When a new Douglas Murray book comes out, I always opt for the audiobook. His formidable intellect, cutting wit, and plummy English accent — tinged with just the right amount of disdain — combine for a singularly enjoyable listening experience.
But in his latest book, “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization,” Murray sounds different than he used to. His speech is slower and more deliberate — lacking some of the verve and archness of his previous recordings. Something in Murray has changed.
I noticed it again when listening to the viral debate between Murray and anti-Israel comedian Dave Smith on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I wanted Murray to eviscerate Smith, and indeed there were many opportunities for him to do so. Smith displayed obtuseness about the conflict and made bizarre ahistorical comments about Israel’s first Prime Minister. An energetic debater who knows his stuff — as Murray clearly does — should have been able to win this one handily.
Instead, Murray seemed unable to do much of anything other than point out that Smith had never “been there” — that, despite all his posturing, he’d never set foot in Israel or the Palestinian territories. It was a fair point, but one that didn’t land with Rogan’s audience. The moment felt strangely flat — underwhelming from a man known for his rhetorical precision.
To understand what happened on that episode of Rogan, and to understand why Murray sounds different these days, one must read the new book to its conclusion. “On Democracies and Death Cults” is a work of reportage. Murray’s reporting began on Oct. 7, when he woke up — as we all did — to news of Hamas’ massacres unfolding in southern Israel. The next day, he saw the first vigorous eruptions of anti-Israel sentiment that would soon engulf much of the country, and he began documenting and trying to understand.
“Hundreds of people were gathered in Times Square. … Some came with homemade signs. One headscarf-covered woman was smiling gleefully, waving a sign that said ‘Zionist nightmares. 10/6/73 Egyptians. 10/7/23 Palestinians. #Long Live Intifada.’ As I photographed her with my phone she punched the air and screamed with joy.”
A significant portion of the book explores this baffling global response to Israel’s war: the reflexive blame, the charges of genocide, the legal campaigns in international courts, and the rise of a global protest movement that laid bare just how fully Western liberals have aligned themselves with Islamist militant groups.
A significant portion of the book explores the baffling global response to Israel’s war: the reflexive blame, the charges of genocide, the legal campaigns in international courts, and the rise of a global protest movement that laid bare just how fully Western liberals have aligned themselves with Islamist militant groups.
Many people have been confused by the sight of college students and various blue-haired progressives donning keffiyehs and chanting Hamas slogans, but for Murray, who has spent years reporting on anti-Western ideologies within the American and British left, this is the culmination of processes that have been going on for years.
He dissects phenomena like “Queers for Palestine” with more insight than perhaps anyone else. While the group is often dismissed with mockery — likened to “Chickens for KFC” — Murray rightly understands that the alliance between the radical left and Islamist movements is not incoherent, but ideologically consistent.
“The fact that … Western organizations such as ‘Queers for Palestine’ can support groups that would kill them is often described as ‘cognitive dissonance,’ but that is not accurate. Such groups are not ‘confused.’ They are simply betraying a completely different agenda. For them the most important thing is to support the revolutionary left and the overthrow of Western liberal democracy. Supporting armed Islamic movements that rape and murder and execute is a necessary condition to achieve this goal.”
Understanding this ideological alignment is one thing. Witnessing its consequences firsthand is another.
Shortly after Oct. 7, in London, Murray attended a private screening for journalists of the video footage documenting the atrocities of that day. “I would see many such videos,” he writes, “from people who had been at the Nova party, from relatives who showed me the last moments in the lives of their loved ones, and from the organizations like Hatzalah whose brave Jewish, Muslim, and Druze volunteers had all driven toward the disaster that day. But none of it compared with the impact of that first, bludgeoning viewing of portions of the massacre.”
“It takes a lot to silence a roomful of British journalists,” Murray continues, “but three-quarters of an hour of this did it. I left with an old friend of mine from the British media, a journalist in his 70s who has seen his share of war. It took a long while for either of us to find any words as we walked along the gray, leaf-covered streets of London. Eventually he did manage to say something. ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Bastards,’ I agreed.”
Soon after, Murray traveled to Israel. Though not Jewish himself, he has long been a defender of Israel and has made many trips to the region to report on the conflict.
Once there, Murray spoke to soldiers, doctors and the families of the hostages. He met with Prime Minister Netanyahu and nearly every other member of Israel’s government. He even visited a prison and sat down across from one of the Oct. 7 terrorists himself. “I suppose that you look at people like this in the hope that you might see something in them. What is it? Remorse? Evil? I spent hours in the prison that day, and although I saw people I knew from the atrocity videos, there was nothing to learn from them. They had decided to live their lives with one ambition — to take away life.”
