On the Present and Future of Warfare from Gaza to Lebanon to Tehran Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah: Good afternoon and welcome to yet another extremely topical and extremely timely EMET Webinar. We’re very honored to have with us today Andrew Fox. Andrew is a very distinguished research fellow with the prestigious Henry Jackson Society in London. He has served in the British Royal Army from 2005 to 2021, completing three tours of duty in Afghanistan, including one attached to the US Army Special Forces.

Andrew has served in the Parachute Regiment and the Special Forces Support Unit with additional tours in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. He’s been to Gaza three times and has seen it firsthand, as well as to Lebanon. Andrew has been published in many outlets, including the New York Post, the Telegraph, and Spiked, and I have seen him many times on I-24 News.

Andrew, although individual IDF soldiers have sometimes acted irrationally, as a whole, how do you think the IDF has managed their conflict in Gaza in an urban setting compared to most other national military forces?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a tough question because when you’re comparing wars, you have to take the individual context of that war into account before you can make any assessments. And the first thing to say about Gaza is it is the most complicated battle space I think any modern army has had to fight in. And the sheer reason for that is, first of all, population density. You know, a lot of people living on top of each other in a very small area. 2.3 million, depending on which estimate you believe, is probably the correct figure.

Secondly, those population were not allowed to flee by Egypt. Let’s not forget that straight after 7th of October, Egypt’s response was to seal that border wall even more. I’ve driven along it and it really is impenetrable and well-guarded. And so the civilian population are trapped inside there by a group who rule them, who also want them to be killed. This is on record. You can see my Henry Jackson Society paper called Hamas’s Human Shield Strategy in Gaza, where we get, I think it’s 283 footnotes of evidence proving that Hamas have a human shield, even in their own words. They say, “We need this for the campaign. Your death is for the greater good, as it were.”

So all of those things are taken into consideration. We then have to layer in the fact that it started with the 7th of October attacks that caught Israel completely by surprise. And this is really one of the first big wins, I think, for the IDF is they mobilized 360,000 soldiers in two weeks.

Now, to put that in context, if we look at how long it took America to mobilize half a million soldiers and shift them to the Gulf back in 1990, that took six months. And Israel managed 75% of that achievement in two weeks. Okay, slightly shorter distance to go, but still, that’s an incredibly tough effort. And a lot of mobilization paperwork was out of date. There was huge kit shortages by design. The IDF had decided that this kind of war was never going to be fought again. And so they didn’t need huge stockpiles of kit for their reservists.

So it’s like starting 100 meters race from 200 meters back. And so just to get over the start line, it was an incredibly impressive achievement. When we look at how they conducted themselves in Gaza, as you said, some soldiers didn’t reach the standard. They let themselves and their country down. And the IDF Military Advocate General, which is their JAG in American terms, have well over 100 cases on their books where they’re investigating soldiers who have stepped outside of the boundaries of what is permissible in conflict.

So the IDF haven’t got everything perfect. But I think the really important point here is that actually the numbers there don’t hugely matter. They’re so small. It’s a tiny, tiny percentage. And the IDF is taking very seriously allegations against it. On top of that, you have a sort of separate group that does investigations for the IDF Chief of Staff. They’re looking at over 1000 incidents. In a two-year war involving 360,000 soldiers, that is not anything to write home about.

And I think this is one of the key issues we have with the Gaza war. That there are standards applied to it that don’t apply to any other conflict. Nobody sends the US Army to war expecting them to be perfect. We know that war crimes happened in Iraq. They’re well documented. We know the British Army had war crimes in Afghanistan, as did the Australians. This is normal. Armies are made up of people, and sometimes people do bad things. It’s as simple as that.

But the dual standard applied to Israel is, I think, where the anti-Semitism comes into it. Israel is held to a standard no army in the world, no other army is held to where they are expected to be perfect 100% of the time.

And to address the destruction in Gaza as well. I think that’s a very important one. And I’ll make this my last point for this question. Gaza is very badly destroyed and damaged. 70 to 80% of all buildings have sustained some kind of damage. We have to take into account how that happened. And the reason it happened is because Hamas has been mining the whole areas. The whole streets have been IED’d. They’ve been using schools, mosques, universities, people’s houses, child’s bedrooms to fight from with a deliberate strategy to maximize that damage.

And of course, when you have 500 to 1000… Sorry, I was going to say kilometers. I’ll try and translate that into American for you, 350 to 700 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza. This is longer than the New York Subway, longer than the Paris Metro, longer than the London Underground. That’s going to cause huge structural frailties in the buildings above them.

And then of course, when a building does get damaged, what the IDF have rightly been doing is bulldozing it because it poses a threat just by collapsing on top of either an IDF soldier or an innocent civilian that’s sheltering inside. So the damage is huge, but there’s very good reasons for it.

And the final, final point is that this is just what urban combat looks like. And it has been urban combat. The IDF has sustained 900 kills, well over 3000 injured. To put that in context, the British Army in 20 years in Afghanistan only sustained 453 deaths. In two years, the IDF in Gaza have passed that total.

It has been tough fighting. It’s been hard fighting. Hamas are an enemy that the IDF respect, in the sense of they are good fighters, and you need to be on top of your game to fight them. And, yeah, I think that probably is a fairly good canter through how I think the IDF have done.

