A Military Analysis of Israel’s War in Gaza (with Andrew Fox)

Andrew Fox: Thanks very much. It’s great to join you.

Andrew Fox: I’ve had some truly terrible Israeli wine as well.

Andrew Fox: It’s about a 75-25 hit rate.

Andrew Fox: But, yeah, that doesn’t stop me persisting. So it’s all good.

Look, the last few years have been a really interesting journey into this space. I was lecturing at Sandhurst. My academic qualifications were a Master’s in Psychology, where I looked at the psychologies of leadership, and also of disinformation. And then, a war studies Masters, where I focused specifically on the Middle East.

And then, of course, a war in the Middle East began with loads of strategic questions and loads of disinformation, so I had plenty to write about. And I was head-hunted by the Henry Jackson Society to do just that. So, I kind of found myself at a new job as a Conflict Researcher.

But, it also kind of came from–I’ve been very vocal since the start of the war about antisemitism and the raging, kind of obvious disinformation that was coming out about the Gaza War right from the start. That got me an invitation on a trip to Israel. From there, I built up my network of contacts, and I worked quite hard to do that. I’d find people who’d talk to me and work out who was who in the academic and the military spaces: who was good to talk to, who could offer you that information that nobody else was getting. And it kind of turned into a niche for me.

So, I’m actually getting to Gaza three times during the war with the IDF. Once was with the high level military group, which is a crowd of retired very senior officers from around NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and other European countries. And, we wrote an amicus curiae brief for the International Criminal Court off the back of that–so, to refute some of the allegations against Netanyahu and the Defense Minister Gallant.

The second trip was, again, kind of laid on for me, if I’m honest. It was–I literally asked the Spokesman’s Department if I could go and visit the troops, because I’ve always been really interested in this from a soldiers’ eye view. There are big strategic questions, there are big policy questions, there’s all that stuff–which is interesting. But actually, I noticed that nobody was really talking about the troops. And, if you want to know what’s really happening in a war zone, it’s the soldiers who fight it that are good to speak to, rather than the generals who sit in their offices a bit further back. Not to denigrate the generals, who are doing an important role; and you can’t have an army without one. But, when it comes to the tooth-and-nail fighting, it’s the troops that you need to talk to. So, that was really interesting and developed my network a bit further there.

And then, my third visit was I was the first neutral international observer to go and visit and film a Gaza humanitarian foundation distribution from start to finish. Which inadvertently turned into a global exclusive; and then the footage I shot went absolutely worldwide, which was quite cool.

So, that’s the access I’ve had.

When you go, particularly through the Spokesman Department with the IDF–they’re the official party line and they’re fighting their own information war. You have to–not take them with a pinch of salt, I’m not saying that at all. But you do have to divine using your experience and your knowledge what they’re not telling you. I don’t blame them for not telling me because they’re doing a job. But it’s my job to try and find the gaps and work out what the truth actually is.

And so, the paper you’re talking about, I kind of slightly naughtily cut out the higher echelons of command in the IDF completely and went to my network of soldiers who would talk to me. And I cross-referenced their accounts of things with OSINT–Open Source Intelligence–and what we could glean from maps. There’s some pretty impressive tracking of the war that’s gone on in the open-source-intelligence-space community. So, there’s some pretty good ways of checking what you’re being told. And of course, you cross-reference the soldiers’ accounts with each other to see where they contradict, where they complement each other, and that kind of thing.

And, only right at the end did I give the paper to the IDF’s Lessons Learned Branch. Because, frankly, I didn’t want to get anything–you know, if I’d made a mistake, I’d like it to be called out. Fortunately, I hadn’t, actually. There were very few things they’d picked up in there. But, also, I didn’t want to get anyone hurt and breach operational security or throw the IDF under a bus in any way by revealing secrets that perhaps might harm soldiers going forward. So, I made sure there was nothing in there that crossed that line. But that’s really the only input the IDF had into it.

And, I don’t think anyone else in the world has come up with a paper this comprehensive on how the IDF actually fought in Gaza. It’s been incredibly under-reported by the world’s press. A lot of sort of pro-Israel academia tends to just stick to the Spokesman’s Department line without interrogating it too hard. And I’ve tried very hard to get past that. So, I think this paper is pretty unique, and I’m very proud of it.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. It’s so tricky, because it’s such a contested information space. And you know I’ve written a whole paper on that as well: It’s called “Information Maneuver”–again, a Henry Jackson Society paper–which talks about this information war and how it’s been fought. And, the “Lessons from Gaza” paper does address the journalist piece.

