School of War - Ep 189: Andrew Roberts on October 7th and Antisemitism

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Lord Andrew Roberts, the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair of the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, joins the show to discuss October 7th revisionism, the potency of antisemitism, and the strange effort to reinterpret World War II. ▪️ Times      •      01:56 Introduction     •      02:35 Why?      •     03:48 No room for debate      •      05:34 Not “accidental”        •     16:13 Cooper’s conclusions        •      20:13 Peace with Hitler      •      22:53 Destroying the foundation         •      25:06 Free speech     •      27:39 Gaza endgame Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We've covered the post-October 7th War in and around Israel extensively here on School of War, with a number of really interesting interviews devoted to it, though my favorite episode so far was when we were actually able to go to Israel and embed with the IDF, which produced a show called Fittingly, School of War Goes to Israel, which came out this past December. I encourage you to check it out. Today, with the great Andrew Roberts, we are going to look at a different dimension of the war, the legacy of October 7th itself, and the role. role that anti-Semitism has played in our conversations about the war. Antisemitism from the left

and from the right. Let's get into it. It is for safety for war. The Lackie and Bayouca. September 7, 1941, a date which will live in it. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing ground.

We shall buy in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am 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. Well, that's really kind of you to have me on the show again, Aaron. This is a remarkable document.

It's a long document. It's exhaustive. It includes, among other things, detailed minute-by-minute breakdown of the attack on Israel on 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

that you produced this piece of work? 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, that there were no rapes or murders on the Senate. 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. 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 Pellid, who calls himself a radical anti-Zionist described the murders rapes, a kidnappings of 7 October as, quote, acts of heroism. The Palestinian poet

Muhammad al-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. It's sick, Nick, isn't it? It really is. We're 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. not fight for king and country. Later, of course, it did. Those same young people who voted that way did actually fight for king country. So one hopes that when they get a bit older and more mature and intelligence 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. Your use of the term civilized is something I want to fasten onto. It's a sort of 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 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 sort of military operation like the United States or Israel or any professional military might launch a military operation. And, you know, if there were any unfortunate civilian deaths here or there, it was a bit of a marginal affair and sort of unfortunate accident.

Yes, that's what the Hamas leader in Doha has been arguing, exactly that, that these were sort of collateral damage that 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 marginalise the armed forces and keep them, either destroy them and 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. No, strictly speaking, it's kind of a pogrom, no, unfortunately well-known phenomenon in Jewish history. Yes, but the planning of the, there are pogroms where Jews are killed and raped and murdered, but not unbelievably statistically tortured. And there are other pogroms, of course, in which they were tortured. But to send your men, as Hamas did, into a operation deliberately wanting them to go into a sadistic and for the victims humiliating sexual, psychosexual kind of killing spree is a, I think, particularly barbaric thing, which is why I do equate the barbarism with the civilization. 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 U.K., in the United States, what drives that? And, you know, it seems often tied up with this attempt to reverse who the civilized parties and who the barbarians are. Oh, yes. It's very much of blame the victims thing, isn't it? And 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. and 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? 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, etc., 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 do you want to reformulate it. Go ahead. No, absolutely. You're so right. of course it does exist, absolutely. I mean, obviously

anti-Semitism metastasizes in each generation and has done for thousands of years. It's a bacillus that's constantly moving and changing. And as you say, a really very 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're 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 Black Shirt 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's concerned, it's sort of caught in a perfect storm, unfortunately. 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. Well, and also, it is, it is, you know, 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, you know, it's all been built by colonists, it's all about colonizing, as though the Jews hadn'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 world view that they can't bear not going down that road. With regard to the right, of course, especially the ultra-right, as you're seeing in the United States at the moment, with various people attempting to defend and even justify Adolf Hickler. It's a natural offshoot from anybody who thinks that way as well.

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, who's 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. Not just the outbreak of the war, of course, which Darrell 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 a 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 relitigate 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 John Le Pen, the French fascist, a detail of history as far as people like Cooper and Carson are concerned. Yeah, you know, Cooper's got a new mini-series coming out about the Germans. Seriously? No, it's about the Germans in World War II. It's just called Enemy. And, you know, it's this interesting, he talked about this on Joe Rogan's show, because this is a sign of the, I don't know, you know, it's interesting to ask if Joe Rogan is mainstream. I mean, the numbers are so big that it's, it's sort of start to ask, well, if he's not mainstream, what is, you know, you command an audience of millions. But Cooper went on the show and discussed it and sort of previewed it. And there's this interesting, I think the debating tactic is called Motten Bailey, but there's this interesting sort of back and forth move that people like Cooper will engage in and will say, well, look, I'm just, you know, the Germans.

were humans too. And I'm just trying to understand the human side of their story. I mean, a lot of innocent Germans died in the war. And, you know, are you so close-minded that you don't want to hear about, you know, the dead in, you know, Dresden or whatever and all the young German children who suffered in the war? And you sort of, you open with this seemingly reasonable, seemingly, you know, hard to refute, indeed impossible to refute notion that there are innocent German victims of the war. But before you know, I don't say there would. 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. Yeah, exactly.

