Douglas Murray Defends Israel

During the ongoing campus protests and their calls for the destruction of Israel by students and outside players who have never visited the Middle East, it is the youth of Israel that offers the brightest hope for the future of the West, argues Douglas Murray. The journalist, author of eight books including The War on the West and The Strange Death of Europe, makes his convincing case in his latest, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.

Take, for example, a 30-something year old Israeli named Izzy. Serving in defense of his country in Gaza in 2009, his left arm was blown off by a bomb. But he refused to stand-down from protecting his people from jihadists. He insisted he could return to fighting. So, over time, the Israeli Defense Forces developed a special gun for him to use with his one good hand, and he returned to battle.

Years later, after his military service ended, he found himself in California on October 7, 2023. Learning about Hamas’ invasion of Israel, he immediately booked a ticket back home. But, considering he was of retirement age for his old unit, his base refused to let him in. So Izzy kept showing up, for two weeks, insisting they let him re-join. Eventually, they let him in the door, figuring that it was an insurance risk for someone to be loitering outside an army base for weeks in the middle of a war. Soon enough, he found himself once more defending his people with his one good arm.

That’s where Murray met him, covering the war as a reporter among Izzy’s unit. Izzy kindly offered to be his one-man Iron Dome. “Well, I’ve already been hit by a rocket once,” he explained. “The odds of it happening twice are much smaller, so if you stick with me, you’ll be safe.” And so he was.

Choosing life is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of the West.

Awed by the courage of Israelis like Izzy, fighting not out of hate but “for the survival of their families, their nation, and their people,” Murray argues that whatever the future holds 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.”

Accusing Jews

Those attacking Israel, in turn, Murray notes, citing the scholar Ruth Wisse, are modern day Nazis – but, in fact, worse. He notes that Wisse has made a point remarkably rare in public coverage of the war that if, as pundits are so quick to note, October 7th was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, what about the perpetrators?  “Perhaps the question wasn’t raised,” he suggests, “because nobody wanted to face the fact that this time the Nazis were among us.” And while the Nazis tried to hide what they did. They didn’t livestream the killings of Jews on social media like Hamas did.

The lack of sympathy on the part of some Americans and so much of Europe to Israel’s defensive efforts after the massacre, Murray suggests, is due to both political philosophy and geography. America is blessed with “the benefit of having friendly countries to its north and south and ocean everywhere else.” Today’s citizens of the United States have never experienced an invasive war, so are in no position to judge those who respond to one.

Europeans, for their part, have tried so hard to move on from the horrors of the Holocaust that their own countries lack unifying national narratives, leaving them subject to the faddish, so-called progressive arguments against Israel. Thus “the same people who claimed that their own countries had no involvement in the Holocaust or who tried to downplay their own involvement in the concentration camps were strangely eager to accuse the Jews of carrying out just such atrocities in the here and now.”

Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.

Such hypocrisy, Murray argues, can best be understood through the teachings of the Jewish Soviet writer Vassily Grossman (1905-1964). In his book Life and Fate, Grossman argues that antisemitism 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.”

Thus, Queen Rania of Jordan’s accusing Israel of genocide of Palestinians comes from someone whose father-in-law, the late King Hussein, himself massacred as many as 25,000 Palestinians. Iran accuses Israel of being a colonizer while it underwrites its colonies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. And Turkey accuses Israel of being an “occupier” while it has been illegally holding northern Cyprus (which, Murray notes, is part of an EU member state), for over 50 years.

Furthermore, Murray notes, supposed justification of Hamas’ atrocities as a response to years-long “ethnic cleansing” by Israel is negated by the numbers. In 1948, Murray notes, the non-Jewish population of Israel was 156,000. By 2024, it was over 2.6 million. In Jerusalem, the Muslim population of 40,000 in 1948 stands now at 371,400. “Some ethnic cleansing.”

Choosing Life

Over the course of this moving work tracing the attack on October 7th and its aftermath on Israeli society, including interviews with victims and meetings with the terrorists, Murray turns again and again to the ethos of Israel that has allowed it to withstand the forces seeking its destruction. He sees the Israel essence emerging in Deuteronomy, in which God says “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.” And from the Psalmist, who, in chapter 118 asserts “I shall not die but live.”

“I thought of these lines continuously,” Murray reflects, “even in the moments when things could not have been darker.”

“Choosing life,” he concludes, “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.”

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