When it comes to my role in that information space, all I’m trying to do is be fair and write about the IDF as I would about the British Army, or the American Army, or the Dutch Army, or the Sri Lankan Army, or whoever you want to pick. Because, I think there’s such a skew in the way the IDF is reported on, almost in the sense that perfection is expected and if they drop anywhere short of complete perfection then somehow that’s the worst thing that ever happened. And, that’s just an unrealistic way of looking at war.

We can go back to Clausewitz and he talked about the chaos and the friction, and the fact that war is deeply messy. And then, the fact that I’ve been to war myself three times in Afghanistan and I’ve seen firsthand just how brutal, and tragic, and awful war is. It’s very different to, say Call of Duty–the computer game–or a Hollywood film.

So, that’s the kind of perspective I take when it comes to my role in the information war, just to report fairly. And I’ve not shied away from criticizing the IDF where I think it’s appropriate. And, actually, the IDF have encouraged that. My IDF friends appreciate that. They don’t want cheerleaders with pom-poms saying that they’re the best thing that ever happened. They just want to be treated fairly and normally.

When it comes specifically to the journalist issue, I kind of weathervane on this one. It depends on what time of day you catch me because I genuinely see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, we know from the 2014 war, there’s very credible third-party journalist reporting talking about how they were intimidated by Hamas on the ground. There’s journalists from the Netherlands and India that report on this, so it’s completely divorced from Israeli press. It’s third party stuff. So, that’s very credible and I believe those reports.

Especially as we saw them repeated, funnily not by Hamas, but actually by Hezbollah during this war. I went to a captured tunnel up in Lebanon. It was technically a media outing, but almost nobody went. And I asked a friend of mine, who I won’t name, but he’s a major international journalist. I said, ‘Why is nobody else here?’ And, he told me outright that it’s because the networks had had their correspondents in Beirut threatened if people went on this trip. So, ‘If you go on this trip to the tunnel, we’ll hurt your correspondent in Beirut.’ So, it’s a very common tactic: it’s not just Hamas that do it. Hamas and Hezbollah are so close, there’s no way they’re not using the same tactic. But, we also know that if anything happened to a journalist on the ground, it would be pinned on the IDF no matter who was responsible.

But, on the flip side, my very first firefight in Afghanistan, I had a BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] journalist with me. I’d joined the battle group prior to a huge assault. She stayed with us in the forming-up area overnight; she went forward with us to the line of departure; and then she stayed a bound back whilst we went through the assault. There’s still an article on the BBC website about that, which is kind of cool.

And perhaps more of those embeds, certainly with trusted journalists–journalists they know they can trust to be fair. I don’t think they want these hagiographies: they want fair reporting. There aren’t many journalists out there that have proven themselves able to do that, which is partially I think a failing of the media, which has harmed their case to get in with the IDF. But, yeah, I think a few more eyes on the ground would have definitely helped.

And then, the final thing I would say though, that is far harder to do in Gaza than it is in Afghanistan. Because in Gaza, you have that. I spoke to a Yahalom–the tunnel commander–I spoke to one of their captains the other day. He described it as a 720-degree threat in Gaza just because of the above-ground, underground, 360-degrees horizontal and vertical. So, it’s a really, really challenging environment to keep people safe. And when you’re fighting, the last thing you want to do is be worrying about where the journo is and are they in cover, etc., etc.

So, I do genuinely see both sides of this argument and I kind of change my mind on a daily basis about what the best thing to do would have been.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I mean, what your students are saying tallies with everything I’ve ever heard from any IDF soldier. And look: you know Israelis. If that wasn’t true, there’s no way they’d be able to force people to repeat the party line endlessly.

Andrew Fox: I was at an academic conference with 13 Israeli academics last year, and at any one time, there were 26 opinions in the room. This is not a culture that will kind of just repeat the party line because they’re told to. In my opinion, in my experience.

But, look: You look at the amount of IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] that were in Gaza. I was trying to get a figure out of people last week when I was in [inaudible 00:16:37]–

Andrew Fox: Yeah, a booby-trap: an improvised explosive device. It’s what’s done the most damage to IDF soldiers in terms of casualties and deaths. It’s IEDs that have really hurt them.

I was trying to get a figure. The low figure was tens of thousands: As many as 100,000 IEDs was the estimate they gave me. And if you then look at the surface area of Gaza, that equates–I did the math when I got home–that works out to an IED every half a football pitch. That’s how dense this minefield was.

And of course, that’s not–they weren’t evenly spread across the strip. They were concentrated in the cities, in the areas where the IDF were fighting. So, actually, it’s probably way more dense than an IED every 60 meters.