It's called straw man argument as well, isn't it? It's where you knock down an argument that nobody but nobody has ever made. But before you know it, then all of a sudden you're into sort of seeing things from Hitler's point of view. You're coming to conclusions, as Cooper has explicitly that, you know, given the choice between allowing Hitler to control large portions of Europe, but avoiding the war and fighting the war, as in fact happened, that the latter choice was a great tragedy. That's ultimately the argument. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

It is the argument. And what happens if Europe controls, is controlled by Hitler, between 1939 and 1945, is the annihilation of the Jews. So what essentially Cooper saying is that the Holocaust is a small price to pay for 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 195? Hasn't he got the bomb by then? Yes, of course he has. So actually none of this, and on any other kind of 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 as the bad guys 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 and transforming it

into a great crime right I've stood with you you you may not remember this but I've I've stood with you in the Churchill war rooms actually in the little provisional cabinet room down there A moment, it was a great moment for me. I remember for a number of reasons. It was also, it was a tough day for the tour guide of the group that we were with. We misquoted Churchill in your present. Oh, no. Oh, was I appalling peddent?

You'll make me out to be the most terrible peddent, Aaron. 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, you know, and Churchill, of course, was often frustrated with them and said, you know, individually, they're very brave men. But together, they're the most cowardly manual. 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.

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. 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.

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, you know, 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 have basically stopped rather than perhaps enjoyed some kind of pause, the notion that Hitler would have 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, I mean, ultimately a key part of the argument, that that would have been, that making this kind of peace would have been a long-term, defensible prospect for the Brits.

Yeah, do you get this actually? When Tucker Carlson was interviewing at Pierce 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 have had a German invasion. And dear that the revisioning,

have to sort of ask questions like this is it just shows that if you're going to try and make a, what is essentially a pro-Hitler argument, you've got to do your homework first and actually learn the basics of history. I mean, they also talk about what Churchill would have done in September 1939. Well, he wasn't prime minister in September 1939, no. He wasn't prime minister on the day the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939, didn't become. come prime minister until, as you say, the spring of 1940, you know, you've got to try and get the basics right before you can make these, in my view, politically disgusting statements about Adolf Hitler.

Well, and there's this deep hatred of modern liberalism, the modern world as it exists, that sort of undergirds the 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 kind of 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 sort of excess of progressivism, which by the way, I, 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, we have to fundamentally reorder that world. We need a sort of 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, you know, evil. Yeah. And what it also does, of course, is to put. 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 weren't, they didn't matter at all and that what they were trying to do didn't have any validity. Whereas, as I believe it did. You know, there's a perfectly good, internal, democratic way of fighting against the various lunuses that have affected us all in the last 10 years or so, 15 years of sort of left-wing view and woe-kery 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. 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, you know, in recent years where it became simply unacceptable to say certain things that actually were sort of conventional center-right opinion in a variety of contexts. the right sort of 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 know, 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'm 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 it seems to me to be increasingly common. That's right. No, it is. And I'm a free speech absolutist.

I'm on the board, actually, of the free speech union. I hear in Britain, which is a very impressive organisation that fights for free speech, I do believe that people should have the right to 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, you know, 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. You know, they've become very thin-skinned when it comes to their respect and so on. With regard to Carlson and Cooper and everything, yep, fine. Of course you've got free speech to broadcast these appalling, stupid remarks and dangerous. these 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. 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. There's sort of 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 401Ks in the UK? What do you, in America, we call our retirement accounts 401Ks. Yeah, no. I mean, we do have the equivalent. They're called ISIS. And I think they've taken pretty much the same kind of pasting that your 401ks have taken. Well, sticking with the Middle East for the moment, we have the Israelis operating back in Gaza

again, continued sort of low-grade events up in the north. And you have this sort of looming Israeli-Turkish confrontation developing in Syria. And it's a an open question, how that's going to be resolved. How do you see things playing out? In particular, in Gaza, how do you see things playing out? There was this talk some, a month or two ago now from the president, President Trump 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 U.S. 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.

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, you know, who else would? It's a, you know, 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, 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're 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. Well, let me, 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, other things we, 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 with, out Palestinians in it. How do you speak to the apparent contradiction there? 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 that was, 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, you know, moved out of a politically and historically toxic area. So I don't think there is a contradiction, really. All right. Lord Roberts, chair most recently of a report for anyone who wants a kind of 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. Well, we worked very hard on it for over a year. I had some

very moving meetings, as you can imagine, with people in Israel. It's a memorial as well as a report. There's a very much, 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 the seventh, sevenoct.p.p parliamentary commission.com.co.uk. I think. Lord Roberts, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.