‘Do you cherish life or do you worship death?’ — with Douglas Murray

“I want to draw a very clear line, a dichotomy, democracies and death cults, life or death – do you cherish and love life or do you worship death?”

Douglas Murray is a rare breed – a journalist whose search for the truth saw him shift to post-October-7th Israel, where he lived for nearly a year and a half.

There he breathed the unfathomable aftermath of the worst atrocity to hit the Jewish people since the Holocaust, charted the traumatised Israeli mindset, and reflected on the massacre that forever changed the world. The result is the monumental On Democracies And Death Cults: Israel, Hamas And The Future Of The West.

In Israel Murray witnessed a reality like no other – a grieving nation slowly emerging from the wreckage and coming to terms with loss that was beyond what many could contain. Fighting for its survival on both the Lebanese and Gazan fronts, it had the hostages heavy on everyone’s mind as forensic teams worked frantically to identify the countless victims, some bodies burnt to ashes and taking many agonizing months to trace.

Murray sought to understand what happened on October 7th – how were the tranquil kibbutzim by the Gaza border invaded and their inhabitants murdered? Why was Israel taken by surprise? Why were NOVA escapees who were hiding in bomb shelters and playing dead for many hours, not rescued any sooner? How did Jews end up feeling persecuted, helpless and unsafe in their own state?

The search for answers saw Murray walk on the torched earth of the deserted Kibbutzim and speak with rescuers whose selfless heroism left him stunned. He looked into the eyes of traumatized survivors and distraught relatives of hostages, witnessed soldiers in action on the Lebanese front and visited the prison where captured Hamas terrorists were detained. He even sat in the very Rafah ruins where leader Yahya Sinwar met his somewhat surreal death.
Here Murray speaks of the many months lived among the Israeli people, why “Israel is absolutely central to the heart the soul the future of the west”, and why its fight is the West’s fight. He reflects on the bigger than life characters he is grateful to have met, the lifelong friendships he struck along the way, Jew-hatred and the urgent need for the West entire, to acknowledge and consider death-cult mentality.

Douglas Murray. Photo by Rob DeMartin

HG On Democracies And Death Cults is a landmark publication, future generations will look at it and see you not as a false prophet, but as the foreseer of truth – much of what you wrote in The Strange Death of Europe is already before us

DM Yes, I wish it wasn’t but thank you, it means a great deal, thank you

HG You write “the right of Israel to fight and win such a war is vital not just for the sake of that country but obviously for Britain America and any western country..” would you agree with Netanyahu that Israel is fighting the West’s war? I believe he said this in an interview with yourself, or with Jordan Peterson.

DM [Netanyahu] said it at the speech to the joint sessions of Congress that I was at last summer in Washington, he said ‘our fight is your fight and our victory will be your victory’, I think that’s absolutely correct. Netanyahu has said it but many others have as well in Israel and outside, but I believe that absolutely

I think the right of Israel to defend itself, to fight for itself, to win is absolutely key for all of us in the free world and what’s more, if Israel were to lose which it won’t, but if Israel were to lose, it would be the loss of the whole civilized world

HG Why does Israel matter?

DM Well, there are different dimensions aren’t there?

There’s a religious dimension, there’s a political dimension, a cultural dimension, all of these things overlap obviously, the whole western world is based on Athens and Jerusalem, cut or lose the tie with Jerusalem and you lose the West as we know it. Obviously, Jerusalem itself is a place of much disputation among the religions, but it is obviously the place on which the world’s faiths fight and obviously it’s the most important place in Judaism which makes it the most important place in all of the religions that have come from Judaism, and so there’s a sort of emotional and spiritual substrate that is there whether people realise it or not, and a lot of people don’t realise it on all sides.

Politically it’s a matter of whether or not you believe in the western tradition of democracy and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, conscience and the ability to hold people of very differing views and faiths under one roof or not, and it’s a demonstration that you can. Of course there are many countries around the world particularly in the Middle East, who do not believe that and want to exercise a different way, and then at the political level there is the fact that as I say somewhere in the book but I’ve certainly said elsewhere, that the reason why Israel is central to everything in the rest of the West is that you can tell it by Israel’s enemies, that the people who march against Israel and scream against Israel always have Israel in their sight first but never last,

I’ve developed this thing I audaciously might call Murray’s law which is that you can tell the sides by the protests – If there’s a pro-Israel protest in London or New York or anywhere else in the West people will fly the flag of Israel and the flag of the country they are in.

