25 August 2026

Content of the series

1. Introduction to the Series. History With Its Backspace Key Attached
2. Part I How Political Conjectures Become Reality. Why winners become countries and defeated alternatives disappear from explanation.
3. Part II Where Does the Error Go?. How organizations become peoples, guardians become problems, states become natural, and Kurdistan disappears from the verb.
4. Part III From True History to Better Problems. How to reconstruct Middle Eastern history as competing conjectures—and transmit the correction without turning it into another doctrine.

1. Introduction to the Series. History With Its Backspace Key Attached

This series began with admiration.

I listened to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s long conversation with TRIGGERnometry because I wanted to learn from an historian who knows far more about much of this history than I do. I did learn. His reconstruction of the Ottoman collapse, Sykes-Picot, Atatürk, Zionism, Palestinian politics, the Shah, Khomeini and the Islamic Republic repeatedly replaces slogans with contingency, actors, choices and consequences.

But a good explanation deserves something more demanding than applause.

It deserves criticism.

The more seriously I took Montefiore’s explanation, the more one problem began to trouble me.

The modern Middle East he describes was not waiting beneath the Ottoman Empire to be uncovered. Its political arrangements were conjectured, negotiated, imposed, resisted, revised and fought into existence. Turkey was created. Iraq was created. Syria was created. Jordan was created. Israel was created.

Yet once successful political arrangements survive long enough, something peculiar happens.

Their history disappears into their existence.

They become countries.

Their borders become facts.

Their institutions become normality.

Their political origins become history.

The alternatives acquire a different status. They become rebellions, separatist movements, failed projects, minority questions—or footnotes.

That is where Kurdistan enters this series.

Not because every history of the Middle East must be reorganized around the Kurds. And not because Kurdish political claims should receive immunity from criticism.

Quite the opposite.

Kurdistan became useful to me as an explanatory test.

If the political arrangements that became Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran may be reconstructed historically as contingent human creations, what happens when the same explanatory freedom is extended to the political alternatives they defeated?

Why do successful political conjectures become reality while defeated conjectures become deviations from reality?

And what happens if Kurdistan is restored not merely as something to which history happened, but as a field of political agency in which Kurds themselves conjectured, negotiated, rebelled, compromised, built institutions, fought one another, made mistakes, learned and tried again?

That problem generated a second question:

Where does the error go?

When a ruler fails, does the error reach the ruler—or the people governed?

When an institution fails, can criticism reach the institution—or must citizens absorb the consequences?

When an organization commits an atrocity, does responsibility remain with the responsible actors—or expand into an entire people?

When a political settlement generates persistent problems, may criticism reach the settlement itself—or has the map acquired Final Immunity?

And that produced the final problem.

Suppose we improve the explanation.

Then what?

Should the reader simply inherit our corrected conclusion?

Or should the reader inherit the problem, the conjecture, the evidence, the criticism, the uncertainty—and the freedom to press Backspace on our explanation too?

That is why this became three essays.

The first asks how political conjectures become reality.

The second asks where political error goes and where criticism stops.

The third asks how better explanations can travel forward without becoming new protected doctrines.

The method throughout is simple:

Protect the person. Criticize the explanation.

Preserve what survives criticism.

Press Backspace where the explanation fails.

Then pass the better explanation forward—with its Backspace Key still attached.

Montefiore is therefore not the target of these essays.

He is an unusually productive interlocutor.

And Kurdistan is not their predetermined conclusion.

It is one of their hardest tests.

The object is something more interesting than winning an argument about history:

to leave the problem better than we found it.

2. Part I How Political Conjectures Become Reality. Why winners become countries and defeated alternatives disappear from explanation.

Part I Note

How Political Conjectures Become Reality

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s True History of the Middle East does something valuable: it restores contingency to a region too often explained through slogans.

Sykes-Picot did not simply draw the modern Middle East.

The Ottoman Empire was neither a timeless paradise of coexistence nor a single unchanging tyranny.

Turkey was not waiting fully formed beneath the Ottoman ruins.

Israel was not the only newly constructed political order in 1948.

The map was fought over, negotiated, rejected, redesigned and imposed.

