ruled it before and they built the walls in Jerusalem, which are now the walls of Jerusalem, which we all think is terribly ancient. They weren't, they were built by Suleiman the Magnificent, same time as Henry VIII, basically. And they ruled with increasing repression of the Arab population. So by World War I, Arabs are dreaming of throwing off the chains of Ottoman rule, and the Ottomans are getting increasingly fascistic and ultra-nationalist.

6:56And somewhere in this period, Lord Balfour in Britain puts out a declaration supporting a homeland for the Jewish people. Apart from the rights and wrongs of it, what were the British thinking about? What was in it for the British? What was their cunning plan? The British didn't have a cunning plan. The British, like many, many powers in many wars, were simply looking for different friends, different alliances, and promising different panaceas to those groups in order to win allies. Which allies were they hoping to win by promising a Jewish homeland? It started in 1915 with the negotiations with Hussein of Mecca, a Hashemite prince descended from the Prophet Muhammad and who they had ruled Mecca on and off since the time of Saladin.

7:40They and the British were discussing the Hashemite family wanted to rule the entire Arab world, one family. And the British made an agreement with them that they would lead an Arab rebellion. This was all to do with Lawrence of Arabia as well. And this Arab rebellion would undermine the Ottomans in the east. But they were very careful not to promise anything too specific, such as Jerusalem. Why did the British think it was a smart move in this war to promise a homeland for the Jewish people? There were various reasons. One was that they were all biblically educated, people brought up in the tradition of Victorian evangelism.

8:17Lloyd George was really, the Balfour Declaration. He was the driver of it. He was the driver. The Balfour Declaration is really the Lloyd George Declaration and should be. Balfour was the former prime minister who had been brought back as foreign secretary, in case that sounds familiar. And so that was one part of it was a cultural one. And another part of it was the belief that the Jews had great influence in America and in Russia. So a way of getting the Americans on the side of the British during the war and keeping them on the side? Yes. And also a way of keeping Russia in the war, because there were around 5 million Russian Jews at that time.

8:51How important do you think history is in the middle of a crisis like this, when a crisis like this erupts in the way that it's done. And interesting that, for example, you felt right from the outset of this interview, you had to set yourself in that current situation. But how important is history? How much should the current leaders who are trying to grapple with this know about the history? And how should they try to apply it to what they're trying to do now? Well, I think history is very important. But the last part of that answer, and the most important, is that people believed that Jewish national determination meant that they needed and deserved a return to their historic home.

9:34So that was the sort of biggest, I told you what the British wanted, but what the Jews wanted was that, and that was recognised by the British Empire. And that is the most important part of this, the ancient Jewish connection and love of and homeland in the Holy Land. That was the key part of that British decision to back the Balfour Declaration, which was backed by the French government and also the US Congress at the same time, and then by the League of Nations. In terms of history, I mean, you may find this a surprise from a historian, but you can have too much history. And actually, what I think really matters is how people want to live now.

10:11And that's why I started with that declaration at the beginning of this conversation, because you can have way too much history. What really matters in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the Middle East, is how people want to live now for their families. But what lessons can be taken from history that could be usefully applied now? I mean, the key lessons that really need to be applied now are this, that you have two peoples with completely legitimate stories, narratives, histories, cultures, and connections to this land. And there is no point in denying either one of those histories today, because to deny those histories is to deny those people's right to live and flourish in freedom.

10:59Gives us examples of people denying the histories on either side so that listeners can understand what you mean when people say denying histories. When I was researching my Jerusalem book, for example, and by the way, the mission of that book was exactly this. The whole point of the Jerusalem, the biography, history book that I wrote was to show the histories of both peoples, to deny neither. That was my mission because without that, peace is impossible. And my dream is that of two states. So let me give you an example. I spoke to many of the top Palestinian professors of history, and they all helped me because I was writing the history of great Palestinian families and showing their histories over the last thousand years.

11:38And they would tell me in private, we can tell you, of course, there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount. But in public, the Palestinian authorities' official position is there was no Jewish temple. The Jewish connection to the Holy Land is completely tenuous and invented. in the 1890s by Zionists. So they would quite happily admit this in private. They said, but in public, we'd be killed if we said it. So that's one narrative. So there's a narrative from some parts of the Palestinian community saying, really, there were very, very few Jews in Palestine. They didn't have much of a presence.