When there is a pro-Israel protest in Britain it finishes with the singing of the Hatikva and of God Save the King, when it happens in America you sing Hatikva and the Star Spangled Banner, and as I discovered speaking to Christians and Jews in Toronto last year if it’s in Canada you finish with the singing of Hatikva and O Canada, no protest or event against Israel ever flies the flag of the country they are in, none of the students protesting in America against Israel fly the American flag and they certainly don’t revere the flag, and they certainly don’t sing the national anthem of the country they’re in.

That’s because they always hate Israel first but never last – the Columbia student group who organized the protests there, they say in their founding statements that their desire is the complete destruction of Western civilization, so they’ve chosen their target, their first current target, they see that if you were to annihilate Israel you would get everyone else in the West next, they know that and I think that although they are on the wrong side, deeply malevolent and evil, they see something that is true which is that Israel is absolutely central to the heart the soul the future of the West

IDF soldier in Lebanon recognizes Murray and salutes him. Photo by Moshe Mizrahi

HG  The book brought tears to my eyes quite a few times but once it made me laugh – you speak of the countless anti-Israel, post October 7th protests in South Africa, London, New York, Canada.. You say that as you were watching them you thought ‘what’s it got to do with you?’

DM I know, it was overwhelming to me in the last year and a half when I wasn’t in Israel. I was in various countries speaking, researching and so on. I think one of the most surreal was being in Vancouver Canada covered in snow, dead of winter and there’s an anti-Israel protest, and this is like way, way, way over there, and same in Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, I saw these protesters and I was just ‘what’s it got to do with you? You’re in Australia’.

This is like me going and standing outside my house or where I’m staying in London and screaming from the top of my lungs about Myanmar and telling everyone, and stopping traffic and shouting about Myanmar, and I think most people would think you’re some kind of a lunatic ‘what are you doing?’ I still think it about a lot of these people, and they don’t think it about themselves.

I was telling an audience in London here last night I think that a lot of these people are in the realms of magical thinking, and obviously some of them in the realms of just simply supporting Hamas and being on the side of the death cults and hating Israel and being wildly antisemitic and more. But the others,

some of the young people who’ve been indoctrinated, they seem to believe that if you attack Israel enough and in their views fight for the Palestinian people, that if you solve this conflict and Israel loses, everything else in the world will be right, or that it’ll unlock every other problem in the world, this is magical thinking – this is what our forebears were doing when they were trying to turn base metal into gold, it’s alchemy, it’s fantasy.

HG Do you agree with Netanyahu that this is new age antisemitism?
DM Yes, and it’s not just Netanyahu who said that, many many people have, my much missed friend Jonathan Sacks explained it as well as anyone and as briefly as anyone, and whenever I have the chance I always repeat what Jonathan said about that – you know which is that shapeshifts, the most extraordinary form of anti-semitic shapeshifting in our era is that just as previous eras blamed the Jews for being poor or being rich, for integrating or not integrating, for being secular or for being religious. In our age the Jewish people who used to be attacked for being ruthless cosmopolitans are now attacked for having a state and defending it, and that is the current most obvious form of antisemitism is that the Jewish people alone of all peoples in the world don’t even have the right to one state where everyone else in the world has a right to a state, and it’s an extraordinary manifestation of a very old virus

HG I’m glad you used the word virus – one example that came to mind while reading your book was Israeli soldiers being accused of raping Arab women but then it turned into they are not raping Arab women because they see them as subhuman – Jews in a lose-lose situation, damned if you do, damned if you don’t

DM That accusation, when I first saw it, the first time in the war, I frankly laughed because of two things – one is the idea that the preposterousness of it, that your average male IDF soldier you know doesn’t get any sex in Tel Aviv or at home in Israel and therefore likes the thrill of finding a Gaza woman, can’t resist is just ridiculous.

The only people who carry out rape as a method of war really do it for issues of sexual violence and control, and I don’t believe any IDF soldier, certainly no organised movement needs to or wants to or in any way desires to do that.

But the second reason I laughed darkly about it is of course that it absolutely vindicates

one of the rules I’m trying to popularise, and which I borrow from Vasily Grossman with credit and use in this book which is what I’m now telling audiences – we should regard as Grossman’s rule, which is ‘what they accuse the Jews of they’re guilty of’.

And look at these people these obscene figures, there’s one on the British Left I won’t name, he went big on the story of the claim that IDF soldiers were raping Gazan women, this is the same person who denied that Hamas raped women on the seventh and when he saw the atrocity video the 47 or 43 minute video, complained afterwards that there was no evidence in it, that you couldn’t actually see women being raped in the video ergo there were no rapes.