Sarah: Did you believe that Hamas is rearming, regrouping, and rebuilding? And how will the IDF sustain the yellow line? I know [inaudible].

Andrew: Yeah, beyond question, they are. If we look at what they’ve done during the war, they’ve actually established two new Hamas units called the Arrow Unit and the Deterrence Unit. I won’t try and pronounce the Arabic for deterrence because I can’t do that glottal R[?] particularly well.

But yeah, the Deterrence Unit is the military sort of aspect of this, where they have been going around hunting down the rival groups that the Israelis have tried to create. And they have pretty much successfully eradicated all opposition in their half of Gaza.

The Arrow Unit, it’s like a paramilitary police is probably the best analogy, who have been making sure that aid is seized by nobody else but Hamas. They’ve been punishing people in the streets for taking aid because Hamas are the ones that want it. That’s what’s kept them in the fight. It’s what helps them pay their fighters. It’s what keeps them in control of the population.

Remember, of course, that pretty much all two million of Gaza’s population are in that area that’s on the other side of the yellow line and still controlled by Hamas. So they’ve done a very effective job, I think, of taking control over their half of Gaza. And now we need to see where these ceasefire negotiations go. We’re seeing real problems with that Trump plan now. It’s kind of falling apart as we speak. And they’re trying to bring into effect measures that will help deliver small parts of it here and there.

Look at the International Security Force, the ISF. Just yesterday, Azerbaijan pulled out. The UAE promised money for rubble clearance, and they’ve pulled out from that funding as well. And what I think we had was a couple of months ago, we had countries just making promises to Trump in exchange for some pretty big concessions from the USA. And now as Trump’s attention is elsewhere, and he’s moved on as is his want, they’ve started to row back on those promises.

So who’s going to be the ISF? Apparently Hamas won’t allow them to operate inside their bit of Gaza. They’ll just be blowing them up and attacking them as if they were the IDF. So no country’s going to want to put troops into the middle of Gaza. So are they going to guard the border? Who’s going to do it? The Turkish are offering, but of course, we’ll talk about Turkey later possibly. Israelis don’t want the Turks anywhere near it for very good reasons.

They’re talking about rebuilding in Rafah. So Israel has been told to pay for a bit of rubble clearance so that they can start rebuilding a certain part of Rafah. But this is small beer when it comes to the overall picture. So it’s not looking good. I was in Israel last week. I haven’t spoken to an IDF senior officer that doesn’t think they’ll be resuming combat operations sometime in 2026.

Sarah: And of course, Erdogan’s rhetoric in Turkey is not adding to the stability of the region. Can you enlighten us a little bit about what Hamas has been doing with the baby formula and their use of hospitals?

Andrew: Yeah, these are some interesting revelations that have come out in the last week, actually, where there was a sense of puzzlement. And I got a real sense of frustration speaking to COGAT earlier in the war. COGAT being, of course, the agency responsible for getting aid into Gaza.

The statistics, even the UN statistics show in detail what have gone in. We know enough food for every person in Gaza, more than enough food has gone in throughout the war. Overwhelmingly so, about 3000 calories per day per person have gone into Gaza. But nobody in Gaza should be hungry on the amount of aid that’s gone in.

But as I said a moment ago, of course, we know that Hamas are stealing that aid. They’re using it as a lever of control. And just this week, Ahmad Al-Khatib put out a video showing stockpiled baby food, because the one thing they couldn’t understand is they were surging baby food into Gaza. And yet there were still complaints that babies were going hungry. And now we’re seeing videos of just this baby food stockpiled.

And of course, there’s another aspect to this, which comes with how money goes into these areas from humanitarian agencies. And I published a paper, again, for Henry Jackson Society just this week, actually, it came out. It’s called Cash to Terror. And it talks about how there is a system of putting cash and vouchers into war zones, because the theory behind it is, if you’re in need, rather than me just send you the baby food directly, I’ll send you money, and then you can go and buy what you need, be that baby food or nappies or diapers or food.

But unfortunately, when you inject cash into an economy like Gaza, that money is inevitably going to end up with an agency like Hamas, because they run the money exchanges. They run the shops. They run the local economies. They’ll tax it. They’ll take 20 to 40% off when they change that money for you. And baby food is a very high-value product. They can make a lot of money by selling baby food, far more than they could cucumbers or tomatoes or watermelons.

So there’s a huge incentive when you send in these high-value things, and you don’t have a system in place that delivers it to the point of need. And you stockpile it in warehouses that can then be seized. There’s a huge incentive for terror groups to stop that distribution and control it themselves. And of course, create shortfalls in it, because then that increases the need, which means they can charge more money for it.

So humanitarian aid, I have no doubt it comes from a good place of people wanting to do good. But it’s so open to abuse that actually, it can very often make the situation worse.

Sarah: Can you talk a little bit about Qatar’s role in all of this?

Andrew: My goodness, I’ll probably take the rest of the session on for details on Qatar. The Qatar is, I think first thing to point out is that they are the Sunni opposition to the Shia Iranian influence right now. If we look at those two strands of Islam, and they’re dueling throughout the Middle East, Qatar and Turkey are the two big Sunni states that have malign influence, of course, Saudi Arabia as well. But Saudi tends to sit slightly above and aside from the kind of flexing. They play a much more kind of grown up role.

