Ep 189: Andrew Roberts on October 7th and Antisemitism

Lord Andrew Roberts, the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair of the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean, thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show Lord Roberts, Andrew Roberts, the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of many books, some will remember him as Churchill's biographer, that book was called Walking with Destiny. He is the chair most recently of an important document. This is the 7 October Parliamentary Commission report prepared by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for UK Israel. Lord Roberts, thank you so much for coming back on School of War.

Andrew Roberts:

Well, that's really kind of you to have me on the show again, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

This is a remarkable document. It's a long document, it's exhaustive, it includes, among other things, a detailed minute-by-minute breakdown of the attack on Israel in the 7th of October, statistics of the victims, an analysis of the causes. Let me ask you this. This is a product of the British Parliament, this attack, of course, just to stick with the basics, occurred in Israel. There were some British citizens caught up in it but, nevertheless, it does strike one as a bit odd that the British Parliament would feel the need to produce such a document. Why? Why is it important that you produce this piece of work?

Andrew Roberts:

Well, Britain actually did lose 18 killed that day and we also had people taken hostage so, in that sense, it was the worst single-day atrocity against Britain since 9/11. And also, we thought it was important because there's a attempted denialism that's going on in Britain at the moment where Islamists and Hamas supporters and so on are actually pretending it didn't happen, there were no rapes or murders on the 7th of October in Southern Israel. And so, we very much wanted to have a document that both, today and also in 50 and 100 years' time, can refute that.

Aaron MacLean:

Your opening essay to the report which stands on its own as a good shorter overview of the themes, you write the following. In the Oxford Union in November 2024, I'm going to mispronounce this name, Miko Peled who calls himself a radical anti-Zionist described the murders, rapes and kidnappings of 7 October as, quote, acts of heroism. The Palestinian poet Mohammed el-Kurd who has equated Zionism with genocide started his speech by announcing that there was no room for debate and ended it by walking out of the chamber, the anti-Israel motion passed by 278 to 59 votes. That is quite a day at the union.

Andrew Roberts:

It's sickening, isn't it? It really is. We are reminded, of course, back in 1933 when the Oxford Union said, I'm a Cambridge man myself so I don't mind laying in now, but the Oxford Union said that this house would not fight for king and country, later, of course, it did and the same young people who voted that way did actually fight for king and country. So, on hopes that, when they get a bit older and more mature and intelligent and so on, civilized, frankly, then these young people might actually see the error of their ways. But yes, it was a very bad day for public discourse in Britain, I think.

Aaron MacLean:

Your use of the term civilized is something I want to fasten onto, it's a theme I want to unpack with you over the course of our conversation. Because it seems that one's attitude towards civilization and one's understanding of what civilization actually is at stake in a lot of what you are attempting to do here with the report. Some of the claims that are made by the denialists or apologists or call them what you like are quite striking. Well, for me, I presume you've seen as well that we've never discussed it, the video that the Israelis prepared where they collate all of the GoPro footage amongst other sources of footage from the 7th. I've seen this film, it's harrowing, it's pretty nasty stuff and shocking even for those of us who have seen terrible things in real life. For those who haven't had that opportunity, even more shocking.

But these claims, maybe we could take them one by one, that there was no targeting of civilians, this is a military operation like the United States or Israel or any professional military might launch a military operation. And if there were any unfortunate civilian deaths here or there, it was a bit of a marginal affair and unfortunate accident.

Andrew Roberts:

Yes. That's what the Hamas leader in Doha has been arguing, exactly that, that these were collateral damage that to you get in any military operation. It is completely and utterly untrue and our report totally irrefutably crushes this line of arguments of Hamas. In fact, the exact opposite was the case, what they really wanted to do was to marginalize the armed forces and keep them ... Either destroy them or keep them bottled up whilst the real object of the operation which was to kill and capture as many civilians as possible was undertaken. So, it's one of those big lies that Goebbels used to speak of where you actually lie so much that it helps you just the sheer enormity of the untruth and our report makes it very, very clear about the planning and the intent of the operation was against civilians.

What you mentioned earlier about civilization, I think, is a very important one because of course our civilization is the Judeo-Christian civilization, it's not just the Christian civilization. The Jews and everything that they have given to the world is an absolutely essential part of understanding that civilization and the kind of barbarism that was unleashed on the Jews that terrible day is something that, as a military historian, I'm interested in, of course, because it's very, very rare. I'm not saying barbarity is rare in war, of course it isn't but what one tends to get historically in war is a death frenzy, a killing frenzy that takes place during the actual operation because of the worst aspects of human nature being unleashed under the circumstances.

