The journalist’s bestseller combines reportage from inside Israel, Gaza and Lebanon and should open minds to the precarious position we find ourselves in the West
April 18, 2025 13:04
A few days after the October 7 massacre the journalist and columnist Douglas Murray was asked on Talk TV whether Israel’s response would be proportional. There is, he said, a “deep perversion in Britain whenever Israel in involved in a conflict and the word is ‘proportion’”. He argued both that it is demanded only of Israel that it should respond in a proportionate way to the murderous violence of October 7 – and that true proportionality would see Israel go into Gaza and rape, torture and murder families at will.
The interview went viral. Even after the sympathy of other establishment figures towards Israel had waned amid the brutal war in Gaza, Murray has maintained the line. But there has always been controversy around Murray too. His 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam had made me so uneasy that I had to stop reading it. I felt that if he had applied some of the things he was saying about Islam and Muslims to Jews – as many did in pre–Holocaust Europe – then what he wrote would be called antisemitism. And he caused controversy in this newspaper for arguing that Hamas were worse than the Nazis because they’d filmed and showed off about what they’d done while the Germans tried to hide it. Although his opinions chimed with many of the survivors of October 7 whom I had interviewed.
He combines deep knowledge and sparkling intellectual capability with a confident appearance
Yet he has also been one of Israel’s most articulate and consistent defenders on the world stage. He combines deep knowledge and sparkling intellectual capability with a confident appearance. Last week he went on the attack against right-wing Israel hatred on one of America’s biggest and most influential podcasts – the Joe Rogan show. He has the ear of Donald Trump and the Tory leadership over here and is a regular on television stations all over the world.
Provisos over: On Democracies and Death Cults is a brilliant book which must be read, at a point in our history that has been radicalised by the war and where we have four MPs who have been voted into our Parliament running purely on a “pro-Gaza” agenda. Jews aren’t alone in being afraid of this sectarianism in our politics. It is important even for those of us who think we know exactly what is going on, and because it will hopefully be read by those who do need to know exactly what is going on.
Murray examines the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by combining reportage from inside Israel, Gaza and Lebanon – where he was embedded with the IDF – with a look at how some in the wider world came to celebrate the massacre.
Murray’s book stands above others thanks firstly to his access not only to Netanyahu and Israeli generals but to the kibbutz members he spent more of the year living with
Much of it is not surprising for those who have been following all of this closely. But Murray’s book stands above the others thanks firstly to his access – not only to Netanyahu and Israeli generals but to the kibbutz members he spent more of the year living with. He has the knowledge of someone who has been looking at the movements beneath the surface in Western society – that strange marriage of Islamic extremism and the left – for decades.
He sees the war between Israel and Hamas as a genuine quest between good and evil and despairs that the West has become so full of self-loathing that it refuses to understand an ideology which quite openly calls for its destruction. He recalls early in the book being shown around Cairo by a progressive Egyptian. He describes how they passed over the 6th October Bridge and went to see the 6th October City.
“Eventually I felt I had to ask him: ‘What is it with all this 6th October stuff?’” he writes. “As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he said, ‘Oh that’s to celebrate our victory over the Israelis’. The idea that Egypt and her allies had lost, not won the Yom Kippur War (or the 6th of October War, as the Egyptians call it) came as a genuine surprise to my friend. And his surprise came as a genuine surprise to me.” The anecdote reveals what Israel is up against: a radicalised ideology, even among “moderate” nations that are officially at “peace” with Israel, where it has become an accepted truth that the the Jews can be forced out if the aggressor keeps attacking.
Elsewhere he brings in heartbreaking testimony from October 7 survivors alongside interviews with everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu downwards. His despatch from the building where Sinwar was killed is visceral.
“As far as the eye could see were the consequences of the war that Sinwar and Hamas had started. I found the last chair that he had sat in and took a seat. There were bloodstains on the side. From here you could see nothing but destruction.”
He sets out to find out how the Israelis managed to screw up their intelligence so badly that October 7 could happen but also answers the question early on when he describes how he was at a UN briefing by Israeli officials in September 2023 after the Israelis killed the top three leaders of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group. “There was something else in the air that morning which was unmistakable, and which in hindsight made me feel sickened,” he writes. “It was the unmistakable, nauseating stench of hubris.”
He looks at the story of Israel since October 7 but, just as importantly, he looks at the wider world, applying theories of antisemitism both new and old which can help us explain the bizarre and frightening way the world turned with people openly celebrating the slaughter of Jews on our streets. Two strands stand out in particular. He writes about Vasily Grossman’s 1959 novel Life and Fate and what he said of antisemitism: “It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” As Murray points out, it is no surprise today that people in actual colonialist nations such as the UK and France or actual white settler nations such as the USA, Canada and Australia should be so determined to pin that label onto Israel. Everything the Western haters of Israel accuse Israel of doing are things the countries where they they live have done: by attacking Israel for this, he argues, they can in some ways assuage their own guilt.
He also explores the ideas of the Harvard emerita professor Ruth Wisse who has said that it wasn’t enough to just point out the October 7 massacre was the worst atrocity carried out against Jews since the Holocaust because that only put the emphasis on the victims. To this Murray writes: “What did it mean that on the streets of every major Western city, people who must have known what had been done on the 7th publicly took the side of the aggressors? As Wisse pointed out, perhaps the question wasn’t raised because nobody wanted to face the fact that this time the Nazis were among us.
Murray rightly argues that the murderous genocidal and specifically antisemitic ideology of Hamas, and its open support in the West should not be ignored. He sees the Muslim Brotherhood – inspired by the Hitler-loving Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini – as the most obvious continuation of Nazi ideology. And he’s rightly shocked that there is no pushback against this.
He reminds us too of the writings of Mehdi Hassan, another bright British journalist who has done well Stateside and who in 2013 admitted in a New Statesman article: “It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article – if they are honest with themselves – will know instantly what I am referring to. It’s our dirty little secret. You could call it the banality of Muslim anti-Semitism.”
Is it now the world’s dirty little secret? The one we all know but pretend doesn’t exist? Murray has written a vitally important book which should open the minds of many to the danger not only that Israel has faced and continues to face but also the precarious position we find ourselves in the West.
On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West
By Douglas Murray
Harper Collins