But if we’re looking at antagonists, it’s Iran versus the Muslim Brotherhood states of Turkey and Qatar. The Qataris, let’s not forget have bankrolled Hamas for a long time now, partly for malign reasons, but also partly because actually Israel had that part of that as their strategy. They wanted that money to come in. They believed that by putting huge amounts of cash into Gaza, it would keep people prosperous and happy and less inclined to attack Israel as well as severing that Judea Samaria-Gaza unity.

So it kind of suited Israeli strategy too. But there’s no question that Hamas were fully bankrolled by the Qataris. That’s how they were able to afford their tunnels, how they’re able to afford their weapons. Let’s not also fall into the mistake that some people do of thinking that Gaza was one of those Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah. And they’re a very different beast. And my dog’s just dropped her ball behind my back. So excuse me.

Yeah, they’re not an Iranian proxy in the way that Hezbollah were or are. They are a group that primarily had a Muslim Brotherhood approach. So they conducted usual Muslim Brotherhood entryism, where they worked from the very ground up, and then slowly built up their influence and built up their political contacts and networks, and took over Gaza from the bottom up rather than from a top-down regime change.

And that’s the exact Muslim Brotherhood playbook that we’re actually seeing play out in parts of the West right now as well. We can talk about that potentially later down the line. But Qatar fully subscribed to this. We know they’ve played both sides for many years. They put money towards ISIS. They put more money towards, which of course was also Sunni. They funded all kinds of terrorism, both in the Middle East and in the West.

And on top of that, they’ve provided an incredible PR apparatus for Hamas since the war has started. You’ve got Middle East Eye, which is the lesser known, but far more extreme, Qatari funded outlet, which straight up parrots Muslim Brotherhood narratives.

And then of course, we have Al Jazeera, which is again, one of the more two-faced news outlets out there. They have spent years building up actually quite good credibility with some of their reporting on places other than the Middle East. And when we see Al Jazeera Arabic, however you’re fully into an anti-Semitic sewer, where they fully take the mask off and push every single anti-Israeli narrative you can imagine on steroids.

But Al Jazeera has taken Hamas’s live footage from the ground in Gaza and just repurposed it and presented it as news. So almost everything you’re seeing reporting wise originates from Hamas in Gaza straight through Al Jazeera. And then other news networks pick up on these stories and spread them around the world as in good faith, quite honestly, in some instances. They’re not knowingly sharing this stuff, realizing that it’s Hamas.

But this ecosystem Qatar has built is hugely responsible for the demonization of Israel on the world stage in support of Hamas’s war objectives, which are to degrade Israel on the international stage. And they’ve done that very successfully, try and isolate them. And to, in many ways, try and force Israel to stop fighting as well, which they successfully succeeded to do on a couple of occasions, most notably January to April 2024 with the Rafah operation. So yeah, Qatar has had a huge role to play in this.

Sarah: Huge problem, showering also universities, think tanks, and policymakers with loads of money, which is really dangerous. Can you explain, speaking of Al Jazeera, the role of social media and the minds of its audience and creating perceptions? And how can this be countered by wonderful Christian Zionists or non-Jewish Zionists like yourselves and Jewish Zionists, Muslim Zionists? How can we counter this?

Andrew: Yeah, this is really tricky, really tricky. And it’s something we’ve not been very good at, I think is probably the first point here. To try and claim success for our side in this information battle, I think would be slightly vainglorious.

But let’s look at how it operates. So I did multiple degrees when I left the army. One of them was war studies, focusing on the Middle East. And my PhD that I’m currently studying for is on that too. But I also, just for fun, did a psychology and Master’s in Psychology, because I figured that wars are fought by people, and if you can understand the people better, then you can understand the war better. And that’s paid dividends when looking at the information campaign around the seven front wars, as I call it.

The key focus of this disinformation has been on one thing, and it’s been on emotion. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the brain now, which is a slight segue, but I think it’s useful. So there’s a part of your brain at the top of your brain stem called the amygdala, which means almond in ancient Greek. And it describes the shape and size of it. And this is where your fight or flight reflex is controlled from.

So when you see something horrifying, see something traumatic, your amygdala gets fired up. It floods you with all kinds of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. And you actually have a physiological reaction where your vision will narrow, blood will begin to flood to your limbs rather than your brain, because your body is getting ready to fight or fly or freeze in some instances as well.

But the really interesting cognitive effect of this process is the suppression of what’s called the prefrontal cortex. It sits at the front of your brain, kind of behind my big shiny forehead. And the prefrontal cortex is where your critical thinking happens. And when the amygdala is fired off, it actually suppresses your prefrontal cortex. It reduces your capacity for clear, critical, analytical thinking.

And this is exactly what this information campaign is designed to do. They show you horrific images. They get your amygdala firing. They suppress your critical process. And then it becomes very easy to attach your chosen narrative to the emotion somebody’s feeling. They’re not at this point thinking through things in a sensible way. They’re reacting in anger to what they’ve seen.

And you probably might have experienced that yourself this Sunday, actually, when you saw what was coming out of Australia from Bondi Beach. And I certainly put social media down for a couple of hours because I didn’t trust myself to react in a fair and balanced way because I was upset. I was angry, horrified.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have that level of self-awareness. I mean, it’s my job to know this. Sorry, I know how I’m a human as well and I operate that way. So I put down social media for a couple of hours and walked away. But a lot of people don’t. They get very angry, very wound up. And it’s a natural human emotion to be upset by a dead child or a mother crying over their son’s body or whatever it might be.

