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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the seemingly forgotten attack on the Yazidi people by ISIS in 2014.
Then, David is joined by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. David and Simon discuss how much of the present-day Middle East emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the violence that took place both before and after the empire’s collapse. David and Simon discuss how, one after another, different language groups and religious groups were pushed into exile or eliminated altogether.
Then, David finishes with a discussion of The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda by Warren Kinsella.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Simon Sebag Montefiore: So, again and again, we have this pattern where if you don’t have a state, you’re nothing, and if you do have a state, the only way to enforce it is with autocracy or with repression.
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Simon Sebag Montefiore, the acclaimed British historian and author of the new book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. The book discussion at the end of the show will feature The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella, subtitled The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda. But before either the dialogue with Simon Sebag Montefiore or the book discussion of The Hidden Hand, some opening thoughts on themes that will run all their way through today’s program.
Simon Sebag’s book The Cauldron describes the transformation of the Middle East from its existence under the Ottoman Empire a century and a half ago to the region of today, divided among many nations. And yet while the map of the Middle East is much more tangled than it was when the Ottomans ruled almost everything from Tunisia to Iraq—although parts of it were under foreign influence: British and French colonial rule, Italian colonial rule—a simple map, but with a complex reality. Simon Sebag describes how, one after another, different language groups, different religious groups, different groups with different histories were pushed into exile or eliminated altogether.
I want to showcase just one of those acts of elimination to drive home what it is that we are talking about when we talk about the making of the modern Middle East.
In August 2014, fighters of the Islamic terror group ISIS attacked the Yazidi minority in northwest Iraq. The Yazidis are a very ancient people who follow a pre-Islamic religion. There are about 600,000 of them living in northwest Iraq in August 2014. ISIS murdered some 3,000 to 5,000 of them, mostly men and older women, and captured 6,800women and girls and turned them into sexual slaves for ISIS fighters, and spared the lives of some of the very young boys in order to recruit them and brainwash them as child soldiers fighting for ISIS. Religious and cultural sites belonging to the Yazidi people were systematically destroyed, and civilian infrastructure, especially water supplies, wrecked. Four hundred thousand of the 600,000 Yazidi were driven into exile, and few of those people have ever returned to their homes.
Now, this was a true genocide. ISIS was very explicit. Their goal was to eliminate the Yazidi people, because ISIS hated their religious traditions. ISIS condemned the non-Islamic Yazidi as devil worshipers and thought that because of their non-Islamic views, they should cease to exist as a people and even as human beings.
The story was a temporary big deal. People in the West were aware of the Yazidi genocide, and some of the Yazidi were given refuge, especially in Europe. But as time has passed, the story has faded from memory. It is no longer of much interest. You certainly don’t see the kind of big marches in Western countries by progressive people or other kinds of people that you’ve seen in, for example, the war that Hamas started in October of 2023. The Yazidi story doesn’t seem to matter. And I think the reason why we have a hard time holding onto it is because a lot of people who study the Middle East, especially the progressive-minded, have a kind of vision of how the Middle East should be. It’s a vision in which Arab nationalism and Islamic identity are seen as progressive, in the most literal sense—the trend of the future—and everything else is seen as kind of backward looking, and it shouldn’t be there.
And so as Christian populations were either eliminated by force or driven into exile—as Simon and I will discuss, there were massacres of the Assyrian Christian population in Iraq. Much of the Christian population of Egypt has been driven into exile. The Armenians were the victim of two waves of genocide in Ottoman Empire, one in the 1890s and again in the 1910s. The Kurds were subjected to murderous attack by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and by the Iranian regime, too. And of course, there is the story of the Jews, who inhabited ancient communities in places like Alexandria and Baghdad, communities that existed before the coming of either the Arabs or of Islam to the region. And after 1945, those communities—or after 1941 in the Iraqi case—those communities were murdered, massacred, plundered, driven into exile, ceased to exist, in-gathered into the state of Israel, where the Jews who formerly lived all through the Ottoman Empire have found refuge in one place.
This great system of simplification was at every turn marked by atrocity, attempted genocide, the refusal of difference within the context of the Middle East. We don’t seem to find that so troubling because we have an implicit idea of who should be on top and who should not be on top. And this implicit understanding may, I think, add some context to why false accusations against Israel and the Jews have gained so much hearing. Because in a way, the Jews and the state of Israel stand out as the great exception to the trend of the Middle East. This is the one place—the one place—where a people that were a minority people under the old Ottoman Empire have built a successful state that is able to be self-sufficient. And that exception to the trend everywhere else in the Middle East is seen by many as a kind of denial of the logic of history, which calls for the whole region to become all one thing under one language—or two, Turkish and Arabic—under one faith, Islam, everyone else driven to the wall.
We’re going to talk a little bit about this in the program, how this happened, and we’re going to try to talk about it from an historical point of view to understand it. It is, I think, a trend to be condemned, but first, before condemning, it is a trend to be understood. And to understand why the state of Israel looms so large in our imagination, we have to pay some attention to the things that loom strangely small, like the story of the Yazidi. So horrible, so forgotten. Why?
