True History of the Middle East With Simon Sebag Montefiore (Video)

In this 29 August 2026 published TRIGGERnometry video, hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster talk with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. This video refers to a highly publicized series of media appearances, podcast features, and masterclasses anchored by the August 2026 release of his masterwork book, ‘The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East’. In these discussions the renowned British historian tracks 125 years of Middle Eastern history from 1900 to the present day, working to systematically dismantle common historical myths, oversimplifications, and Western misconceptions about the region. 

Montefiore’s new book challenges conventional ideological narratives by emphasizing the following core realities. The Brutal Reality of World War I: While Western focus often dwells exclusively on the British-backed Arab Revolt, the vast majority of Arab soldiers actually fought bravely for the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans demonstrated fierce military capability before their ultimate collapse and the horrors of the Armenian Genocide.   Modern states like Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon were largely “cobbled together” by British and French authorities via the Sykes-Picot Agreement. These slapdash imperial boundaries systematically ignored long-standing cultural and community lines. Montefiore documents how the outbreak of World War II fused early Arab nationalism with Nazi anti-Semitism. This historical intersection culminated in the infamous 1941 Berlin meeting between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. The mid-to-late 20th century became a volatile tournament of power dominated by heavy-handed dictators and kings—such as Egypt’s Nasser, Libya’s Gaddafi, Jordan’s King Hussein, and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat—whose clashing egos frequently threatened to implode regional alliances. 

In one of his most vital data points, Montefiore notes that if you add up every person killed in every Arab-Israeli conflict from 1900 to today (roughly 150,000), the scale is starkly lower than other regional atrocities. By comparison, the Syrian Civil War killed 600,000, Iraq lost half a million, and conflicts in Sudan have claimed over 2.4 million lives. He argues the global fixation on Israel’s wars is structurally disproportionate to their actual demographic scale. 

https://youtu.be/QwN0K2ZSAoQ

00:00 – Trailer
00:39 – No Ads
01:06 – The Ottoman Empire: Tolerance Myth, Collapse and the Three Pashas
18:56 – Ad: Dose Daily
20:30 – Atatürk, Sykes-Picot and the Birth of Modern Turkey
36:29 – Ad: Expat Money
37:49 – Mandates, Nationalism and the Imperial Carve-Up of the Middle East
52:46 – Ad: Sheath
54:06 – The Shah of Iran: Autocrat, Reformer and the Road to Revolution
01:10:18 – Ad: Unpacking Israeli History
01:11:20 – Khomeini’s Masterclass: How the Islamic Republic and Its Informal Empire Were Built
02:14:25 – What’s The One Thing We’re Not Talking About