Particularly, of course, if you’re a non-expert in the Middle East, and you don’t understand 7th of October. And I would put as a sidebar that I don’t think Israel explained that very well. But if you don’t understand the background to this conflict, if you don’t understand 7th of October, and you see a dead baby in Gaza, for a malign actor to then come along and attach a narrative to that and say, “Look what Israel is doing, they’re slaughtering the children, it’s a genocide,” that becomes very, very easy.

Now, the real challenge here is how you overcome that. And your question was, what we could do better to fight this battle? And it’s really hard once people are triggered off, because we can stand there and say, “Well, yes, that is a dead child, and it’s horrible, and our hearts go out, but actually, that was a legal strike under the law of armed conflict. It was entirely proportionate. There was a full targeting process followed. And that was just unfortunately part of war.” That’s not going to work because they’ll go, “I don’t care, there’s still a dead baby, and I’m still really upset about it.” That’s normal, natural stuff.

So logical, rational explanations don’t work, which is again, where I think Israel has fallen over slightly, because that’s all they’ve tried to do for the last two years. And it’s the equivalent of when you’re in a fight with your partner. If you say, “Calm down, my love, you’re being irrational,” how does that go?

Sarah: Not very well.

Andrew: It just pours fuel on the fire, doesn’t it? So that’s the one thing we probably shouldn’t do. At this point, I think it’s a matter of the dust settling slightly, because people have been so wound up for so long, that actually changing their mind, you can’t reason someone out of a position they’ve taken on emotion. And you’re also very unlikely to get them to replace their first emotion with a second emotion that’s in favor of Israel. Those two things are highly unlikely, I would suggest.

So letting the dust settle is the first thing, because the new cycle moves on. And the thing with an angry reaction is you can’t be angry always. Some people can, and we can write them off, but they’re a tiny minority. Once the anger is burned off, there will be a negative perception that we then have to deal with.

And I would suggest that we need to plan this with a mirror image of what the other side have done. And that is to use emotion, positive emotion about Israel, to use messaging that hits people at an emotional level, that builds connections with Israel, that shows like, for example, the good Israel does in the world. Focus on not just saying, “Look, we’ve made a new cancer cure,” show a survivor of cancer who is now better and has another 10 years of life because Israel gave him the technology. Find those human levels and those human connections. And that needs to happen over a period of time. It’s not going to happen quickly. It’s a long, slow rebuilding process.

And of course, the other side are going to be trying to keep this going. And you’re seeing that already with all the fake AI videos of flooding in Gaza, which I have called a flood libel, which I was very proud of that particular joke. So yeah, it’s not easy. It’s going to take time. But we have to be far more clever and use psychology in how we do this because simply just patiently explaining stuff just isn’t cutting it and won’t cut it.

Sarah: Yeah. So we saw what happened in Australia last weekend. We saw what happened in Birmingham on Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, where two people ended up being killed. I think three were very badly injured. We’ve had numerous attacks here. In May, two members of the Israeli embassy were killed. We’ve had the Poway Synagogue attack where in 2019, a man with a machete went into a kosher butcher store and killed a rabbi. 2018, somebody went into Munsee, leading to the death of a rabbi. And of course, the Tree of Life Synagogue where they killed 11 people.

Do you think the Holocaust gave us maybe a 25-year reprieve from anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism is the norm? Is it just the Seven-Front War that’s bringing out all the anti-Semitism and the emotional reactions that people are having to it? Or is this the way it always has been?

Andrew: It’s a really difficult question. This is a thousands of year old problem. I don’t think we ever reached a point where just because the Holocaust happened, this went away. I think Nazism did a kind of handover, takeover to their allies in the Middle East. Certainly, there’s been a very strong anti-Semitic narrative in the Middle East since the end of the Second World War.

They’ve considered the existence of the State of Israel to be an offense almost in parts of Islam. We’ve got this idea of Waqf, which is where once a part of ground has been Muslim. It should always be Muslim and it’s haram for anyone else to hold that land. The fact that Israel, as the Jewish state, sits on land that was once Muslim, Ottoman Empire onwards, is considered an offense to religion.

That kind of anti-Semitism has always been lingering around. Certainly, for the most part in the West, it was underground from 1945 onwards. But even at school, you’d hear jokes about Jews and schoolchildren just saying these tropes that there’s no malice or evil necessarily behind it. It’s just a thing people said. And how you study The Merchants of Venice in school, Shakespeare is one of our greatest writers and you’re being taught essentially the Shylock tropes, even in the classroom, because that’s just embedded in that cultural history.

So I think it was underground for a while, but certainly since 7th of October, it’s been turbocharged by a very deliberate campaign. There’s no question in my mind that driving anti-Semitism against the diaspora was one of the objectives of the campaign run by Al Jazeera and the rest. It’s been very successful, unfortunately. The logical end point has been things like Colorado, things like Washington DC. It was Manchester, not Birmingham, by the way.

Sarah: Oh, I’m sorry.

Andrew: That’s okay. Manchester, Heaton Park Synagogue. The worst example we’ve got so far is the one in Bondi Beach. Just today, there’s images suggesting that the Australian police have foiled another attack that was being planned in Australia.