And now, my dialogue with Simon Sebag Montefiore.
[Music]
Frum: Simon Sebag Montefiore is a British historian of Russia and the Middle East whose books have been published in more than 40 languages. His nonfiction—he has written fiction too—his nonfiction includes: Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; and also Young Stalin, as well as the internationally bestselling Jerusalem and the history of The Romanovs: 1613–1918.
He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London. His new book is The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, a history of the region from the last years of the Ottoman Sultanate to the present day. Simon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Lovely to be with you, David.
Frum: So first, congratulations on the astonishing acclaim for The Cauldron. And thank you for making time in what has been obviously an exhausting media tour. You’ve been everywhere, so I’m so honored you would join.
Montefiore: Thank you. And thanks for having me on this. I’ve always wanted to do this, so here we are finally.
Frum: The Cauldron is this thrilling narrative history of the Middle East from approximately the year 1900 under the Ottoman Empire to the present day, with characters that are presented very vividly: many anecdotes, many quotations from the literature of the region. The book is a tremendous linguistic achievement. And it’s an exciting read, but it’s also one that can be read not necessarily from beginning to end, but you can start from the middle and work outwards if you prefer, because it’s addressed regionally.
But I want to test a thesis on you. So this is a narrative history. It’s a story, and a thrilling story. But you’re not an argumentative historian. Your own ideas are sort of present in the background but are not in the foreground. I want to try to assess what I think you’re telling us. Let me lay out what I think is your thesis, and then you can tell me whether I have it right or whether I have it wrong. May I go ahead?
Montefiore: Please do.
Frum: Okay. So if we start in the year 1900—let’s start a little before. Let’s start 10 years before that. Most of what is now the Middle East is ruled by the Ottoman Empire. So what is now Turkey, parts of Southern Europe, what is now Iraq, what is now Syria, what is now Lebanon, what is now Israel and the West Bank. Egypt is theoretically part of the Ottoman Empire, although not practically. Tunisia is theoretically part of the Ottoman Empire, not practically. Libya too. And across this vast array of space, there are dominant groups, especially the Ottoman Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims, but there are many, many minority groups in many, many cities. And it’s not an egalitarian society, it’s not a just society, and it’s not a progressive society. It’s kind of backward-looking.
But still, if you’re a Greek in Smyrna, if you’re a Greek in the city of Alexandria in Egypt, if you are an Armenian in one of the cities of the empire, if you’re a Jew in Baghdad, if you’re a Yazidi peasant, an Assyrian Christian—there’s a way forward for you, both as a people and for you as individuals.
And suddenly that begins to change—and you’ll know why I’m dating this back to 1890 rather than 1900—with a process that unfolds over the next decades, of brutal simplification. That’s the cauldron: the great melting. Brutal simplification. Minorities are massacred or driven into exile, and the two big dominant groups—Turkish-speaking people and Arabic-speaking people—assert greater and greater control and intolerance over the region, driving everyone else out. And that is what the cauldron is.
So do I have it right?
Montefiore: That’s one part of it. One part of it is an increasingly tightening nationalistic control that does ultimately lead to what is in fact the biggest kind of slow, ethnic-cleansing purge over the last 125 years, which is the destruction of and the vanishing of the Christians of the Middle East. And that is one of the parts of what you’re referring to here. One is a sort of tightening of a nationalistic control. And the other one is a driving out of anyone who doesn’t fit into that.
And the Christian population—it’s such an extraordinary thing. You know, in 630 AD, the Middle East was basically sort of 90 percent Christian, just before the Arab conquests. And then over the next sort of thousand years, 25 percent remained Christian. And so in 1900, the time you’re talking about, or 1890, you know, still 25 percent of the Middle East is Christian. And jump ahead to today, and that population has virtually vanished. It’s something like 4 percent now.
Frum: Well, let’s start with one of those populations, which underwent a brutal process of murder. This is not an abstract historical process. And I’m speaking, of course, of the Armenians—and that’s why I backdated to 1890, not 1900, because the attacks on Armenians begin in the 1890s.
Tell us the story of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, and why they are so brutally treated.
Montefiore: The Armenians had lived since time immemorial, since ancient times, in this region. They didn’t have a single homeland. They were spread across the Ottoman Empire. But before the Ottoman Empire, in the early modern period or the Middle Ages, there had been Armenian kingdoms in Eastern Anatolia.
And of course, in ancient times, there had been full Armenian kingdoms in that region, and Armenian kingdoms had been buffer zones between the Persian or Parthian and the Roman Empires. They had been among the first people to convert from paganism to Christianity, and they never converted to Islam. And in the Ottoman Empire, they remained a powerful community, a self-governing community that was recognized as Christian, provided they paid, like all other non-Muslim communities, the jizya—that’s the tax for people of the book. And their community was, like the Greek community, which was another large community within the Ottoman Empire, also recognized. But there were spasms of violence against them whenever economics or war or famine, or there was a crisis in which one would blame the other within one’s community.
