By Abe Greenwald
Thursday, May 15, 2025
On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future
of Civilization, by Douglas Murray (Broadside Books, $30)
Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the
British-born writer Douglas Murray has been the man on the scene. For those who
have closely followed Israel’s efforts to defeat Iran and its terrorist proxies
on multiple fronts, Murray has practically become a feature of the war. He flew
from his home in New York City to Israel soon after the invasion and has spent
a good deal of time there ever since. He has embedded with the Israel Defense
Forces in Gaza and Lebanon, spoken with Israeli leaders at every level of the
military and government (including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), and
gotten to know the families of Hamas’s hostages and victims. Murray, raised an
Anglican, has immersed himself in the life of the Jewish state — and argued for
its war of survival — to such a degree that, in April 2024, Israeli President
Isaac Herzog presented him with an honorary award for being a “friend to the
Jewish people and fighting the resurgence of antisemitism.”
And he has been fighting it ceaselessly. On countless
media platforms and in multiple newspapers, Murray has made the case for
Israel’s just war and swatted down antisemites on the left and right.
But it’s an indication of Israel’s unique place in elite
opinion that when a non-Jewish, non–Evangelical Christian journalist comes
along and defends the existence of the Jewish state, Israelis feel compelled to
honor him with an award for his friendship. Which is to say, Murray is right
side up in a world turned upside down, and Israelis know better than anyone
what a rarity that is.
In On Democracies and Death Cults, Murray sets out
to describe the savage attack on Israel, Israel’s prosecution of its
existential war, and the Western liberal embrace of theocratic terrorism and
Israel’s destruction. It is fitting, then, that the book opens with the 1979
Iranian Revolution. If you’re looking for the origin of both the modern effort
to exterminate Israel and the West’s going topsy-turvy, it’s as good a place as
any to begin.
Western academics such as Michel Foucault and Richard
Falk cheered on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as he took the reins of power.
Murray recalls that Falk, for example, “greeted the Iranian Revolution by
reassuring readers of the New York Times that the depiction of Ayatollah
Khomeini ‘as fanatical . . . and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly
and happily false’” — soon after which Khomeini reduced Iran to a theocratic
hell whose animating purpose was to export anti-American and antisemitic
terrorism.
The Iranian Revolution is an important starting point for
another reason. It was when the only verifiably colonial power in the Middle
East began to expand and wage war on an indigenous people. The left has long
railed against Israel as a colonialist project, but, as Murray notes, “while
decrying Western imperialism, the Iran of the ayatollahs became one of the
biggest imperial powers of the age.” It essentially supplanted the government
of Lebanon, controlled the government of Syria, and established outposts in
Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and the West Bank — all aimed at destroying Israel.
On October 7, the Iranian proxy group Hamas, having
amassed decades of Iranian funding and support, killed some 1,200 people inside
Israel and kidnapped 251 others into Gaza. Murray’s treatment of October 7 and
its traumatic aftermath makes for the kind of reading that can darken one’s
outlook for days. But the brutal experience is sadly necessary because, as he
notes, the West was quick to skip over Hamas’s bottomless savagery and jump
immediately to criticizing Israel.
He recounts, for example, the case of 74-year-old Kibbutz
Be’eri resident and lifelong peace activist Vivian Silver. “Every week she took
part in a joint Israel-Gazan initiative in which she would drive Palestinian
children and others in need of highly specialized medical treatment to
hospitals inside Israel.” Hamas burned Silver alive in her home, and “there was
so little left of her that it took five weeks just to find enough DNA evidence”
to confirm her murder.
Or there’s the Bachar family, already wounded by gunfire,
hiding in their burning safe room and breathing through urine- and blood-soaked
towels to prevent asphyxiation. It didn’t work. Wife and mother Dana died first
from “a combination of grenade blast and smoke inhalation.” Murray adds, “Her
daughter cleaned the black around her mouth.” Dana’s 15-year-old son died next,
from a gunshot to the chest. The father, Avida Bachar, who survived, said of
Carmel, “He told me, ‘Dad, when you bury me, please bury me with my
surfboard.’ ”
Murray’s coverage of Hamas’s atrocities is extensive and
intimate. The reader is brought into the heart of Israel’s nightmare: there’s a
girl shot in the genitals; a boy, with one eye blown out of his head, looking
for his family; the bloodied walls of bomb shelters where Hamas slaughtered
everyone who remained inside or tried to escape. There’s the 74-year-old Bracha
Levinson, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Hamas broke into her safe room,
used her cellphone to film her murder, and posted video to her Facebook page,
showing Levinson “lying in a pool of her own blood with her killers standing
over her.” Murray writes, “All her family and friends saw it.”
And all these accounts represent no more than a fraction
of Hamas’s polymorphous depravity on October 7.
So how did democratic and so-called civilized populations
react to this orgy of self-documented evil? “By the evening of the 7th a great
crowd of anti-Israel protesters had gathered outside the Israeli embassy in
London, among other places, to celebrate the massacres of the day,” Murray
reports. “They lit flares while shouting the same war cry and victory cry as
the terrorists, ‘Allahu Akbar!’”
May this never be forgotten: The Western left, in
coordination with a since-revealed global network of Islamists, didn’t take to
the streets to protest Israel’s response. They came out to rejoice in the
slaughter of Jews and to honor the slaughterers.
Yet before that can be remembered, it must be known and,
hopefully, understood. And this is one of the most important aspects of
Murray’s work. He not only documents the liberal West’s naked enthusiasm for
jihad. He breaks it down to its fundamental components. One is, of course,
antisemitism. The other is a kind of self-shame.
Murray, in his analysis, leans profitably on the work of
the 20th-century writer Vasily Grossman. “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of —
I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of,” Grossman wrote in his novel Life and
Fate. Murray amends this to fit the self-hating West: “Tell me what you
accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you believe you are guilty of.”
In other words, activists of the Western left have been taught that they are
part of a racist, murdering, imperialist power. They believe this must be true
of themselves, and so they project that onto the Jews.
My only quibble with Murray’s virtuosic book is that he’s
slightly too lenient in this assessment. The pro-Hamas mobs don’t believe they
are racist; they are racist. Their actions prove that they understand
Gazans as primitives who can advance their cause only by acting on tribal
bloodlust. It is these “protesters,” more than any other party, who have made
Hamas’s inhumanity synonymous with the Palestinian cause. By defending
terrorists and civilians without distinction, they group the two into one
savage horde.
Contrast the young adults of Europe and America with
those of Israel. Murray speaks with first-year female IDF recruits, some as
young as 19, tasked with sifting through the ashes of those burned alive to
find bones and teeth from which DNA can be extracted. “They were the same age
as people in the West who are treated like — and often act like — children,”
Murray writes:
These women had already seen and
gone through more in their lives than their contemporaries in the West would go
through by the time they die. But this wasn’t a curse for these young women. It
was a blessing. To know something about life from its outset and to know what
matters from the start of the journey.
It is the young men and women of Israel who have, through
the course of the war, put the enemies of civilization on the back foot. And
Murray, in witnessing Israel both fight and carry on the precious job of
living, has been changed. He has grown optimistic about civilization’s chances
against jihadists who profess to love death more than we love life. It is
Israelis’ very love of life that Murray sees as the spine of the West.
One of the most maddening aspects of watching the world
get all the critical things perfectly wrong is that outrage can overtake your
ability to articulate what you know viscerally to be true: These are the bad
men, those are the good, and over there are the lost. If you’ve struggled for
the right words to describe the degeneracy of the post–October 7 anti-Israel
fervor, Murray is very nearly life-giving in his power to say what needs
saying. For this, too, he deserves an award.
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