So the people who did not believe the Jewish women who were raped, or do not believe the soldiers and others who found the bodies of raped women, these people who are covering over rape, accuse the IDF of rape – they’re telling us about themselves, they’re not telling us anything about the IDF, they’re telling us about themselves, their side rapes and they cover it over, and then they claim that the people they hate are rapists, sorry, you’ve just held up a mirror to yourself and seen yourself, nothing more.

HG In the book where Nimrod covered one of the women, pulled her nickers up to allow her some dignity

DM Yeah he’s a wonderful man, wonderful man

HG I don’t have to tell you that Israel is in trauma, people ‘move on’ with their lives, this is what Israelis and Jewish people do, this is what they’ve always done, but especially with the hostages – Jews just celebrated Passover and people had a chair at the table for a hostage

DM That was one of the most striking things I heard from a number of people and I tried to bring out in the book which is obviously everyone is very interested in PTSD, but it was a therapist at one of the NOVA reunions who said to me, a brilliant woman, lives in the south, she said to me, “Don’t forget Douglas this isn’t PTSD, the trauma is still going on and we’re still in the trauma,” and I believe that is the case for all of Israel actually, and as long as the hostages are still there the trauma goes on as Hamas knows.

This question that I ask in the book, that I don’t ask I just repeat, what so many people told me, the feeling they had on the morning sitting in the bomb shelters and hearing the terrorists in their houses, this thought of ‘are we not safe here either? Maybe we’re not safe even in Israel’ – that is one of the central traumas that Israelis are in I think.

If I can be so audacious as to say so I think that it’s the trauma of you know, this is the one place we know we’re safe, where we look after ourselves, where Jews can look after Jews and are we not safe here? The answer is yes we must be, but the doubt will stay there for some time I think, it’s lessened in the year since the seventh and the set of stunning victories in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere, but I think that it still is there but it’s slightly lessened maybe, but until every Jew in the south every Israeli in the south everyone in the north all my friends in all the towns and the villages in the north, until everybody in all of these places is safe, the trauma will go on

HG And back home of course – as you noted in the book, you know these people who have been displaced for over a year now
DM I have you know, people who have become friends in the past 18 months who I’ve visited their places where they live, more often than they’ve been able to, it’s a terrible thing, whenever I’ve spoken outside of Israel in the last year and a half reminding the world where I can about these displaced people, these effectively are refugees, sure they’re internal refugees but they are refugees who do not have the right to be in their homes. Everyone talks about Palestinian refugees, what about Israeli refugees? The fact that Israel looks after its refugees and houses them and much more, well that’s terrific and that’s what Israel does do, but until these people can return home, till my friends can return home it’s not over

HG Yes and also the fact that as you note in the book, it’s everyone’s reality, everyone in Israel knows the army firsthand, you would know somebody who either lost their life or are disfigured, lost their limbs or who are fighting for life, it’s very personal
DM Absolutely, yes absolutely I mean this is again one of the things I try to bring out to people outside of Israel is you know if you imagine by proportion of population what this would mean in America or Britain – everybody had everybody they know, but particularly more so in Israel because of the tight-knitness of family life and much more – this is something that everyone is one or two degrees of separation from.

I mean the stories.. I say that if I try to do justice to some of the people who I’ve had the honour of meeting and spending time with in the last year and a half, but if I had even relayed the stories of everybody I met, let alone if you included everyone I hadn’t met who also has a story, the books would be endless I mean it would be an entire library of stories and indeed probably should be

Image from Douglas Murray X

HG I did wonder about the timing of your book, I didn’t know whether you concluded it before the Bibas children returned for example
DM I had to draw a line somewhere and so I decided that I would not tie up every human story because we didn’t know the outcomes of some you know, as a writer there’s a publishing schedule there, but I hope the reader understands that, and    that for instance some of the people I mentioned like the Bibas family ends in we now know, the most terrible tragedy but I’d like to think that people also take away the fact that there are miracles that have happened, I mentioned Omar Shemtov in the book, you know when his parents texted me to tell me that you know they were looking forward to welcoming me to their home and introducing me to their son I think it’s a miracle

HG You convey Israeli life to perfection – you even mention the tranquility of the kibbutzim, I take my hat off to you because unless you’ve walked in a kibbutz, you don’t know how incredibly peaceful it is – it is peace unlike any other
DM Exactly the feeling of the earth breathing, and the trees growing and the birds singing, yes, I’ve been to many kibbutzim before the seventh but yes, I wanted to bring that out because it is something which is just additionally shocking and appalling