12:11And this leads into something you've been very worried about recently, which we'll get onto, which is your worries about stories about settler colonialism. And then presumably on the other side is an Israeli narrative, which downplays the significance of the Palestinians as a people and the type of state they had and how much represents they had. Yeah. Well, just to finish, just give you another part of that. Another part of this denial of the Jewish history, which I'm not going to dwell on because I'm dying to get onto the other one too, because I despise that just as much. But the sort of settler colonial narrative is a huge denial of modern Jewish history because it claims, for example, that it imposes on this story a whiteness narrative.

12:52And I'm going to interrupt for a second. So, So again, for listeners, this is very, very common, particularly in university campuses, particularly in the United States, where recently we've seen over the last few weeks, the projection of a lot of narrative around race, where Jews are depicted as whites, where Palestinians are depicted as black adjacent, where the conflict is interpreted through a lens of settler colonialism, right? What do you think delegitimizes? Well, it delegitimizes, it dehumanizes the Israelis completely in all sorts of ways. We might come to the details of that in a minute.

13:22But just for this denial of history point, something like approaching 60%, but certainly over 50 % of Israelis are Mizrahim, who are descended from black or brown peoples in the Middle East. They are indigenous to the Middle East. They come from Iraq, from Persia, from Yemen, from Ethiopia, from Morocco. Like my own family comes from Morocco, the seabags. So they are far from that white narrative. It's just completely ignorant. On the other side, ultra-nationalists in the Netanyahu government, which I loathe, by the way, and the ultra-right nationalists on the Israeli side claim that Palestinians don't exist, that there's no history of Palestinians ruling themselves, which is an anathema to me.

14:06And we must also deny that. And that's one of the reasons I wrote Jerusalem, the biography, was to show how the Palestinian connection is an ancient one as well. You said that you loathe the Netanyahu government, and presumably particularly those extremist elements on the hard right. But have the events of October 7th made you loathe them less or differently? It's a good question. They haven't. I mean, I found them appalling from the moment they were elected. I've always found the Netanyahu approach to this a deep, deep mistake from the time he came to power. In the 90s, he undermined the two-state solution in which he was aided, weirdly.

14:48And I'm not making an equivalence between Hamas. I mean, Hamas's entire campaign has been to destroy a two-state solution or any hope of a compromise because they want a Jew-free, all-Arab caliphate in the Holy Land, which would involve the slaughter of all the Jews there, as we've seen on October the 7th. Can I challenge on that? It's very interesting because Hamas says very different things on this. Their official line, I believe, is that they want an Arab majority state in which Jews would be welcome to remain. So they would say what they deny is the idea of a Jewish homeland. They see it as a Palestinian state from the river to the sea.

15:25They would deny that their objective is to try to murder every Israeli. I agree what happened October 7th was completely horrifying. Isn't that the stated objective of Hamas' leadership? In other words, it often appears when they talk that it's exactly the shadow of what people like Smotrich are saying. In both cases, they're saying we should be controlling the state. The others are welcome to remain if they wish to cooperate with our form of government. And if not, they can leave. But they're both talking about creating a state effectively from the river to the sea. Well, I think from the river to the sea is one of those.

15:54I'm not as obsessed with that phrase as some people are. I think it's all to do with the context, rather like the famous green octopus, which could be a children's toy, but it's also become a symbol of the international Jewish conspiracy. Sea. So, I mean, if it's in a child's room and they're playing with it, I'm not claiming it's a solemn anti-Semitic symbol. But from the river to the sea, when quoted by Hamas and Hamas supporters clearly means the ethnic cleansing of the whole land of its Jewish population, and much of the celebrations among some well-intentioned, but mostly I would suggest malignant actors in universities on our streets, when they say from the river to the sea, they are very clear what they mean because they are...

