Mick Hartley

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has a new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, out next summer. He’s interviewed today by Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News. What, he’s asked, have been his impressions since 7 October 2023.

“I found massive support from all over society, both high and low… almost unanimity in sympathy for Jews and much more understanding of what’s really at stake here”, he tells me.

That lies in sharp contrast to “those in the most privileged higher echelons of media and academia, where the taboo against anti-Jewish racism has truly vanished. Many news anchors and reporters have become ideological activists who arrogantly disdain facts in place of a simplistic unrealistic Manichaean world pantomime in which Israel and Jews have dark sinister roles.”

He goes further. “This kind of darkness is really at its most intense in these news organisations and so-called humanitarian organisations, and in academia too… The bias leads them to make repeated mistakes, that they resist correcting. They only correct mistakes when forced by public outcry. But mistakes have to be called out.

“It was indulged in our civic institutions, academia and civil service …our politicians and our leaders indulged it. But October the eighth, the day after, showed us that this is a struggle that we now have to fight. Really, it’s the same old fight against authoritarianism, against intolerance, that we’ve always been fighting.   It is a battle for the liberal part of our democracies.

He believes that “the lesson of recent years is that liberals and British Jews need to call out and expose egregious cases of bigotry and racism, because it turns out most decent people support tolerance and despise intolerance and bigotry.

But the ones who don’t are the ones who’ve been making the most noise, and grabbing the headlines.

“On the other hand there are people whose words and thoughts, now so popular with a vicious, malignant, delirious squad of left/Islamist activists on the streets and social media – will not age well. Indeed, they will be regarded as a mix of moronic absurdity and malice, that should ultimately embarrass them deeply.”

I hope he’s right.