Simon Sebag Montefiore on Israel, Gaza and a Middle East in crisis

For the past century, the Middle East has been besieged by conflict, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine, and neighbouring countries. The region has been without lasting peace. Is it history, politics, resources, or religion driving these tensions? I'm Tangel Rashid and you're listening to the new society from the new statesmen. I'm joined in this episode by historian and author Simon C. Bergmantufuri, whose new book The Cauldron sets out to tell the story of the making of the modern Middle East. Simon, thanks so much for joining us here at the new statesmen. Your new book tells the history of the Middle East from 1900 to the present day, and it invokes this metaphor of a Cauldron, a place of intense pressure and heat, and I think most of us who read the news will know what you're referring to. But why exactly is it like this? I mean, if you're emergent in Damascus in the 19th century, not long before your book begins, you might not have thought that your region would be engulfed in violence in the century to come. Why is it that the people of the Middle East ended up embroiled in this Cauldron? It's a great question, and by the way, it's great to be here and talking to the new statesmen and you personally. I came up with the idea of the Cauldron because it's just a matter of describing what we're seeing now every day, and in fact, since I've started it has become even more Cauldron-like, but the reasons for this are both ancient and new, and so your question is well put. I think the reasons why the Middle East is so important is because of, first of all, of its geography. It's geographic position as a bridge between three continents, essentially. Then there's the fact that because of that, because of its bridge-like position, anybody who wants to be an empire or to be a global planetary power has to have an interest. In the Middle East. Then there's the fact that because of this nature, because it's been both a sort of a crossroads, a bridge, a fortress of anyone who wants to have a sort of key position between these three continental positions, needs to have some holding there. For that reason, throughout history, and this starts right with the Babylonians, if not earlier, people have tried to impose on the Middle East, they've tried to impose their religion, their political system, and they've tried to settle people there. Each empire has left, in the Middle East, a sort of living legacy of people who they positioned and promoted, and also people they deported in order to promote their control of the Middle East. And all these people still exist in different forms, and that's why you have this huge challenge to how to live peacefully there, and how to find a harmonious way of governing the Middle East. And of course, at various times, giant empires have sort of almost solved this problem. I mean, most recently, the Ottoman Empire, for example. And when my book opens in 1900, the Ottoman Empire is ruling large parts of the Middle East, and their solution was different in change from here to here, and there are many different versions of the Ottoman Empire. But essentially, providing you regarded the Sultan as absolutely all-powerful and recognized his political position, his political supremacy, and the supremacy of Islam itself, you could live there as a subordinate ethnicity or a sect. And when that broke up, there was a huge question like, how on earth do we govern this? And of course, there's great criticism of Britain and France and Italy and Greece and all these countries that tried to govern it. And one of the ways they governed it was to impose the new fashionable idea, which was nationalism, and the new fashionable form of governance, which was the nation state, which had worked well in Europe. And they imposed this on the Middle East, and that didn't necessarily work very well in these multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian new states that were created. And then there's of course the fact that there's like, then there was great power competition. There was oil discovered, which then made it absolutely essential to control. And so these are just some of the factors that have contributed to making this the cauldron. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you, although your book begins in 1900, clearly you're thinking about it in much longer term historical frame. And it seems that there is this continuity of history when you look back at the millennia. And ultimately, it seems if I've understood you correctly that you think this is basically because the region is a victim of its own geography at the sort of basically the center point of the world. Geography is very important. And America is just getting a huge lesson in geography at the moment, in the Gulf, for example. And you really can't understand anything that's happening here without understanding the geography of how this looks, which is of course just a piece of circumstance, if you like. And from there, everything else comes. But why does the geography, I mean, because you know, you mentioned some of the ancient history of the Middle East. And when we, when historian speak of that period, they use a different metaphor for the Middle East, they invoke the idea of the cradle, the cradle of civilization. And you're talking about the cauldron, how do we get, why do we get from a cradle to a cauldron? I mean, you know, these seem to be contradictory things. I also call it, I like to call it the source. And it's the source of the, you know, the three Abrahamic religions. The point about the book is