16:41Or they don't know. That's why I was a little surprised at your answer earlier. About history. Yeah, because, for example, I read recently that only 2 % of British schools learn about the history of the Middle East. That doesn't exactly help current understanding, does it? But mind you, we always blame everything on the fact that they didn't learn about this in school, they didn't learn about the Empire, they didn't learn about the Middle East. We don't learn anything in school. None of these things are taught. It's not always a great crime. It's just an indictment of the fact that history is very low on the list.

17:14But I think the point is that if you look at the statements of Khalid Mishal, Hamad, and other Hamas leaders since October 7th, Rory, they've been absolutely specific that they wish to annihilate Israel. They've said so. They would do October 7th over and over again. Yes, over the last 30 years, Hamas have played all sorts of games with the West with Western bien-pensant sympathisers, telling them that they were going to recognise 67 borders, telling them that they might do this, they might do that. But they have now spoken pretty clearly on October 7th. Is it radically different to the IRA, who also completely refused to recognise the existence of the British state in Northern Ireland and would have argued that Ireland needed to be free from sea to sea?

18:00I think that British people always want to use the Irish parallel because we did rather well in the end in making peace there, which we're very proud of, quite rightly. Thank you, Alistair, and your administration. But the real parallel, I think, which is much more important, is that you never can convince everybody. There are always extremists left, and we will never convince the ultra-ultras in the Palestinian movement that Israel should exist in any form. But I think the real answer is that, let's just go back to the beginning again, Many modern nation states are created by partitions. Partition is not necessarily an evil thing.

18:41The real success in Ireland was the partition in 1921-1922, which created an Irish state and a Protestant province. and many, many modern countries, India and Pakistan is the other big example, but also Greece and Turkey were created in partitions that created nation states that I'm afraid were accompanied by huge ethnic violence. And out of that came states that we regard as entirely legitimate and now part of the modern world. Israel is simply one of those states. Okay, Simon, Rory, let's just take a quick break and be back in a minute. Can I ask you a little bit about you? You've got this amazing name.

19:24You've already mentioned one of your ancestors, Moses, another amazing name. Not the Moses, but a pretty significant Moses. You had grandparents on your mother's side who fled the Russian Empire because of antisemitism, moved to Ireland, if I'm right, and then moved from there as well because of antisemitism, and finally settled in Britain. Is that right? Right. That's the basic story. So does your kind of passion for history and your particular interest in Israel, Palestine and Russia, does it come very simply from that family background? Yes, it does. It does very, very simply. I mean, the Russian history part of it comes from, they came from Russia in 1904.

20:08They were escaping the Kishnev pogrom, which launched a wave of pogroms. And pogroms comes from pogromite, from the Russian, which means to destroy, to lay waste. And so the Tsarist regime in Russia, the Romanovs, had been increasingly repressive against the Jews. And in fact, Moses Montefiore, who was a friend of Queen Victoria and Israeli and Palmerston and all these people, went to see Nicholas I in Russia to try and persuade the Tsarist. So what's his relation to you? He is my great-great-great-uncle, something like that. But also I should say that the Seabags came from Morocco. So I am a complete Jewish mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi, not unlike the people in Israel, in fact, in that sense.

20:50I'm very typical of that. But when they arrived in Ireland in 1904, they were driven out of Limerick in the famous Limerick Pogrom, which is a sort of forgotten detail. But basically, they were welcomed in Britain. They loved Britain. And Britain has always been exceedingly tolerant. And my parents and grandparents loved Britain. Both Rory and I have spoken to Jewish friends who've, not all of them, but some of whom have said that they do feel very, very differently at the moment, including in Britain, that they feel that their Jewishness has become a bit of a problem for them in a way that most of their lives they haven't.

21:28Are you feeling any of that? Yeah. I mean, it started in the Jeremy Corbyn years when I had never been a sort of public Jewish person. I mean, I've always been very Jewish and proud of my Jewishness, but I'd never spoken out about being Jewish or regarded myself as a sort of Jewish historian. I just wanted to be a historian. And when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, and I really feared what would happen then. And that has continued now with these protests. Now, I'm not one of those people who think that these protests are hate marches. I'm perfectly aware that, you know, many, many, perhaps most of the people on these marches are protesting against the images they see from Gaza of children, of families hit by Israeli bombing.