That gives you an answer as to why Gaza looks like it does straight off the bat. Because, the IDF is fighting or was fighting a combined arms maneuver operation. This wasn’t counter-insurgency where they could go, every time they found an IED, call the disposal assets forward, wait there while they clear the bomb, and then move on. That’s just not tactically viable in the slightest in Gaza. Most of these IEDs were operated by a Hamas member that was watching the tunnel mouth or wherever it was through a camera that they’d planted. Hamas were an astonishingly adaptive and well-improvised enemy when it comes to stuff like this.

So, straight away, that rules out any chance of an ammunition technical officer getting forward to do the old red-wire/blue-wire thing that you see from the films. So, the IDF had to detonate these things. And of course as soon as they go bang, that’s the building destroyed. And, when you are literally advancing through a minefield detonating every mine, that’s why Gaza looks like it does.

Andrew Fox: I think that rests on a false assumption that before the war, Gaza was somehow a kind of neutral population in terms of their attitudes to Israel, and only Hamas in there were the ones who really hated them. I don’t think that stands up to any polling that we’ve seen ever in terms of Gaza and attitudes towards a two-state solution or coexistence peacefully with Israel. I don’t think there was just a crowd of people who were, like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about Israel. Oh no, they’ve bombed me; now I hate them.’ I don’t think that has happened at any point during this war. This is a population who have been, in many cases, indoctrinated by the school system or by UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] to loathe, hate, and despise not only Israel, but the Jews generally.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, thank you for that. So, the U.N. Relief Works Agency. There are people in there who–very few are neutral towards Israel, even before this war. So, the idea that you’ve somehow now turned the population that already you against you further I think is kind of irrelevant.

It’s a flaw in military thinking where you map Conflict A onto Conflict B. And you say, ‘Right, because Conflict A went like this, Conflict B will go like this.’ And, I think that’s really the wrong way to look at lessons from one conflict to another.

And in this instance, what we’re seeing is Western commentators taking our counterinsurgency doctrine from Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, and trying to apply it to a situation where it really doesn’t fit. So, I kind of reject that one.

In terms of options, the idea I’ve had on the table. Look, I spoke to the Defense Minister about this firsthand. And, his point was, ‘Look, it’s the Middle East, you have to be strong. If you have a choice between being liked and being strong, you choose being strong.’ It’s a mentality thing. It’s a psychology thing, when it’s comes to the Middle East. I think a lot of Western commentators just don’t understand; and that has informed–those flawed assumptions informed a lot of really sub-par, frankly, commentary on this conflict, especially when it comes to Gaza.

But, let’s go back to 7th, 8th, 9th of October 2023 and just stop for a second and think about what was on the ground there. You have 1200 people lying dead. You have hundreds more where you don’t know where they are. Are there bodies, are they in Gaza? You don’t know. You’ve got rockets coming in from the north from Hezbollah. You’re now worried about Judea, Samaria, and the West Bank, what’s going to happen there. Syria is still a mess, so you’re worried about that. You’ve got the Houthis down in Yemen making threats. And, you’ve got Iran as the spider at the center of the web. You are under siege from all sides if you’re Israel. And I think the only option on the table at that point really is to punch back as hard as you can.

Now, what does that punch look like? Could they have done just targeted strikes and left it there? Potentially, but that doesn’t remove the threat of future assaults from Gaza into Israel. We’ve seen that repeated in previous conflicts–so, Guardian of the Walls or any of the other ops that have taken place in Gaza since 2005–that’s essentially what Israel did. A few air strikes, a little bit of ground maneuver, and then stop. That didn’t make Israel any more safe and actually led to the 7th of October, you could make the case.

So, Israel took the opportunity–what’s the word–took the decision to get in there and dismantle Hamas’ terror capabilities methodologically. And, unfortunately, when those terror capabilities are embedded in every square inch of the Gaza Strip–when you have as many as 1000 miles of tunnels underneath the ground, when you have 57,000 tunnel entrances and they’re digging more whilst you’re fighting, when you have IEDs and arms cases[?caches?] and rat runs between houses in pretty much every house you come to–unfortunately, to destroy that, you’re going to have to take Gaza to pieces. And that’s what’s happened.

You can make the case, I think, as a final point, that the IDF have approached this mercilessly when it comes to Hamas. I don’t think they’ve been merciless when it comes to evacuating civilians because they have done that and probably to a greater extent than actually they needed to. Under international law, anyway. Notwithstanding that law, legal and moral, are two very different things. But, they’ve certainly approached Hamas and their capabilities with a merciless approach where they’ve just ground yard by yard, systematically dismantling everything in front of them, And so, we do see the destruction.

I think it boils down to one thing: What’s the political end-state for this war? It was to remove the threat to Israel. Which they’ve basically done. I don’t see any other tactical way of doing that.