that, you know, you've got it, you can only understand what's happening now, through understanding the history. And history has become, you know, very ideological in the 21st century. And this is partly, I argue in the book, due to the, due to the diminution of religion in Western life and our sort of supposed secularity. And in its place, history has assumed much of the authenticity, legitimacy and authority the religion once had in European societies, American society too. And therefore, history is constantly invoked as a sort of political nationalist and moral guide. And that's all very well, providing the history is right. And by right, I mean, factual, you know, sourced, accurate. And the Middle East is such a sort of victim of misinformation, misunderstanding, selectivity, if you like, it is kindest. That this book is just something I wanted to create to provide a service for something that it hasn't read, it didn't really exist. And there are millions of books on the Middle East, as we know. It's an industry now, particularly about various section, little sections of it, you know, for example, The Bit After World War One, sort of the Sykes Pico. That's a whole sort of industry. Then there's another industry about Israel Palestine. And now there's another industry about Gaza, of course. And all of these little bits are, you know, give people little windows of knowledge. But surprisingly, though there are many books, also the histories of the Arabs, the histories of the Jews, the histories of the Turks, no one's put it all together. And when I found out that this book didn't exist, I decided to write it. Yes. And the history of the Middle East is quite unlike histories of other regions in that. The sheer frequency with which events are constantly unfolding and changing our view of the region necessarily means we'll change our view of the region's past. Now, most of us in recent generations who have observed the Middle East probably see two fundamental problems. One is authoritarian regimes, you know, in the Middle East, governing the Middle East, very brutal dictators. And secondly, the conflict in Israel Palestine. And now we'll take these two in turn. But first, why is the Middle East, or why do so many of us think of the Middle East as basically the region of Saddam Hussein, Kanor Gaddafi, Hafiz, and later Bashar al-Assad, the Ayatollahs? What's that all about? I mean, their ideologies are very different as well, but it seems to be that this region is just lumped with the most horrific kind of authoritarian government. What's your view of that? I mean, I think the other thing I'd add to those two points, and I think that there are other points as well, by the way. Because I think another massive point is something we're seeing at the moment, which isn't always recognized us. which is the battle within Islam to define which Islam, which pathway within Islam the Middle East should follow. And that is a major part of this, and a major tension which itself leads to contributes to the other factors. It seems to be the kind of background, or if you go further, you might say the animating force behind the sort of tensions in, let's say, these two more practical ways of framing. The practical ways of framing the problems. I mean, the Islam thing is so important because we can see it clearly. I mean, if you look at much taba Kamehni's posts, we don't know if he's alive, by the way. I mean, he may be occulted in sheer tradition, but he may well be alive, we just don't know. But in his posts on Ex, for example, whoever's writing them, they talk about a new Islamic civilization, is the aim of Iran. And that's a sort of new way of putting what used to be called the axis of resistance. And yet, at the same time, there's an entirely new vision of Islam, a totally different vision of Islam. By Saudi to a certain extent, by the UAE, by the Gal states and places like Egypt, in which Islam is less important in the state, and more open to the West. So that is a big conflict that goes all the way through. And of course, this is a conflict that has been but present in Islam since the cradle of Islam to use your word. Which conflict? Well, for example, Shia versus Sunni is part of it, but there are other debates all the way through about how to observe Islam, how to the relationship between state and religion, and so on and so forth. But to go back to your original question, we'll get into Islam shortly. Yeah, just go back to your original question. I mean, many Arab writers, and I quote them in the book, have talked about, you know, the Arab crisis, the crisis in Arabs, the political crisis, the Arab malaise, and many, many Arab writers have written about this and would side wrote about it, for example, so did many other people. And I don't see it so much as an Arab malaise myself. I see just simply that the states that were created by the Western, mainly by the Western past, but not exclusively by the Western powers. After World War, were misdesigned, and they were designed in such a way to create sort of Western style, nation states, like Syria, Iraq, etc. I mean, only two of these states had ancient traditions, and that was Iran, which isn't Arab at all, in Egypt, which has been an ancient state, an ancient nation state almost from thousands of years back. Yes, there's a special nature. Those are the only two policies in the Middle East that have a continuity going through the millennia, and the third, some would argue, is Israel itself, although there was an, a kind of hiatus of a very long time, but Israel also has deep historical antecedents in the Middle East. But so you are effectively