Andrew Roberts is a distinguished British historian, author of an acclaimed biography of Winston Churchill, and recently the head of a committee of parliamentarians who produced a detailed report on Hamas’ atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023 and how the world responded to them. More on the report, and Lord Roberts’ comments on the world’s reactions to Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response, can be found here: “Chair of UK Oct. 7 report: ‘Denial started while the massacres were still ongoing,’” by Robert Philpot, Times of Israel, May 9, 2025:
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….
Andrew Roberts knows just how tremendous an effort the IDF has made to minimize civilian casualties. It has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, and made millions of robocalls, all in order to warn civilians in Gaza away from sites and buildings about to be targeted. The IDF did this even as it knew it was also giving Hamas the same warning. Roberts would certainly agree with British Colonel Richard Kemp, who served in a half-dozen military campaigns and commanded the British troops in Afghanistan, who has declared the IDF to be “the most moral army in the world,” and with West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer, who has studied the Gaza war in depth and concluded that “ Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires.”
“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.”
Ipse dixit. How nice it would be if Andrew Roberts, after having worked so diligently on this report as the head of the parliamentary committee entrusted with the task, and having drawn his conclusions so forthrightly in support of Israel and so damning not just of Hamas, but of all those, around the world, now standing up for the terror group, were to be given one-hundredth of the attention that is now being lavished by the American media on Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, two Hamas supporters, who led their brownshirt followers on campus who joined them in calling for Israel’s disappearance and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state.
Hoi Polloi says
Thank you, Andrew Roberts et al.
Hoi Polloi says
Thank you, Andrew Roberts et al.
Cynthia says
A voice of true research and reason. He will be ignored by the leftist/ Islamic coalition that only values propaganda.
Lucky Luke says
@ Mr. Fitzgerald: you call them brown shirts (Sturm Abteilung: SA). I’d call them black shirts (Schutz Staffel: SS). For the remainder I completely agree with you and Mr. Roberts. ‘Ipse dixit’: I’d be inclined to say that that expression presumes a contradiction: he said a, but now he says b: ‘he said it himself’. But I see no contradiction. Anyway, maybe I’m wrong.
James Lincoln says
Great work by Andrew Roberts.
Just wondering, in today’s UK, will he be branded “islamophobic”?
Hugh Fitzgerald says
You are right to take me to task about “ipse dixit.” I was using it to mean “he said it” when, in fact, it ordinarily means that a statement is made without proof. Thank you for the correction.
As to brownshirts and blackshirts, I chose the former because I don’t want any confusion with Mussoliini’s Blackshirts (Squadristi).