What happened in this episode?
Bari Weiss interviews historian Simon Sebag Montefiore about his book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, using current events to frame longer historical arguments. They discuss what Montefiore calls a new regional “moment of potential” tied to deepening ties between Israel and Gulf states, while also describing an escalatory “dark side” involving Iran and militant networks. Montefiore argues that 7 October should be understood as the start of a series of interconnected conflicts, including political and social effects in the West.
Montefiore says Britain’s Jewish community feels newly “besieged”, citing security at synagogues and people avoiding visible Jewish symbols on public transport. He also makes a number of contentious claims: that a UK air base incident was described by the Prime Minister as Iranian-linked; that Hamas’s strategic gain has been the spread of anti-Israel politics in elite Western institutions; and that a Labour MP urged armed intervention to dismantle Israel (without providing a name).
The conversation ranges across Montefiore’s historical thesis that Western obsession with the Holy Land is rooted in Christian imperial and crusading history, and he describes today’s campus activism as having religious characteristics despite secular language. On geopolitics, he speculates about US decision-making around strikes on Iran and argues a “quiet” oil-and-finance squeeze would be more effective than air power for weakening the Islamic Republic. He also warns—speculatively—that internal factionalism could, under certain conditions, lead Israel towards the kind of militia capture seen elsewhere in the region.