making the case that many historians do that imperialism is, to some extent, to blame that the great powers in the West created incoherent states that were fundamentally unstable because of artificial borders and an incoherently organized kind of demographics within these states. Is that fair? Yes, and also I would say that you only have to look at the states now to see how this is true. I mean, look at the crisis of states. You have Lebanon, you have Syria, you have Iraq, you have Libya, and I could go on. One of the tragedies of the period that I cover in this book is on one hand you have these states that are like an unfit for purpose, and really may find their way as federal states, as Iraq is now increasingly a federal state with a big Kurdish authority. But at the same time one of the tragedies of this period that I cover is, you know, when you start this period in 1900, there are, for example, you know, 25% of the region is Christian, Arab Christian mainly. And, you know, you have in Iraq, you have over a million Christians, for example, and Egypt is a multi-national, multi-ethnic, gloriously cosmopolitan culture with turkosa Cassians and cops and Jews and Greeks and Lebanese and so on, Italians. And as we go through this period, this is the one place in the world, a region that is getting less and less, less and less cosmopolitan. And everywhere else is getting, you know, Britain is getting wonderfully more and more cosmopolitan in a way that is enriched the country greatly. The Middle East is the opposite and this is a bleak picture and one that as a sort of descendant of Moroccan Jewish Moroccans who really personified the sort of the sort of cosmopolitanism of the Middle East and particularly of Morocco, which is part of this book. I see that as a sadness and this grinding binary nationalism is of course a disaster for everybody as we see in say Israel, for example. But I want to go back to this, this earlier question I asked you about, you know, why is the Middle East the way it is? I mean, essentially what I'm asking you is a version of the question that Bernard Lewis historian of the Middle East, which is what went wrong. And his answer was Islam, Islam went wrong. But you seem to be sort of more interested in the role of imperialism, imperial blunders. And you seem to emphasize less Islam as a problem. Is that fair to say? Yes, I do. And I see it as less sort of a problem. But I see, I mean, history is also often argued that Islam is an earlier stage than, actually I've heard this many times from people in the Middle East in Egypt and so on, people telling me, you know, we were at an earlier stage. We haven't had the Renaissance yet, or we, you know, we're still in the age of the religious wars. I don't understand this, this framing really, because that's not how society is worth. Of course not. I see if every religion has an age and you know, as if there's a sort of a preform narrative you have to follow. And I think this is kind of old fashioned sort of post oriental sort of approach, but you hear a lot in the Middle East. And, but obviously always from very secular people in the Middle East, but I don't buy that. But I do think that there, that the, that the, the embassies are different there. And the emphasis on all everybody has been, you know, keeping these states together. And, and that has been, that has been a massive challenge and has led to these incredibly ruthless, these incredibly ruthless dictators. I mean, one of the things that, you know, another viewpoint, which is interesting is that a lot of people who write about the Middle East from Western universities, you know, say like, you really shouldn't put in Saddam Hussein and, you know, Qadafi and itself. I mean, why are you putting them in the book? And I was like, because this is a history of the region. What's their, what's their region is that their idea is that this is kind of orientalist, an orientalist analysis that, you know, I'm using these kind of figures to describe a whole society. But I, but I replied, well, you know, actually, I think this is, you know, I think the, you know, the history of the Middle East, the history of the Arab peoples or Iran or Islamic people, whatever you want to say, is, you know, it's actually patronizing to sort of to sense a half of the history in order to, in order to protect some westernized view of what this region should be like. Yeah. And so I've just, I mean, one of the things I'm trying to do in this book is, I've told the history of the Middle East as you would tell the history of Asia or Europe or, I've told it through characters. And I've, you know, I've concentrated a lot on, you know, these huge characters, Abdelazis, the founder of Saudi Arabia, NASA, Sudat, King of Say and so on. And, and of course, in Iran, the Shah, the Shah's father and so on all the way through to Kamin A. And I find that a useful way to narrate in a book that is meant for any, you know, general readers meant, and it's meant to be exciting to read as well. But, you know, obviously all these dictators are different. Their countries are different. And, you know, one froze to gather Saddam and Qaddafi, for example, the Assads. But the way they seized power, there are similarities with, especially with Bathism and, you know, between Syria and Iraq of course. But they're also different because the states are also different. And that's what's fascinating about it and their careers are so different. I mean, Qaddafi is obviously a sort of almost Nehru like Nehru, not Nehru, Nehru like a dictator. But also he in this sort of, in the history. history of the Arab world, sort of from 1969 