But jump forward to the late 19th century. For many centuries—you put this very well in your introduction, David—but for many centuries, these minorities had been allowed to govern themselves, but they didn’t have equal rights to the ruling Ottoman Turkish Sunni Muslims. But that changed beginning in the 1830s and intensifying in the 1850s with Tanzimat. That made all Ottoman citizens equal, whether they were Christian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish.
Frum: Tanzimat means “reform.” Is that right?
Montefiore: It means reform. And the idea of reform was not necessarily to turn the Ottoman Empire into a liberal democracy, but to make it more powerful, to exploit its peoples, to make the empire stronger.
But in fact, what it did, in part, was, in part it liberated these minorities and enabled them to own land, to expand their businesses, to become wealthy. And many dynasties emerged in trade and so on that were Armenian and Greek overwhelmingly. And that caused immense jealousy amongst the Muslim population that had been the ruling class for all this time, or the ruling caste for all these centuries. And it also discombobulated the empire. And this policy only went on for about 20 years.
In 1877, 1879, a new sultan attacked by Russia, fighting for the existence of his dynasty and his empire, came back. Abolished the new parliament that had been part of these Tanzimat or the climax of these Tanzimat reforms, and unleashed a new idea of Islamic empire, Islamic Ottomanism, in which the senior peoples were now the Muslims. And the sultan rebranded himself as sultan caliph of the empire. And at that point—
Frum: Sultan means “power holder”; caliph means “religious leader.”
Montefiore: Yeah. It meant the sort of successor to the prophet. And at this point, Abdul Hamid II, a fascinating character, started to promote a new concept in the empire where he played off different minorities against other minorities to promote essentially the Islamic nature of the state or the empire. And this involved using, for example, Kurds, who were sort of second-class Muslim citizens, to attack Armenians, who were third-class Ottoman citizens in effect. And this unleashed all sorts of notorious massacres. The Bulgarian massacres—they were also known as the Hamidian massacres after Hamid himself, the sultan.
And at the same time, something else was happening. Which was the excuse for this, which was that nationalism had arrived amongst these peoples. And just as the Turks started to embrace nationalism, the Arabs started to embrace it, and the Serbs and all the Christian peoples of Europe started to embrace it, so did the Armenians. And some Armenians now started to say, like: We want a state too. Everyone else has one. Where can we have one? And they naturally found a backer in the Ottoman Empire’s main enemy—which was the Russian Empire, which was the Orthodox Christian empire of the Romanovs. And so now when they looked at the Ottomans, they started to think, Not only are these people Christian Ottomans, they’re actually Christian Russian agents who are holding a dagger right at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
And it was made worse because, though the Armenians were mainly concentrated in the eastern part of what is now Turkey, they actually were speckled around the whole empire. There were Armenians in Jerusalem. There were Armenians in Constantinople, the capital, and all over the empire. And therefore, they began to see them very like how Germans began to see Jews between the wars. And there hangs a tale, of course.
So by the time we reach World War I—I’m jumping ahead here a bit, if I’m allowed—by the time we reach World War I and the Ottoman Empire enters the war against the Allies on the side of Germany, of course Russia is on the side of the Allies and against the Ottoman Empire and is, of course, backing the Armenians. And the Ottoman regime at this point has changed from the Ottomanism autocracy of Abdul Hamid II to the ultra neo-fascist, almost proto-Nazi eugenist nationalism of the Young Turks. Who were led by the three Pashas, who were the kind of triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war, and they believed that war would be a cleansing experience for the Ottoman Empire.
Frum: And they attacked the Armenian communities. In the 1890s, there were Ottoman riots against Armenians in the cities. And during the war, there’s a murderous rampage against the Armenians who are not in the cities.
What is the total death toll among Armenians between 1895 and 1918?
Montefiore: It’s about 2 million.
Frum: About 2 million.
Montefiore: I mean, during World War I, 1.1 million is the usually accepted number, which is colossal. And it’s a large part of the Armenian nation. And it’s such a decisive moment because it’s because of this genocide—and by the way, this wasn’t the only genocide. They also killed 300,000 Maronite Christians in Lebanon. They also killed over 400,000 Greeks or Pontic Greeks who were on the Black Sea coast and in Ionia. They also killed several hundred thousand Assyrian Christians who lived on the borders of what is now Turkey and Iraq. And so this was a deliberate purge. And there is evidence, there are directives, there are orders from Talat Pasha and the other leaders to either massacre these people, men, women, and children, or to drive them out into the desert to starve. And it’s really the first modern genocide.
Frum: And it’s a modern genocide unlike what Stalin will do to his subject peoples, where he’s trying to break economic resistance. This is ethnic elimination by—it’s maybe not a fully modern state, the Ottoman state. It’s obviously not as efficient as Germany and not as efficient as Stalin’s Russia. But it is the deliberate elimination of categories of ethnicity in order to simplify the state, to make the state more powerful.
Montefiore: That’s right. And also to destroy the bacteria within, to destroy the traitors within.