But that isn't what happened on the 7th of October, what happened on the 7th of October was the deliberate creation by Hamas of this killing frenzy. They set out to go into a killing frenzy which is something that I haven't seen in history very often.

Aaron MacLean:

No. Strictly speaking, it is a pogrom, an unfortunately well-known phenomenon in Jewish history.

Andrew Roberts:

Yes, but the planning of the ... There were pogroms where Jews are killed and raped and murdered but not, unbelievably, sadistically tortured and there are other pogroms, of course, in which they were tortured. But to send your men as Hamas did into an operation deliberately wanting them to go into a sadistic and, for the victims, humiliating psychosexual kind of killing spree is a, I think, particularly barbaric thing which is why I do equate the barbarism with the civilization.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm curious to know your view on the deep sources of the denialism about October the 7th. It makes sense on some level why Hamas would deny its own crimes, it makes sense why Hamas's funders and direct backers in places like Qatar would engage in these acts of denialism. But the wider spread stuff that one encounters in the UK, in the United States, what drives that? It seems often tied up with this attempt to reverse who the civilized parties and who the barbarians are.

Andrew Roberts:

Oh, yes, it's very much a blame the victims thing, isn't it? Historically, it comes straight from Holocaust denialism, of course, which at least took years to come about, whereas, this denialism actually started before the killings were over. The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, it's called in London, got in touch with the Metropolitan Police in London to ask for the right to have a demonstration, i.e., a celebration actually before the killings were over and long before, three weeks before Israel fought back in Gaza. So, you have this combination of people trying to blame the victims and also using Holocaust denialism as their template essentially. You have those things that go together and, therefore, create this kind of psychosis.

Aaron MacLean:

There is a way in which, and I've never really thought about this in a systematic fashion, but anti-Semitism anger towards the Jewish people, et cetera, seems to be tied up with anti-Westernism. So, wherever you find people who hate, as it were, the post 1945 world order, whether they are on the left, as has often been the case with anti-Israel sentiment in recent years, or on the right which is increasingly, again, a noticeable phenomenon here in the United States, you tend to also find that these people take a dim view of Israel or the Jewish people and tend to engage in, we'll just say, fanciful exercises divorced from facts when speaking about these subjects. And I'm curious to know, one, if you agree that that link exists and, two, get your reflections on why it might exist or if you want to reformulate it.

Andrew Roberts:

[inaudible 00:10:42]

Aaron MacLean:

Go ahead.

Andrew Roberts:

No, absolutely, you are so right. Of course it does exist, absolutely. Obviously, anti-Semitism metastasizes in each generation and has done thousands of years, it's constant, it's a bacillus that's constantly moving and changing. And as you say, a really very dark and unpleasant side of it is making itself known in the United States of the anti-Semitism of the right which, of course, unfortunately because we catch colds when America coughs, it's not long before we are going to see anti-Semitism on the right raise its ugly head again in Britain. It tended to die out in the 1950s at the end of the Mosley Blackshirt movement but of course it can flare up at any stage, at any time. So, you have that in the same time that the post 1967 left hatred of Israel has been brought to such a head as it is at the moment. So, as far as Israel is concerned, it's caught in a perfect storm, unfortunately.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, Israel is too much of a state and too much of a successful example of the post-war international order to please the revolutionary left.

Andrew Roberts:

Well, and also it is very much an ally of the great Satan America and little Satan Britain. And so, as a result, therefore, all this business about how it's all been built by colonists, it's all about colonizing as though the Jews haven't been in the Holy Land for 3,000 years, it's an attempt to superimpose anti-colonial, anti-imperialist views onto the Middle Eastern situation where, in fact, historically, it has no purchase whatsoever intellectually. But nonetheless, it fits in so nicely with the leftist worldview that they can't bear not going down that road with regard to the right, of course, especially the ultra-right as you are seeing in United States at the moment with various people attempting to defend and even justify Adolf Hitler, it's a natural offshoot from anybody who thinks that way as well.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, there's a fascinating way, and we've talked about this on the show before, you were kind enough to come on, I guess, it was about a year ago now and talk about this podcaster Daryl Cooper whose shot to prominence when Tucker Carlson had him on his show. But whether it's him or Tucker or others, World War II plays a very central role in the far-right conversation. There's a need to relitigate World War II which comes with, occasionally, not necessarily but occasionally, a dose of Holocaust denialism but certainly and almost inevitably an attempt to recast the victims and villains of the war overall.