Andrew Fox: There’s a slightly binary approach to looking at war that I think is a real mistake people make, and that’s looking at victory and defeat as if they’re tangible things. I much prefer to frame it in a more useful way. I don’t think victory and defeat are useful. I think what we’re looking at is strategic goals: Have they been achieved or not? And, Israel’s strategy goals were pretty clear: Secure Israel’s borders, return the hostages, and destroy Hamas.

Okay, so first one is done. The strategic threat to Israel has been removed. Hamas cannot repeat 7th of October. Their rocket stocks are absolutely minimal. They may get one off, but it’s not going to be anything remotely serious; and certainly Iron Dome is more than capable of dealing with it. Which leaves us to the final one, which is: Was Hamas destroyed? Well, no, they’re not. But, they are heavily degraded, they can no longer strike Israel, and they are now presiding over a kingdom that is half of Gaza where everyone lives in tents and is miserable. That feels like pretty strong achievements of strategic goals right there.

Now, does that provide longterm security?

Well, the answer is we don’t know. Because, actually, under the Trump ceasefire deal, that is really outsourced to the United States now. And if you go down to the Civil Military Corporation Center in Kiryat Gat–where I was last week–it’s very clear who kind of runs the show down there. And it isn’t Israel, it isn’t the British, it isn’t one of the 27 countries that have provided troops to that center. It’s the Americans, quite clearly. They are liaising through Egypt directly with Hamas. Or indirectly with Hamas, I should say. They are keeping the violence to minimal levels. And they own the Board of Peace, and then what happens in Gaza going forward. So, it’s kind of out of Israel’s hands at this point.

So, in terms of the longterm security of Israel, I think it’s safe certainly for years at least. I think Israel retains the ability to strike back in to Gaza with air strikes, should any serious capability look like are being developed by Hamas or any other militant group.

But, a lot is going to depend on, you know, who governs Gaza going forward. And there’s so much down there that’s not decided on, it’s complete unclear as to the way forward in terms of Hamas being disarmed, etc., etc., that we can’t make assessments at this point as to where it goes in the future.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, it’s okay.

Look, I saw hungry people but not starving people–I think is my takeaway. They weren’t anything like–you know, if you close your eyes and think of famine, I think most of us think of Ethiopia or Biafra, all those images that came out of the 1980s. Nothing like that at all, nowhere close. People wanted food, but they didn’t look malnourished. And I’ve got a raft of photographs and video images to prove it. So that’s just not me making it up.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, at least where I was. But, I was down in Rafah, which has some of the worst destroyed areas.

Look: There’s a weird inversion during this war, and we’re in danger of playing the game a little bit here. Because, the way allegations usually work is if you make an allegation, you have to give evidence. And then it’s on the defending party to refute that or otherwise.

At the moment, what we’ve got is allegations–people making allegations–and saying, ‘Right, refute that.’ And you’re, like, ‘Well, there’s nothing to refute. You’ve made an allegation. You’ve not provide any evidence. I’ve got nothing to refute here.’ And then, by trying to refute it, you kind of play their game because you give credibility to the allegation by taking it seriously.

So, we’re in a real trap here, I think. The flip side is if you don’t refute the allegation, and that’s the only narrative that runs.

So, it’s a really clever information tactic that the anti-Israel side is using.

If you make allegations of starvation, you have to get past the fact that 3000 calories per day, per person on average went into Gaza during the war. Like, that is more than enough for every man, woman, and child in Gaza to be well-fed every single day.

And so, we can conclusively say that the issue is with distribution inside Gaza, not with the supply of food. So, the simple facts stack up that way.

Why weren’t people getting fed? Well, a variety of reasons. It’s a war zone. There’s a lot of rubble. It’s very difficult to get food to some people. And, I think if there was any hunger, that’s where it was: It was in those isolated pockets where it was exceptionally difficult to get food to.

Obviously, you’ve also got Hamas hoarding the aid, and we’ve seen video after video of the baby food stockpiles that were in there. And, I spoke to someone in COGAT [Coordination of Government Activities] who couldn’t understand why there was a shortage of baby food, because they knew how much powder had gone in. They just couldn’t work out why A and B were not matching up.

And, since then, we’ve seen videos released of warehouses stacked full of baby food, because it’s a high value item and Hamas can sell it for a good price if they restrict supply. It’s basic economics: That’s your wheelhouse. So, there’s all these other factors playing into it.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Israel didn’t do stupid things, and the complete cessation of aid, at that point–was at last May?–it was unnecessary. It didn’t work. It did so much strategic damage reputationally. It gave the enemies as much ammunition as they could have dreamed of. And, it was just a foolish thing to do. Even though we know there was enough food in there for months, that doesn’t matter. We’re in an environment where the slightest mistake gets seized upon. And that was just a strategic mistake. It didn’t need to happen.

