LONDON — With its minute-by-minute timeline, copious testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses, and wealth of forensic evidence and open-source footage, the 316-page report produced by British parliamentarians last month detailing the terrible events of October 7, 2023, is a comprehensive and meticulous account of the Hamas onslaught on Israel.
That is unsurprising. The panel responsible for the “7 October Parliamentary Commission Report” was chaired by Andrew Roberts, a renowned historian, biographer and expert on warfare, from the Battle of Waterloo to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
It isn’t simply Roberts’s longstanding support for Israel that led him to agree to chair the commission, but his concern over continuing attempts to whitewash Hamas’s atrocities — an effort he compares to Holocaust denial.
“There’s a movement afoot on behalf of Hamas and its sympathizers to pretend that October 7 never happened,” he tells The Times of Israel. The report’s aim was to compile “a large amount of unimpeachable evidence to prove that it did.”
With an eye on history, Roberts also wanted to gather irrefutable proof to ensure that, in future decades, “the deniers” can still be challenged, even in the absence of living eyewitnesses.
Roberts, who is not Jewish, does not underestimate the scale of the challenge.
“It took decades for Holocaust denial to really get going,” he says, “but October 7 denial started while the actual massacres were still going [on].”
He recognizes that Hamas’s denial of its crimes contains multiple grim ironies. Pointing to the GoPro cameras worn by the terrorists as they perpetrated murder, torture and rape, he notes the group and its allies are “attempting to deny something that they themselves have provided the best evidence for.”
Roberts also believes that Hamas is trying to “have their cake and eat it.”
“They are trying to celebrate something they deny happened, and deny something that they’ve celebrated happening,” he says. “It’s unlike anything else, really. Speaking as a historian, you’ve got to come down on one side or the other about an occasion [or] a big historical event like October 7, and you’ve got to say that either it happened, and it was terrible, or that it didn’t happen.”
“You can’t have it both ways, and yet that’s what Hamas and its supporters in the West are trying to get,” he adds.
Depravity of human nature, filmed in real-time
Roberts, who sits as a Conservative member of the House of Lords, and fellow members of the panel — who include Labour and Liberal Democrat parliamentarians and a former UK chief prosecutor — visited Israel and the scenes of some of the October 7 attacks. Roberts says it was both the “breadth as well as the depth” of the assault that struck him — not just the murder of some 1,200 people and abduction of 251, but the “depravity of human nature that was seen, the sheer cruelty, the sexual violence and the humiliation.”
Roberts speaks of the “bloodlust” displayed by the assailants — they killed a 10-month-old baby and a Holocaust survivor in his 90s — as well as the “premeditation of the cruelty.”
Historically, he says, this is unusual. “Bloodlust happens a lot in history, but it’s very rare that it’s been set up so diligently and with such foresight — ‘malice aforethought’ as it used to be called,” he says.
The report of the 7 October Parliamentary commission, which was established by the All Party UK-Israel Parliamentary Group, isn’t an official publication of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Roberts accepts that it has already been written off by some on social media as “Zionist propaganda” — the internet, he jokes, has become “the universal lavatory wall” — but he believes it cannot easily be “intellectually and rationally written off.”
“Bloodlust happens a lot in history, but it’s very rare that it’s been set up so diligently and with such foresight — ‘malice aforethought’ as it used to be called”
The panel was careful to stick to verifiable facts, avoid speculation and focus simply on the events of October 7, he says.
“We were not attempting to do what other reports could do better, which is to look into the intelligence failures and everything else that happened in the background to it,” Roberts says.
The report argues that Hamas knew that “military victory was unlikely” and instead sought to trigger an Israeli retaliation, which would isolate the country internationally and spark global outrage. However, Roberts disputes the notion that, on these terms, Hamas has already emerged victorious.
“In terms of the propaganda war, I think they have won in that on these disgusting, ridiculous social media sites, like TikTok and Instagram, you’re getting… 10 times more anti-Israel propaganda than pro-Israeli facts and truth,” he acknowledges.
