Andrew Fox marks the first anniversary of October 7th by joining me for an interview at South Hampstead Synagogue
The retired British Army major defends Israel and discusses the military and psychological aspects of the ongoing war against Hamas and Hezbollah
South Hampstead Synagogue gave me the honour of introducing my friend, Major Andrew Fox to the community.
"More than just a SHul”, as the South Hampstead strapline goes, and that sense of community was heightened by hosting our conversation on October 7th, the first anniversary of the pogrom committed by Hamas terrorists in Southern Israel.
Andrew served in the British Army for sixteen years with three tours to Afghanistan, one of them with US Army Special Forces.
He was in the Parachute Regiment and the Special Forces Support Group with tours in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland.
He retired in 2021 as a Major.
Since then, Andrew's leveraged his huge experience into academia, as a senior lecturer in War Studies and Behavioural Science at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
He holds degrees in Law & Politics, Modern War Studies and Psychology. He is now a Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.
As you’ll read in this transcript of our discussion, his areas of expertise include Defence, the Middle East, and disinformation.
You’ll find all of my podcasts in the series here. They’re also embedded in my Substack.
TRANSCRIPT:
JONNY: It’s great to see so many familiar faces and friends here at this amazing shul. Andrew, you've been talking truth to power for quite a while. I'm going to just credit your substack, mrandrewfox.substack.com. That's a good place to start.
And first I want to ask you, Andrew, what's driven you to become such a foremost expert in this conflict, and why, why Israel, why have you backed Israel?
ANDREW: Jonny warned me of this question downstairs, and I've spent the last half an hour racking my brains just having to give a relatively concise answer.
It's really complicated.
I think I was very fortunate in the sense that I already had a platform, an ITV documentary about my regiment that I was in, I had a few Twitter or X followers off the back of that, so I had a voice. And I also had a number of Jewish friends that I could see how publicly that affected them on the 7th of October last year.
But what really drove the knife for them was the reaction on the streets of London on 7th of October last year. And my family and my grandfathers fought through Europe, so that never again would be a thing and the concentration camp would be liberated.
And I wasn’t about to sit back and allow it on the streets of London. So first of all, I wanted my own personal Jewish friends to know they weren't alone at this time and by extension the entire Jewish community.
So that was my first motivation.
JONNY: And you told me downstairs, Andrew, your grandfather was part of the US Army which liberated Dachau.
ANDREW: US Army, yeah.
So, well, that's the emotional bit out of the way that I've been threatening you for half an hour. But in terms of supporting Israel, as a fundamental starter for ten, I completely believe in Israel's right to exist, and that's non-negotiable, as far as I'm concerned.
But secondly, as Neil Blair mentioned in the introduction to us, I've done degrees in Law Studies specializing in Middle Eastern strategy, and I've looked at the psychology of disinformation. I can see right from the word go patterns of disinformation that I've come to know really well. So we have war in the Middle East in which I had expertise, we have a human-mode of disinformation in which I had expertise.
So I had stuff to say.
And I've actually been with the IDF for a time there and seen what's going on first hand. You know, I wouldn't be analysing this fairly (if I hadn’t). I'm doing my best to analyse it from a position of fairness.
And I do think it's a just war on Gaza. And I do think the IDF are behaving justly for the very most part. And I think that needs saying because there is this sea of disinformation out there saying the opposite.
So I've just tried to tell the truth as I see it.
JONNY: So, you're doing a MSc in disinformation.
And there I was “doomscrolling” as you do on X, thinking I must do something else with my life. And you tweeted:
“The global disinformation campaign about the 7th of October is going to overdrive. They're going to deny everything and trying to blame Israel for it.
So don't engage, don't reply, don't quote tweet. All of these drive engagement and boost these posts in the algorithm, meaning more people will see them and possibly raise money for the originator. Just block, or if you absolutely must comment, screenshot and post that”,
It really is in full force, aided and abetted by licensed mainstream media!
