Dear all,
The subtitle of this piece might be misleading, but I’m going with it. This letter isn’t just to the new friends I’ve made this past year, both Jews in the UK and people in Israel. It’s also to my non-Jewish readers who may wonder why I have been quite as vociferous as I have over the last year, on a topic where I don’t really have a dog in the fight.
It starts, as do all acts of remembrance this week, on 7th October last year. I’m a former Army officer; my academic areas of interest were (and are) strategy in the Middle East, and the psychology of disinformation. So when a war began in the Middle East that raised many strategic questions, whilst soaked in the patterns of disinformation I know intimately from my studies… well, I had something to say.
Of course I knew of the events of 7th October: I’m a Middle East researcher. On the day itself, the Telegram channels I follow were writhing like a bag of snakes with snuff movie after snuff movie. All so abhorrent; all so shocking; even for a reasonably experienced soldier.
My early strategic analysis was about right. I guessed Israel’s strategic goals and I looked at their tactics, and felt they all looked logical. They fought a contested urban battle against a dug-in defence in pretty much the same way British Army doctrine advises. Isolation; break-in; seize objectives; clearance.
Obviously, the isolation and break-in phases to Gaza City drew the world’s ire. The global public was unprepared for the live-streaming of the effects of modern weaponry in an urban setting. The closest most people have come to it is Call of Duty. They were primed on decades of Palestinian information operations about Israel, and swam in a rising sea of antisemitism. They didn’t understand what 7th October meant and why Israel had to respond the way it did. When Hamas’ ringmasters presented them with a narrative of genocide that fit their prejudices and biases, they clung to it with both hands.
Israel’s great mistake was in assuming that the horrors of 7th October would buy them some credit. They wildly overestimated their bank balances of sympathy, and as victims of disinformation fraud they rapidly became overdrawn.
So, there was I, in my Twitter/X stovepipe, merrily analysing away in broad support of Israel’s strategy. Until April 2024.
I was invited on a trip to Israel by the Military Expert Panel. We were granted decent access by the IDF and they briefed us their plans, which I noted smugly were just about what I’d predicted. Situation: no change.
What changed everything for me was visiting the massacre sites and seeing those hurt by it: victims and hostage family members. I wasn’t prepared for it conceptually or emotionally. It turned those snuff films of months earlier into 3-D.
Before, it was just another set of horrors in a world full of horrors, of which I had seen my fair share firsthand.
After, it was a lurid kaleidoscope of pain, misery, inhuman rape and torture; sadism, dehumanisation, and bloody, mutilating murder of the utmost savagery, carried out with Satanic glee. I walked in human ashes mixed with the remnants of the fires in kibbutzim where innocents were burned alive. I have seen the evidence of rape. I have seen the sites of these obscenities against humanity.
Before, I knew. After, I understood.
I realised that Israel is not fighting a war of self defence; it is fighting a war of survival. There is no question that those who Israel are now fighting, led by Iran, wish to destroy Israel and annihilate the Jewish race. To me, with a grandfather and grand-uncles who fought in Europe in 1944-45, one sustaining appalling facial injuries, “never again is now” was not just words. Never again was now. And I had a voice. And I was not going to stay silent.
Israel’s war is just, and their conduct is, for the most part, just. And when the latter is not just, they take action against those soldiers who transgress. So I’m satisfied not only with the cause for the war, but also with the conduct of the war. I’ve seen compelling evidence with my own eyes. I’m happy to let my professional reputation die on that hill, if need be.
There is a major element to my vociferousness this year that I have bypassed, however. Even before April, and my two subsequent visits, I had been consistent with one thing:
I stand with British Jews.
Whilst the events of 7th October appalled me at the time, the events of that evening in the UK, and subsequently, sickened me to my stomach. Including my visit to Israel in April this year, these events in the UK were the most politically radicalising events of my life. The UK has problems with radical Islam, and susceptibility to disinformation, and we need to wake up.
I had no prior connection to Israel, but the celebrations of 7th October in London turned my stomach. I had Jewish friends before 7th October and I saw the pain caused to them by the massacre in Israel and did my best to be supportive. I did not, however, foresee the agony that would come from those, ostensibly their countrymen too, who would nakedly celebrate the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust on the day it happened. Whilst blindly aware of the general concept of antisemitism, wrongly thinking it mostly a thing of the past, I had my eyes glued open to its modern day incarnation.
And that modern day incarnation recycles the same old tropes that are centuries old. Jews lie. Jews murder. Jews pay with hoarded shekels. Jews run the media. Jews run the world.
Disgusting.
And so, almost every weekend since, we have seen a turd-berg of antisemitism, shat out by extremists and supported on the backs of useful idiots, floating disgustingly down London’s streets on a sewage river of disinformation.
Our country’s great shame.
I have made it my mission since last October to let Britain’s Jews know that they are loved, wanted, and appreciated in this country: by me, and by countless silent millions who share my view. You are not alone in this fight.
I spoke this week at a synagogue in north London. It was a kind and gracious gesture by the Jewish community to allow me to share their private grief. The applause was humbling. But it was all also deeply, deeply saddening. When I go to church, I don’t need security outside. That’s not right and shouldn’t be normal.
And how appalling that our vibrant British Jewish community feels the need to thank someone just for raising a voice to support their right to exist. What a horrifying age we have created for our once great nation.
I fear for the future.
But I am grateful for my present.
Britain’s Jews and my Israeli friends, just ordinary civilians, have stood by me in turn, on the occasions that the firehose of online antisemitic abuse and disinformation has swung my way. You’ve also given me platforms from which to scream that message of support to anyone that will listen. You have empowered my own voice in the way that I hope my, and many others’ words of support empower you. This letter is as much a thank you to you, as anything else. You know who you are.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Yours in brotherhood,
Andrew
Thank you for everything you do, Andrew. I'm tearing up reading this. You're a gem of a friend to the Jewish. We are lucky to have you.
I know Jews whose surname is Fox. I actually thought you were Jewish. I deeply respect your knowledge and opinions about warfare because they come from real expertise. Now I realize your life is not on the line, as ours is. You are just speaking up for us out of conscience. And I am so fricking grateful.
Thank you for your articulate analysis of the conflict, day after day, and thank you for having our backs. We get used to being shunned or attacked for things we did not do, for having the bloodline of a pariah race. I know you are not the only one who speaks out for us but every person who does, who "doesn't have a dog in the race" but who speaks out nevertheless out of a sense of justice, these are the people who give me a little faith in humanity.
I used to think that most people were fundamentally decent, but that they can be led astray by bad narratives. I'm not so sure about that now because I've seen so many people leap to embrace bad narratives and refuse to accept facts that disprove their worldview. People are tribal and they think what their community tells them to think so they won't be ostracized. So someone who has the courage to speak his truth when he will surely be punished for it, well there is no end to the respect I have for such a person.