And that leads to a question much larger than the interview itself:

What happens after one political conjecture wins?

Turkey survives.

It becomes Turkey.

Israel survives.

It becomes Israel.

Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon acquire institutions, armies, passports and international recognition.

Eventually contingency disappears from view.

The winners become countries.

The alternatives become counterfactuals.

And Kurdistan?

Montefiore mentions that Kurds were among the peoples for whom post-Ottoman political arrangements were contemplated.

Then comes a devastatingly revealing compression:

they “didn’t get theirs.”

And history moves on.

My first essay asks what happens when political victory becomes epistemological privilege.

Why do successful arrangements become reality while failed arrangements become footnotes?

Why is Turkish rejection of an imposed post-Ottoman settlement remembered as national liberation, while Kurdish rejection of the settlement that followed is so often treated as destabilization?

And what does the history of the Middle East look like when Kurdistan is restored from something history happened to into something Kurds themselves conjectured, negotiated, built, fought over, revised and tried again?

This is not an argument for predetermined Kurdish statehood.

It is an argument against predetermined history.

The Winners Became Countries. The Losers Became Footnotes.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s True History of the Middle East is an unusually rich correction to bad history. But its own blind spots reveal something even more interesting: how successful political conjectures become “reality,” while defeated alternatives disappear from the map—and eventually from the explanation.

I watched Simon Sebag Montefiore’s long TRIGGERnometry interview expecting to learn history.

I did.

Quite a lot of it.

Montefiore is an extraordinary storyteller. He moves across Ottoman decline, Armenian genocide, Atatürk, Sykes-Picot, British and French mandates, Zionism, Palestinian politics, the Grand Mufti, the Nakba, the Shah, Khomeini and the Islamic Republic with a command of characters, contingency and political drama that is rare in contemporary public discussion.

He is also trying to correct something real.

At the beginning of the interview, he describes much contemporary writing on the Middle East as ideological, partisan and organized around narrow explanatory frameworks. He explicitly says that he did not want to write either a neo-Marxist decolonization history or a conventional Zionist history. The hosts immediately praise him for having achieved something close to objectivity.

That ambition deserves to be taken seriously.

But precisely because Montefiore is attempting to correct bad explanations, his own explanation should receive the same treatment.

Not denunciation.

Not applause.

Criticism.

I have increasingly come to think that serious intellectual respect consists in trying to find where an explanation fails.

So I want to do something perhaps more useful than deciding whether Montefiore is “balanced.”

I want to ask:

What problem is he actually solving?

What explanations does he improve?

Where does his own explanation become too easy?

Where does the error go?

Where does criticism stop?

And finally:

What happens to the history of the modern Middle East when Kurdistan is restored from the status of historical object to political conjecture?

That last question turned out to be the most important one.

Because there is something striking about this two-hour history of a region produced from the collapse of an empire.

Israelis appear as political agents.

Palestinians appear as political agents.

Turks appear as political agents.

Hashemites appear as political agents.

British and French imperialists certainly do.

Iranian revolutionaries do.

Islamists do.

Arab monarchs do.

Kurds repeatedly appear.

But mainly as people to whom history happens.

Used.

Promised.

Divided.

Suppressed.

Crushed.

And then the narrative moves on.

That is not simply an omission.

It may reveal one of the deepest habits by which history itself becomes an accomplice of successful power.

There Is No “True History” Without a Backspace Key

The title of the interview is True History of the Middle East.

I understand why.

YouTube requires titles.

And given the amount of historical nonsense circulating online, the temptation to say, “Here is what actually happened,” is understandable.

But I would begin with a philosophical objection.

There can be true historical propositions.

There are events that happened and events that did not.

The Armenian genocide is not merely a “narrative.”

The Holocaust happened.

The British Empire existed.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed.

Israel was established in 1948.

Palestinians were displaced.

Historical inquiry is constrained by reality.

But no historian possesses The True History in the sense of a final explanatory architecture immune from improvement.

Facts are not self-explanatory.