ANDREW: Yeah, there's a very clear pathway for this information.
It starts with Iran, it starts with Qatar, it starts there, Russians involved as well.
They have very cleverly exploited 60 years of propaganda, starting with Yasser Arafat in 1964, and the narrative he devised around the Palestinians where he completely re-framed that context, which is where we see terminology coming in.
It's then amplified by Al Jazeera.
You cannot underestimate what a sewer Al Jazeera Arabic particularly is.
And in this age of the AI translation, you can actually go and see it yourself, although, frankly I don't recommend it.
But there is an inherent blatantness, I think, in certain elements of changes where they see a story and repeat it without really checking it properly first.
And the Al-Ahli Hospital incident is the perfect exemplar of this.
Where we started off with 500 dying in an Israeli airstrike, and we ended up with 41 dead from a drop short, Islamic Jihad rocket.
But by the time the truth came out, the lie had already gone around the world.
And Israel was once again condemned.
And it's this kind of laziness and this thoughtless repetition, and also this unfair credibility that's somehow given to Al Jazeera, that fuels all this stuff.
And it is beyond me why we banned Russia Today, but not Al Jazeera.
They're absolutely two sides of the same coin.
They're state-sponsored propaganda media. It's causing irreparable harm, as we see on the streets of the UK on a weekly basis.
JONNY: And I was watching BBC News at 6 o'clock.
I should have got here earlier, really! More fool me.
And Clive Myrie was there at a Tel Aviv concert. And he said, and how mean is this?
He said, “251, they say, were taken hostage!”, right? And then he just threw away the 40,000 (Palestinian dead) number without the they say from the Gaza Health Ministry. I would like to have had a they say for that, but he missed that out.
And so I thought to myself, “what's going to happen to the BBC?” Because they are spreading this disinformation. You know, in these more dramatic comments (intermingled with the news), you might say that, G-d forbid, something happens here, you might say that they have... I don't want to say the words, but...
… they are culpable for what can happen in this country.
So I looked up the funding of the BBC, and once upon a time, the licence fee was 100% of their revenue. I'm very sorry to report that 65% of their revenue now comes from us, 30% of it comes from BBC Enterprises, and another 5% from donations. It does look like they are a never-ending broadcaster, even if they are banished from these shores.
(The current BBC Royal Charter expires on the 31st December 2027)
BBC seem here to stay as they move east in their editorial.
ANDREW: It's a problem of disinformation.
It's really tricky, and how do you solve it? Because ultimately a disinformation campaign is designed to exploit emotion. That's why they've led so high on the numbers of children that died, well, they're claimed to have died.
That's why they show photos, be it from Syria or faked, or potentially sometimes real, of children dying in Gaza, because it generates an emotional response. And if someone then doesn't have a framework around it to sort of understand what they're seeing, I think it's very easy for an online actor to attach a narrative to that.
So they can show you something, you're horrified, the amygdala in the brain kicks in, which suppresses your prefrontal cortex, which is where your critical thinking aids.
And if someone then suggests to you that the answer for this is because it's a genocide, you're already in a susceptible state, and you have no other means of countering it, so you will accept that narrative and go with it. So that's how this works, and the real challenge to change someone's mind is that how do you reason someone out of a position they haven't taken for a reason in the first place? And that's the real challenge here.
And do I have an answer?
Not yet, if I'm completely honest. I think the answer is actually to stop disinformation at source. You know, making sure that we ban these channels that are clearly spreading propaganda, making social media platforms accountable for the content that's shown on them.
I think it's tricky to how we deal with this, because what we can't do is change someone's mind once they've jumped to a conclusion based on curation.
JONNY: Andrew, we're in an era of urban warfare, and putting stats on that, this is by far the longest war that Israel has ever fought. And we fear that we're not even halfway through these conflicts. Hamas is the first army perhaps in history to use its own citizens as collateral for their own stated purpose, the destruction of the State of Israel.