onwards, he fulfills the role of a sort of Shakespearean fool who sort of tells the truth to everybody. And there are amazing speeches that he gives, like the one in 2008 where he says to, when he says to the Arab League, you know, why not? Didn't we, didn't we create a Palestinian state between 1948 and '68 when we could have? Why are we suddenly only now interested in the Palestinians? Of course, this is like an incredibly embarrassing comment. And everyone, if you watch the film of it, and if you haven't, I think you'd enjoy it. You literally see everyone just, they are horribly embarrassed by what he says, but that is a question. Well, the question is blatantly true. Yes, you know, after 1947, Jordan showed no interest in creating a Palestinian state, and neither did Egypt in Gaza. I mean, we'll get into Israel-Palestine shortly, but you have a personal story, a personal family history that connects you to the Middle East, and particularly to Israel-Palestine. But I want to ask you more generally as a historian, why do you think we care so much about Israel-Palestine? I mean, clearly we care about it more than most regions and most conflicted regions in the world. Where does that come from? It's such a good question. And the reason isn't just to do with Zionism, Israel, anti-Semitism, proto-philosemitism or anything else. What is to do with is where we started right at the beginning, which is like, you know, of the whole Middle East, the pathway through the Holy Land is the connecting marching road that leads to Egypt and North Africa, or from Egypt into, you know, Mesopotamia and the Levant. So it's always been extremely key strategically. But more than that, the Western fascination with Israel-Palestine, or the Holy Land, is the clue is in the name Holy Land. It is so deeply ingrained, entrenched in us, in our consciousness. And the reason for this is the history of Judeo-Christianity, the Bible, the nature, the fact that Jesus was a Jew, was a Judean who found the religion that became the European-American Christianity. And the fact that when Constantine the Great between 306 and his death assumed Christianity, made Christianity the imperial religion, and converted the Holy Land into a sort of location for pilgrimage, for Christian pilgrimage. And then of course you have the Crusades. And in the Crusades, this extraordinary thing of like hundreds of thousands of people marching from Frankfurt and London and York and all the way, all the way to the Middle East. And it's fascinating because like hundreds of thousands of people set up. I mean, the people who arrived were about 10 or 15,000 and they stormed Jerusalem as well as other cities like Antioch and so on. And when that failed, a hundred years later in Saladin retook Jerusalem 1187, the two centuries of crusading left a complete fascination with the Holy Land. And I believe that the West could shape the Holy Land as they wished. And you've got to remember in the Middle Ages, every village in Europe had a picture of Jerusalem and a Jerusalem chamber in their church with a vision of what a Christian Jerusalem, so at the point is that all of this led to the Puritan fascination with the Holy Land and the Hebrew Bible and the fulfillment of revelations and other prophecies. That led to the Victorian evangelists, the awakening, the Christian awakening in America. And when you get to the 20th century in this period, you have people like Churchill and Balfour and Lord George who they weren't religious Christians, but they were raised on biblical culture. And that led to all sorts of different manifestations. I mean, the Balfour Declaration, for example, is one. And the designation of the mandate as a new entity Palestine, for example. And this led to everything that's happened in the last sort of 80 year, in the last 125 years, I should say, which is covered by the book. And the fact of the matter is, the West has a very weird fetishistic obsession with the Holy Land. That includes a proprietary moral entitlement to adjudicate what happens and to pontificate on what happens in the Holy Land. And that spirit looks secular when you see it amongst de-colonic colonization and design as activists, for example, what could be more secular than that? It's near Marxist, but actually, you only have to look at the language to see that there's a great religiosity. It's an effectively religious movement, a post-Christian religious movement. Stay with us. We're going to take a short break. We'll be back after this. I wouldn't fundamentally disagree with you, but I think the interesting thing here is that it works. It kind of works both ways, doesn't it? Because people say, and people often tell me, I mean, why do you care so much about what Israel is doing? Do you care so much about what's happening in Sudan, what's happening in all these other places? Why are you inordinately fascinated and obsessed by these atrocities, as opposed to others? But that really does work both ways, because similarly, with October 7, for instance, was mourned with much more interest and feeling than atrocities in Sudan. So it kind of works both ways, and I think we just have to be honest about the fact that there is this historical relationship that links us to the Holy Land, that any gets there in multiple directions. I agree. I agree. I think that's very true, and that's one of the big themes of the book, and it's fascinating. So there's this fetishistic fascination, and you see it's so striking in Sudan. The third Sudanese civil war, which is what we're seeing now, starts just before October 7, and the death toll is over 150,000 civilians. There was one massacre