A hundred historians can agree that an event occurred and still disagree profoundly about:

• what problem actors believed they were solving;
• which mechanisms were causal;
• which alternatives were available;
• why one institution survived;
• why another failed;
• which consequences were intended;
• which were emergent;
• which historical similarities represent genuine transmission;
• which are retrospective pattern-making.

So I prefer another ambition.

Not:

the true history.

But:

a better explanation of the history—one deliberately constructed so that a later explanation can correct it.

That sounds more modest.

It is actually more demanding.

The historian then has to expose the machinery of the explanation.

What is fact?

What is inference?

What is counterfactual?

What is analogy?

What is moral judgment?

What is conjecture?

What evidence would make the interpretation weaker?

That is the difference between transmitting a conclusion and transmitting an explanation with its Backspace Key attached.

Montefiore often does this extremely well.

But not always.

And the places where he does not are unusually instructive.

The Middle East Does Not Explain the Middle East

One of the earliest moments in the interview contains a small sentence with enormous explanatory consequences.

During the discussion of Ottoman rule, one of the hosts proposes that perhaps the region is simply unusually difficult to govern without brutality. The Ottomans ruled it for centuries, he says, and perhaps this required being exceptionally “tough.”

Montefiore essentially agrees.

He says:

“You’re right that you had to be pretty tough to control the Middle East.”

This follows his compelling account of the limits of Ottoman tolerance, the massacres under Abdul Hamid, the Armenian genocide, repression of Arab nationalism and the violence of the Three Pashas.

And here explanation suddenly collapses.

“The Middle East” becomes the explanation.

But the Middle East cannot rebel.

Geography does not demand torture.

Latitude does not require hanging Arab nationalists.

Deserts do not produce Armenian genocide.

What requires explanation is not why “the Middle East” needed toughness.

It is:

What political arrangements required so much coercion to preserve them?

That changes everything.

An imperial structure contains multiple peoples.

They possess different languages, religions, loyalties and increasingly national political aspirations.

Authority is hierarchically distributed.

Political equality is incomplete.

Exit is restricted.

Alternative sovereignty is treated as rebellion.

Under those conditions, coercion is no longer a mysterious regional characteristic.

It is part of the architecture required to preserve a political order whose subjects increasingly reject its premises.

That is a much better explanation.

And notice what has happened.

In the weaker explanation:

imperial institutional error

travels downward into:

the character of the region.

The people become the explanation for why the ruler must be brutal.

I want the error to travel in the other direction.

Upward.

Into the rule.

Into the institution.

Into the imperial explanation.

This is what I mean when I ask:

Where does the error go?

The Ottoman Tolerance Argument Is Better Than Its Opposite

Montefiore is right to attack romantic Ottomanism.

There is a tendency in some contemporary political writing to imagine a tolerant Ottoman multicultural order shattered by Western imperialism and modern nationalism.

History is more difficult.

Montefiore describes the Tanzimat reforms, periods of expanded citizenship and genuine pluralism, but also Hamidian repression, Christian massacres, anti-Armenian violence, the genocidal transformations of the First World War and the coercive suppression of Arab nationalism.

This is important.

But “Was the Ottoman Empire tolerant?” is itself a poor question.

A much stronger question is:

What kind of difference could the Ottoman order tolerate—and what kind of political claim caused toleration to end?

A minority may be tolerated as a minority.

That does not mean it may demand equality.

A religious community may be protected.

That does not mean it may demand sovereignty.

A language may be spoken privately.

That does not mean it may become the organizing language of political authority.

A community may survive.

That does not mean it possesses political agency.

This distinction matters far beyond the Ottoman Empire.

Many political systems are tolerant until somebody asks the wrong question.

Then the tolerance reveals its boundary.

“The Kurds” Did Not Do Anything

At this point Montefiore describes Abdul Hamid as using “various minorities like the Kurds” against Christians.

This is the kind of sentence that passes unnoticed because everyone understands approximately what it means.

But it violates a discipline I increasingly regard as essential:

Locate responsibility at the lowest sufficient causal level.

“The Kurds” did not collectively make an Ottoman policy decision.

Specific Kurdish tribes, commanders, auxiliaries and Hamidiye formations participated in particular structures.

That is historically consequential.