ANDREW: If you look at the mechanics of the attack on this day last year, you know, they have fully formed recognizable combat engineering teams to get through the fence.
You know, this wasn't just a chain of defense.
There's been five level deep defensive perimeter.
And they have combat engineering teams to get through it.
That takes training, that takes equipment, and that takes tactical nous as well to make that happen. You know, the rocket barrage, which they used to kind of effectively suppress what they were hoping were going to be IDF positions.
They attacked the military bases first to what we call dislocate the chain of command for the IDF. They chose their timing well during a religious holiday.
And then if you look at the actions on it, when they reached the Kibbutzim, you know, the first thing they did was set up anti-armour ambushes.
You know, it's just tactically sophisticated.
And if you look at the weapons, they were even carrying cut down thermobaric RPG rounds, which even the British Army don't have.
JONNY: Where did they get them, from Iran?
ANDREW: So they got them from Iran, but they also had weapons manufacturing sites inside Gaza which they made themselves.
JONNY: Wow.
ANDREW: So, one of the weapons they had was actually made in Gaza itself.
And then if you look at the technological and information warfare, sophistication, you know, whilst coming hand in hand with the most wicked cruelty, you know, in terms of the effect they wanted to have, for example, in Israeli society.
I was in Tel Aviv when they released the videos of Hirsh (Goldberg-Polin) and the other five hostages, just before they were murdered.
And, you know, psychologically, they know exactly what they're doing to cause maximum effect.
And also look at the production values on those videos. I mean, you probably weren't looking at that in the first instance, but unfortunately it's my job to look at this stuff in depth. You know, the production values they've got on their media releases is actually incredibly high standard.
You know, so I think it's very important that we don't underestimate Hamas, if we're honest, the way Israel maybe did in the run-up to 7th of October. But the reason they're underestimated this time last year is because they've run an incredibly effective deception campaign to persuade Israel that if they kept being funded by theiur Islamic allies then perhaps good things might happen. So you know, I say we, I think the Western world, not just Israel, not just Jewish people, I think the Western world is up against a deeply sophisticated, cunning, cruel enemy.
We need to make sure we understand that because you need to know your enemy before you can properly fight.
JONNY: And most of their battalions have been destroyed and yet we hear they are regrouping in the middle and even the north of the Gaza Strip.
This war is not over.
There were aerial assaults in the south today.
ANDREW: The real issue here is, you can't delete Hamas completely. You can't wipe them out at the last minute because the tactics it would need to do that would inflict a degree of damage beyond that which I think would be within the bounds of the international and military law.
Israel has been very, very careful to stay within those bounds for the last year.
It would be foolish, I think, to throw that away now. What can we realistically expect to see achieved in Gaza? Well, I think there are three objectives.
First of all, it's securing Israel's borders. Secondly, it is the removal of Hamas's ability to project force into Israel itself from Gaza. And of course, the third objective is to recover the hostages.
So what does that realistically look like as an end state?
And this is the really tricky thing because you have to understand that in order to need to the only in the extent that you need to, there will be a requirement to destroy all the tunnels. There will be a requirement to find all the rocket launch sites. There will be a requirement to take apart that infrastructure they've created in Gaza and that will take time.
I spoke to the IDF about this a couple of months ago.
And in July, they estimated another 12 to 18 months to complete that job.
Okay, so this is not a quick fight. And really, I think this is going to come down to two things on the Israeli side:
First of all, it's societal resilience and determination.
That's what Hamas are attacking when they release these hostage videos and when they release their press releases.
That's what they're trying to attack. They're trying to attack as well as they're fighting.
And the second thing will come down to the material, in other words, arms, the ability of the IDF to keep churning through the brigades and their divisions through Gaza until this job is done. But we can't address all of the tunnels.
I mean, when you go down into them, you know, these smooth concrete walls, they're properly dug in.
You can't just collapse them.