And so it’s decisive in various ways. One is that it ensures that the Armenian nation exists really more in diaspora than it does in formerly Armenian territories. It led the Western powers to back Armenian nationhood as well. And Armenian forces fought on the side of the Russians in the wars that followed. And in the wars that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire, they fought against the new Turkish state to try and win an Armenian state, which was designated to exist in what is now eastern Turkey. And its big backer was President Woodrow Wilson of America, who promised to rule, to govern a mandate—an American mandate—for the Armenians, which is quite a thought. Of course, this never happened. And in fact, what happened was, as David will know better than I, Wilson went back to America and failed to get any of these obligations through Congress or membership of the League of Nations that he’d created and so on.
But what happened in the former Ottoman Empire was that a new Turkish-nationalist maestro arose: Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became [Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk. The master of the father of Turks, who founded a new Turkish nation, who founded a Turkish republic, and crushed the Armenians in eastern Turkey. So they never got the republic.
Frum: And then drove out the Greeks from western Turkey.
Montefiore: And then switched round and drove out the Greeks from western Turkey, and that’s also a fascinating part of the story.
Frum: I’m going to pause you there, because there’s an element here that is going to, I think, come as a pause or something to a lot of modern readers.
If you have studied Middle Eastern studies at an American university, or even more a European or British university, you’re introduced to the Middle East as a kind of inert mass. Nothing happens there unless a Western power makes it happen, and anything that happens there is a reaction to something that a Western power does.
But as you were telling it, the beginning of the cycle of purging, elimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide—it’s a spontaneous local phenomenon. This is something driven by the Ottoman Turkish government and their successor, the Young Turk government, which is defining itself in new ways against its subject peoples in an effort to exert stronger control over its territory.
Montefiore: That’s right.
Frum: It’s not a reaction to Western neocolonialism or Western imperialism. This is something they wanted to do for their own reasons and acted on their own volition.
Montefiore: Yeah. This is Ottoman Turkish imperialism. This is Ottoman Turkish genocidal massacre of their own subjects for their own purposes. And it’s a sort of proto-Nazi ideology with social Darwinism, eugenicism, and ultranationalism, and this comes from within the Middle East itself. Though, of course, they’re highly influenced, as are all the peoples of the region, by nationalism—the new drug of nationalism that seems to offer the solution to all things.
Frum: Let me hit another pause button here because—and I wanted to pause before we got to Atatürk, because the First World War ends with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It’s carved up. It loses most of its remaining European territories, and many of its holdings are then divided up into new Arab countries that either have outright Sunni majorities or else have Sunni elites, as is the case in Iraq. Most people in Iraq are not Sunni, but there’s an Arab Sunni elite, and there are then other groups. And what we now call Turkey is also a successor state. It’s carved out of the Ottoman Empire, too, and it’s defined as a national state with Turkish as its language. It changes the name of its capital city from the Greek Constantinople to the kind-of-Greek Istanbul—which is also Greek, I understand, but it sounds more Turkish even though it’s Greek in origin.
So we have these now-new states. And the Arab states and the new Turkish national state, they begin eliminating their minorities one by one by one.
Montefiore: That’s correct. And so, you know, in Turkey, for example what happens, the new Turkish state is really defined on what we would now call, in progressive parlance, an ethno-religious basis. In the sense that Turks were Ottoman subjects who spoke Turkish, lived in what was regarded as the Turkish heartland, and were Muslim. And people who were Christian could not be Turkish. So what we see today—and it started with Atatürk’s version of Turkishness, but his was secular and this is religious. So that’s exactly right. And so they drove out the Armenians who had challenged them and tried to carve out a state in the east, and then they turned on the Greeks.
And the Greeks—it was slightly a different story, because the Greeks had been promised a sort of new Byzantine Empire in what is now western Turkey. And the reason why they claimed that was because there were huge Greek Orthodox populations in western Turkey—that used to be called Ionia—that had been there for thousands of years, literally since the Trojan Wars. And they lived in cities like Smyrna, the great Greek city of Smyrna. And so now Greek armies arrived, backed by the British and the French—and this was an example of European interference in the region—they arrived to protect their own ancient local Greek populations, but also to increase their kingdom. The Greek kingdom, the Greek state. And there they encountered Atatürk and his new Turkish army.
And what ensued was a brutal nation-building war of ethnic purging, population swaps. Brutal, huge battles of regular armies. The armies in this were huge. They were 150,000 strong each in these major battles, with artillery, of course, and everything. So they were real World War I battles. But this is in 1922, and the Turks won these battles, and they then drove out, massacring and driving and deporting the Greek populations of what is now western Turkey. And in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, which involved Britain and Greece, the populations were swapped. So all the Muslims went to Turkey, all the Christians were expelled—
Frum: That sounds so antiseptic.
Montefiore: It’s not that antiseptic, because there were huge massacres.
Frum: It’s murder, it’s pillage, it’s people standing on docks. It’s cities on fire.
Montefiore: Yeah. It’s people jumping into docks and drowning. It’s burning cities. And at the heart of it is the inferno of Smyrna, which is one of the most apocalyptic urban demolitions of all time. And this creation of the Turkish nation is so important, because it explains what we’re seeing now in the rise of Turkey as a regional power. And it explains both the militaristic Turkish nationalism. It explains also the aspiration for much more influence, the grievance that they were diminished inside these borders agreed on in 1923, and the wish to expand and re-energize the Ottoman idea.