HG These communities were the most ardent ‘Peaceniks’ in Israel, they were demonstrators for peace, some volunteered to drive Palestinian children to hospitals in Israel and so on
DM People like Vivian Silver, yes, this was much on my mind and I wanted to bring this out. You know, when I was in London about six months into the war, I came back to see family here and I did an event in London and a wonderful Jewish British friend of mine interviewed me, an actress, and one of her questions to me was ‘you know I have friends who agree with you but they think you know, maybe there’s another way than the war, and maybe this and maybe that, and surely maybe if the Israelis had done this.. and I said to her, it just came to me on the spur of the moment because I’d come straight from Israel and I said to her, she said “what would you say to my friends in London and Manchester who say this?”

And I remember I just was so struck by it and I repeated some of the stories of the people in the kibbutz and the people who lived and those who died and I said to her ‘tell your friends these people dreamed even greater dreams than they dream, and they can’t dream them anymore, and that the dream died, but don’t flatter yourself that you can dream dreams they can’t anymore’.

I think that’s very important for people outside of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish to realize – you couldn’t have dreamed the dream of peace more than people at the NOVA party or in the Kibbutzim – this realization, this red pilling that happened to so many of them after the horrific events.

HG Thomas Sowell talks about this inability of many people, or unwillingness of many people to recognize that there are people in the world whose view of the world, whose approach to life, to fellow human beings and every aspect of life is so fundamentally different from yours that it renders coexistence an impossibility

DM Yes, it is hard for people to accept that, that’s why I draw this line, that’s why the title of the book is what it is, I want to draw a very clear line, a dichotomy, democracies and death cults, life or death – do you cherish and love life or do you worship death? And this goes right back to Deuteronomy, goes right back to the prophets, this is the central thing, choose life or worship death, and thank God the Jewish people, the Israeli people have chosen life, continue to choose life and continue to fight for it, but if other people can’t realize that not everyone follows this tradition, that some people have gone a very different road, and they should at least understand that.

HG You explain it perfectly in the book with many examples, one of these is Eizenkot when he just heard that his son soldier died

DM That was very moving and stark to me, I told that story to the audience in London last night

HG And you saw it firsthand, your timing is so ‘fortunate’, like when you got the message about Sinwar and so you were able to actually visit the place where he died

Image from Douglas Murray X

DM I was in New York launching the book last week and as it happened the friend of mine whose Sukkot tent I was in when we got the news of Sinwar was there in New York as well, and came to the party.  At the launch party I read out the end of the book to the audience and she said to me after, you realize you were going to frame the book, end it around my Sukkot tent

HG That was quite an image

DM Yes, I wanted to see it, I wanted to get that, and that passage in the book I thought about a lot of you know, I suppose there are several bits in the book where I try to bring this across, one is talking about looking out at the landscape where Sinwar had his last sight of earth and’ this is what you did with your life, this is what you did to your own people’, and the other is the terrorist I stared in the eyes of in Hadera, and it was the same thing I tried to bring across which is ‘of all the things you could do with your life you did this, what a stupid thing to do with your life’.

HG The level of destruction is unfathomable

DM If you believe that life is a great gift from God or in any case a gift, I wanted to bring across some of the wickedness of using your life to do these things

Times of Israel

HG You managed to convey the tragedy and the heroism so convincingly, you even included Yotam’s mom – the letter she sent to the Israeli soldiers who accidentally killed her hostage boy (it was the same brigade that later ended Sinwar’s life)

DM Unbelievable, when the soldiers showed me that in Rafah I was blown away, blown away, again, it was a story that came full circle, and I suppose all of us, I mean authors look for full circles but we all do in life, and that was a full circle and it was completed thanks to the soldiers of the Bislamach Brigade

HG What a thing to say to the soldiers though, what a remarkable woman

DM Unbelievable, unbelievable, she’s a hero, what a hero, a moral and courageous hero that woman

HG Your book is a stark reminder to the pivotal difference between laptop journalism and on-the-ground search for the truth. One can tell that the book is written by someone who understands what they are commenting on – the characters, events and conversations are authentic to the core

DM I spent most of the last year and a half in Israel and spent a lot of time there before you see, but the truth is that in every moment since the war, since the seventh, I felt it was my duty to record everything I could and try to get it down and to live in it, and that’s why to the pleasure and sometimes surprise of my friends even at a Friday night dinner, I lived it, it’s my honour to live it with the Israeli people, and to be able to convey what I could in the time I had.