You know, they need explosive detonation if you're going to get rid of them.
In living areas, they've actually got astroturf.
The bathrooms have got tiling and sewage and, you know, they're fully connected.
You know, these are not just rock tunnels dug into the sand.
You know, they are a proper living accommodation.
And the IDF even found Vitamin D supplies down there. And that shows they were prepared to spend significant time underground. I guess it's a tricky task, and it will take time.
JONNY: But they completely underestimate Israel's resilience and the Jewish people all over the world. Israelis have nowhere else to go.
And now to the war in the north, one of the other fronts.
Israel expressly told Hezbollah to stay out of the war in Gaza. One of the first interviews I did after the 7th October was with Chuck Freilich, former Deputy Security Advisor to the government. And at the time he said that the war with Gaza was not existential.
It is now.
And Hezbollah didn't heed their calls. They started rocketing Israel on the 8th of October.
It's led to the evacuation of 80,000 Israeli citizens. They've been gone a year with little prospect of returning. Yet a buffer zone needs to be created.
But that doesn't necessarily mean pushing Hezbollah back to the Littani River as the UN 1701 says. Because even then Hezbollah can still target Israel from then in the modern era of technology. They have to be completely taken out.
And Hezbollah, I know the leadership has been taken out. And there are unguarded weapons south of the Littani River.
But they are a major threat.
We've lost eight soldiers since yesterday.
ANDREW: Yeah, Hezbollah are heavily combat experienced.
And they are actually a far greater proposition in the mass.
They had a deep involvement in the Syrian civil war. Where they were involved in a number of atrocities on Syrian soil on the side of Bashar al-Assad's forces. So in terms of fighting, they are much more battle-hardened than us.
And essentially more numerous as well.
If we look at the maps, the IDF are pushing out at the moment.
They've declared military zones on the border.
The IDF told us this is a limited time-bound incursion.
And looking at the maps at the moment, I suggest it probably is at this point.
The areas they're fighting in are those border areas to enable those 80,000 people to move home. But the real challenge with Hezbollah, of course, is that you can't defeat Hezbollah without defeating Iran.
And the head of the snake is still there and is still biting.
And that's going to be an exceptional challenge in all of this.
And I think it requires further international pressure.
And it is my endless frustration that we seem to have lost our will completely in the West to use the force that we need to do to make the Middle East a pure place.
Now, to the fact, of course, that the last time we had a military intervention in the Middle East it was a disaster that arguably led to the situation we are in today. If Iraq hadn't been destabilised it wouldn't be an Iranian puppet and Iran wouldn't have had their opportunity to establish the hegemony that they hoped for.
But there is a place for force in the world.
Sometimes diplomacy doesn't work, sometimes sanctions don't work.
And I find it intensely saddening that the White House and No.10 Downing Street don't do the right thing in coming down on Israel's side on this to make sure that Iran is dealt with. Because until the regime in Tehran is dealt with peace is not coming to the Middle East.
The chains of appeasement, wherever we are, let's not escalate the war, whatever they mean by that. This is another just war in the north. Israel faces a wholly different threat, but it's now subject to some extraordinary successes.
JONNY: Let's mention the pager and walkie-talkie explosions. And you talked to me on the podcast (Jonny Gould’s Jewish State) when we first discussed this a few weeks ago about shaping operations in the north. This is pre-walkie-talkie.
It means that any potential ground assaults, and there have been limited ground assaults already, will be less painful. Is that the way of putting it?
ANDREW: So we can break this down into shaping, decisive, and sustaining operations. This is fully military doctrine now, so I will move on very quickly, so I won't bore you. But the idea of the shaping of it is that you set the conditions for your decisive strike, and you do that by degrading the enemy's capabilities, their firepower, and their command structure.
And that's what Israel has been doing for the last three, four weeks.
Attacking the command and control of Hezbollah by taking out their leadership, attacking their firepower by taking out the rocket supplies.