And that is what we’re seeing now with President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan.
Frum: Let me take you now to the Arabic-speaking countries, mostly Sunni, that are carved out of the Ottoman Empire.
Now, Egypt was notionally part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. It was really an independent state with a lot of British influence, some French influence. Egypt remains a reasonably cosmopolitan place after the First World War with Greek minorities, Jewish minorities. Syria has more French influence. Lebanon has a lot of French influence. Palestine, which is reserved as a Jewish homeland, is a British mandate.
But there’s this new country of Iraq created, and it becomes kind of genocide central in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Tell us about the history of Iraq from the end of the First World War to the advent of the Second World War.
Montefiore: Well, that’s right. But the Egypt you described was—and it’s hard to imagine now—but Egypt was the most cosmopolitan country in the Middle East. The fellahin, the lower, you know, the peasant class, were Arab, but the merchant classes were—as you said, David—Jewish, Lebanese, Greek, Italian. And they were large populations. The Jewish population was several hundred thousand just on its own, and they were the descendants of Jews who had been settled in Egypt by Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, so they’d been there for millennia. And the wealth of Egypt depended on this mercantile class.
And then the ruling class, the landowners, were Turco-Circassians, who were the descendants of enslaved Christians who had been enslaved and kidnapped by the Ottomans and previous rulers from their villages. They were Christian children who’d been enlisted in the Ottoman or Mamluk armies, who had been stolen from their parents, who were probably murdered. And who had then been converted to Islam, manumitted, and then joined the army and founded these families, these dynasties. It’s just a fascinating story. And even in the 1920s, these people, the Turco-Circassians, were still owning and ruling Egypt. And the ruling kings of Egypt, as they became, were also Turco-Albanian dynasty, who didn’t even speak Arabic right into the 1930s, which is fascinating. So that’s Egypt.
And so you’re absolutely right that these are incredibly complicated because of Ottoman countries. When you come to Syria and Lebanon, these are also multiethnic, multi-sectarian countries—as they still are, which is why their rulers to this day are desperately struggling to make them work as single countries.
And the French mandate was for Greater Syria, which is now divided into Syria and Lebanon. But it’s just worth remembering how different these countries could have been. Because when one thinks of them as they were bound to be Syria and Lebanon, no, that isn’t how it worked at all. And that’s also true with Iraq. With Syria and Lebanon, the French were thinking about dividing it into five or six countries. And those countries were two Sunni ones in Aleppo and Damascus, and then a Druze one, an Alawite one at Latakia on the coast. And then they were going to devise a Christian Maronite country that the Christians would rule, who were the French allies in Lebanon. And in the end, they decided not to do this, but to divide it into two big countries: Syria and Lebanon.
So then we get to Iraq. Again, one thinks of Iraq as set, but Iraq was known to the allies as Mesopotamia—“the land between the rivers” in Greek. Iraq was an old Arab name for this region, but there’d never been a country called Iraq before, just as there’d never been a country called Lebanon or Syria or Jordan. And these countries were all drawn by the Western overlords, particularly Britain and France. And Iraq was just a combination of three provinces, or vilayets, put together by the British. And the vilayets were Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. And Mosul is where the oil was, and that’s the Kurdish area. And there was a big question as to whether Mosul would be in Iraq or not. And that’s a pretty important detail, because it’s partly the Kurdish area; it’s where the oil is. And the Turks, who we were just discussing a minute ago, wanted Mosul and believed Mosul should be in Turkey. Now, that would have really changed the situation.
But the Western allies also wanted to create a state—not just for the Armenians that we were discussing, but for the Kurds. And the Kurds would have a state that was partly in what is now Turkey and partly in what is now Iraq. But that didn’t happen either, because the Kurds were betrayed by everybody. And talk about genocide; this is another genocide in the 1930s where Atatürk and the Turkish Republic bombed Kurdish revolts, destroyed Kurdish village, killed something like 40,000 to 50,000 using poison gas, bombing villages. And they crushed the Kurds for another generation.
In Iraq, they hoped to get Mosul or at least to prevent a Kurdish state being created. And in the end, the British were determined that Mosul would stay in the new country they’d created of Iraq. But as you said, David, Iraq was a multiethnic, multinational, multi-sectarian country. It had a small Shia majority, a barely Sunni minority. But that minority was very educated—was the landowners, was the civil servants. And it had been favored and empowered by the Turks, who were also Sunni.
And then there were huge minorities of Kurds, small Christian sects, the Chaldeans, and Assyrians. And when I say “small,” they were a million people, so they weren’t that tiny. Non-Muslim sects like the Yazidis and Turkmen and all sorts of other minorities. Assyrians who were Christian.
Frum: And Jews in Baghdad.
