Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (Broadside Books, 2025) is broad in its scope and detailed in its focus, factual in its reporting and philosophical in its thinking, humane in its tone and clear in its vision.
In this work Murray brings together the ideas that have shown him to be a champion of Western Civilization and also of the Jewish people and Israel. If you can read only one book about Israel, the Arabs, the October 7 Massacre, the surrounding circumstances and the meaning of these events, this is the book you should read.
For Murray, the October 7 Massacre was like a flare that illuminates the night so that all of a sudden you can see where everyone is standing. Murray’s account is both factually detailed and philosophical in its approach.
He was deeply aware of the Biblical directive that “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: choose life that you and your children may live.” In five concise chapters and a mere 197 pages Murray shows that Israel has chosen life. He also shows that Israel’s enemies, particularly the murderous mullahs and homicidal Ayatollahs in Iran, the rapists , kidnappers and murderers of Hamas, the stone age Houthis (stone age except for their Iranian missiles) and Iran’s slavish Hezbollah army in Lebanon are little more than a death cult that prefers killing others to having prosperous and healthy lives for themselves and their families.
All of them like to say “We love death more than the Jews love life.” They mean not only that they love the deaths of Jews, but also the deaths of their own children who they are happy to transform into ‘martyrs.’
Murray briefly describes the history that led to the October 7 massacre including Gaza’s relationship to its neighboring countries. He then moves to the mechanics of how the Hamas attack unfolded across southern Israel on October 7. Hamas attacked the kibbutzim of peaceful farmers, the unarmed recently-recruited young female soldiers whose job was to watch the border fence cameras and the Nova Festival partygoers.
The soldiers had warned the higher-ups that something was brewing in Gaza but their concerns had been dismissed. The deeply mistaken ‘conception’ that Hamas would become lazy and uninterested in continuing hostilities because it was receiving tens of millions in Qatari and other foreign money every month and had to govern in Gaza lulled Israel into its own form of blindness. Hamas’ partner in the Gaza government, UNRWA, provided most of the medical, educational and social services as well as employment that a government would ordinarily provide, leaving Hamas free to continue to build its war-making infrastructure and plot the destruction of Israel and the murder of Israel’s Jews.
Murray went to Israel soon after October 7, knowing from experience that denial of the atrocities would soon follow and wanting to be a witness to what had happened. He walked through Kibbutz Nir Oz ‘while the blood there was still wet’ and recounts the testimony of some of the survivors and his own observations in all their horrible particulars.
In Nir Oz he went through what had been civilian homes. As just one of many detailed examples Murray relates: ‘The next house belonged to seventy-four year old Bracha Levinson. The child of Holocaust survivors she was alone in the house when the terrorists came in. We stood in the safe room where she had hidden. She had no chance to hold the door. The terrorists took her phone from her and recorded her killing. They then used her phone to post that video on her Facebook page, the video of her lying in a pool of her own blood with her killers standing over her. All her family and friends saw it. The terrorists then set fire to the home. It took a month to identify her charred remains.’
There are similar descriptions of whole families slaughtered including toddlers, infants and the elderly, people who posed no threat to anyone and the especial cruelty inflicted on them. Murray understood even then that the attention of the press and the world would promptly turn from the Israelis as victims to concentrating only on the expected Israeli response, so that Israel could be portrayed as a perpetrator.
It is important that Murray also recounts stories of individual heroism on that day: stories of Nova party-goers who rescued other party-goers, of Israeli reservists in the cities who understood what was happening, grabbed their weapons and drove south into the attack despite orders to report to their base, policemen in Sderot who fought the terrorists, even while wounded, until they ran out of ammunition, of Druze caterers at the Nova party who witnessed the slaughter and tried to protect the Israelis who did not speak Arabic.
Murray contrasts Israeli young people with those in the West who have never had to defend anything. In England and the U.S. Murray points out, polls show that many young people believe that their country is not worth fighting for. Raised on one-world universalism and taught that their countries and their cultures are racist, colonialist oppressors, young adults in the West don’t see the point of defending their homes and the Western tradition. Polls show that many of them say they would refuse to fight for their country even if it were attacked. But that is not the case in little Israel, where most Israelis understand that this is their home, the only one they have, and that it is worth fighting for.
Murray is also openly critical of the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the U.N. its fake courts, an intellectually and morally lazy and lackadaisical press and the web of dishonest, Israel-hating N.G.O.s that support the Arab forever war against Israel. Murray is pointed and detailed in showing the prejudice of the Western press and the active participation of the Arab press in their war against Israel. He highlights the dishonesty of the anti-Israel N.G.O.s and the disgusting hypocrisy and active hostility of the U.N. and its various agencies against Israel.