Andrew Fox: I think they were trying to–I can’t remember off the top of my head how long it lasted for. I think it might have been a month-and-a-half, but I’d have to check. I think the reason they did it is because they knew Hamas were using the aid supplies to raise their funds, pay their fighters, keep themselves in the fight in many respects. And they thought that by cutting the supply, it would mean that the demand inside escalated, which means Hamas would have to feed people. Yeah, I just think it was fuzzy logic. And, as I said, it didn’t work anyway. It just got Israel hammered on the world stage.

So, when it comes to, yeah, starvation, yeah, it doesn’t stack up. And, I would recommend you read the paper by Danny Orbach and Jonathan Boxman, et al, published by the BESA–the Begin-Sadat Center. It’s called “Refuting the Genocide Allegations,” and it’s the most extensive interrogation of this during the war.

And, when it comes to headshots and snipers, there’s a really good point that they make in that paper. When we have doctors in the New York Times saying, ‘We were in hospitals and all we saw was headshots to children and gunshot wounds to children,’ unfortunately that’s belied by Hamas’ own numbers. Because, Hamas published, by hospital, the number of injuries and the kind and the mechanism of injuries they had been treating. And, whilst those doctors are in the Gaza Strip, no hospital in the Strip reported a majority of gunshot wounds, nevermind the majority of gunshot wounds to children. By far and away, the biggest mechanism of injury was air strike. So, their accounts of things is belied by Hamas’ own data.

So, it’s just a really good example of how you make an allegation, you don’t provide any evidence other than anecdotal. Especially when you look at who they went to Gaza with, Medical Aid for Palestine, a charity that’s been reported for links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the terror groups. Straightaway, there’s a biased source. But they say ‘Dr.,’ so they get the halo effect. And then the story goes around the world, but there’s actually no evidence.

Andrew Fox: I mean, respectfully, I’ve seen headshots in real life, and they don’t look like they. I’m completely unconvinced by those X-rays.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I’ve seen a headshot to a six-year-old, so I actually know what it looks like to a child. It was a ricocheted round to a child in Afghanistan. And, I can assure you it doesn’t look like anything like those X-rays. So, I’m intensely skeptical of those, and I don’t believe it.

Andrew Fox: So, straight off the bat, my grandfather was in the U.S. Army in World War II. I know what he was fighting against in Europe, so that’s always been something I deeply admired him for. And I feel a sort of legacy to carry on in some way with this new face of antisemitism and Nazism that’s reared its head.

Secondly, I had a very good Jewish friend who was killed in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Paul Mervis. Up to 7th of October, that was the only time I’d ever worn a kippah–was at his funeral. And, I’m very conscious that he gave his life for our country as a Jewish man. It morally offends me that Jews are presented as anything less than fellow British citizens. I find that deeply upsetting when I think about Paul’s memory.

And then, finally, I worked very hard to get some of our former colleagues out of Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban took back over again. We ran a charity, a group of us, and we managed to shift about 3000 Afghans to safety, mostly women and children. And, we couldn’t have done it without the Jewish community in the United Kingdom, who really helped us with fundraising and some of the legal stuff around it because, actually, it’s very easy to people-traffic accidentally when you’re doing this stuff. If you don’t have the legal protection, you can get yourself in trouble. So, we couldn’t have done any of it without them.

And then, I saw how 7th of October affected my friends. And then, I saw the storm of denial and antisemitism that came off the back of it. And, I think what got me my first invitation to Israel was primarily my support for the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. So, in terms of my attitudes to Israel, I’ve always been kind of a Zionist, if you will. I’ve always believed in the State of Israel as a thing that needs to be in existence for very important historical reasons. I’ve always been aware that the IDF go hard when they respond to terrorist acts. And, look: The law of armed conflict is pretty permissive, and I’ve got no moral qualms with going hard against terrorists. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

And yeah, but I’ve always come into this, like I said, with a clear-eyed approach where I know that–look, I’ve studied, I have a Psychologies Masters because wars are fought by people, and if you can understand the people better, you’ll understand the war better. And, the psychology when it comes to Gaza or Lebanon with Israel is no different: there’s good, there’s bad, and you have to take each into them as it comes and judge it on its own merits.

So, that’s kind of my story and how I really got into this: but it all stems from family history, friends, and wanting to live in a world where people can get by without getting abused based on their religious or ethnic identity.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I think if I had an answer to this, I’d be a lot wealthier than I am. I’d have a lot more [?] on the world stage. This is a conundrum that has beaten every diplomat who has taken it own since 1948, and I think the reason for that is because 1948 was so messy. It wasn’t a clean handover from A to B.