Montefiore: And Jews in Baghdad. And a third of Baghdad was Jewish. Yeah. And many of the great families there like the Sassoons, most famously, who later went to England and became the sort of richest family in England, basically. The Sassoons, “the Rothschilds of the East,” they were known as. They were an incredibly prosperous minority, and they dominated the city in many ways. And the most kind of privileged of them ran huge business empires and also served the Pashas who ran Baghdad and—
Frum: And between 1919 and 1942, there’s just attack after attack on each of these groups: on the Assyrian Christians, on the Kurds, on the Jews. And they are murdered and driven into exile.
Montefiore: That’s exactly what happened. One of the big outrages is in the early ’30s, when they turn on the Christian Assyrians and massacre them. The Assyrians flee the country. And it’s really the first sign in Iraq that these new nation-states created for the Arabs are actually contradicting the multiethnic kind of cosmopolitan nature of these regions, that had been, perhaps in some ways, at various moments—and one mustn’t generalize—better ruled by empires with capitals far away.
And so the climax for the Jews comes in 1941 with the Farhud, which is a terrifying pogrom. But in these pogroms against the Jews in 1941, influenced by specifically Nazi propaganda and perpetrated by a self-consciously Nazi-influenced militia, it was an episode more like October the 7th, you know—where women were raped and then their bodies mutilated. Body parts were paraded through the town. And it really took place at an interesting moment when the British were about to retake Baghdad, and a pro-Nazi government was just in the process of being overthrown in 1941. And in that interim period, they decided they were going to get the Jews, and they went round the town marking the doors of every Jewish house. And so when the Farhud started, when the pogrom started, they knew exactly the houses, and they could see the mark on the door. Which is just a sort of chilling detail, isn’t it, David?
David Frum: Yeah. I want to bring now the story up to the present in our last few minutes.
One of the things I think that you will hear said a lot on modern university campuses by advocacy groups of various kinds is—they’ll tell the story of this Edenic Middle East before the Jews got there, before the Jews came to the state of Israel. And they will ask, Why aren’t the Jews comfortable to live in a multiethnic, multinational state with an Arab majority? What could possibly go wrong in such a situation? And I wanted to give people a tour of that. The story of the Middle East from the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, as you say, in the late 19th century, beginning with the attacks on the Armenians, most bloodily in the 1890s and continuing, is: You either have a state, or you’re dead. Those are your choices in the Middle East.
Montefiore: That’s right, and that is one of the themes of the book. And one of the themes of the book is to confront all of these Edenic myths, which even a cursory look at the facts and the history will show you is entirely legendary and has never existed.
You know, it starts with the myth that the Ottoman Empire was this kind of wonderful kumbaya, tolerant, poetry-spouting kind of a multicultural society. And that was never true. It was a conquest society built on the enslavement and kidnapping of Christian children.
This isn’t some sort of story, by the way. This is how the Ottoman Empire, it was how it was so successful. This tribute of children—which the Ottoman Empire took from Christian villages in the Caucasus, in the Crimea, in southern Ukraine, and also in the Balkans—was how it was provided with talented, energetic manpower.
And the women went into the harems. The boys went into the army or the civil service. And the women in the harems. The most lucky of them became queens. They became the wives of actual sultans. And Hürrem Sultan, known as Roxelana, for example, the blonde or red-haired Ukrainian girl—who incidentally was the most powerful Ukrainian in world history, I would argue—she became Suleiman the Magnificent’s wife, mother of his successor. And she was typical, but of the luckiest of those. But for the boys, they became soldiers. They were forcefully converted to Islam. Once they were about to become officers, they were manumitted—in other words, freed from slavery—and then they were able to work up the military. And they were the army of the Ottoman Empire that conquered this vast empire from the borders of Libya all the way to the borders of Iran.
So that’s the first thing about the Ottoman Empire. The second thing is: There was tolerance, provided you accepted the total supremacy of Islam and Sultan. And if you in any way challenged that political and religious supremacy, you were slaughtered. The history of the Ottoman Empire is filled with massacres of minorities and Jews at regular intervals. And this goes on right into the 19th century, well before we get to the 1890s, where David started this discussion. But, you know, a typical example is in 1860; 25,000 Christians were massacred in Damascus in the 1860 event, which was one of the occurrences that brought the Western powers into the Ottoman Empire. And we’ve seen how the Ottoman Empire ended, with a proto-Nazi genocide of entire races.
And then you get into the creation of these states. If we look into the second half of the 20th century—where Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, they all became independent—again, you see a similar pattern. Dictators from one sect or another protected and promoted their own group. Saddam Hussein, for example, protected the Sunni majority, even though he was from a very poor Tikriti peasant family, and brutally crushed the Shiites and the Kurds. And ultimately, to come back to your theme, this culminated in the attempted genocide of the Kurdish nation in Iraq.
So, again and again, we have this pattern where if you don’t have a state, you’re nothing. And if you do have a state, the only way to enforce it is with autocracy or with repression. And that is the process by which, in my book, you’ll see over a century and a quarter we go from this wonderful efflorescence of sects and ethnicities. You go to this bleaker and bleaker and bleaker environment, and the Christians virtually vanish. So that in 2000, like 25 years ago, you still had a million Christians in Iraq. After the Islamist insurgency during the Iraq War, now there are 115,000 Christians in Iraq. So 900,000 of them have gone.
