Any anti-Israel firebrand and keyboard warrior will tell you that the brutal massacre Palestinian terrorists in their thousands unleashed on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, was just deserts.
The bloodbath, they will say, was but a righteous bid by a national liberation movement of the oppressed to throw off the yoke of their oppression “by any means necessary,” including orgiastic murder and mayhem.
Conveniently ignored is that it didn’t matter to the terrorists one whit whether their victims were peaceniks or hawks, supported a Palestinian state or opposed it, voted for Benjamin Netanyahu or would never do. No, any Jew was fair game for rape and rapine, murder and mutilation: newborns, toddlers, pregnant women, disabled octogenarians.
The terrorists made no secret of this, proudly broadcasting their atrocities in real time, along with battle cries of “Allahu Akbar!” One young Hamasnik, shrill with joy, called his parents in Gaza to boast to them about having “killed 10 Jews with my own hands” in Kibbutz Mefalsim.
None of this signifies to the demagogues and even some diplomats.
Take Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador to The Hague. “Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is [an] inalienable right,” the ambassador stressed the other day. “[T]he struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression [and] domination, against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts.”
Would this be an envoy of the same country that invaded Tibet in 1950, has since occupied and colonized it, and declared the exiled Dalai Lama’s prayers for his fellow monks in his homeland to be “terrorism in disguise”? Wanton butchery of Israeli civilians isn’t terrorism, but peaceful prayer by Tibetan monks is. Got it.
Such rank hypocrisy is par for the course because double standards are as routinely applied to the Israeli-Arab conflict as Jews are labeled “Zionists” so they can be safely demonized by their vilifiers who cloak their hatred of Jews in semantics.
Here’s Danny Shaw, a professor at City University of New York, fulminating on X/Twitter: “These Zionists are straight Babylon swine. We need to protest their neighborhoods... Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s genocidal disease.” And this well before any Israeli military response to Hamas’s unprovoked attack.
Dismantling demented calumnies
So it goes. But British journalist and author Douglas Murray isn’t having it. In his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, he mounts a spirited defense of Israel.
Murray dismantles the demented calumnies (endlessly repeated like tantric mantras) that Israel is an “apartheid state,” “a white supremacist outpost of settler colonialism,” and the like. Murray, a prominent defender of Israel, does so cogently without downplaying the misery of civilians in Gaza.
But perhaps his book’s greatest merit lies in his firsthand accounts of what he saw in the aftermath of the bloodbath to show the collective trauma of October 7 through Israeli eyes. At Nir Oz, a kibbutz of idealistic peaceniks a mere mile from the Gaza Strip, he meets Ron Bahat, who lost many relatives and close friends in the massacre, in which a quarter of his community’s residents were either killed or kidnapped.
Anyone who couldn’t hold their safe room’s door locked from the inside, Bahat tells Murray, were dragged out and shot on sight or brutalized and abducted, with bullet holes and stains of dried blood “showing the story of their final moments,” the journalist writes. “Other marks showed where someone bled out or was burned alive on the floor.”
One of them was Bracha Levinson, a 74-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors and devoted grandmother. “The terrorists took her phone off her and recorded her killing. They then used her phone to post a video on her Facebook page of her lying in a pool of her own blood with her killers standing over her.”
Not even the Thai foreign workers were spared. Eleven of them were shot with AK-47s and slashed with machetes inside a small bomb shelter, whose walls were “covered with the smear marks from blood-covered hands of people trying to save themselves.”
Stronghold of peaceniks
At Kibbutz Be’eri, another stronghold of leftist peaceniks, Avida Bachar held out valiantly in his bomb shelter with his wife, teenage son and daughter as Hamas terrorists tried to get to them, setting the house on fire to smoke them out. “Fifteen-year-old Carmel was shot in the chest. His mother died first. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she said,” Murray writes. “Avida told his daughter, ‘Mommy, she’s okay. She [does] not feel nothing now. She’s good. Believe me, she’s good.’ They laid her on the floor.” As Carmel, an avid surfer, lay dying, he asked to be buried with his surfboard.