outside of the Latvia, which in which like 40,000 civilians were killed, according to the Guardian, and there is literally no interest in this in the West. And it's happening just across the Red Sea from-- From Gaza. It's so close. But what's your view here? I mean, do you think we should care less about-- we should care less about Palestine and Israel both, or do you think do you just accept we are intimately linked by history to this region, and it's just the way human sympathy works, and people will naturally, depending on your ideological orientation in the West, you'll be inclined to support Israel or to support the Palestinians, but for whatever reason, be more linked to one or what other of these causes. Or do you think that's just not right? And I think the reality is that if you look at the history, you'll see that the Jews and Israel for a while benefited more from this fetishistic obsession with the Middle East, and that we have the right to decide what happened. And now it's the other way around, and we see exactly the opposite, the inverse happening, and there's a rising sympathy for the Palestinians against Israel. But they're both normal-- they're both manifestations of exactly the same thing, which is that deep within the Western soul, there is more than a splinter. I'd say a seam that has much in common with the crusader knights, the Victorian missionaries, and that we are seeing that in different ways, all the way through this period. But do you really think the Israeli side benefits less from this now? Because it's not just the matter of history here, there's also the matter of sort of policy. And Israel is an ally of Britain, of America, especially of America's, and most European countries. I mean, Israel clearly still benefits from that historic sympathy with their cause. Obviously, it's also linked to Europe's shame over the Holocaust. Do you really think the tables have turned? I think they've turned to a certain extent, and you see that in our streets, and in the utterances of our governments all the time. But I would say something like when I say that the viewpoints of the fashion has changed. But of course, we're not in a position, and all should we be in a position, to destroy an entire people, or dismantle an entire state just because fashion's changed. and that's true in any part of the world, including the Middle East, but everywhere else. But to go back to the original point, one of the themes of this book is that everyone counts or no one counts. And I think everyone should count. And in the book, I don't argue for any particular people in the Middle East, whether it's African Sudanese or the 600,000 people killed in the Syrian Civil War, or the hostages of Israeli hostages, or the civilians tragically killed in the Gaza war. I don't argue for any of these people. My job is to treat them all equally, curbs, whether they're curbs or alawites or Jews or whatever, and to treat them all equally and to shed light, illuminate their stories. And in the book, there are a lot of vanished tragedies. I mean, Sudan is like, what's happening now? Yemen is happening now. But there are many kind of stories that people won't know. Like, for example, the Pontic Greeks, who, like, 300,000 Pontic Greeks were just slaughtered by the Turks and all the Greeks, or the million Greeks of Ionia, where a million Greeks were either killed or thrown out of Turkey in the Turkish Civil War. And the Turkish Civil War, for example, the Turkish War of Independence, is not the Civil War, but the Turkish War of Independence. Yes, the War of Independence. I mean, it has many parallels with the creation of Israel, and I accept to a certain degree the argument that what happened in 1948 with the creation of Israel, which lots of critics of Israel, you know, really can't get beyond them, you know, quite rightly, more than the Nakper and the dispossession of the Palestinian 700,000 dispossessed. But similar things were happening in the creation of other nation states, and yes, they may not talk about that, or even think about that. At the same time, we don't really need to look at history. I mean, in a sense, if you just look at the present day, everyone counts or no one counts, I agree. But if you look at something like Ukraine, Russia invades Ukraine completely illegally, a problem proxy wars from the West against Russia. I mean, Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank since 1967, and the West is, you know, on paper, it disapproves of this, but it's continued to have sort of very friendly relations with the state of Israel. I mean, that's a gross unfairness, don't you think? Well, actually, I just think it's actually, I would look at it completely different. I think it is just a recognition of reality. For example, you know, the Turks are occupying half of Cyprus and have done since the '70s. The Turks are occupying, and have occupied from more than 10 years northern Syria, parts of northern Iraq. The region is filled with long occupations or occupation zones. And that is the reality of an unstable and turbulent region. And I personally, you know, want to see a Palestinian state or Palestinian Republic in West Bank and Gaza, and that has been my passion, that is my passion at view. But, and that requires an Israeli withdrawal from these places. But, you know, we didn't, we didn't end all relations or thrown a French turkey out of NATO when they occupied Cyprus north northern Syria. And it's very funny that people, you know, many of the people who are furious about Israel occupying Mount Herman and its foothills, and now had no idea that Turkey was occupying, you know, a