So this is the picture.
Frum: And this process of consolidation also leads to economic and technological failure. So Egypt—the cosmopolitan Egypt you describe of the 19th century—there was a large stock market in Alexandria. Egypt was a food exporter. Cotton exporter.
Montefiore: Huge cotton industry.
Frum: A big, big destination for foreign investment. The Suez Canal. And then after the Second World War, Egypt, a newly nationalist, newly Arabized Egypt, expels its Greeks, Italians, Jews, of course. And imposes state control over the economy and becomes an ever-more poverty-stricken country, dependent evermore not on investment, but on aid.
Montefiore: That’s right.
Frum: That’s the story of every region. And this story is told as one that the West did to the Middle East, not as a story something the Middle East did to itself
Montefiore: Agree. That is one of the major themes of the book. And you do have to question whether the nation-state itself was—as an ideology, as a state architecture—suited to this region at all.
Frum: Well, let’s talk about one particular nation-state, which is the one that gets almost all the airtime, and that is the nation-state of Israel. Built over a century of gradual development created by a vote of the United Nations in 1947. In 1947, there is a war of independence. The Arab population is pushed out of what will become Israel, or chooses to leave. In some cases leaves voluntarily. And then Jewish populations all over the rest of the Middle East are expelled in hundreds of thousands, and come to Israel. And a nation-state is built there that is actually economically capable, technologically capable, militarily capable. And this becomes the last and most intolerable provocation, that there is one nation-state that actually is suited to the region when other nation-states don’t work.
Montefiore: That’s right. And also, I mean, there are other ways to look at Israel. I mean, one way to look at it—I look at the creation of Israel as very much just one of the states created out of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and out of the end of the British Empire too. But you know—the real comparison is, it’s very like the creation of Turkey, which is only 20 years earlier. Where you have a new concept of a new nation created with ethnic and religious characteristics, a newly defined language, and a brutal ethnic war. A competition with another people who are also indigenous to the region, in which many of them are expelled.
Frum: This is Turks versus Greeks, compared to Jews versus Arabs.
Montefiore: Yeah. And it’s very similar. Out of it comes a nation that is extremely proud, extremely competent, extremely dynamic, militaristic to some extent. And there are huge population swaps to make all this work. And out of it comes Turkey. Though Turkey remains with a massive ethnic population that doesn’t want to be in Turkey—the Kurds—and that leads to something like 100,000 civilians being killed over the next century. So does it sound like anywhere?
Frum: Yeah. Well, you don’t have the Kingdom of Greece, or now the Republic of Greece, sponsoring endless terrorist attacks on Turkey.
Montefiore: No. But you do have—
Frum: And saying that Turkey has no right to exist, and it should all be Greece.
Montefiore: No, and that’s one of the huge differences. No one criticizes, no one says it’s disgusting. What, you know—what is Turkish nationalism? Why should the Turks have nationalism? You know, it’s only Israeli nationalism that is constantly challenged. So, but that’s part of it.
And the other country that’s very similar—but none of these countries are the same, but there are strong parallels—and the other one is, of course, the creation of Pakistan. Which has huge similarities, and is almost simultaneous with the creation of Israel in 1947. The difference between all three of these, one major difference, is how small the war was in 1948—the Nakba War, or the War of Independence, the War of Israeli Independence was. In Pakistan and India, the loss of life and the scale of deportation and displacement was just colossal. Obviously, India is huge, and there were 1 to 3 million people killed in that process. There were 12 to 14 million people displaced.
And out of it came Pakistan—which, again, is an ethno-religious creation which had never existed before, ever, in history, as a result of a new nationalism. And out of it comes, again, not a democracy, but a new sort of nationalism with religious characteristics, a strong military ethos, and huge swaths of population.
So the creation of Israel isn’t completely unique, is what I’m saying.
Frum: Well, there’s one difference between the creation of Turkey, the creation of Pakistan, and the creation of Israel—that the creation of Israel is the one example that involves a uniquely despised people in the region. The product of exile from other regions, actually now turning out to be quite a successful state. So there’s not just all the things you describe—all the carnage, all the movements of population—but there’s an element of humiliation that is ineradicable. These are the people who are supposed to be absolutely at the bottom of the regional hierarchy.
Montefiore: The other half of the parallel would be to the Armenians. But what was different with the Armenians was, the Armenians were much smaller number. Such was the genocide against them that they didn’t recover enough ever to gather the strength to create the states that they were promised. While the Jews did recover from the Holocaust, which they endured, and they did manage to create a state.
So there are fascinating parallels here, which I know we don’t have time to go into in detail. But this is so interesting to talk about this.
