Who REALLY Made the Modern Middle East - with Simon Sebag Montefiore (Part 2)

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Simon Sebag Montefiore** (0:23)
There are no total victories. There are also no total solutions to political problems. There will always be large constituencies within the Israeli nation, but also within the Palestinian nation that will object to the existence of the other.
Even after you have the UN partition plan, which we all know about in 1947, secretly King Abdullah of Jordan approached Golda Meir that he would take over the Arab parts of the partition and there would have been population swaps so that there would have been great Jewish and Arab minorities in each of the states. So I think some of these earlier plans are relevant today.

**Dan Senor** (1:15)
Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlein and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the US-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now on to today's episode. On Monday, we published part one of my conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore, covering the period from 1905 to 2001, and ending, fittingly, on September 11, 2001 For most of us, 9-11 still feels like recent memory, but next week marks its 25th anniversary, enough time for the event to begin passing from memory into history. And that distance gives us a chance to see September 11 not only as a day to change the world, but as part of the much longer history that produced the Middle East as we know it today. My conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore right after this short message.
This message is sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute.
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Here's part two of my conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore.

**Simon Sebag Montefiore** (4:05)
In 9-11, as you know, the Al Qaeda attacks America. America attacks Afghanistan and then Iraq. And it knocks Iraq out of the power architecture of the Middle East.
And Iraq has always been the major Arab state that restrains Iran and that is always in conflict with Iran. And actually, there was no need to take out this rump state. I think it would have been wiser. We may disagree on this, Dan. But I think it might have been wiser to leave it there, separating in its own decay.
But by taking it out, America gives Iran a great opportunity, not only to back the insurgency and to back all sorts of militias in Iraq, which you know all about, but also it creates a sort of vacuum. Iraq is out of the game. It's still out of the game. It'll be a long time before Iraq is a major Middle Eastern power. And Iran therefore has this amazing opportunity. What they do with it is they create this informal empire. Some people call it the Shia Crescent. Some people call it the Six Armies. And this is what General Soleimani, the sort of mastermind of this strategy.

**Dan Senor** (5:12)
Your former head of the IRGC, who was killed in the first Trump administration, Qasem Soleimani, who was the architect of all of this.