Andrew Roberts:

Not just the outbreak of the war, of course, which Daryl Cooper did so magnificently ignorantly about 1939 of the outbreak of the war but also, at the end of the war, Yalta and the FDR and the inability of the United States to keep Poland independent from the USSR and so on, again, with tremendous stupidity and ignorance and lack of knowledge about things like how many Russian boots there were actually on the ground in Poland in 1945. So, you have this, as you say, attempt to re-litigate both the beginning and the end of World War II and what's sitting in the middle is, of course, the Holocaust and the way in which that is, in the words of Jean Le Pen, the French fascist, a detail of history as far as people like Cooper and Carlson are concerned.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. Cooper's got a new miniseries coming out about the Germans-

Andrew Roberts:

Oh, my God. Seriously?

Aaron MacLean:

I know. It's about the Germans in World War II and it's just called Enemy and it's this interesting ... He talked about this on Joe Rogan's show because this is a sign of the ... It's interesting to ask if Joe Rogan is mainstream, the numbers are so big that you start to ask, well, if he's not mainstream, what is? You command an audience of millions. But Cooper went on the show and discussed it and previewed it and there's this interesting, I think the debating tactic is called motte-and-bailey, but there's this interesting back and forth move that people like Cooper will engage in and will say, "Well, look, the Germans were humans too and I'm just trying to understand the human side of their story. A lot of innocent Germans died in the war and are you so close minded that you don't want to hear about the dead in Dresden or whatever and all the young German children who suffered in the war?"

And you open with this seemingly reasonable, seemingly hard to refute, indeed impossible to refute notion that there are innocent German victims of the war. But before you know it, you're-

Andrew Roberts:

And also, that we couldn't care less about them and, for some reason, we are glorifying in the slaughter of innocent children kind of thing.

Aaron MacLean:

Exactly.

Andrew Roberts:

It's called straw man argument as well, isn't it, where you knock down an argument that nobody but nobody has ever made.

Aaron MacLean:

But before you know it, then, all of a sudden, you're seeing things from Hitler's point of view, you're coming to conclusions as Cooper has explicitly that, given the choice between allowing Hitler to control large portions of Europe but avoiding the war and fighting the war has in fact happened, that the latter choice was a great tragedy. That's ultimately the argument.

Andrew Roberts:

Yeah, yeah, that's true, it is the argument. And what happens if Europe is controlled by Hitler between 1939 and 1945 is the annihilation of the Jews. So, what essentially Cooper is saying is that the Holocaust is a small price to pay, the 6 million who died is a small price to pay in order to avoid a larger war that kills more people than that. And it doesn't take into account either, of course, the morality of the situation or the truth of what happens on the ground in that he doesn't just stop at Europe, he obviously also goes further than that. The invasion of Russia is in itself going further than just Europe or an attempt to. And also, it doesn't take into account the nuclear bomb which of course comes into existence by the mid-1940s. What if Hitler's still in control of Central Europe in 1955, hasn't he got the bomb by then? Yes, of course he has.

So, actually, none of this and on any other sensible level works in and of itself. But the trouble is, as you say, it can be presented to millions upon millions of people in a seemingly reasonable way that makes us, people who actually believe it was right to destroy Hitler as soon as possible, as the bad guys.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. And there's this profound perversion of transferring Hitler's or understanding Churchill's rather great moment of heroism in the spring of 1940 and transforming it into a great crime, right?

Andrew Roberts:

Yeah.

Aaron MacLean:

I've stood with you, you may not remember this, but I've stood with you in the Churchill war rooms, actually in the little provisional cabinet room down there moment. It was a great moment for me, I remember, for a number of reasons, it was a tough day for the tour guide of the group that we were with. We misquoted Churchill in your presence, I don't know if you-

Andrew Roberts:

Oh, no. Was I appalling pedant?

Aaron MacLean:

[inaudible 00:18:09]

Andrew Roberts:

You're making me out to be a most terrible pedant, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

No, no, no, you had to intervene. You had to intervene, it was bad. He was pointing out where the chiefs of staff or the heads of the British military had sat and he said something to the effect of and Churchill, of course, was often frustrated with them and said, individually, they're very brave men but, together, they're the most cowardly men you'll ever meet. And I remember, I'm not a Churchill scholar, I couldn't have corrected it on the spot but I remember standing there thinking that doesn't sound like Winston Churchill to me. It doesn't sound like something he would say or, frankly, anyone in his position would say. And you immediately leaped in and gave the much more eloquent Churchill quote which is something to the effect of, together, you get the sum of their fears or something like that.