swath of northern Syria for more than 10 years. So what this book does is just to try to show, you know, this, what is all these things that are happening, and without judgment, but revealing them. And there's a lot of things in the West Bank. I deeply disapproval that Israel is doing that deeply. I know, and you've written about this. And, you know, I know you're not a supporter of the current Israeli government. You've been very, very critical of them. Now, you wrote an article in the Atlantic, which was widely read three years ago, shortly after, you know, in the aftermath of the seventh of October, this was three years ago, you said there was no genocide then. Now, since then, I didn't go into the genocide. I went into decolonization, decolonization, but you do it at some, at one point in the article, at that point, say that you didn't think there was anything like a genocide happening. Have you changed your mind in subsequent years? No, I have not changed my mind. I still don't think there's a genocide happening there. I think that there's a brutal war happening there. The argument that there's a genocide is a particularly inversion of the Holocaust, and a particularly malignant inversion of what happened on October 7th. And it's designed to undermine the legitimacy of Israel, and it inevitably reverberates on Jewish populations, on slightly vulnerable Jewish populations around the world. But it's actually in the facts that there's a problem with the genocide argument, and that is that, you know, if Israel wanted to destroy, you know, Gaza would destroy the Palestinian people. It would have done a major. There has to be intent, and that the law, the international is extremely clear about this. There's no evidence of intent whatsoever. No, it doesn't have intent whatsoever. I mean, there are statements by ministers, and those are the main arguments. Does our not come as intent? Well, you know, when ministers are saying these are animals, they have no right to exist, you know, that's a minister of education. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated. Those things, those comments are all quoted in the book, by the way, and I'm certainly not someone who. I know you're a critic of this government. I think this is the worst government. I think these people are just disgraces. But I don't think that this is, for all sorts of reasons, I don't think that this is a genocide. What are those reasons? You say there's no intent. I mean, when the defense minister says all the civilian population Gaza is ordered to leave immediately, we will win. They will not receive a drop of water until they leave the world. Yeah. I mean, that's how it's like intent. Yeah. No. I mean, I think that those are disgusting comments. Well, what actually happened is that massive, you know, there's been some massive figures of aid has been sent in. In fact, the aid sent in has been larger than the aid sent in beforehand. And in fact, there's been an excessive aid in Gaza. There's a ton of aid. There's also the tonnage of bombs. I mean, I am personally heartbroken by, you know, the civilian toll and of women and children and civilians in Gaza. And, you know, that is an unbearable fact of what is in fact a brutal war. But another point is that the genocide narrative only works. If you look at the fact that like, first of all, there's no intent. Secondly, Israel was attacked. Thirdly, if you erase the presence of Hamas and an armed force and fighting within that, there's plenty of evidence. For example, the vaccination against Polo of 600,000 children. If you were doing a genocide, why on earth would you do that? Let me finish because this is important. There's the massive amount of aid sent in there. There's the enormous measures to move people and give people the chance to go to safety. There's the huge delay, for example, in the Raffa, in order to give civilians the chance to move away. There's the fact that the Israelis, rather that yes, they used a massive amount of bombs. But, you know, they also used house-to-house fighting. They used their own troops in order not to use, not to cause civilian harm. There are umpteen reasons why if they wanted to wipe out the people of Gaza, they could have done so. There's another point which is like, if they wanted to wipe out the Palestinian people, which is essential for a genocide. In fact, there are millions of Palestinians living, some thriving in the Palestinian-Israeli citizens, for example, in the state of Israel, in the state of Israel, in the recognized borders. And in the West Bank, there are three million Palestinians. Yes, there are attacks by horrendous hilltop youth on Palestinians civilians there. But there is a Palestinian authority also ruling millions of Palestinians opinions there, and Israel is making no attempt to harm those people. So, no, I don't, I mean, no, but all of these things, one could criticize much about the conduct of that war, where the war crimes committed surely, that's common in most wars, including the British and American campaigns in Iraq, for example, in Afghanistan. And so, I think that there's a norms amount to criticize it. You know, this is not a case of a war that is beyond or approach far from it. And I think that the sort of promises of total war, the rhetoric by extremist ministers, all of those things are appalling. And as you know, I've denounced them. But I just think historically, this is just not a genocide, and another point to which I think is also important is the ratio of civilian casualties. And again, I mean, far from being a genocide, you know, two to one, even if you take the Hamas figures of 