Simon Sebag Montefiore: Starmer’s foreign policy risks rewarding aggressive extremists

The author of bestseller ‘Jerusalem’ on why the West needs to be more shrewd in dealing with Hamas and his vision for Israel’s future

Not many writers can claim to have been given an audience at No 10 with Mrs Thatcher, and only one was an “avowed Maoist” who dared directly to suggest to the prime minister that her defence of the Falklands was purely a ruse to improve her image.
“There was a lot of finger waving,” recalls the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, “but she was very nice to me. At one point she told me to pull my socks up. I thought she meant I should pull myself together – I was lounging on a sofa – but then she stood up, pointed at my socks and made me pull them up there and then.”
The subsequent interview was written up in the Harrovian, the eponymous public-school newspaper Montefiore edited, aged 17. But, alas, it was vetted by the Iron Lady herself. “I wrote that ‘I left that famous black door of No 10 with the relief of a prisoner escaping the torture chambers of the Great Khan’,” says Montefiore. “But when we got the proof back, it had a red line through it and a note which just said ‘No’.”
Following the episode, Montefiore – or Sebag as he is known to his family and friends – has continued to cut a dash. A brief career in banking with the “big swinging d—s” of Wall Street during the boom of the late 1980s was followed by a lively stint as a war correspondent in the Caucasus following the collapse of the Soviet Union and then a long career as an author and esteemed historian. 
Now, in perhaps his most risqué move, he has updated his international bestseller, Jerusalem: A History of the Middle East, to include within its sweeping 3,000-year narrative the October 7 massacre and the start of the Gaza war. 
The aim was to “deliver something that didn’t exist which was a balanced, fair, judicious account, respecting both narratives, all peoples, all faiths, all centuries and all empires,” he said when I spoke to him this week. Good luck with that, you might think, not least for an author whose great-great uncle, the British financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, was a founder of the modern city of Jerusalem, that part which exists outside the Old City’s walls.
“My ancestor Montefiore got on extremely well with Palestinian Arabs, with Ottoman Turks, and all the different Christian sects… he was never a nationalist,” says Montefiore, 59, who has studied his forebear’s correspondence. “He’s sometimes described as a ‘pre-zionist’, but I don’t think he envisioned a full state. He bought land from Turks and Arabs, he dined with them, he socialised with them… he’d have hated the curse of ultra-nationalism on both sides that we see today.”
The first edition of Jerusalem, published in 2011, included the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the Nakba, in which the Palestinian population was displaced but ended relatively cautiously with the Six Day War of 1967. “A gripping account of war, betrayal, looting, rape, massacre, sadistic torture, fanaticism, feuds, persecution, corruption, hypocrisy and spirituality… Montefiore’s narrative is remarkably objective,” wrote the historian Antony Beevor. Its Herod the Great and Caesars section is now being adapted into a television series which Montefiore likened – before October 7 – to the fantasy drama Game of Thrones.
Time heals and even the most horrific events can be written about decades later with elan and even humour, but tackling raw events such as October 7 is a different thing entirely. “Israel is there to stay and it should have a Palestinian republic next to it. The great challenge for both nations, Israeli and Palestinian, is to change significantly if we wish to go forward – to back brave, tolerant leaders and to reject extremists, ghouls, blood-suckers and pyromaniacs… and I believe history can help with that,” says Montefiore.
Montefiore has been a bit of a warrior on the social media platform X during the Gaza war, but those hoping to find simple conclusions in the new edition of the book will be disappointed. Jerusalem remains a serious historical endeavour, not another propaganda vehicle for the ethno-nationalist Israeli Right.
In his book, Hamas’s “colossal and ghoulish crimes” are rightly compared to the Crusaders’ storming of Jerusalem in July 1099, which resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Muslims and Jews, including women and babies. In many ways, October 7 was “a crime against Islamic tradition, which is why its critics are so often Arab moderates, while its cheerleaders, Western activist radicals”, writes Montefiore.