In Tel Aviv, Murray meets a young man who survived the Supernova music festival massacre. He shows the foreign journalist mobile phone footage he took of civilians from Gaza looting Israeli cars with dead Israelis in them. Another partygoer, still alive, was lynched on sight.
An Israeli Druze, meanwhile, saw a terrorist launch a rocket-propelled grenade into a terrified huddle of young partygoers. He then overheard some terrorists debating in Arabic whether to kill or kidnap a 19-year-old female. They decided to kidnap her, but one had second thoughts and shot her in the head. She was still begging for her life “when only half her face remained.”
Horrors still fresh
Snippets like these aren’t for the faint of heart, but they are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Israel is up against; props to Murray for documenting them at length. This is especially so because October 7 may feel like yesterday to Israelis, its unspeakable horrors still fresh in their minds, but the world has long since moved on.
The victims of October 7 have been widely recast as the villains in this seminal event in Jewish history through specious claims of “genocide” in Gaza as the IDF carries on trying to rescue the remaining hostages and root out Hamas, which has weaponized schools, hospitals, and mosques.
And thus it has always been from time immemorial: Palestinians murder Israelis, the IDF responds. Attention instantly pivots to the response, which is then condemned as disproportionate, unjustified, unhelpful. The more intransigent Palestinian terrorists are, the more Israel is blamed for making them so vicious and violent. Last year, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 resolutions against the Jewish state and a mere six against as many countries in the rest of the world combined, with only a single resolution each against such brutal regimes as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar.
This disconnect from reality speaks to the main theme of Murray’s book: While Israelis are waging a thankless war forced upon them, another war, this one of words and sadistic bullying, is being waged against Jews – “Zionists” – across the West: on streets, on university campuses, on the Internet. Out of political expediency or sheer cowardice, governments may pay lip service to Israelis’ “right” to defend themselves, but few will take Hamas to task over the calamity it has unleashed on Gazans by forcing Israel into a prolonged war of attrition and by hiding among civilians in blatant violation of the rules of war.
Murray ranges far and wide in his learned treatment of history and current affairs (not even the execrable proto-Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, a staunch ally of Hitler, escapes his attention), but the gist of his thesis is this: Despite standing for modern liberal values, Israel is forever excoriated far out of proportion to its crimes, real or imagined, all the while Hamas, whose ideology is antithetical to all those values, is cheered on by many self-professed champions of the same values. This helps no one but radical Islamists.
Ultimately, Israel’s struggle is also the West’s inasmuch as resurgent jihadism is now threatening liberal democracies on their home soil, where terror attacks have become commonplace. Just as lives, so too hard-won freedoms are fragile things that need defending from those keen to snuff them out.
At stake is a choice between classical liberalism and death-cultish religious extremism, between human flourishing and unending misery. Israeli parents built safe rooms to protect their children from Hamas’s rockets, but many Hamas-affiliated locals, Murray finds in visiting war-torn Gaza with the IDF, “used their families to protect their rockets” by placing them in their children’s bedrooms.
Hamas and Moloch
For Hamas, just as Jewish children are legitimate military targets, so Palestinian children are disposable like sacrificial victims to Moloch. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh made this point explicitly. “The blood of the women, children, and elderly – we need their blood so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit,” he harangued Palestinians in Arabic.
Faced with such implacable fanaticism, Murray, who is neither Jewish nor religious, quotes God’s command to the Israelites in the Torah: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore, choose life.” Israelis have been doing just that.
The author befriends an IDF sharpshooter who lost an arm in combat years ago but insisted on reenlisting after October 7 with his modified rifle. “Some people never get a chance to be weighed in the balance. But people like Izzy did get a chance, and they were found to be magnificent,” Murray writes.
The future of not only Israel but Western civilization as well, he argues, depends on this spirit of resilience, love of life, and willingness to defend all that we hold dear. Amen to that.
On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization
By Douglas Murray
Broadside Books, 2025
240 pages; $30