I think what Gaza has done when it comes to anti-Semitism is give permission for it. Look at what the Jews are doing in Gaza, this makes hurting Jews okay, I think is the broad logical flow of how this goes. And I got very angry on Sunday and I said, “Don’t react in anger.” And I stand by that. But I do think you can use anger to fuel things in a healthy way.

I wrote a piece on my Substack, basically saying that these people have blood on their hands. They’ve been spreading blood libels for two years about genocide and about all sorts of starvation and all that kind of nonsense. What they have done is created a permission structure for the most malign actors to feel justified in taking violent action against Jews.

I hold these people responsible, and I hold them accountable where I can. I think anger can be a good thing in that sense if you channel it the right way. Don’t react and say something you’ll regret. But if you can coldly focus that anger, then I think that can be a good thing. And that’s certainly what I did on Sunday. And as I said, these blood libel spreaders have blood on their hands.

Sarah: The Israeli government seems to think that Iran was partially responsible. Do you have any reason to believe that?

Andrew: I’ve not seen anything in the public domain that suggests that. I think it’s really interesting they had an ISIS flag on their car, be that homemade or provided for them by someone we don’t know. We know they went to the Philippines, to Mindanao, which is a hotbed of ISIS thinking.

ISIS and Iran are not friends, which makes me somewhat suspicious, or at least skeptical, I should say. What I think is more likely is that this is a lone wolf attack inspired by these extremist Islamist ideologies. Whether there’s state backing or funding behind it, there might be. That will come out in due course.

But our security agencies in the West are actually very good at spotting the networks and intercepting them. We have a very, very strong track record of doing that. The one thing that’s really, really hard to get past is these lone wolf actors, because they don’t have signals intelligence that you can intercept.

They don’t have communications and purchases and things like that, that you can track as easily with a network as you can with one person who’s an individual. So the fact they got through the net, the fact that they had an ISIS flag, the fact that it was a father and son seems unusual to me. If I was betting, I’d say it was more likely a lone wolf than not. But we can’t draw full conclusions on the information that’s out there.

Sarah: We’ve read reports that President Trump has rebuked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for eliminating the Mossad terrorist, Raed Saad. And he said he was violating the ceasefire in Gaza. As you know, Mr. Saad was the director of weapons production for the Qassam Brigade and one of the architects of the October 7th massacres. Do you think it was appropriate for the President to say this to Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s always tricky with Donald Trump, especially when it comes to Israel. I think he’s played a slightly interesting game over the last year, since he took office, where on one hand, he appears to be in lockstep with Bibi, and then on the other hand, it does seem to be a very subordinate relationship at times. And it’s been quite a difficult one to work through.

And there’s lots of theories out there about how closely those two are working. I’m in the camp that they’re not working particularly closely together, if I’m honest. I think if we look at things like at the very tail end of the 12-day war with Iran, when Israel had jets in the air, and Trump ordered them to turn around and fly home, and they did, that, I think, was a kind of revealing insights into that relationship.

Likewise, Mr. Trump has long claimed this huge achievement of a peace in the Middle East that nobody else had achieved in 3000 years. I think he sees his ceasefires as his great achievements. I’m not convinced they are. I don’t think many of them hold. Look at Thailand at the moment, which has just fallen apart. Look at Ukraine, Russia. He’s not a strong peacemaker. But I think he’s very keen to be able to present Gaza as a success.

I’ve already covered the fact that it isn’t even a ceasefire, full stop. But this was potentially a little bit too high profile for Mr. Trump. And so he felt the need to step in and try and grip the situation. So that would be my take.

And I think in the broader, I think it would benefit Israel to achieve a greater degree of strategic independence from the US going forward. We saw repeatedly from 7th October ’23 onwards that the US had far too much say in how Israel conducted those ground operations. The US was putting a brake on certain things. They stopped certain warheads being delivered. They enforced pauses in the ground operations, like in Rafah.

That’s not healthy for a country that’s fighting for its survival, having another country telling you what to do. So when Bibi gave his speech about autarky the other day, a couple of months ago, actually, that made a lot of sense to me. So I think strategic autonomy, if I were in the Israeli government, would be one of my key objectives going forward, especially given that the US is starting to play both sides here too.

They’ve massively gotten into bed with the Qataris, which is no good thing at all, in my view. They’ve talked about selling F-35s to the Turks, which is again, a really bad deal for Israel. And Iran seemed to be starting a rearmament that nobody has yet gotten a handle of. And I would have expected Israel to react sooner to some of those things. And I suspect it’s Washington that’s stopping them from doing so. So it’s a pretty fragile time from where I’m sat.

Sarah: Right, right. As much as our administration likes to claim that this is a lasting peace, especially, we do not see an international stabilization force going in to Gaza and Hezbollah is rebuilding. Can you talk a little bit about your visits to Lebanon, or your visit to Lebanon and what you’ve seen with Hezbollah?

Andrew: Yeah, if you ask me again, at the end of January, I’ll have a much more comprehensive answer, because I’m going again. But I can tell you, when I went there, I went into one of the tunnels that Yahalom had captured. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like it.

It was a mile and a half tunnel dug into solid chalk rock. It had air conditioning. It had wired in electrics, so they had lights and exchanges for power. The living accommodation, that was fully tiled. They had fire suppression systems in the ceiling. This was a real feat of engineering. And I was very privileged to be able to get down there and have a run around.