Frum: I want to touch on one last thing. Which is in this discussion, we have used the words genocide over and over again, and we’ve used them to describe very large-scale killing involving the elimination or near-elimination, and followed by expulsion of large numbers of people. Organized according to ideological programs, with a view of elimination. And they are practiced by the Ottomans; they are practiced by the Turkish successors to the Ottomans; they are practiced by the Arab-states successors to the Ottomans, especially Iraq. The genocide that everyone talks about, imagines they know about, is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. That did not involve this scale of killing; that did not involve any kinds of expulsions and that leaves Gaza physically damaged, but its people still alive and in place.
And maybe it’s just a gap in what we know. We don’t like to read history. It’s about old people. We don’t like to read about other countries. They don’t speak English. It involves books and not short-form videos. So there’s a lot about this that is off-putting to the modern consumer. But there is something strange about the willingness to remember, to imagine one genocide that didn’t happen and to forget all the genocides that did
Montefiore: That’s right. When I think of the word genocide I think that, as a historian, my duty is not to forget the millions of people killed in these successive genocides in the Middle East that I cover in The Cauldron. And this really starts with the million Armenians. But it goes on all the way through—and we’ve touched on some of those stories—the Maronite Christians, the Pontic Greeks, the Ionian Greeks, and all the way through to the Yazidis under the ISIS terror in our very recent history. Saddam Hussein’s killing of the Kurds and using of poison gas to try and exterminate the Kurds.
So I think we have an absolute duty to honor these people, and any degradation of the term genocide, which is a special word morally, historically, and legally—anything that degrades the experience of those people is an insult to the memory of these people who must be remembered. And it is our duty to remember them. And nowadays, I think the word has been so degraded; it’s just become a hyperbolic, ideological insult that has become meaningless and is used as much to describe a brutal war in Gaza as it is to describe the blockade of Cuba, for example. And it’s just become a word that we use to describe a bad war or something we don’t like, and that is an insult to the peoples who faced the real genocides in the Middle East, which are chronicled in this book.
Frum: Well, it could be a little more sinister than that. Because if your national program, if your ideological program, requires the forgetting of what was done to the Armenians, to the Assyrians, to the Kurds—if that has to be obliterated—then you want to devalue the word. And a great way to devalue a word is to apply it to things that didn’t happen. And that not only indicts the people you want to indict, in this case the Israelis, but it absolves the people who implicitly want to be absolved. And it buries a memory that many people want buried.
Frum: Simon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Montefiore: Thank you so much for having me, David.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Simon Sebag Montefiore for joining me today for that fascinating discussion. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella, [subtitled] The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, just published. Warren Kinsella is a prominent Canadian journalist, active for many years in Canadian party politics.
He’s a close associate of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. He has become passionately involved in recent years in Canada in the debate over the state of Israel and its detractors. Kinsella is very much a shoe-leather journalist. He’s not interested in big theories. He’s interested in getting to the bottom of stories. And The Hidden Hand is his attempt to take his microphone place by place and understand how is it that you have seen this extraordinary surge of anti-Semitic propaganda on the new social media.
His big thesis is that this surge is not an organic phenomenon. It’s not that thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of separate people all over the planet have spontaneously and individually decided to turn their social-media feeds into attacks on the state of Israel. But rather that something is happening here driven by political actors, many of them foreign, but even more worryingly, driven by the nature of social media itself. The algorithm here is taking on a kind of mind of its own, and we are all becoming the algorithm’s captives, and our brain functions are becoming its product.
We are moving into a world—and this is a theme I’ve often stressed in these book talks—that is less committed to the word and more to the image. Less committed to rational thought; more committed to emotional action, to emotional response. And therefore more susceptible to manipulation, both by people who want to manipulate and by machines that exist simply to cultivate engagement and to get people to feel anger and upset as a way to maximize engagement.
We are building a political culture that is anti-rational, and anti-rational cultures are cultures that are very prone to conspiracy theories, which function as a kind of pseudo-rationality. They seem to explain the world even though they really don’t. And when you become connected to conspiracy theories, at the bottom of all conspiracy theories is the master conspiracy theory about the Jews.
The Jews form an important part of the consciousness of ancient myths of Christianity, the killers of Christ; ancient myths of Islam, to deny that the people in the Bible were actually Muslims all along, and the Jews then falsely claim that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and so on were Jews when they were in fact Muslims all along, and so the Jews are falsifiers of their own scripture. And Jews also play an important part in the conspiracy theories of the third great Western religion, Marxism, where Jews are the people who are the ultimate expressions of the false consciousness: the attempt to hold onto religious and national identity instead of the true identity that Marxism wishes us all to embrace, the identity of class.
As the target of all three of these kinds of conspiracy theories—in a time when conspiracy theories are emancipated and run wild—well, naturally the Jews occupy an enormous part in the consciousness of the conspirator. And in the images that you see on social media formed to buy and to win appeal, win audience from people prone to conspiracy theories.
That’s Kinsella’s story. It’s a very disturbing one, and I recommend the book to people who want to understand what is happening and begin the work of understanding why and what to do about it.
That’s it for this week’s David Frum Show. Thanks so much for watching or listening. Hope to see you again next week. Remember, the best way to support this program and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will consider doing that. Share, like, and subscribe to this show on whatever platform you use. See you next week. Bye-bye.
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