22:15And against a government that you hate as well. And against a government that I hate. But I'm also completely clear, and so should we all be, that there is a minority, and I don't know how big that, but I suspect a rather large minority in these marches, who are celebrating Hamas, who are celebrating the killing of Jewish and Israeli civilians en masse, who are denying what happened on October the 7th. It's an odd paradox, isn't it? Because it was true with 9-11 too, that you have this sort of strange conspiracy theories going on, where on the one hand, and I found this often actually amongst people I met in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Middle East, where you could both simultaneously deny that 9-11 had happened and celebrate it.

22:56Yes, that's exactly what we're having now, is that many of these people in these crowds are both denying that it happened and also celebrating the killing and rape of civilians, the beheading of babies. Yes, and although even that's very complicated, isn't it? Because often what they're doing is celebrating the attack, but distancing themselves from atrocities. The weird thing is there that they're actually saving Hamas from themselves, because after all, the evidence of all this is not invented by some Jewish conspiracy. It's filmed by Hamas themselves on their GoPro cameras and on their smartphones and put up online by them.

23:33Have you personally ever felt directly anti-Semitic abuse attack, verbal or otherwise? I have at different times. I have when I've been speaking in public. I've been accused many times of being part of an international Jewish conspiracy of some sort, for example. And that is an alarming conspiracy theory, which I used to regard as the sign of a kind of half-mad crank, but is now widely espoused by people who don't know the history. which brings us back, Alistair, to the point is like, we really care about how people want to live now. And that means Palestinians living in a safe Palestine, Israelis being safe in a safe Israel next to each other somehow.

24:18And that's going to be very difficult. But in order to achieve that, we have to know the history. And the history is being violently misused and abused. Most of the people who are supporting Hamas and probably chanting from the river to the sea actually don't know the history of Israel and how it was created. And it also doesn't reflect the Palestinian plight either. And that's why this new history theory, which Rory mentioned and which partially explained at the beginning of this conversation, is a disgraceful distortion and abuse of history. But it also rules out ever having a two-state solution.

24:56Can you tell us a bit about that then? What in the most optimistic scenario could a two-state solution look like? Give listeners a bit of a sense of what some of the ingredients might be and what it would take to get there towards peace. Well, two of the basic things are extremely hard to achieve. One is Hamas has to be out of the picture and has to be scattered as a political power. At the same time, there needs to be an Israeli partner in peace too. And that means not having people like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir anywhere near the process. But if there was an election in either of those places now, an election in Gaza right now, how much are they going to win it with this happening?

25:38They might do with this happening. And then Israel, one of the reasons why people are maybe not pushing as hard to get rid of Netanyahu is because they're worried that actually the guys who are even worse get in. I think it's more likely that some of the things Netanyahu has done, like the judicial reforms, which would have made Israel less democratic, have recreated a center that had vanished from Israeli politics. And so that it's quite possible. As we saw, I mean, it was only a year, but one forgets so much has happened. It was only a year and a half ago. There was a centrist government in power in Israel with an Arab party as part of the coalition, which was a thing we all celebrated.

26:15Because Israeli Arabs, the vast majority of them, are citizens in Israel, have the vote, sit on the Supreme Court and actually want to live in Israel. In fact, the leader of Hamas's family, Haniwa's family, are all very pro-Israeli Arabs. Fast forward then, back again. Two-state solution. How are we going to get there and what's involved? We need to have partners on both sides who are capable of that. We hope Netanyahu will be gone soon. We hope that Israel won't re-elect these ghastly messianic settler leaders again. And explain to listeners why settlements is a significant challenge for the two-state solution or continuing to expand settlements.

26:54The majority of Israel, of which there are now 9 million Israelis, live in Israel proper, within the lines of the 1967 lines. And many of them have been there for many generations. So they are not settler colonialists. Reminding people, the 1967 lines are broadly speaking the edge of the Israeli state, as was inherited from the late 1940s before following the 1967 war. Israel expanded and took the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza. So, the majority of Israelis live within that original state and then the settlers. Tell us about the settlers. Yeah. And so we're not talking about them at this point.