We Live in ‘a New World of Counterhistory’
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore is no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu but says there won’t be a Palestinian state for ‘decades.’
By Tunku Varadarajan
Simon Sebag Montefiore / Barbara Kelley‘The conversation is happening all the time at Jewish tables in Britain,” says Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Jews ask each other: “ ‘Where could we go?’ ”
“Oct. 7 has caused a sea change in the treatment of British Jews,” Mr. Montefiore, a historian, says in an interview at his own dinner table.
“We’ve seen several terrorist attacks on Jews. Jews killed at Yom Kippur in Manchester.
Bombing, arson attacks and stabbing attacks in London.
Our synagogues and schools are fortresses.”
British news was quick to add to local Jewish dread.
On July 29, days after my interview with Mr. Montefiore, the mayor of the London borough of Hackney wrote to his counterpart in Haifa that Hackney had begun the process of terminating its twin-city relationship with Israel’s third-largest municipality.
In the grimmest bad taste, the letter gave Haifa until “7 October 2026” to respond.
“There is a huge crisis of Anglo Jewry,” says Mr. Montefiore, 61, a scion of Anglo-Jewish aristocracy.
He is descended from Sephardic Jews who came to Britain from Tuscany in the 1790s and from Mizrahi Jews who arrived from Morocco in the 1820s.
The latter wore turbans and robes and spoke Arabic.
His great-great-great-uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), was a storied financier and philanthropist whom Queen Victoria described as “a noble Hebrew.”
Sir Moses also received praise (albeit backhanded) from Czar Nicholas I, with whom he’d sought an audience to intercede on behalf of Russian Jews.
“If our Jews were like you,” the czar told him, “they wouldn’t be a problem.”
Mr. Montefiore is a man who treats the sweep of history as his own backyard.
He’s written a shelf’s worth of big history books, including “Jerusalem: The Biography” (2011), “The Romanovs 1613-1918” (2016), and “The World: A Family History of Humanity” (2022), the last of which a reviewer for this newspaper described as “history as collective biography, a journey across almost two million years, from the appearance of Homo erectus in east Africa to the rise of Xi Jinping’s China.”
He has now turned his hand to a subject that only someone “bonkers”—his word—would dare to address.
To be published in September, his new book is titled “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” a chronological account from 1900 to February 2026 (when the current war with Iran started) of an area “set with ambushes.”
It is, he writes, a region “more present in the Western consciousness than any other, its history more debated and contested than anywhere else yet conversely less understood.”
Its “pivotal middleness” makes it “the epicenter of our tumultuous, rushing, interconnected world.”
Mr. Montefiore’s definition of the region is expansive, going beyond “the usual focus on the Levant and the Holy Land” to include everywhere east to west from Morocco to Iran, and south to north from Sudan to Turkey.
It covers 19 countries, as well as the “seaside Palestinian Islamist statelet” of Gaza.
“I call Gaza a semi-independent ‘statelet,’ and I think that’s important because there’s a pretense now that it was occupied from 2006 to 2023,” Mr. Montefiore says.
He points out that since Israel withdrew troops and civilians from Gaza and the Palestinians held elections the following year, Hamas “had had prime minister, ministries, ministers and police.”
It also had “what was in effect a formidable army of 40,000 paramilitaries, and it had a foreign policy. It was independent enough to launch a war.”
Unlike anywhere else in the world, “it was a base for a military but it eschewed any need to educate or feed its citizens.
That was the responsibility of international aid organizations.
A very unique arrangement.”
From this perverse “statelet,” the horrors of Oct. 7 emerged.
“A vile act of terror, an almost Mongol style of raid and massacre and rapine,” Mr. Montefiore says, describing the events of that day.
“It was also an illustration that in the Middle East, violence and war work, and force is incredibly effective at changing the whole destiny of geopolitics.”
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander, was “a diligent student of Israeli weaknesses.”
He managed to put together a military and “a unique subterranean warscape of fortified tunnels that was capable of exploiting Israel’s flaws, its hubris and its political division to score what has to be seen as a very short-lived and murderous but decisive military strike against one of the great military powers of the Middle East.”
Sinwar, whom Israel killed on Oct. 16, 2024, “successfully changed the whole destiny of the Middle East,” Mr. Montefiore says.
The worst pogrom in Jewish history since the World War II was turned into a propaganda victory for the perpetrators.
“He, Sinwar, understood much better how the Middle East worked than this Israeli government,” Mr. Montefiore observes.
“You have to say that it was an act of total evil.
But it was also one of the most successful Arab victories since Hattin in 1187, when Saladin defeated the Crusaders and took Jerusalem.”
Although Hamas “ultimately failed militarily,” abandoning Gaza’s civilians to a prolonged and bloody war, “it has also won massive success in terms of political consequences.
The whole Middle East has been upturned by this tiny statelet and the gamble of one psychopathic leader who had immense freedom to act, since Hamas leaders didn’t care what happened to their people.”
Mr. Montefiore quotes a Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri: “The price of the suffering is worth paying.
The benefits are extensive.”
Mr. Abu Zuhri added that “the wombs of our women will give birth to twice the number of martyrs.”
Israel won “in the pitiful ruins of Gaza,” Mr. Montefiore says.
“Hamas won in the West,” in part by controlling the media within Gaza and presenting all losses as civilian, a narrative that proved “irreversible even when Hamas’s allegations were later proven to be untrue.”
“Who would have thought,” Mr. Montefiore asks, that Oct. 7 would result in “students at Harvard and Columbia calling for a one-state solution—‘from the river to the sea’—not a two-state solution?”
