What is to blame for the Middle East?

“How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, and how they murdered one another is found accurately recorded in history, and, if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago.” So Gandhi described the writing of history, which he thought was unable to account for human flourishing and served only to record interruptions to it. Simon Sebag Montefiore seems mindful of this possibility in The…