But while Hamas and its “cadaverous” leader Yahya Sinwar are pilloried, so too is the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man “no longer able to see the difference between his own personal interests and those of the republic”. “Netanyahu cynically enabled the extremists of Hamas, whom he believed he could confine to their Gaza fiefdom, and who were the worst possible representatives for the Palestinian cause.”
In person, Montefiore is more punchy but not in the predictable, occasionally boorish, vein of his social media. He does not believe Israel has conducted itself well in Gaza (“they should have bombed Gaza with aid”), but at the same time regards the suspension of some 30 UK arms licences to Israel last week as “unwise and disappointing”; something that “gives succour to Hamas and Iran”. 
“I recognise that David Lammy is somebody who has the courage to stand up in the House of Commons and say, ‘I am a liberal Zionist’ and acknowledge Israel is a British ally – and those are sensible views for a foreign secretary in the real world. But it’s one thing to look moral. I fear there is a performative aspect to this and I hope Britain will not be running its foreign policy through a series of concessions to reward aggressive extremist activists who, in effect, support our enemies.”
“The British government should follow our higher national interests, to support our ally Israel and our Sunni Arab allies in the Middle East, against Iran and against murderous terrorist sects – while protecting Palestinian civilians and supporting the future of a Palestinian state. There is also much to criticise in this Israeli government, its treatment of detainees, the disgraceful comments of its extremist ministers. Certainly the war with Hamas has been ferocious and we deplore every death of so many Palestinian civilians just as we do Israeli civilians. But the illusion that human rights and international law is an immutable series of principles belies the fact that many of these legal decisions are highly ideological, and the singling out of Israel is a classic example.”
In contrast, Montefiore praises the recent unsealing of US indictments calling for the arrest of surviving Hamas operatives, including Sinwar and one of the terrorist group’s political operatives in Qatar. “This is the way to go… to back our allies against enemies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who loathe and menace every value of liberal society and democracy that we hold dear.”
Montefiore says too many of us have become guileless. “The desperate quest by Western pundits and politicians for that elusive holy grail: the ‘reformer’ – pragmatic and pro-Western – within the dark cliques at the top of authoritarian, totalitarian tyrannies or Islamist terrorist sects or police states reveals both weakness and naivety,” he says. Too often we are suckered into arrangements the other side had no intention of honouring. The lavishing of aid on Hamas in Gaza in the decade running up to October 7 is only the most recent example.
“We sought these elusive ghosts in Stalin’s Politburo, Hitler’s court, Saddam’s Revolutionary Command, Taliban’s Shura Council, Hamas’s Politburo and Hezbollah’s Shura Council. In Russia we fall for it every time. Stalin loved to claim he was the moderate liberal in the Politburo and that mysterious hardliners were forcing his hand. The appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s depended on this narrative,” he adds.
Montefiore says this naivety is “a sign of our better hearts… our decency” but that it is also pathological. “We crave glints of moderation and decency in brutal murderous groups. We hope for people like us. But the fact is that people who devote their lives to terrorist groups or Islamist dictatorships, who embrace the conspiratorial and paranoid life, who risk everything to pursue and use violence to terrorise and kill civilians, are not like us,” he says.
There are, of course, obvious exceptions. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and a lifelong Leninist, became a reformer par excellence who ended the Cold War and lifted the Iron Curtain, freeing millions from Soviet penury across eastern Europe. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were hard-nosed IRA men who ultimately rejected terror in favour of a political settlement and peace in Northern Ireland. So is it really daft to seek out reformers? And even if that is the case in the Middle East – as many of Netanyahu’s devotees claim – isn’t it a counsel of despair?
Montefiore is quick to condemn the associated trope, widespread in Israel, that Islam is in some way an inherently dangerous religion. It is not what he means at all. “I certainly don’t think that. I think it’s a racist view”, he says. “Our friendship with moderate Sunni Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia and UAE, is the future. They are our allies in countering Iran and Hezbollah but also building a new Middle East which is exciting and hopeful.” 
