It still feels somewhat surreal, but last night I spoke as part of a panel event at the United Nations in New York. The other speakers were Natasha Hausdorff, Richard Kemp, John Spencer and Alan Derschowitz. The subject was ‘Proportionality in Conflict’ but the wider political ramification was the importance of an event sharing the truth about Israel’s ongoing war, within the United Nations building itself. The UN building is laden with self-congratulatory statues decrying war whilst dripping hypocrisy from every brick. It is a breathtaking shamelessness for the UN to pat itself on the back whilst embracing the world’s worst nations, including rewarding the Palestinians with a membership upgrade post-7 October. In this context, it was an honour to be able to enter the building and speak the truth about Israel’s efforts to conduct the ongoing conflict in accordance with international law.
The full event can be found at this link but below the obligatory UN selfie, you will find the full text of my speech and a video of me delivering it.
To explain the thought behind the speech: I was very wary of the topic of proportionality. It is a very dry and legal way of explaining away human suffering. Balance was my biggest concern. War is dreadful, and innocents suffer. This suffering is an inevitability of conflict. Whilst adherence to the Law of Armed Conflict is both necessary and important, it is of no consolation to war’s victims that they have died in a legal and ethical manner. There should never be an easy acceptance of innocent civilian deaths in war under the umbrella of proportionality. In my speech I wanted to make sure I placed those innocent deaths front and centre.
UN Speech, 25 September 2024
My name is Andrew Fox and I am a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based transatlantic think tank. Before that, I was an officer in the British Army. I served for 16 years and completed three combat tours in Afghanistan. I am going to talk about the nature of war.
First, however, we must acknowledge the victims of war. We cannot reasonably discuss proportionality in combat without first understanding that war is not some abstract concept. The State of Israel currently faces war on several fronts. Any compassionate observer must note that innocents are suffering. Israeli citizens: some massacred or taken hostage by Hamas; tens of thousands displaced and targeted by Hezbollah. Innocent Gazan civilians caught between Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces, forced to shelter in tents in the Mediterranean heat with limited aid distribution. Innocents in Lebanon, forced to flee to avoid Israeli missiles, targeting the Hezbollah fighters who have turned their homes into weapons sites.
As Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “self-imposed restrictions… termed international law, accompany war without essentially impairing its power”. If we take his definition of war, “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”, those acts of violence in war, in an era where war is amongst the people, will inevitably lead to the suffering of innocents.
This discussion hinges upon whether those acts of violence are legal and proportionate. St Augustine articulated the theory of a “Just War”. He wrote that governments need not be ashamed of protecting peace and punishing wickedness. He wrote, “the sacred seat of virtue is the heart”. Israel’s jus ad bellum, or reason for going to war against both Hamas and Hezbollah is clear.
I, and my fellow panel members, have walked in human ashes in Kibbutz Be’eri. I have seen the site at Nahal Oz where Hamas burned 22 Israeli soldiers alive. I have visited the site of the Nova festival at Re’im where Hamas murdered innocent party goers. I have seen the evidence of mass rape.
Israel is a country created by a resolution from this very organisation in which we sit. No country on Earth could accept a threat of the repeat of 7th October. Nor could any country in the UN accept over 9,000 rockets fired indiscriminately at civilians, displacing some 60,000 of their citizens. Israel’s jus ad bellum is beyond question.
But what about the other half of St Augustine’s equation, jus in bello, or conduct in war? Returning to Clausewitz: “the coarseness of war’s elements excites repugnance”. I can speak from firsthand experience that war is, indeed, repugnant. We cannot, however, assess a war based on those feelings of repugnance. Never in history has a war been fought that has not included visceral and bloody death, extreme violence, and the suffering of innocents. It is not, however, the death that is to be used as our vehicle for assessment of any conflict. Under international law, what matters is the manner and legal justification for that death.
I have spent significant weeks with the IDF. I have examined their targeting processes, their rules of engagement, and their design for the war they are currently fighting. I am satisfied that their processes and procedures match, or in some cases, exceed those of Western armies in terms of satisfying their international legal obligations.
That said: it is inevitable that when young men and women are trained to violence, and placed in the most horrific of settings, some will break those laws. It happened at Abu Ghraib, Camp Breadbasket, Fallujah, Yusufiyah, and it happened with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan, and possibly the British SAS, too. What matters is how those breaches of law are dealt with. Since last October, the IDF has launched 74 criminal investigations into the conduct of IDF soldiers. This is a tiny percentage of the 300,000 troops who have served in Gaza. Having examined the IDF’s legal mechanisms, I am convinced that they are correctly holding their soldiers to account. This is what moral armies do.
War is repugnant. Proportionality can only be assessed through an objective lens: is the war just, and is conduct during the war just? Even whilst innocents suffer, as they always do in war, I am convinced that Israel meets both those criteria.
You got the balance just right 👍
Thanks for sharing, I'm glad you were invited to make this speech!