Certainly, there were groups like Irgun or Haganah who didn’t play the cleanest slates in the run-up to Independence. And, as a Brit, there’s a bit of antagonism–not from me personally because it was decades ago, but certainly people do bring it up quite regularly. There’s the Declaration of Independence, there’s the attack by the Arabs, there’s the Israeli victory, there’s what the Palestinians called the Nakba as a result. None of this is clean. None of it gives you nice lines on a map. None of it is not messy. And, it’s that messiness that has caused the endless conflict ever since.

But, the article you’re alluding to–I was really looking at the lens through which we try and analyze this problem. You look at the international law, the U.N., and all the arguments that are advanced forward. All the language they use is of colonialism, which was the era in which all that international law was written. That period post-Civil War when European empires were rushed–

Andrew Fox: Oh, sorry. Yeah, I misspoke. When European powers were rushing to hand their colonies back to the indigenous populations. Well, that framing just doesn’t work with Israel. It’s not that you’d had a bunch of Jewish colonizers from Europe who came in and kicked all the native Arabs off their land where there had never been any Jews before, and all of a sudden you’ve got a colony. That doesn’t work.

What you effectively have is two peoples who both claim indigeneity, who both claim long historical ties to the land. And I’m not going to debate which one is right. I’m not interested in that right now. Because I think part of this is we all keep trying to rehash the battles of the past, rather than deal with what’s in front of us right now.

And, what’s in front of us right now is the State of Israel that isn’t going anywhere. They’ve proven that beyond doubt in the last two years–that they will fight to the last soldier if need be. And some bases down in the south did that: They fought to the last soldier on 7th of October to defend their land. And, that’s where we are, so we have to play that. But, colonialism narrative doesn’t work.

And again, this debate, I think quite often pro-Israel advocates fall into the trap I articulated earlier where you play the enemy’s game. When they start using the language of colonialism, many defendants like Natasha Hausdorff regularly uses uti possidetis juris as a counterargument to that. But, actually, that’s a colonial framework, as well.

Andrew Fox: So, that is that when a colony was returned to the indigenous population, the borders were as they fell: ‘Okay, this is the area that was colonized; these are your borders now.’ And that’s the argument by which the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria are considered part of Israel.

But again, it’s a colonial argument. And Israel is not and never has been, certainly since 1948, a colony of anyone. It’s Jews returning to their indigenous homeland. Arabs maintaining that there is a waqf or Islamic right to the ground. And, they also claim a degree of indigeneity, whether that’s true or not.

So, that’s the situation as it is. And I think using colonial international law frameworks doesn’t solve the problem.

And, I think part of the reason this is so intractable is people keep using those frameworks, and they’re not fit for purpose. And perhaps we need a different way of looking at this problem to solve it rather than tie it to international law that doesn’t really fit.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. So, the drones piece is interesting. It’s not quite as widespread as Ukraine, and they’re used in slightly different ways, so there’s a really interesting in[?] comparing and contrast. And, I haven’t done that work yet because that’s part of my Ph.D. dissertation, so you’ll have to bear with me until I grind through that one.

But, drones have been huge force multipliers. They haven’t been available to every unit. There’s a misconception: some of the reserve units have actually really struggled for equipment. And, one of the lessons is the challenge of mobilizing that many people in that short of amount of time. 360,000 soldiers were mobilized by the IDF. They did not have stocks and supplies for 360,000 soldiers. So, that’s a really good lesson about the challenges that come with mobilization.

And then, even how you train 360,000 reservists–because a lot of them hadn’t worn a uniform for as much as three years, because every three years, they have to report. And yet, they only had a month-and-a-half of training before deploying to Gaza. So, there was actually quite a lot of on-the-job training done at the start of the war; they were learning in contact.

Which led to some mistakes, I would suggest. It led to things perhaps not going as well as it might have done at the start of the war because there were some soldiers lacking training. That’s a really important lesson as well.

Medical is fascinating. So, it’s 600 soldiers that would be dead not only if they’d been given current British standards of care, but if they had been given previous Israeli standards of care. So, if this had been the Lebanon War, 2006, those 600 would be dead. And, what’s really interesting about the developments in the IDF medical space is how data-driven they are. They’ve really crunched the numbers on how soldiers were dying, where they were dying; and they’ve made some brilliant adjustments based on pure data. It’s a very mathematical way of looking at it.

So, they’ve quite reasonably asked the question, ‘How do soldiers die on the battlefield?’ And the answer is blood loss. So, the very logical conclusion is, ‘Well, why not have blood on the frontline?’