And there's an estimate now that Hezbollah are below 50% of the rocket stocks they've started war with.
They've fired 9,000 of them.
They had 130,000 to start with.
But of course what that 50% degradation of their missile stocks means is they still have many thousands of rockets that could be fired at Israeli towns and villages and cities. And so the requirement to keep churning away at that supply of missiles that Hezbollah has is absolutely critical to the success that they have ground operation.
Because actually, if you go in clear Hezbollah south of the Litani, unless Israel intends on holding it in the way they did the Golan Heights, they're going to have to withdraw at some point.
There's nothing to stop Hezbollah re-infiltrating their rocket stocks, almost destroyed, and they've got no way of replenishing them through Syria, from Iran, then Israel's going to be in a much safer place if the enemy Houthi rockets are reaching Israel as well.
JONNY: And we have to outsource that war to the US and the UK because they are targeting allied shipping as well. But again, Israel has to get involved in that. As they do in Syria, there was that remarkable boots on the ground incursion. I mean, all the kind of stories that are fed to us, Israel, heroic, inside Syria, produced amazing results as well. This is a war on seven fronts.
And we could say eight fronts, which is the media, but we'll concentrate on the seven for now.
Just give us a little summary about what Israel can achieve in the other theatres that we haven't talked about.
ANDREW: The issue we have is forced rejection when it comes to the other theatres. You can reach out and set foot with IDF soldiers into Gaza.
You can do that with Lebanon.
It's much, much harder to do that in Yemen or in Iran or in Iraq or in Syria.
It's much, much more difficult because the IDF is not designed to be an expeditionary overseas army.
It's designed to defend Israel. It's designed to fight short wars that involve lots of raiding and not wars of repression where you stick troops on the ground and you grind your way. So the IDF is designed, being a reservist army, it's not designed to do this stuff, which makes it very tricky, which means the Israeli Air Force is probably the single best means of attacking these other countries.
To what end would you attack with that?
And there's two kind of aspects to this.
First of all, it’s reducing their ability to strike you and the second one is to deter them wherever possible. And it's the deterrence that I think is the biggest challenge at the moment.
Because how do you deter an enemy that wants to die?
You know, if they believe that if they die in combat then they're going to go to heaven and get their virgins and all that good stuff.
JONNY: So how on earth do you deter these people who actively not only want to die but also want their own people to die?
You know, it's insanity and it's very hard to say that there's any other way around this other than remove their ability to fight. If you can't make them stop fighting you have to stop their ability to fight. There's no other option.
Or you surrender and clearly that's not happening. So I think the best way to deal with these open countries is through those continuous air strikes and the occasional Special Forces raids and then the occasional bit of Mossad dazzle.
JONNY: Indeed, we've had a few hits. Before I go to the audience with the roving microphone like Nicky Campbell does, can we express a message of hope amid this? The world's got to decide that “we need an Israel”.
If we're fighting for another 12 to 18 months in Gaza, G-d forbid, I don't know how long the war can take because in Lebanon as well, we need some help out there. So can we have a message of hope that the allies may begin to understand this?
Can we have a message of hope, anything?
ANDREW: No, I think the biggest hope is Israel itself.
You know, like I said, I've been there three times this year.
And frankly, the resilience of the Israeli people is remarkable. I can't imagine what would happen in London if we were facing the same threats that Tel Aviv currently is. And yet life carries on as normal.
People are still on the beach.
People are still happy. They're still smiling.
You know, they're still embracing the benefits of being in their ancestral homeland and making a country for themselves. You know, it's something to be incredibly proud of.
I'm inspired by it.
And I really hope all of you who live outside of Israel, who are British Jews here, I hope you're inspired by it as well.
JONNY: Andrew, you're truly righteous among the nations. Thank you so much for answering those questions so clearly.
Can we have a few questions from the audience?
Let's have a few questions.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you very much. What is your assessment in terms of Iran military capability? As you said, the source ultimately is Iran.