70, around 70, 73,000, I think it is now, which is too high, which is tragic, but, you know, is that the sign of a genocide? Those ratios, and I hate the sort of analysis of using ratios of civilian to armed, etc., etc., but those ratios are better than the ratios that in many, much of the fighting in Iraq, for example. So, you know, I mean, those ratios are, I agree with you, they're very sort of dehumanizing, really. I hate them. But the fact is, but the fact is, if Israel is conducting a genocide, you know, how come those ratios are actually better, all the same as British and American conduct in places like Mosul and other Iraqi citizens? I mean, those ratios, there's much question about these ratios, especially these really governments kind of outrageous view that anyone who is a man of a certain age is considered a competent because they might potentially be a competent, which is not a standard that's used, that's conventionally accepted. But, you know, I mean, there's much to criticize. There's much to criticize. It's extremely, but I think that there's another wider point here that I think is interesting, which is that if we allow, the only way that the definition of genocide works is if we widen the definition, which has been, which has been much discussed, but the only way you can really justify that is by widening the definition, the international legal definition of what genocide is. And if you do that, and that is happening, of course, widely, and many people believe it is a genocide for that reason. But if you do that, you're ultimately degrading the definition of genocide, which was so carefully defied after World War II, and which has been used to define things that are undoubtedly genocide, like in Rwanda, Bosnia, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, the Turkish genocide and all of these genocides, by the way, are in the book. And I should also say, again, in the book, I don't make this judgment, actually, I actually state the accusations of genocide. But I also show something else, which is very important, which is that, you know, this definition, this accusation of genocide is not new. I mean, on October the 8th, crowds, including some of the people now running for Congress in New York, allies of Mayor Mamdani, and Mamdani itself, all of them met before the Israeli, even launched its incursion into Gaza to accuse Israel of genocide. And one of the things I show in the book is that after the '67 War, Soviet and Palestinian radicals and Soviet intelligence started to propagate the genocide lie that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians. And I don't deny it. And I absolutely chronicle this in great detail that the Palestinians suffered a grave injustice, and that, you know, the Palestinians deserve the same self-determination that the Israelis do. And so on and so forth. This is all in the book. But I also show how particular that particular really egregious accusation of genocide, which is artfully designed to invert the experience of the Holocaust, has been promoted by radicals and the Soviet since 1967, right up to now. The focus on those, that kind of rhetoric, don't you think that is going away from the actual debate, which is on what Israel is actually doing? And what a lot of genocide scholars have been saying, who don't have anything to do with, you know, you know, Soviet radicals or whatever, I mean, people within Israel, people within Israeli civil society, people within Israeli academia, scholars like Omar Bartov, who have family histories connected to Zionism and have long been sympathetic to Zionism. And these are, you know, something has changed in the last few years. You know, these are people, many of them who were denying that Israel had committed genocide in the early phases of the war, but who then have changed their mind. Clearly, something has happened such that, you know, former Israeli prime ministers, whose commitment to Zionism, you can't question someone like Ehad Al-Mard, saying that Israel is prosecuting a war of extermination or a war of annihilation, depending on how you translate the Hebrew. I mean, it has not something in your mind kind of switched at all, looking at what's happened in the last few years, but I do think, but I do think that we are now, we've moved into a new phase in the conflict and we've done into a phase that went from, you know, went through different stages. And now we're in a stage of a kind of societal, almost annihilationist battle between, between the two peoples, which is tragic. And you see that on October the 7th, as well as in the Gaza conflict, and you can't see one without the other, they're totally linked. And I do think that that societal conflict is just a disaster and it's a tragedy. And somehow we have to get out of, we have to get out of this stage. I mean, why is there so little hope of resolution, do you think? I think resolution is possible. And I think that, I don't think it's possible tomorrow, but I think that, I think that there was a tragedy on both sides. And I think that this is all the results of one state's solutions on both sides. I mean, there was a period between 1990 and 2010 when Israel was constantly offering more and more, more and more generous, you know, offers to the Palestinians, which the Palestinians turned out. Now, you can argue that these always involved demilitarization, they weren't offering a real state. And Israel was always dominant. And there were lots of sort of reasons why they turned down these offers. They weren't offering the real right of return. But, you know, one can't deny that that process was happening. And the, the offers, by