So, they’ve got refrigerated blood packs with the forward fighting units. So, when a soldier is wounded, rather than saline or some of the other intravenous stuff they give people which doesn’t clot–which doesn’t carry oxygen in the way that blood does–they give them blood. Incredible. No other army that I know of does this outside of the Special Forces.

They also look at where soldiers die, and actually, it’s mostly the battlefield. If they make it to a hospital, they usually survive. The deaths are happening on the battlefield. And so, they’ve taken the doctors out of the hospitals and put them on the battlefield, because that’s where they’re most needed.

So, it’s developments like this–data-driven, really, really intelligent, using technology–and where they’re going is quite remarkable. They’re going to be talking about wearable technology that updates in the app, that everyone in the medical chain can see. So when a casualty comes in, they’ve already got all their stats there. Then you can factor in AI [artificial intelligence] into that, which will recommend triage and treatment, and speed up that process as well, and save more lives. This is quite remarkable stuff they’re doing.

They’re even talking about investigating synthetic blood so you don’t have to carry human blood. It can only be O-positive [Hmmm. Shouldn’t be O-negative? O-negative blood is the universal donor blood type. In many cases, O-positive is fine; but O-negative is the actual universal donor blood type.–Econlib Ed.], because that’s the only one that goes with everyone. It’s got to be cleared of potential diseases or whatever it might be. With synthetic blood, you can just make a pure, clean blood that can go into wounded troops.

So, these are remarkable technological innovations, all data-driven. So, that was fascinating to me. And actually, the paper that I’ve already written, I’m just writing an annex to it now about those medical developments, because I only found those out last week.

But yeah, there’s rafts of lessons here. And some of them are as old as time. Like, hygiene in the field. Gaza’s sewage works were damaged: you know, the soldiers had to find somewhere to do their basic bodily functions. And then, if a bulldozer comes on and sweeps that into a sand berm, you’re lying on a very contaminated pile of dirt. And people can pick up infections and all that sort of stuff.

So, even these really, really granular, gritty lessons that probably applied to the Romans just as much as they apply to the IDF in Gaza today, it’s always good to have. Because, we get very excited about future technology, future developments, what’s new, what’s shiny. Actually, some of these classic soldiering lessons, it does no damage whatsoever to remind ourselves that they’re still really important. So, I’ve tried to look at both new and old lessons in the paper quite deliberately.

Andrew Fox: Oh, I love that question. It’s really important. It’s a point to hammer home, I think–is that, it goes back to my earlier point about what you don’t do: Is you don’t lift Conflict A and say, ‘Conflict B will be just like this.’

That the skill of the analyst–and what I’ve tried to do–is to say, ‘Look, these lessons are not going to be the same as Gaza, but here are themes. Here are, kind of, specific data points that will lift and drop across.’

And, I’ve broken the lessons down into actually: You can learn from; You might want to learn from; or, You probably don’t need to learn from. So I’ve actually broken them down.

But, it’s not inconceivable that should we end up fighting in Eastern Europe–which looks increasingly likely, quite frankly–or in case we’re fighting against the U.S. Army in Greenland–who knows–that there is almost certainly going to be an underground element. Look at the Battle of Stalingrad back in World War II. They were fighting in sewer systems there. This is not new; it’s not unlikely.

And, what we’ve got from Gaza is the benchmark on how to do it against an enemy that’s prepared underground; there’s an obstacle every 100 meters. You’re trying to maneuver simultaneously with the troops on the surface. You’re trying to coordinate your fire supporters. It’s all of that is happening. And it’s absolutely conceivable that a NATO force could be doing that in Eastern Europe in due course. Not in the same way, but there are techniques, tactics, procedures that absolutely we can learn from.

And on top of that, what the IDF has done in Gaza is what we call a combined arms maneuver, where they use the full orchestra of war. They use air supports, artillery, mortars, guns, drones, signals intelligence, technological advances, infantry armor, tanks, you name it. It’s like the whole orchestra is playing together in that urban setting. British Army hasn’t done that since 2007. And even then, that was in a rural environment interspersed with buildings, rather than a pure urban environment. And, I know, because I was on that operation. I did it the last time the British did a battle group assault in that way. That is a lot of skill faith[?]. That means pretty much anyone in the British Army below company commander has never touched this stuff and has loads to learn.

For example, the IDF had quite high levels of fratricide–of blue on blue at the start of the war. Because it turns out that when you operate in an urban environment, all of a sudden everything is rubble. Nothing looks like it does on your map. You lose track of where the people to the left and to the right of you are, and it’s very easy to shoot your own troops by accident because of the chaos and friction of war that I mentioned earlier.