It should be investigated and criticized without hesitation.

But the error must not expand:

specific actors

→ organization

→ political structure

→ ethnicity.

This is not merely sensitivity about collective blame.

It is analytical precision.

If the wrong causal unit is chosen, the explanation becomes weak.

The same discipline must apply everywhere.

The PKK is not “the Kurds.”

Hamas is not “the Palestinians.”

The Israeli government is not “the Jews.”

The Islamic Republic is not “the Persians.”

The Muslim Brotherhood is not “Islam.”

A political organization is not a people.

That distinction becomes extraordinarily important later.

The Moment the Map Became Natural

Montefiore is particularly good on something badly misunderstood in popular discourse: Sykes-Picot.

At around the first quarter of the interview, he argues that Sykes-Picot has become an all-purpose explanation for modern Middle Eastern borders even though the actual settlement emerged through a much larger sequence involving Russian imperial ambitions, Sèvres, San Remo, war, nationalist resistance and finally Lausanne. He reconstructs the extraordinary number of possible political arrangements circulating after the Ottoman collapse, including Armenian, Kurdish, Greek, Arab, British, French, Italian and Russian claims.

This is excellent history because it restores contingency.

The map was not waiting to be discovered.

It was being fought over.

Negotiated.

Conjectured.

Revised.

Imposed.

Rejected.

Destroyed.

Reconstructed.

Atatürk is perhaps the greatest illustration in the interview.

He looks at the post-war menu and essentially says:

No.

Turkey will not accept this.

He does not choose obediently between the alternatives offered by the victors.

He creates another possibility.

He organizes military resistance.

Defeats Armenian forces.

Fights the French.

Defeats Greece.

Faces down British and French policy.

Destroys the Sèvres settlement.

And eventually produces Lausanne and a radically different Turkish political order.

In my terminology:

the menu was wrong.

Atatürk did not merely choose.

He engaged in Choice Creation.

Whatever one thinks morally of the violence, demographic engineering and homogenization accompanying the process, the epistemic structure is striking.

A settlement presented by powerful governments as the post-war answer was treated as a conjecture.

Turkey pressed Backspace.

Then something curious happened.

Turkey’s successful rejection of the inherited menu became history.

And eventually history became normality.

The successful conjecture became:

Turkey.

The unsuccessful alternatives became:

what might have been.

This is where the historian needs extraordinary discipline.

Because political success has a strange epistemological power.

It turns verbs into nouns.

The Winners Become Nouns

Consider the vocabulary.

Turkey.

Iraq.

Syria.

Jordan.

Lebanon.

Israel.

They now sound like things.

Stable political objects.

You can point to them on a map.

They possess ministries.

Flags.

Embassies.

National football teams.

Passports.

Schools.

Bureaucracies.

Armies.

Once institutionalization reaches sufficient depth, contingency disappears from ordinary consciousness.

The arrangement becomes the world.

But Montefiore’s own history shows how recently and violently many of these containers were assembled.

He makes this point forcefully in discussing 1948. The surrounding Arab states, he says, were not timeless political units confronting an artificially new Israel. Many were themselves very recent state formations emerging from imperial collapse and mandate politics.

This is an essential correction.

But it has an implication larger than the one Montefiore draws.

If the newness of Israel does not invalidate Israel because other political arrangements were equally new—

then the present existence of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran cannot itself invalidate alternatives to those arrangements.

The principle must survive the names changing.

That is the test.

• If a people can legitimately reject an imperial arrangement and build something new—why does the principle stop once Turkey has succeeded?
• If sovereignty can be created—why does sovereignty become metaphysically closed the moment Kurdistan asks to enter the argument?

This is not an argument that every Kurdish territorial claim must be accepted.

It is an argument that every existing territorial arrangement must be allowed back into the realm of conjecture.

And Then Kurdistan Vanishes

This is where the interview becomes fascinating for reasons Montefiore probably did not intend.

He tells us that after the First World War the Allies supported various national aspirations:

Armenian.

Arab.

Kurdish.

Jewish.

Greek.

Others.

Then he gives us extraordinary detail on the actors who eventually obtained states.