The intention behind Hezbollah has never gone away. They haven’t packed up and gone home just because they’ve been smashed. And Lebanon is a failed state. The Lebanese government does not have the level of control that you would require to say that it was a coherent, functioning country. They will still be scared of Hezbollah. Hezbollah use assassination. They use intimidation on all their political opponents.

So without being fully in control of their country, the Lebanese government are always going to have one hand tied behind their back. The Lebanese Armed Forces really aren’t up to the job either. And of course, they’re also quite heavily co-opted by Hezbollah anyway. So there’s no security apparatus there to get a grip of Hezbollah.

And UNIFIL have never really covered themselves in glory, shall we say. Endemic corruption with them too. And it’s really interesting, the tunnel I went to, the tunnel entrance was 500 meters from an Irish UNIFIL base, to give you an idea. And they’d managed to build this entire thing without them apparently noticing. Now, to be fair, I don’t think the Irish would turn a blind eye, but certainly their commanders have failed to get that message up the chain.

The future looks better than it did, better than it did in the sense that Israel has inflicted huge losses on Hezbollah. Their resupply pathway through Syria has now been cut off. So there’s some positives there. But the fact is that Hezbollah retain the intent. They don’t yet have the capability, but they will try and get there.

This all goes ultimately back to Iran, I think is the key point here, is that until there is a new regime in Tehran, Iran is going to try and keep fermenting opposition to Israel around the Middle East, because it’s a matter of religious fervor for them. They believe that for the Mahdi to return, Israel has to be destroyed. This is the foundational religious underpinning of everything they believe. So they’re not going to stop.

And the question is how we prevent them, or how the West prevents them, how Israel prevents them. And that’s something I’m certain they’re working on very hard in Jerusalem and Washington right now.

Sarah: That’s exactly right. So the people have no power. It’s the regime that has all the guns and all the weapons. So how do you feel this regime could ever be overthrown?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a tricky one, and I wrote about this a lot during the war itself. Because I think from the Israeli perspective, they were absolutely hoping for regime change. And again, I suspect that it was Washington that stopped the strikes on Ali Khamenei and the leadership of the regime.

Every bit of messaging that came out of Jerusalem suggested regime change was a goal, even down to the name of the operation Rising Lion. I was tracking this very closely. And we were looking for a number of things to happen if regime change was coming. There were sort of warnings and indicators. One of them is key regime figures fleeing. One of them is army units changing hands, sort of changing sides. One of them is popular mass uprisings. And none of these things happened, never even came close.

They’ve got the Basij. They’ve got the IRGC. The Basij is their sort of thugs. If you think about it as the difference between the SA and the SS, one’s brown shirts, one’s black shirts. I don’t think it’s an inappropriate analogy either, quite frankly.

But I spoke to people who were speaking to insurgent groups on the ground, they weren’t able to coalesce. Every street junction was locked down. Every gathering was broken up or prevented. There was no way to achieve any of that mass uprising that people were hoping for.

And then of course, the Iranian opposition is incredibly fragmented. It’s not one coherent unit. They don’t have a key figure to rally around. And of course, people push Pahlavi, but I don’t think he commands enough respect across the board, because people remember his father, the Shah, who wasn’t a particularly pleasant man either. So I’m not sure they have that central figure to coalesce around in opposition to the Ayatollah.

So it’s really tricky. And the way you can collapse it is by putting that pressure on it economically, trying to get an uprising. But I think at the moment, that’s a recipe for an awful lot of Iranians dying, and an awful lot of good Iranians dying. I know you spoke to Barack a few weeks ago, and he’s super keen on this. I take the other position to Barack. I think it’s a terrible idea. I think it’s the worst of two evils because not only will a lot of people die, but also you don’t know what comes next.

And it’s entirely possible that an even bigger hardliner could follow on if you don’t have a suitable government and waiting to take over with, critically, mass support from the population who are going to get behind them. So I think we’re a long way from regime change in Iran. I don’t know if Barack [inaudible] would be arguing with me right now.

Sarah: Okay, going back to the wonderful IGF that is being stretched so thin, we see that Jordan has been smuggling weapons to Judea and Samaria, or known as the West Bank to some people. And there has been a lot of very hostile rhetoric coming out of the Hashemite Kingdom. Do you think the 1994 peace treaty will endure?

Andrew: It’s a really tricky one, because Jordan… I think I started every my answer with it’s a really tricky one.

Sarah: It’s tricky. They’re all tricky.

Andrew: It’s the Middle East, it’s kind of like the defining characteristic, unfortunately.

Sarah: Right, right.

Andrew: But Jordan is in a really difficult position. The Hashemite monarchy are not in the strongest of positions. They have a fairly febrile population. And on top of that, they have other regimes around the Gulf that would love to see them fall. If you look at the origins of Jordan and where the family came from, Saudi Arabia aren’t huge fans.

If I’m Iran, I’m making that my main effort now that I’ve lost my Syrian pipeline. My main effort is to try and topple the Hashemites. If I was in Tehran, and I was in the regime, I’d be throwing everything I had at Jordan to try and get that to topple.