The IDF put some really good measures in on how to de-conflict your own call signs when they’re moving around on the ground, so you don’t actually have that. What a lesson to learn; and we can learn it from the IDF’s mistakes so that we don’t make those mistakes ourselves. So, it’s a great opportunity, I think, for any army in the world to learn really, really important lessons in how to operate in an urban environment.

Andrew Fox: Look, the biggest difference I think is the fact it’s a citizen army: It’s so heavily reliant on reserves. And I have noticed differences in quality and performance between the high-end professional units and some of the reserve units. That’s really interesting.

And look: it gives a lot kind of a flatter command structure in the IDF. It’s very much a people’s army, where our armies are very regimented and rank-orientated. My regiment is quite relaxed in that regard, and we encourage our soldiers to speak up and chip in ideas and that kind of thing. But the IDF takes that to a whole new level. And that’s interesting to watch.

I don’t think the IDF is quite as disciplined as Western armies tend to be. I’ve noticed that when I’ve been out with them.

But, it seems to work, and that’s the important thing. It’s, like: Does it work? Yes, it does. Then, great.

But it also has created some problems. If we look at how soldiers have taken their phones into Gaza when they’re not supposed to: They’ve made stupid videos and messed around in people’s houses. It comes nowhere close to the threshold of war crime, but the optics are incredibly poor.

And also, when you have a reserve army, it’s very difficult to discipline them, because you can go home. They’ll sack you; and they’re like, ‘Brilliant, I can go home now. This is great.’ So, there are challenges there.

I do like how well the Israelis do what we would call mission command, what the Germans would have called Auftragstaktik[foreign language 01:03:32]. The way they empower down to the lowest level. We call it mission command. Actually, it’s just command done well. And it does seem to work and have effect.

The other really good bonus from a citizen army is that you have some incredibly well-qualified, very genius soldiers. I have a friend who is a machine gunner–I won’t mention his unit–but he’s a machine gunner as a grunt, and the guy is just finishing off his Higher-Mathematics Master’s. This is the single-brightest, most intelligent machine gunner that I’ve ever met in my life.

And, I can only imagine having someone like that as a battalion commander or a company commander. That would add enormous value to have someone that bright, at the lowest level you could go to, and get ideas from, and trust when you give them a mission and know how that goes.

But, the final observation is the army–the armies are made up of people. The IDF has some outstanding people, some good people, some average people, and some mediocre people, and almost certainly some bad people. Because that’s just humanity. And, that actually, if you’re recruiting from across your whole society, you’re going to get a reflection of your whole society.

So, I find the differences interesting. I find them sometimes a little bit maddening. But, what I’m really interested in is: Does the army work or not? And it does. So, whatever they’re doing culturally is obviously working for them.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. There was one thing that really jumped out. It was went in Netzarim Corridor and was with 252 Division, which is a Reserve Division. And, it was classic kind of IDF disorganization, and they obviously weren’t expecting us. We sort of rocked up with our escorts. It took us ages to get in. We were waiting around for hours and hours and hours. We eventually got driven in. And everyone just looked at us in a really confused way, like, ‘What on Earth are you doing here?’ They then had to trawl the camp to find a tiny handful of English speakers, maybe five or ten, that’s all they could find. So, that’s how I know this wasn’t staged or laid on, which was why it sort of had meaning.

We interviewed all of them. And what really impressed me was the unity of purpose. Every single solider understood why they were there. None of them wanted to be there. None of them, on 6th of October 2023, had any desire to go to Gaza and do anything. But they understood the importance of the mission for the defense of their country. And, they came across so compassionate when it came to talking about the civilians, actually. I was really surprised. Look, I’ve never bought into the genocide narrative or the systematic war crimes piece. But, the fact that unprompted, clearly un-briefed, clearly not expecting an interview with some random British guy, all of them expressed this compassion and regret for what was happening, but also understood why it was happening.

I just compare and contrast that with, firstly, my own troops who never fought in a war of that nature. And, I think back to how difficult it was as a commander to explain why we were in Afghanistan because, frankly, half the time I wasn’t sure because it changed every 10 minutes. First of all: we were anti-narcotics; then we were supporting the government; then we were there to protect the people. It just changed every tour I went on.

But, the IDF didn’t have that and their soldiers got that real unity.

And, it was quite humbling to see people from all walks of life just having dropped their daily life to go and defend their country. It was a really commendable thing, and I find that quite moving. I’d really hope that it’s something that we could replicate in the United Kingdom should that ever come to us. But I’m actually not convinced that we could. So, that was quite sobering and certainly is an experience that stayed with me.

Andrew Fox: Thank you for having me. It was great to be here.