Is there a way Iran can be attacked?
ANDREW: There is.
The reason Iran developed their proxy strategy is because they are domestically so weak. And we've got a very good example of Iran in combat.
From the last seven weeks, certainly, we'll be 40 years on from the Iran-Iraq war.
We know they have large numbers of troops, but they're poorly trained, they're poorly armed. The Air Force has aircraft from the 1960s, which frankly would be fireballs by the time they even saw the Israeli Air Forces F-35s. They've got Russian air defenses, which aren't bad, but again, the F-35 can probably defeat them.
Again, their Navy is also incredibly poor as well. They're a little challenged with attacking Iran now. As I said, it's that force rejection.
There's no way Israel can get boots on the ground as well, and nor would they want to, quite frankly. But they now have to repair. So the nuclear sites will be as defended as they can be.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard locations will be as defended as they can be. The leadership will be as defended as they can be.
They'll be deep underground, or wherever.
So the real challenge with Iran is actually finding the target to hit.
I think Israel can do it. They don't have complete air superiority.
They will have a slightly contested airspace, but they do have the upper hand there.
So the jets will get through.
It's what they have to hit, once they're through, that is the big question that makes things follow the challenge.
Let's have a question from you.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thanks Jonny.
Hi, Andrew, you said it's going to go on for another 12 to 18 months, is that it? Do they have enough stock, enough weaponry, and it hasn't got it all it needs?
ANDREW: I mean, the IDF, for all their positive aspects, are the most secretive army I've ever worked with. And the simple answer is I don't know. That's not the sort of thing they wouldn’t tell me.
So I would only be able to hazard a guess.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi. We know the government is kind of also doing a diplomatic game.
How does the (British) army stand on the defence of Israel? Is it different to the (British) government, do you think, or is it the same?
ANDREW: The British Army, I think, it represents UK society and will be as split as UK society, if I'm honest. The IDF is not an army that we partnered with particularly in the past, so we don't have those links to them and it might cause those bonds to be slightly stronger, for example in the way that we have in Ukraine.
But for my friendship group, the majority are kind of broadly pro-Israeli, but there is still that span of opinion.
There's a really big danger, actually, I think, with, certainly with a lot of military analysts that have seen in this conflict, is that just because you've been in the army doesn't mean you know everything about every war.
And there are a lot of people who you should know better, there are some very former senior ranks, who are firing off opinions without any of the granular detail they need to really make a fair assessment. So people who aren't particularly Middle East specials will have a slightly more informed than average reckoning, but they won't have that dark-out key detail they need to make a really fair assessment.
JONNY: Unfortunately, we only have one more question because Andrew has to do yet another public appearance, in demand as he is.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, I'm one of your Twitter groupies and I want to thank you very much for what you’re doing. My question was, what do you think of UNRWA?
ANDREW: Well, first of all, thank you. That does mean a lot to me.
I think UNRWA have fomented this war. I think they've prolonged this war.
And I think in many respects, they've taken part in this war. There is a path to peace in the Middle East.
It's complicated. There are two waypoints that must be passed. First of all is that Arab states have to accept the existence of the State of Israel.
It's going nowhere. And the second one is that Iran must be dealt with.
But on that journey to peace in the Middle East, we need to remove the dictatorship in Iran.
So if you want to be a Twitter or X groupie, follow at Mr. Andrew Fox, and when you get to his Twitter feed, you'll see “Chaverim” at the top in his bio, in lovely red and yellow neon, and mrandrewfox.substack.com.
You can follow my X account and my Instagram or enter my WhatsApp group
Will you be my guest on Talk with me soon?
Thank you very much indeed for such a well-informed and sober discussion, and we really appreciate this.
Your first ever appearance at a synagogue. I hope it's been a good one for you.
N.B. No mention of our mutual support for Aston Villa, which I think showed great sobriety and composure!