Andrew Roberts:

Exactly. Those docents, they're very good overall at the cabinet war rooms but, occasionally, I do find it very difficult not to butt in. I'm afraid I've done it on other occasions where my family have been incredibly embarrassed. I once was going around Athens and the tour guide of a school was arguing that there were no good reasons why the Elgin Marble should be in London rather than in Athens and I just couldn't stop myself and my wife was going, "No, darling, please don't," and I said, "I'm terribly sorry, I'd just like to give you three good reasons if that's all right and then I'll go."

Aaron MacLean:

Well, the reason that the war rooms comes to my mind is, of course, among the really bizarre elements of this argument that the neo-revisionists are making is the notion that, had Churchill capitulated in some fashion or the voice is calling for the appeasement of Hitler or the making of peace in the spring of 1940 triumph, the assumption then that somehow the war would've basically stopped rather than perhaps enjoyed some kind of pause, the notion that Hitler would've been satisfied with the British Empire just sitting there off the coast of the continent in perpetuity. I find to be sort of mind-boggling but that is, ultimately, a key part of the argument that that would've been ... That making this kind of piece would've been a long-term defensible prospect for the Brits.

Andrew Roberts:

Yeah, and you get this actually when Tucker Carlson was interviewing Piers Morgan the other day. He said, "Well, the Germans didn't have any plans to invade Britain, did they?" And the answer is, yes, they bloody well did, of course they did, extremely well-advanced ones. They had plans for the 3,800 people they were going to shoot on site, they didn't just have plans for them, they had their names and addresses. They had the places where they were going to set up concentration camps, they knew exactly what they were going to do with regard to which beaches they were going to land on and so on. If we had lost the Battle of Britain, we would've had a German invasion and dare that the revisionists have to ask questions like this.

It just shows that, if you're going to try and make what is essentially a pro-Hitler argument, you've got to do your homework first and actually learn the basics of history. They also talk about what Churchill would've done in September 1939, well, he wasn't prime minister in September 1939. He wasn't prime minister on the day the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939, didn't become prime minister till, as you say, the spring of 1940. You've got to try and get the basics right before you can make these, in my view, politically disgusting statements about Adolf Hitler.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, and there's this deep hatred of modern liberalism, the modern world as it exists that undergirds this stuff. And they understand, I think ... They do understand something true which is that the understanding of World War II that you and I share is, well, first of all, it's true but also significant is it is a foundation story for the modern west and the modern world. And if you hate the modern west, and the case as Carlson would make it would be you take every excess of progressivism which, by the way, I and probably you would object to a lot of the excesses of modern progressivism and you add it all up and you say what an awful world we live in.

We have to fundamentally reorder that world, we need a series of white revolutions to upend the world order and upend our states, our nation's politics at home and, to do that, we have to sever the links of affection or regard that we have for the founding of this world. You have to retell that story in a way that it all becomes clear that everything that followed 1945 was a mistake. As a project, it's coherent if evil.

Andrew Roberts:

Yeah. And what it also does, of course, is to push aside as well as the heroes of 1945 and the creation of that modern world. It also pushes aside all of the people who actually have done tremendous things in the conservative movement to try to fight back against the excesses that you were talking about earlier. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are shoved to the sidelines as though they didn't matter at all and what they were trying to do didn't have any validity, whereas, I believe it did. There's a perfectly good internal democratic way of fighting against the various lunacies that have affected us all in the last 10 years or so, 15 years of left-wing view and wokery and so on. So, that's another part of the intention, I think, is to make mainstream conservatives to look like fools and idiots and cowards.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. And then this other dimension of it that you frequently encounter, and I heard Ben Shapiro give a very good talk about this just recently, is the way in which there's this abuse of an understandable reaction to left liberal dogmatism and assaults on free speech in recent years where it became simply unacceptable to say certain things that actually were conventional center-right opinion in a variety of contexts. The right naturally reacts to that and takes up the banner of free speech and says, well, no, I should be able to say my actually pretty conventional opinion about X and you're being somewhat authoritarian and nasty and preventing me from doing that.

But then, once you're in that stage of the argument, the next step is to say, well, I should really be able to say anything and what are the things that typically you really shouldn't say. And you really shouldn't say nasty things about the Jews and so, when I start saying that sort of stuff, actually I'm less of an anti-Semite and more just of a free speech hero. I am pushing back against the progressive orthodoxy that represses the truth and I know it's true because I'm not allowed to say it. And it's a weird state of mind to be in but seems to me to be increasingly common.

Andrew Roberts:

That's right. No, it is. And I'm a free speech absolutist, I'm on the board, actually, of the Free Speech Union here in Britain which is a very impressive organization that fights for free speech. I do believe that people should have the right to say, say, stupid and disgusting things so long as they're not actually shouting fire in a crowded cinema, so long as they're not starting riots deliberately in which people are hurt but, otherwise, we must stand up for everybody's free speech. However, if you do say things that are stupid and loathsome, you should have a pushback against you.