But, he continues, the war itself is not over and it won’t be possible to say either side has won until both sides have stopped fighting — a prospect that seems some way off. Indeed, quoting Winston Churchill’s famous words upon becoming UK prime minister in 1940, Roberts believes that Israel will eventually prevail, but it will take “a lot more blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Checkered history of surprise attacks
Roberts’s belief that Hamas can be vanquished rests in part on the checkered history of surprise attacks. They may give the attacker a momentary advantage, but, with a “very few” exceptions — such as the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel launched a preemptive strike — they rarely lead to ultimate success. The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Yom Kippur assault on Israel in October 1973, Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982, and Saddam Hussein’s grab for Kuwait in August 1990 did not see the aggressor triumph.
While undertaking a surprise attack “seems like a good idea at the time… ultimately, it leads to a much worse situation for the people who launch [it],” believes Roberts. “If you launch a barbarous and vicious surprise attack, you shouldn’t be surprised about the response,” the historian says, noting the “holy rage and fury” that is stirred on the part of those who have been attacked.
“If you launch a barbarous and vicious surprise attack, you shouldn’t be surprised about the response”
The author of an acclaimed biography of Churchill, Roberts has previously compared Israel’s position to that of Britain in 1940.
“In that 12-month period from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain and her Commonwealth formed the tip of the spear against ‘the menace of tyranny,’ just as brave Israel today represents the tip of civilization’s spear against the tyranny and barbarism of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and exterminationism,” he wrote in the Jewish Chronicle last October.
Roberts readily admits, however, that Britain, which had not yet been joined by the US and Russia but had strong backing from the Empire and Commonwealth, was less alone than Israel is today. With the exception of the US, he says, “it’s difficult to look around the world and see countries that are really four-square behind Israel in what is essentially a struggle between civilization and barbarism.”
He worries that people in the West “enjoy attacking ourselves… and berating ourselves” for “perfectly reasonable” responses to surprise attacks such as 9/11 or October 7. He contrasts the response to Pearl Harbor.
“Nobody attacked FDR [who was US president at the outbreak of World War II], or, indeed at the time, [US] president Truman [under whose administration a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki], for punishing the attack on Pearl Harbor as condignly as they did, whereas today, everybody seems to be leaping up and down, criticizing the West for punishing these equally horrific attacks,” Roberts says.
Nonetheless, Roberts is convinced that Churchill would have recognized and sympathized with Israel’s position today.
“He was a Zionist. He didn’t subscribe to [the] antisemitism that so many of the people of his age, class and background did. He was a supporter of the Balfour Declaration and believed that the ‘Judeo’ side of Judeo-Christian civilization… gave Christianity its ethics and its positive moral angle,” he says.
Roberts says that Churchill’s daughter had once warned him never to assume what the former prime minister would have said about any event after his death in 1965, but he is happy to wager an opinion.
“It strikes me as very clear that he would have been as outraged as any other decent, rational, logical human being about what had happened on October 7, and he would certainly have been in favor of a terrible punishment raining down on Hamas,” Roberts says. “He was a humanitarian and so he’d have wanted to have minimized the civilian casualties in Gaza, and I believe that the IDF have done that to the best of their ability.”
Perhaps, like Roberts, Churchill would also have seen a commonality between the enemy he defeated and that which Israel faces.
“The overlap between Hamas ideology and Nazi ideology is so well colored in on the Venn diagram”
“The overlap between Hamas ideology and Nazi ideology is so well colored in on the Venn diagram,” Roberts says.
Of course, he adds, it is always “difficult and dangerous” to draw direct historical analogies. Hamas’s murderous rampage cannot be compared with the industrial-scale killing carried out by the Nazis, even if the former wore GoPro cameras and broadcast their “monstrous actions” on Facebook while the latter tried to cover up their crimes and destroy the gas chambers in 1945.
“The analogy between Hamas and the Nazis strikes me as completely obvious one,” Roberts says. “I think you’d have to be deliberately obtuse not to see the connections.”
The Hamas attacks of October 7 and the ensuing conflict have confirmed Roberts’s belief that launching a war is a “profoundly immoral” act.
“Wars are truly terrible things, which is why you shouldn’t start them,” he says, “and why you should fight them in as humanitarian a way as you can, which I think is what Israel has done.”
The Times of Israel Community.