Obviously, the Arab street is incredibly inflamed by what’s happening in Gaza, or what they think is happening in Gaza. And there is a very strong Palestinian connection between Jordan and Jabal al-Samar in the West Bank. And so the other thing I’ll be doing, of course, if I was Iran, is trying to get that insurrection going in the West Bank. I’ll be going for the third intifada.

And we’re seeing many IDF operations there now to try and get the security situation in hand. And there’s a very good reason the IDF are operating there right now. It’s because people like Iran are trying to push as much weaponry into Jabal al-Samar as they can, in order to try and destabilize Israel. So there’s no peace at this point in time when it comes to that. And yes, Jordan is in a very weak and difficult position.

Sarah: You did mention in the beginning of your talk, Egypt, our other “peace partner”. They are amassing troops on the Sinai. They’re sending drones over to the territories to Judea, Samaria and Gaza with weapons. Do you think that this treaty is going to endure?

Andrew: To an extent, I do. I think I’m a lot more positive about Egypt than I am about some of the other countries that surround Israel. You have to remember the real economic hit from the war has been on Egypt. But Israel’s economy has held up pretty well. But with the Houthis cutting off access to the Suez Canal, that’s a huge proportion of Egypt’s GDP that they’ve lost. They are in a real bind. And that’s one of the reasons why they signed the energy deal with Israel this week. It’s not because they found a new love for Zionism. It’s because they’re in desperate straits economically, and they need what they can get.

We have to remember with the Sinai, they’ve only recently just put down a really unpleasant insurgency in the Sinai. One of the reasons they were so keen on shutting down that Gaza border was because the last thing they wanted was a two-million person influx of fairly radicalized Muslims who could then restart that insurrection in the Sinai.

So whilst you can criticize them on a moral basis, on a very cold realpolitik strategic basis, that makes a lot of sense. That’s what I think the build-up’s about. You have to remember, Egypt only just overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government within the last decade. They’ve spent a long time putting down the Muslim Brotherhood. The last thing they want is more Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, having just kind of got rid of that problem. So I don’t think Egypt’s in a real position at the moment to do anything militarily.

And yeah, look, there are elements within Egyptian security services, certainly within the military, who are not necessarily hugely pro-Israel. I don’t think Sisi’s necessarily pro-Israel, but he is a man who is working to political expediency. We also know how much money Egypt takes from the US right now. A lot of arms, a lot of their defense capability comes almost directly from the USA. They’re not going to want to upset Trump at this point.

So with Egypt, I’m slightly more relaxed about what we’re seeing there. There may be some low-level nefariousness, particularly with Bedouin smuggling. That’s a very common piece that comes from Egypt. But in terms of launching an attack on Israel, I would be very surprised.

Sarah: Now, we’ve mentioned Hamas and Hezbollah. The Houthis are another trouble spot. They have these roaming trucks, and it’s very, very hard to know where in Yemen the missiles are coming from. Do you think the IDF is working on some strategy to counter this?

Andrew: I mean, potentially. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have plans to strike missiles as and when they appear. But it’s a very, very long flight time from Israel to Yemen. The challenge with a very mobile rocket launcher is that once it pops up, it can fire and then disappear. It’s quite hard to track if you don’t have direct eyes in the sky the whole time.

And even then, eyes in the sky, you can’t saturate the ground with a drone or whatever. You have to tell the drone what you want it to look at. You have to say, “Look at that point on the ground there, look at that road there, track that for me.” You can’t just say, “Look at that square mile and find the rocket launcher.” It doesn’t really work like that. So it’s very difficult for Israel to be reactive in that sense, just because of the distances involved.

And we also saw the Americans early this year, spend a huge amount of money and a huge number of missiles to achieve not a huge amount, if we’re honest, if we’re brutally honest. Yes, some really good work was done. Yes, capabilities, particularly leadership and missile strikes were degraded.

But Iran has spent well over a decade pumping arms through Hodeidah ports. It’s just very similar to Gaza. You’re not going to get rid of all these weapons with airstrikes. There’s just too many. So I think it is worth noting that Houthi missiles on Israel have reduced. They’ve got slightly bigger fish to fry right now because they are facing incursions into Houthi territory from the Saudi-UAE-backed coalition, which represents the real government of Yemen. So the Houthis have been weakened enough that it’s given that alliance some gains. So that’s positive progress, actually.

And the big lesson, I think, in the Middle East is don’t try and decapitate regimes from the sky without providing something else to replace it. If we go back to the Libya operation, absolute disaster. We removed Gaddafi, and I say we, the US, France, UK, we removed Gaddafi with nothing to replace him. And next thing you know, ISIS have popped up and the entire Sahel is now destabilized.

Actually, when we’re slightly critical of how much was achieved by the US bombing campaign, that’s not the end of it. Hopefully, what that bombing campaign has done is set the conditions for the Saudi-backed alliance to go in and make real gains against the Houthis, which will then of course make Israel safer because they’ll be less worried about firing missiles at Tel Aviv than they were defending their own space. So that’s where we’re at with Yemen. But I don’t think it’s going to resolve quickly.

Sarah: Right. Discussing the Saudi-backed alliance, it is American law that Israel should get a qualitative military edge, QME. Yet, I think we’re getting ready to sell a whole fleet of F-35s to Saudi Arabia. Do you have any views on this?