He explains how Turkey was created.

How Iraq was created.

How Transjordan emerged.

How Faisal moved from Syria to Iraq.

How British and French mandates worked.

How Zionist political agency developed.

How Hashemite political agency developed.

How Palestinian political factions competed.

And of the Kurds he says, essentially:

“the Armenians and the Kurds didn’t get theirs.”

And on we go.

That sentence stopped me.

Because it reveals an extraordinary historiographical asymmetry.

For the successful political projects, history asks:

How?

For the defeated political project, history says:

It didn’t happen.

But why?

What Kurdish political conjectures existed?

Which actors carried them?

What institutional resources did they possess?

What did Sèvres mean to different Kurdish actors?

Why did those possibilities fail?

Which internal disagreements mattered?

Which external powers opposed them?

What did Lausanne close?

How were Kurdish political claims transformed when Kurdistan was divided among successor states?

What political knowledge was lost when one menu became frozen?

These are not merely Kurdish questions.

They are necessary to the explanation of the Middle East Montefiore is trying to give us.

Because a region cannot be explained only through the projects that won.

The losers altered history too.

History Has a Survivorship Bias

This is where my newer concern with cultural transmission becomes useful.

An idea’s survival does not prove its truth.

Its disappearance does not prove its falsity.

Before interpreting persistence, ask:

What selection environment allowed one political idea to survive while another disappeared?

Turkey survived through a combination of:

• military organization;
• leadership;
• inherited Ottoman military capability;
• geopolitical circumstances;
• diplomatic settlement;
• demographic transformation;
• war.

Israel survived through:

• political organization;
• immigration;
• institution-building;
• international recognition;
• military mobilization;
• war;
• political transmission.

Iraq survived through another configuration.

Jordan another.

Kurdish state projects were selected against by:

• state consolidation;
• military defeat;
• international bargains;
• regional opposition;
• internal fragmentation;
• division of Kurdistan across several sovereign systems.

None of this tells us automatically which arrangement was just.

It explains replication strength.

That distinction matters enormously:

Survival under competition is evidence that something replicated successfully. It is not by itself proof that the surviving political explanation was the best one.

This is the political form of what I call the Continuity Error.

The map exists.

Therefore the map must have been right.

No.

The map exists because particular arrangements survived particular selection environments.

That is history.

Legitimacy requires another argument.

Zionism, Continuity and the Difference Between an Inheritance and a Programme

Montefiore’s treatment of Zionism contains another extremely productive problem.

He rightly rejects the idea that Jewish attachment to Judea and Jerusalem suddenly appeared in the 1890s.

He stresses the deep historical, religious and cultural connection between Jewish identity and the land, Jewish presence across centuries, prayers of return and ancient memory. He describes political Zionism as the modern expression of a much older attachment.

There is real knowledge here.

But we need one distinction.

An ancient attachment is not identical to a modern political programme.

This is where corrigible inheritance becomes useful.

What travels through time?

A word?

A prayer?

A territorial memory?

A sacred story?

A legal claim?

A desire to return?

A modern sovereign-state programme?

These are different inheritances.

If we collapse them, we commit another Continuity Error.

The stronger formulation is:

Modern political Zionism transformed an ancient Jewish civilizational and religious attachment into a modern nationalist political programme under nineteenth- and twentieth-century conditions.

That does not weaken the historical relationship.

It explains it.

This is what rational transmission analysis should do.

Do not simply say:

the idea survived for 2,000 years.

Ask:

What exactly survived?

How was it expressed?

Reinterpreted?

Changed?

Reconstructed by new generations?

Converted from prayer into political organization?

From cultural memory into institutions?

From longing into migration?

From nationalism into armed defense?

That is more interesting than the claim of uninterrupted sameness.

Ideas do not travel through history intact.

They are reconstructed.

That is true of Zionism.

Islamism.

Kurdish nationalism.

Liberalism.

Religion.

Everything.

The Same Test Must Apply to Palestinian Maximalism

Montefiore later traces an important lineage from Amin al-Husseini’s rejection of Jewish political presence to contemporary Islamist maximalism, especially Hamas.

There is something to this.