Murray visited the rocket-pounded towns of Israel’s north and the burnt-out kibbutzim of the south. He walked through Hamas tunnels and traversed the ruined streets of Rafah. He even sat in the chair where Yahya Sinwar took his last breath and tried to imagine what the terrorist mastermind could have possibly been thinking in his final moments.
In other words, he was there, bearing witness to acts of incredible bravery and heroism as well as stomach-turning displays of barbarity and callousness. And this is why, on Joe Rogan’s show, all he could say to Dave Smith was “You’ve never been there,” which was an infinitely more stinging indictment than the Wikipedia-educated comedian could grasp.
Bearing witness is not easy. I have assiduously avoided seeing any video footage of Hamas’ massacres. To even read the details of that day is incredibly difficult, and as I worked my way through Murray’s book, I was surprised by the visceral effect that it had on me — the way that a year-and-a-half’s worth of pain and fear and outrage swelled up in me as I read.
As I worked my way through Murray’s book, I was surprised by the visceral effect that it had on me — the way that a year-and-a-half’s worth of pain and fear and outrage swelled up in me as I read.
But something else swelled in me too — pride. At a time when even large parts of the Jewish community look at Israel and respond with shame, condemnation and distance, Murray sees something else entirely. He sees the best in the Israeli people — and he documents it.
For instance, Murray tells the story of Ben Shimoni. On Oct. 7, “Ben managed to escape the party, taking four other terrified partygoers with him in his car. He drove them to safety in Beersheba, 30 minutes away. Then he headed back to the site of the party. On that trip he managed to save another group of five young people and also took them to safety. Each time, his passengers begged him not to go back into the firefight. But he had a mission. On the third attempt, carrying three more survivors in his car, the terrorists caught him …”
This is not to say that Murray has no harsh words for the Jewish state. But unlike those who criticize Israel for defending itself, Murray’s critique is that Israel hasn’t defended itself enough. “How,” he asks again and again, even posing the question to Netanyahu, “did this happen?” Who dropped the ball? And why? And how can it be assured that it never happens again?
At the book’s end, Murray reflects on the very shift in tone I had picked up on in his delivery. “Throughout this year of war I often felt this strange disjunct,” he writes. “Friends and family occasionally remarked that I had changed. Readers sometimes noticed it too.
“And as the year went on readers started noting to me that I seemed to have lost some of my usual pessimism. I noticed it myself, and there was a reason for it: I was seeing answered a question that had always troubled me. What we would do if we came to a time of trial like our forebears did?”
Something Murray returns to throughout the book is the gulf “between the realm of war and the realm of peace.” Living between these realms as a journalist, Murray comes to a startling realization. War, for all of its terrible tragedy, can have a clarifying effect — making humans understand at once what is truly important in life.
It’s just as true that peace can be deranging. On his trips to America and Britain, Murray observed fractious, materialist, petty societies. “Is this really the highest moment of human achievement and peace, I wondered.”
In Israel, on the other hand, embattled by “death cults” on all sides, he saw a people that had been forced to understand what life, commitment, service, community and citizenship were really about.
Jewish-American historian Salo Baron coined the idea of “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” the idea that Jewish history has been nothing but a series of unfolding tragedies. This was something Baron railed against, pointing out that the Jews had also known moments of prosperity and success throughout the centuries.
Since Oct. 7, this “lachrymose” way of looking at things has reared its head. Aside from the scale of the tragedy itself, there is the ongoing catastrophe of the hostages, 24 of whom are still waiting to be rescued from Hamas captivity. On top of that, there are ongoing security threats to Israel, rising antisemitism around the world, and an anti-Zionist movement that continues to grow in size and legitimacy.
For many Jews, it feels that the walls are closing in, that there is more to fear than to celebrate, that there are no blessings to count.
Douglas Murray doesn’t flinch from these harsh realities. And yet, he emerges from it all not broken, but transformed — uplifted by what he saw in Israel, and more confident in its future than in that of his own homelands, Britain and the United States.
This, more than anything, is why you should read this book. Murray reminds us of what is still worth celebrating, still worth taking pride in, still worth believing in.
We can celebrate the fact that we have endured.
We can take pride in how we’ve met the challenges of this past year—with resilience, clarity, and courage.
And we can trust the people of Israel. On Oct.7, the army failed and the government failed — but the people rose. Confronted with a death cult, they chose life.
Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.