Andrew: Yeah, look, that’s how the hostages came home. I and many others were saying that Qatar were the key to unlocking this and Turkey as well. Turkey had been taking Hamas fighters to Turkey during the war to rehabilitate them. We’ve seen assassination plots against Ben-Gvir launched out of Judea and Samaria that we know originated and were commanded from Turkey.

If you think about the Muslim Brotherhood I was speaking about earlier, Qatar gave the money and the political coverage, Turkey gives the military muscle. And the only way the hostages were ever coming home was by pressure on Qatar, particularly. And we’ve seen the price that Washington has paid for that in terms of security alliances, intelligence sharing, major non-NATO ally status. I think there’s a very good case to be made that Qatar is the biggest winner from this war.

The bribe to Turkey was F-35s. We wouldn’t let them have them before. The American government wouldn’t let them have them because they have Russian…

Sarah: [inaudible] against that very heavily, but there they are.

Andrew: Yeah. They have Russian air defenses, and the last thing we want is Russian air defense better understanding how to shoot down F-35s. So a huge, huge price has been paid to get those hostages home. Now, you will have your own opinion as to whether that’s worth it, and my personal take is that a guaranteed good is better than a possible bad. But we have to be very alive to dig the can of worms that Mr. Trump has opened.

I always argued for pressure on Qatar. He went the other way. He just paid them off. And we can talk more about his own personal business links and Witkoff’s business links, and that’s a can of worms I’m not really interested in. But the fact is, we’re dealing with what’s happened. Qatar hugely, politically empowered, Turkey potentially militarily empowered, and that is not a good recipe for stability in the Middle East.

Sarah: Right. Okay, finally, looking at the future, do you think another war is inevitable or the continuation of the war that was begun on October 7th, 2023?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I’m in the position that we’re still in the war. I don’t think the war has ever really ended. And we’re seeing that with the reserves are still being called up for the IDF. There’s still operations in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza. So the war has massively reduced in tempo, but still continues.

What does the end of the war look like? I think that’s probably the bigger question here. Where do we get to in terms of a more enduring peace? And I struggle to see that, which is not a hugely positive thing. I think resolving the issues with Syria is probably the first step. Israel can’t allow the pathway to Lebanon to reopen, which means they have to cooperate with the Al-Jilani regime at some point.

That doesn’t solve the problem of Turkish operations in northern Syria against the Kurds. HDS [inaudible] had a fractious relationship with the Turks. So I think what you have in Damascus right now is a competition for influence between the United States and Israel and Ankara. I think that is the strategic competition that’s happening in Syria, which I think right now, certainly, Mr. Trump seems to have given a lot of money to the Syrians. And essentially, again, it’s his way. He just pays them off.

In Syria, that might work, actually. So it’s not a bad thing. And actually paying them off might well just be cheaper than fighting in some cases. But that’s never going to be a particularly secure border. So I don’t see the buffer zone that Israel’s established going anywhere anytime soon.

Lebanon, I suspect the minute Hezbollah raises its head in any significant way, the Israelis are going to blow it straight off again. There is no planet on which they’re going to allow Hezbollah to gain strength in the way they did before. So I think that’s just going to drone on. It’s going to be airstrikes. It’s going to be assassinations. It’s going to be kind of that low rumble.

What happens in Gaza is the really key thing, because once Gaza is put to bed, that allows Israel to start rebuilding its reputation and rebuilding its connections around the world. And going back to my earlier point about people still being really angry about it, that’s not going to go away until bombs stop falling. It might come to the point where Israel goes back in.

I’d be surprised to an extent, if it happens soon, because Mr. Trump is placing a lot of personal kudos on that deal. I think a more likely thing is the stalemate, where we kind of just end up holding where we are, or even if Israel just withdraws to the original borders.

But again, the second Hamas raise any sort of capability, the bombs will start falling once more. So I’m a lot more skeptical about long-term peace prospects than many. But hopefully I’ve given you my rationale for that. It’s not just me being pessimistic. I have actually thought it through.

Sarah: Wonderful. On this very, very sanguine note, I want to thank you so much, please, for all of your… First of all, I want to also elucidate that I have the utmost, utmost respect for the brave men and women of the IDF. I think it was a little bit misinterpreted that there are always a couple of adolescent bad apples that have to be straightened out. But my overwhelming respect is for the wonderful reservists and soldiers of the IDF that have sacrificed their lives, put their lives on the line for the survival of a free, sovereign, independent Jewish state of Israel. And I just wanted to clarify that for whatever readers.

And beyond that, I also have the utmost respect for Andrew Fox and the entire Henry Jackson Society. Please be sure to look it up and to make your donations to the Henry Jackson Society now that it’s the end of the year. And please also don’t forget to support us at EMET. Right now, as I’m talking, part of my team is on Capitol Hill educating members of Congress to try to upgrade our foreign policy towards Israel and looking at the entire Middle East. And it is incredibly important for both of our organizations do.

So please, support Andrew Fox and all the wonderful people at the Henry Jackson Society, as well as EMET at emetonline.org. Thank you so much, Andrew. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Andrew: No, thank you for having me. And I will end on one very positive note, and that is that Israel is going from strength to strength in spite of all the kind of conflict that surrounds them. You go to Tel Aviv today, it’s absolutely thriving. And Israel is not going anywhere. And it’s only going to get stronger from this point onwards, no matter what really happens. So just to give you that positive point to end on.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Andrew. God bless.

Andrew: Thank you. Bye-bye.