the time you get to Erdogan, who you mentioned, you know, they were really offering what even Palestinians, many Palestinians regarded as kind of acceptable, acceptably generous offers to launch what would become a Palestinian state in the end. And all of those were in the end turned down to the fury of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and much of the Arab world. Because actually the fact is they all just want this, just they want, they want this sold. And they have, you know, so that's one part of it. But isn't the other part you're missing, you know, Israel's consistent refusal, especially of the Israeli right to actually leave the Palestinian occupied territories. And it's really got into sort of, I don't know, overkill even seems like an understatement now when you're looking at the settler violence, and the way that Israeli outputs in the West Bank, which are illegal under Israel's own laws and yeah, sponsored by the IDF and figures with the Israeli government. I totally agree with you. And I think that, you know, when I write in the book about, you know, states they're in danger of being degraded, of becoming collapsing states, of militiarization of state. Israel is in real danger of this. You know, Israel is in danger of militias capturing its government. And that could lead to the total disintegration of Israel, which is one of the ironies is that Israel's doing more to destroy itself now than its enemies could possibly, ever possibly do. And what is happening in the West Bank is a colossal disaster for Israel as well. I mean, Israel should not be holding having an occupation should not be building these settlements. and certainly should not be protecting, you know, these hilltop youth, these militias. But the reason why I don't think everything is hopeless in terms of getting peace is that actually those lunatic militias are actually tiny numbers of people. A new government in Israel could actually arrest all of them, deport them all, even if they had the will to do so. And there is a wide recognition in Israel that this is now a disastrous self-mutilation and a threat to the state itself. On top of being completely wrong, as far as the Palestinians are concerned. So in both cases, the Palestinians, you know, in which the Palestinian national movement in which Hamas became the most dynamic part. And in Israel where the far right became the most dynamic part in both these cases, and they are mirror images of each other, and they do reflect each other. And we see in the tragedy of Gaza, exactly what happens when they lock horns, what a disaster it is for ordinary Palestinian people and ordinary Jewish people murdered in October 7th. But there was a time in the '90s and the '80s and '90s and early 2000s when majority constituent, more jorities in both people's were keen to try the two-state solution. I don't like the two states of the world, the phrase two state solution. I use two nations to republics because I think the problem is in the word solution. There won't ever be a solution in the terms of like there are always going to be people. And in the Israeli society who just want to throw out the Palestinians and set up and have everything in the West, have the settlements in the West Bank, there are always going to be people in Palestinian society who want to slaughter all the Jews in a genocide and dismantle the whole Israeli state and Israeli society. There was going to be those people in both sides. But there has been a majority in both in both nations for a negotiated settlement in the past and there can be again. And I think it was a colossal mistake of the Netanyahu to cease all negotiations and to cease all talking with the Palestinians. There was also a major disaster and an act of folly in favoring Hamas over the Palestinian authority in order to discredit the Palestinian authority. And these were acts of colossal folly and the consequences of what we're seeing now. But I think in the end it is possible. And if you look at the deals that were being discussed in the Old Mut and Old Mut by the way, read this book for me and gave us questions and so on, if you look at the deals that he was offering with our bass in 2007, 2008 period. I agree, there's a real missed opportunity. So it was the closest yes, the world I've ever got to fixing that situation. And unfortunately, you know, one of the tragedies, there are so many. But one of them is in Israeli the Israeli constitutional lack of a constitution and the and the proportional representation, which means that it's almost impossible to find an Israeli government that has the authority to do enough to do something so existential as to make that deal. But leaving aside that the democratic that the electoral dynamics is also the social dynamics, which is that even if there was democratic consent and, you know, for a solution, as I said, it's like Robin came basically in an Israeli prime minister on board and he was assassinated by people who are now in the Israeli government and show no signs of leaving it, which is why I'm perhaps much more pessimistic than you. But it's it's heartening to know that you are hopeful and as you know, someone who is you are an expert in the field and for you to say that you see a solution or a resolution coming that's that's very heartening to know. Simon Sibag want to through, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you and thanks for joining us on the New Statesman. Thanks, thanks for having me. You've been listening to the new society from the New Statesman with me, Tandir Rashid and my guest Simon Sibag Montifuri. The podcast will be back next week.