“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 tragedies of Algeria in the 1990s (200,000 killed), then Iraq (500,000) and Syria (600,000) and Sudan which is in a tragic class of its own — two million were killed in its first civil wars; 300,000 in the Darfur genocide.”

Another fallacy Montefiore dismantles is that Israel distinguishes itself in today’s Middle East as a new state surrounded by ancient nations. That’s largely why his chronology begins in 1900, not with the First World War, the Sykes-Picot pact of 1916, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 or the UN Partition Plan of 1947, as other histories tend to. 

In 1900, the region was still dominated by the Ottoman Empire and ruled from Constantinople by an Ottoman sultan. But after 1918, it was carved up by the imperial powers, particularly Britain and France, who, Montefiore tells The Post, “created a series of new states and new entities that have now become part of the Middle East. We think of these nations as long-standing but they’re not. They’re very recent and, in fact, all of them really became independent after World War II, along with Israel.” 

While vast in scope, “The Cauldron” is written in a way that is equally accessible to regional experts and neophytes, with the region’s history told through the compelling and, at times, insidious characters who helped forge the Middle East we know today. 

One of the first characters introduced is a dashing “young prince,” Ibn Saud, who, along with a band of 33 warriors “armed to the teeth with swords, spears and British Martini-Henry rifles,” raided Riyadh at dawn on Jan. 13, 1902, to restore his family — the House of Al-Saud (later the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) — to power, heralding what Montefiore terms as beginning of “the modern history of the Middle East.” 

The cast of protagonists and antagonists grows more vivid from there: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who proclaimed, “bloody revolutions are solid … bloodless ones are not permanent.” Reza Khan, the 6-foot-6 Cossack officer who was crowned Shah of Iran in April 1926 at the age of 48. Qatar’s founding sheikh, Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, an “exuberant, swashbuckling warrior-emir-poet,” who, between 1850-1900, “fathered fifty-six children and fought a series of wars to win independence for his tiny bleak peninsula.” Joseph Stalin, who sought to control parts of Iran in the early 1940s. And British prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Clement Attlee who, before and after the Second World War respectively, “offered a Palestinian Arab state and no Jewish entity along with severe restrictions on Jewish immigration.”

The real strength of “The Cauldron” is that it is comprehensive and unsparing of critique. 

Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, is described as “a murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao.”  

Montefiore is just as blunt about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his post-Oct. 7 strategy, faulting him for promising total victory, “but while the IDF developed effective tactics to fight Hamas, even in its tunnels, Israel lacked a strategy, conducting bloody but ultimately unproductive offensives subject to the whims of its inept coalition and the pressures exerted by America and Europe.”

According to Montefiore, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a “world-changing epochal moment” for the region. The next transformative event could be another revolution in Iran, one in which “the Islamic Republic will fall.” When it happens, he adds, “it will probably be very surprising and happen very quickly.”