Nor does he believe we are doomed by our naivety in the West. We just need to wise up. What he’s advocating is a form of realpolitik, something he discussed with the master of the genre, Henry Kissinger, before his death last year.
“It means we should take our enemies at their word,” he says. “It doesn’t mean we can’t negotiate with them. It doesn’t mean we can’t make deals with them. But we should follow our own interests and take seriously what they say.” Crucially, he adds: “We should confront them when their stated interests clash with our own, rather than appeasing them, apologising for them and bending over backwards to give them what they ask for.”
Montefiore was brought up in London. The youngest of four brothers, his father was a doctor and his mother was a novelist. He is married to the novelist Santa Montefiore (née Palmer-Tomkinson, the sister of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who died in 2017 aged 45, after suffering a perforated ulcer) and counts King Charles III as an inspiration and a friend. 
The King and Queen attended their wedding at the liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood, north London, in 1998 – the first time they attended a public event together as a couple. Prince Harry was also in attendance.
“I am very lucky to be friends with the King… He’s someone I like enormously, but he’s also someone I admire enormously. I think we’re very lucky to have someone of this experience, this sense of duty, this dedication, as our sovereign, especially at the moment, in such unstable times.”
At home, Montefiore, who says he has never suffered anti-Semitism personally, is now involved in building interfaith relations – something he was partly inspired to do by the King. Although always a practising Jew, he became involved in the Jewish community when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour party, lifting the lid on the long-subdued but never extinguished anti-Semitism of the British Left. “I thought it was important,” he says.
Ultimately he remains hopeful a peace will be found in the Middle East. The influence of Iran, Russia and China is pernicious and growing, but no one has an interest in all-out war. The answer, he says, must ultimately lie in “a friendship of like-minded peoples and states across the Middle East, including the Islamic powers and Arab powers”.
Like the Americans and most Western diplomats, Montefiore supports a two-state solution, actively sponsored by the surrounding Arab states, which can rebuild trust, rights and prosperity over time. 
Many Israelis will say this demonstrates exactly the type of naive optimism he is railing against, and it’s true that Montefiore’s first impressions of Jerusalem were established on family holidays as a child. He has visited many times since but not since October 7. “I spent a lot of my childhood there… it was the Seventies, a different era… we travelled frequently in the West Bank, to Ramallah for lunch and dinner with friends… it seemed like the arc of history was going in a different direction then.”
Like many, Montefiore says good leadership on both sides is needed to break the impasse. Such leaders, he says, will have to be strong – “the only people who can make peace in this neighbourhood are people with guns” – but there is now no room, in his view, for Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu undermined Israeli democracy, he oversaw the October 7 disaster, but the worst thing he’s done is to is to bring into the government Jewish-supremacist ultra-nationalists and to enable them to govern the West Bank and encourage fanatical settlers to harass Palestinian civilians, none of whom should be there at all, and who, I hope, will be removed in a peace deal – by force if necessary – by a more responsible and essential Israeli government negotiating with moderate Palestinians in the future. Yet also this is a democratically elected government that is facing existential war on three fronts, evil brutal enemies in Hamas and Hezbollah, the threat of Iran, rising Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism in the West Bank as well as Gaza.”
Netanyahu and his followers are fond of saying – in response to Islamist taunts – that Israel’s Jews are going nowhere, and Montefiore agrees. Jews have lived in Jerusalem for more than 3,000 years and while the State of Israel is new, it will survive. His nightmare, however, is something different – and shared by many millions in the Jewish diaspora around the world.
“I don’t think Israel will be destroyed, but my great fear is that religious extremists in Israel capture the Israeli state from within and degrade its democracy, degrade its international status, promote a supremacist, undemocratic project that makes Israel into what is, in effect, a Jewish version of many of the regimes we hate in the Middle East, an intolerant theocracy. That is my great fear, and that is a danger.”
The new revised edition of Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99), is available now