Excerpts from ‘On Democracies and Death Cults’
In the year that followed Oct. 7, I saw protests in a bewildering array of cities. I saw crowds protesting against Israel in snow-covered Toronto and icy Vancouver, in Sydney and Melbourne, in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Everywhere the same thought came to my mind: What has it got to do with you? Why does this one conflict matter so much? Of all the conflicts going on around the world, from Syria to Myanmar, from Sudan to Ukraine, why was this the one that it seemed people from around the world had chosen to immerse themselves in, to throw themselves into, and not against the invaders but against the victim?
In city after city across the West, Jewish communities and others put up posters of the kidnapped Israelis. And in city after city, they were torn down. In almost no place outside of Israel did these posters stay up. Cities in which a poster of a missing dog would be left up with reverence seemed to have a colossal problem with allowing posters of missing Israelis to be put up in the same way. In East London, among many other places, people — often young women — jubilantly and exultantly ripped away at the posters. In Dublin, members of the Bibas family, among other hostage families, went on a visit to the Irish government to plead for the plight of their family members. At the age of just eight months, Kfir Bibas was the youngest hostage stolen into Gaza by Hamas on Oct. 7. One of his family members described getting out onto the streets of Dublin for their visit and seeing a poster of his by then one-year-old relative. The poster had been ripped through, as if there was anything that a one-year-old could have done to make himself a culprit or undeserving of sympathy. But this was the way of the protests outside of Israel. While Israelis protested daily for the return of the hostages, Western populations seemed to consider even recognizing the plight of these people as an affront — a terrible provocation that must be repelled.
Why did this happen? Why did the world’s sympathy seem to be not with the victims of the massacres but with the perpetrators? Why had the whole world seemingly got this conflict so completely upside down?
Most curious of all — and perhaps more extreme than anywhere else — was the response in the U.S., where there were street protests against Israel from the moment that Oct. 7 happened. Like Britain, Sweden, Australia and Canada, these protests sprang up on the streets of major cities. But one of the most curious things about the response in America was that the focal point for the anti-Israel protests turned out to be not among Islamist rabble-rousers on the streets, but at nearly every elite educational institution in the country. If the protests in Britain seemed to be taking place from the bottom up, those in America seemed to be coming from the top down, and not least at its most expensive, elite, and historic schools.
On Oct. 7 itself a number of prominent professors at the most storied American universities gave their immediate takes on X. As the massacre was going on and news of civilians being murdered was already out, Yale University professor Zareena Grewal issued a tweet saying, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” In another post she wrote: “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.”
Taking to the same platform on the day of the seventh, Albany Law School professor Nina Farnia wrote, “Long live the Palestinian resistance & people of Gaza, tearing down the walls of colonialism and apartheid. As the Biden admin builds more walls at U.S. borders, the people of the world are rising up and tearing walls down. The Palestinians are a beacon to us all.”
Shortly after this, Professor Danny Shaw of City University of New York posted his view: “These Zionists are straight Babylon swine. We need to protest their neighborhoods. Where is your humanity? Why are you racist arrogant bullies? You think you are better than others? Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s genocidal disease. #Israel #Gaza #Gaza_Genocide.” Cornell University history professor Russell Rickford was filmed at an anti-Israel rally praising Hamas’ massacre and telling the crowd, “It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating, it was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, the shifting of the violence of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.” ■
It struck me then as it had many times over the previous year, that everything was the wrong way around. Young people at institutions across the West were judging the actions of their contemporaries in Israel. They were throwing slur after slur at them and reigniting every blood libel of the past in a modern guise. Yet it was their contemporaries in Israel who were the ones they should have looked to not as a scapegoat but as an example. Whatever the years ahead hold for the West, I know that Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia and America should be so lucky as to produce a generation of people like Israel has.
Finally, I also realized that I had found the answer to a question I had mulled over for almost a quarter of a century. All my adult life I had heard the taunt of the jihadists. “We love death more than you love life.” I had heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments. And it had always seemed to me not just a necrophiliac utterance but one that appeared almost impossible to counter. How could anyone overcome a movement — a people — who welcomed death, who gloried in death, who worshipped death? Was it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West could not possibly win?
That is what I feared for many years. Yet this year I saw an answer to it. Of all the soldiers I saw in war, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none take a joy or pleasure in the task they have to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted cannot be taken so. They know that you won’t have the ability to party in Tel Aviv, fall in love, grow a family, or live a meaningful life unless they are willing to fight for it.
“Choose life” is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of the West. They, and all of us, can win in spite of the enemy loving death. Because there is nothing wrong with loving life so much. It is the basis on which civilization can win. ■
Murray, Douglas. On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. (HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.)
