It is a most peculiar experience to share an analysis of the October 7 war that comes down in Israel’s favor. It is not my job to be a pro-Israel cheerleader; others fulfill that function far better than I.
My role is to take my uncommon set of qualifications – 16 years as a professional soldier, and academic degrees in law, war studies, and psychology – and produce a fair and balanced analysis.
I start from the position of being a Zionist, in the sense that I believe strongly in Israel’s right to exist. I am also conscious of my own bias in that I like Israel: the people, the scenery, the food. I am also aware that I have had more exposure to this war, up close, than most outside Israel, having visited Gaza three times and Lebanon once (in addition to having a direct, contemporary conflict comparison with time spent on the frontlines of Ukraine).
Military experience
In the case of Israel’s war, my experiences, academic knowledge, and military training lead me to believe that the IDF has fought this war, particularly in Gaza, in a manner that adheres to the laws of armed conflict.
Of course, there have been incidents where the conduct of some soldiers has strayed outside those bounds, but I am also aware that the IDF itself is investigating many hundreds of allegations against its troops.
If I thought Israel was committing genocide or war crimes at scale, I would say so.
However, this is not my position, having weighed up the facts. I believe the evidence I have seen with my own eyes points to the opposite conclusion. Sharing that position is where this steps from the rational to the insane.
Firsthand evidence
The vast majority of those criticizing Israel, globally, have not seen firsthand evidence. Most people in the world have only seen a carefully curated leviathan of Hamas propaganda, filtered through complicit media organizations working with Hamas on the ground in Gaza, amplified and repeated unwittingly by other news outlets, and turbocharged by social media.
This propaganda campaign works as do all propaganda campaigns: on emotion. Israel’s enemies understand the Western psyche and have weaponized the power of empathy. They have taken the images of war and have portrayed them as something unique. In doing so, they spin the world’s only Jewish state, and the only democracy in the Middle East, as something uniquely evil.
Soft, comfortable Westerners do not understand war. We have spent decades fighting only counterinsurgency wars of choice on other sides of the world. People do not understand the true depth of the horror of October 7, nor do they understand what a war looks like when fought against a terrorist state on your own border.
They do not understand that war is a terrible thing, in which civilians and children always suffer the most, especially when forced into harm’s way by their own [terrorist] leaders’ policy of human sacrifice for PR gains.
This near-total lack of understanding has made it very easy for Hamas and their allies to take the usual appalling imagery of war and spin it into something it is not.
Amplifying propaganda
Social media has amplified this lack of understanding. Images can reach people’s pockets even as the dust on the ground still settles from an airstrike; and people reach emotional conclusions based on mere seconds of uncorroborated, curated propaganda.
The past two years on social media have been a peculiar mixture of gaslighting and relentless abuse. People deny what I have seen in person, with my own eyes, based on things they themselves have only seen on social media. And because I represent the rational narrative, I am told that I, as with Israel, am uniquely evil – with all the death threats and insults that come as part of that designation.
The bot swarms are also a factor: Mention the rapes of October 7, of which I have seen firsthand evidence, and notifications will swarm with bots denying them. This cumulative effect has one goal: to make it an unpleasant place to defend Israel’s conduct and to deter allies from speaking up.
So why bother? After all, I am neither Jewish nor Israeli. I have no dog in this fight.
However, I do believe, as an academic, that truth has meaning. Simply because social media exemplifies epistemic collapse, this does not mean that the truth loses importance.
I will continue to share what I believe to be true because when the dust settles from Gaza, a just outcome needs the truth in its corner. When this war is over, without the truth there will be no justice and no peace for either Palestinians or Israelis.■
Andrew Fox is a retired British Army officer and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.