The Grand Mufti’s worldview matters.

His alliance with Nazi Germany matters.

His antisemitism matters.

His rejection of political compromises matters.

His suppression of Palestinian rivals matters.

Montefiore is particularly valuable when he shows that Palestinian politics was not one thing. There were Husseinis, Nashashibis, Hashemites, moderates, maximalists, negotiators and people pursuing competing political arrangements.

This destroys the lazy category “the Palestinians.”

Good.

But the same transmission discipline applies.

We cannot simply say:

Mufti
→ Hamas.

We have to ask:

What travelled?

Was it the sacred-land explanation?

Rejection of permanent Jewish sovereignty?

Institutional networks?

Religious vocabulary?

Anti-Jewish doctrine?

Refugee memory?

Later Islamist reinterpretation?

Political practice?

What was changed?

What was discarded?

Which later experiences independently reproduced similar ideas?

This distinction matters because resemblance is not transmission.

If we want to explain how an anti-rational political idea survives, we need its Transmission Architecture.

Not just genealogy.

The Grand Mufti: A Brilliant Institutional Case

In fact, one of Montefiore’s strongest explanations in the entire interview comes from the Mufti story.

He explains how British authorities elevated Amin al-Husseini institutionally.

They did not merely “deal with” an already fixed Palestinian representative.

They helped create representative power.

They concentrated:

• religious authority;
• economic authority;
• institutional legitimacy;
• resources.

The expectation seems to have been that responsibility and inclusion would moderate him.

Instead, the institutional architecture strengthened him.

This is a profoundly important lesson.

Representation is not merely discovered.

It can be manufactured by institutions.

A government asks:

Who speaks for this community?

It chooses a convenient interlocutor.

The interlocutor gains:

• recognition;
• resources;
• authority;
• visibility.

Then outsiders say:

See? This is the community’s representative.

The process becomes recursive.

We should ask this question everywhere.

Who appointed the representative?

What rival voices existed?

Who received funding?

Whose access was blocked?

What did dissent cost?

Which selection environment turned one actor into the voice of a people?

This applies far beyond Mandate Palestine.

Europe should take note.

So should Washington.

So should every government that has ever tried to manufacture “community leaders.”

But Then Montefiore Says “Madness”

When the Mufti rejects proposed compromises, Montefiore calls some of these decisions acts of madness.

That is rhetorically understandable.

It is analytically unnecessary.

The Mufti’s explanation can be reconstructed.

He appears to regard the territory as sacred Islamic land and permanent Jewish collective sovereignty as illegitimate.

That explanation is criticizable.

It may be morally abhorrent.

It may have produced catastrophic consequences.

But once we have identified it, “madness” contributes nothing.

This is a recurring problem in political analysis.

We encounter a terrible decision and say:

irrational.

Crazy.

Mad.

Fanatical.

But those terms often mean:

I do not share the governing explanation.

The better task is harder.

Find the explanation.

Show how it works.

Show where it fails.

Show what it protected.

Show why its holder refused criticism.

That is how accountability becomes sharper, not softer.

Counterfactual History Needs a Backspace Key Too

Montefiore repeatedly says certain arrangements “would have worked.”

King Abdullah’s plan.

Particular partition proposals.

A Jordanian-Palestinian-Jewish arrangement.

At one point he says one such deal could have “solved the entire Israel-Palestine problem.”

I understand the frustration behind these sentences.

History is full of moments when one wishes the actors had chosen differently.

But counterfactual certainty is a serious epistemic error.

We never observe the alternative future.

An unrealized arrangement might have:

• reduced one conflict;
• created another;
• delayed war;
• transformed identities;
• produced civil war later;
• succeeded surprisingly.

We do not know.

Therefore a disciplined historian should say:

This alternative contained promising institutional possibilities.

Or:

It may have avoided the particular catastrophe that followed.

Not:

it would have solved the problem.

Why?

Because problems do not disappear.

They change.

A political arrangement that prevented the 1948 war would have generated new constitutional, demographic, security and identity problems.

That would not have meant failure.

It would have meant politics.

Problems are inevitable.

The question is whether the new ones remain soluble.