Simon Sebag Montefiore offers a Middle East primer for todays TikTok-addicted, attention-deficient armchair experts

Has there ever been a region dissected in public discourse as exhaustively as the Middle East, yet misunderstood almost universally? Ask someone what the words “Middle East” conjure, and odds are you’ll hear an assortment of answers ranging from “Gaza,” and “Israel-Palestine,” to the “ayatollahs” or the “Strait of Hormuz.” Posing that question on a US college campus will most likely spur more colorful responses around the “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. What you likely will not hear about are the labyrinthine histories, the empires, the rulers, coups, assassins, poets, fanatics, sects, alliances, the myriad peace processes and deadly civil wars stretching across 19 states from Morocco’s Atlantic coast in North Africa to the shores of the Persian Gulf in western Asia. “There is now a kind of internet-created social-media TikTok vision of the Middle East,” historian Simon Sebag Montefiore told the New York Post, “one that bears no resemblance to the actual players and the stakes that are in conflict in the Middle East.” Correcting this severe knowledge drought, Montefiore has produced an extraordinarily ambitious and sweeping history of the Middle East, “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” spanning more than 500 pages and starting in 1900 with the twilight era of the Ottoman Empire right up to the US-Israeli assassination of the second Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei, in February 2026. One of the most startling conclusions Montefiore draws in “The Cauldron” is that the West has held a trance-like, “fetishistic” obsession with Israel-Palestine and the Holy Land, a fixation that has produced a preponderance of media attention on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the war in Gaza which, over the span of 80 years, has killed approximately 150,000 people. Yet, our own era, he notes, has seen “gigantic catastrophes” we seldom broach, “including the tr...