And so, other people have got the perfect right to use their free speech in order to deride you and, on occasion, offend you. And that's, I think, what quite a lot of people aren't so good at, they've become very thin-skinned when it comes to their respect and so on. With regard to Carlson and Cooper and everything, yup, fine, of course you've got free speech to broadcast these appalling stupid remarks and dangerously stupid remarks to millions of people but you shouldn't be surprised if other people then point out in articles or on shows like this how ill-founded they are in terms of evidence and truth and sources and so on.

Aaron MacLean:

So, for the time we have left, I want to take you back to the Middle East where things continue to be tense and dangerous. A comment we could make about the world right now, things seem pretty tense and dangerous all over and we haven't even discussed the economic situation, I don't know if you've looked at your ... Do you have 401(k)s in the UK? What do you-

Andrew Roberts:

No.

Aaron MacLean:

In America, we call our retirement accounts 401(k)s.

Andrew Roberts:

Yeah, no. We do have the equivalent, they're called ISAs and I think they've taken pretty much the same kind of pasting that your 401(k)s have taken.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, yeah. Well, sticking with the Middle East for the moment, we have the Israelis operating back in Gaza again, continued low grade events up in the north and you have this looming Israeli-Turkish confrontation developing in Syria and it's an open question how that's going to be resolved. How do you see things playing out? And in particular in Gaza, how do you see things playing out? There was this talk a month or two ago now from the president, President Trump is saying that the United States was going to take some level of responsibility for Gaza. It's unclear where that stands, it's unclear if that is actually US policy. You wrote a good piece about it in the Free Beacon, I'm just curious to know how you think things are going to play out.

Andrew Roberts:

Oh, I don't think it's going to happen. I can't see Egypt or Jordan taking hundreds of thousands, even millions of people because they don't want enormous Palestinian population in their countries. Why should they and who else would, they're an irredentist population which nobody else wants to take in so I don't think it will happen. What I argued in the Free Beacon was that, if it did happen, then the Palestinian people really have lost any right to stop it, to complain about it. If you've spent decades saying you are living in an open concentration camp, then you can't really complain if somebody wants to let you out of it.

And so, historically, I gave 10, I think, examples over the last century of peoples who have been moved en masse in their hundreds of thousands and even millions sometimes against their will, sometimes not but mostly against their will. And they don't have the right to complain because they usually started conflicts and then lost them and that's exactly, of course, what Hamas has done. It hasn't lost yet but it certainly would have by the time any major population transfers ever took place.

Aaron MacLean:

In a way, you've already answered it but I want to say what I imagine someone would say if they were here on the show with us and had the strong view that the people of Gaza were in the right and the people of Israel were in the wrong here. They would say something like, "Lord Roberts, you've been perhaps defensively talking about how it's wrong for Hamas to engage in its irredentist plans to rid Israel of the Jewish people and reclaim Palestine for the Palestinians which smacks of genocide and ethnic cleansing and other things, other labels we might put on it. And here you are turning around and essentially saying that, whether or not it's going to happen, it seems reasonable to doubt that it would, it's still a perfectly legitimate aim of policy that you might have a Gaza without Palestinians in it." How do you speak to the apparent contradiction there?

Andrew Roberts:

I don't think there is an apparent contradiction, the whole thing is about starting wars, you shouldn't do it. It's a profoundly terrible thing to start a war. Sometimes there's no alternative, it was Britain that declared war on Germany after all in September 1939. But overall, unless you have a profound moral reason to do this like America had, by the way, also after 9/11 because the war was started by Al-Qaeda because of 9/11. But if you do that, you mustn't be surprised if you lose that war to lose your rights especially with regard to having your countrymen moved out of a politically and historically toxic area. So, I don't think there is a contradiction really.

Aaron MacLean:

All right. Lord Roberts, Chair most recently of a report ... For anyone who wants a one-stop-shop account of the events of the 7th of October in Southern Israel, I am not familiar with a better document in English than the Parliamentary Commission Report that you produced.

Andrew Roberts:

Thank you, that's very tricky. Well, we worked very hard on it for over a year, had some very moving meetings, as you can imagine, with people in Israel. It's a memorial as well as a report, there's very much try ... We mention all the names of all the people who were murdered that terrible day and so thank you indeed for giving publicity to it. It's 7octparliamentarycommission.co.uk, I think.

Aaron MacLean:

Lord Roberts, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Andrew Roberts:

Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

This is a Nebulous Media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.