On his trips to Israel’s north, once fighting against Hezbollah began, he noted that UNIFIL, a UN force that was supposed to be ‘peacekeepers’ were not peacekeepers at all but ‘war watchers’ because every time Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel or prepared facilities for invasion of Israel, UNIFIL did nothing to stop it but ran for their bases.
Although Israel did not make a responsive ground incursion into Gaza until October 27, already on the evening of October 7 a crowd of anti-Israel protesters had gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London lighting flares and shouting ‘the same war cry and victory cry as the terrorists, “Allahu Akbar.” The vast majority of the demonstrators were ‘British Muslims with the men dressed in terrorist chic and many of the women in burkhas and other face coverings.’ They rallied for murder of the Jews worldwide through Jihad and Intifada.
“‘Intifada’ is not a neutral term any more than ‘Sieg Heil’ is a neutral term.” Murray observes. During these demonstrations, the Islamists attacked and defaced British national monuments, such as the monument to Britain’s war dead in both World Wars and the statue of Winston Churchill. The Home Secretary of France described the anti-Israel demonstrations as ‘hate marches.’
The ideological basis for this terror was not something new or unknown in the West. In Paris in 2015, ISIS terrorists attacked a rock music concert with bombs and automatic weapons, going first to the disabled section of the hall and shooting those in wheelchairs and unable to move, then circling ‘the young people like vultures, picking people off as they lay on the ground or tried hiding under seats and tables.’
In 2016 there was the Pulse gay nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida when an Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53.
In 2017 in England, Salman Obedi, the son of Libyan immigrants, exploded a bomb that contained nails and ball bearings to cause the largest number of injuries and deaths at a concert in Manchester, England. He left 22 dead and over a thousand injured.
But in none of these attacks did the world immediately turn on the victims and declare them perpetrators as they did with the Jewish victims in Israel.
Gaza is also subject to Murray’s close scrutiny. Instead of being the developed center of Jihadi operations and prosperous enclave with tens of millions of dollars arriving every month, the Jihadi propaganda machine and the press falsely portrayed it as a ‘concentration camp.’ No one has ever heard of a concentration camp in which the population multiplied exponentially as in Gaza, rather than decreasing. No one has ever heard of a concentration camp that had thousands of missiles, a terrorist army of approximately 35,000 trained combatants, a war infrastructure and billions in foreign aid.
The fact that Gaza tunnel entrances and weapons were often found in children’s bedrooms, that explosives and weapons such as AK-47s and grenade launchers in residences were ubiquitous in Gaza, and that supposedly devout Muslims used their mosques as storerooms for armament and tunnel entrances surprised even many of the Israeli soldiers who fought their way through the Gaza Strip. The entire population of the Gaza Strip, it seemed, was in on the Jew-killing project, with such literature as Arabic translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and pamphlets with titles like How to Kill Jews common in the homes the Israeli soldiers entered.
The philosophical parts of On Democracies and Death Cults include Murray’s reflections on what it means to have a good society, one in which the people care about each other, their families and the kind of world they live in: places like Israel.
When Israeli Minister to the Knesset Gadi Eisenkot’s son and nephew were killed in battle in Gaza in the same week, many mourned, as Israelis do. When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s three sons who were also Hamas leaders were killed he smiled, unperturbed, and thanked Allah for the honor bestowed upon him of being able to provide martyrs to the cause of killing Jews.
In Gaza and the Palestinian Authority streets and monuments are named in honor of terrorist murderers. In Israel, where there have only been a few Jewish terrorists, such as Baruch Goldstein who murdered Moslems at prayer in a mosque, no streets or monuments are named for them and they are banished to historical obscurity.
When the murderous Yahyah Sinwar was killed in Rafah, the Palestinian Authority, the Turkish government and the mother of the Sheikh of Qatar and various chapters of ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ (a group dedicated to eliminating the State of Israel) all mourned his ‘martyrdom.’
Yet, despite all the destruction Murray had seen and had to reflect on in the year after October 7, the one place where he felt most comfortable was Israel. He is in awe of the young people of Israel ‘who were just like the people I knew outside of Israel but were having to do things these people could not imagine.’ Instead of loving death, like the Jihadis, they loved life. They fought, ‘not because they loved death but exactly because they loved life. They fought for life, for the survival of their nation and their people….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 you are willing to fight for it.’
Israelis follow the Biblical directive to choose life. That choice, Murray concludes, can be the basis for the victory of civilization over barbarism.
Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.