Israelis have also had to confront “another nightmare they never contemplated, that a moral inversion of the Holocaust would be used against them.”
What’s more, “the Israeli lobby” in Washington, “which was immensely powerful in the 1980s and ’90s and into the 2000s, has been totally eclipsed.”
Mr. Montefiore explains this as a consequence of Oct. 7, “in part thanks to the development of the new ‘decolonization’ and anti-Zionist movement, and in part thanks to the misgovernance of this present Israeli government.
There remains the personal relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, but that will not outlast these two personalities.
Indeed, its very closeness may further contribute to the Israeli lobby’s decline.”
Mr. Montefiore doesn’t hold Benjamin Netanyahu in high regard.
His Israeli icon is David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), the country’s first prime minister, whom he describes as “a tactical genius who managed to do the impossible—create a Judaic republic in the Middle East.”
He wasn’t flawless, however, and made what Mr. Montefiore called “massive mistakes”: “He never created a constitution, and that has proved to be very dangerous in the 21st century.
And he completely misunderstood the nature of the Haredim”—Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews.
“He believed that they should be protected as a sort of vanishing species.
Well, that turned out to be madness, right?”
In his book, Mr. Montefiore highlights what he calls Israel’s contradictions: It is, he writes, “both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy.”
Yet he says there is “a moment of massive opportunity for Israel politically, even now, in the region.
But they’ve got to work out how to convert their ability to win tactical military victories into lasting settlements.”
That would require the Palestinians to “recognize the permanence of the Jewish republic in the Holy Land” and “to signal clearly that they do not aspire to its total destruction.”
Oct. 7, however, means that “in the short term—and I’m talking about decades here—they’ve prevented any creation of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future.”
As Mr. Montefiore sees it, history in the West’s “postreligious age,” and the uses to which it is put, may not be on Israel’s side.
“History has assumed much of the propulsive legitimacy and authority that religion once held.
Many of the movements in Western politics now, like the new decolonial activism, depend on a specially curated version of history”—which is to say a false one.
Mr. Montefiore says the West’s “self-regarding secularism,” is hampering our understanding of the Middle East.
“The irony is that we are in fact still Christian-adjacent, and the modern, ultra-radical, secular, decolonialist activism has many of the characteristics of a religious movement.”
These include its “language of righteousness, of piety, of guilt, of sin,” along with “orthodoxies, credos, purity tests and jargon.”
The result is a “semi-religious movement” grafted onto the West’s longstanding “weird fetish and obsession with the Middle East, particularly the Holy Land.”
The history of this “fetish” dates back to the moment that Constantine the Great (272-337) “converted the Holy Land into a sacred route and landscape.
Then came the Crusades, after which, one’s got to remember, every church in Europe had a Jerusalem room with a picture of what Jerusalem would look like under the Christians.”
The Holy Land is embedded in our consciousness, and “the proprietorial moral belief that we need to adjudicate for what happens in the Holy Land is very, very deep in the Western soul.”
This belief persists to this day.
But in present times it strives to overturn Israeli, not Muslim, control.
Where the fate of the region was once in the hands of “Edwardian imperial grandees like Churchill and Balfour and Lloyd George, you now see international lawyers and decolonialist activists believing they have a moral right to decide what happens in the Middle East.”
This gives rise to a further irony.
Though today’s activists are “very critical of Western intervention, and blame much of what’s happened on Western intervention, their pressure may well lead to a new Western intervention in the Middle East,” Mr. Montefiore says.
“After all, that’s what they’re calling for—a new intervention to change the political status quo in the Holy Land.”
And so, alongside the jihad being waged against it, Israel also faces what Mr. Montefiore calls “a secular moral crusade.
These are modern missionaries.
And their mission is very Christian, with features of deep religiosity.
We’re living in a fascinating period.
That these activist movements in the West may force their governments to make a new intervention in the Middle East would be so beyond irony.”
This new external impulse to reshape the Middle East originates not in grand chanceries but in nongovernmental movements.
“Activist alliances are putting pressure on Western governments,” Mr. Montefiore says.
“Though great powers should not have their foreign policies formed by small but aggressive cadres of activists, that is exactly what is happening.”
It is an “extraordinary moment”: “Gaza and Palestine have become domestic issues in small towns in postindustrial northern Britain and in the poshest universities and the bourgeois activist class.”
These activists, he notes, are “not interested in any other regions or atrocities”—not Syria, Sudan, Yemen or Iran.
“That selectivity is prefigured, and preprogrammed, by the history of Christendom.”
There have been no protests of any scale against the atrocities in Iran, where in two days—Jan. 8-9—more than 30,000 people were killed.
Altogether, Mr. Montefiore says, 42,000 civilians were slaughtered, “an event so colossal that it may be the largest single event massacre in the entire Middle East since 1900.”
He says the regime killed more people in a week than the Shah did in his nearly 40-year reign.
What accounts for the selective moral outrage?
“It shows the dangers of ideology,” he says.
“When you sublet your judgment about facts and morals to a rigid ideology, you really surrender your ability to make real moral judgments, and also to make real factual judgments.”
Instead, “you end up with this mad situation where the United Nations was resisting talking about the killing of 40,000 young people and the once-humanitarian NGOs refuse to discuss it because it might help the U.S. and Israel.”
We are in a “completely different moral realm now, of how to judge the Middle East,” Mr. Montefiore says.
“We are in a new world of counterhistory, where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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