On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

Throughout this period, from the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing: there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city. Not one. The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city. Some people will say that this is because Hamas would not listen to protesters on the streets of America or Europe. Or that Western countries have no control over Hamas.

But as I started to grapple with it there was one thing in particular I just couldn’t fathom. From writing about and covering wars on three continents I have seen my share of horrors. But there was something unusual about this atrocity. As I tried to put my finger on it, I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that in all this footage of the terrorists—taken by them and broadcast to their supporters (who would first celebrate and then deny these acts)—there was something uncommon even in the long history of violence. It was that the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish. Not just the endless shouting of their war cries. Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices. It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy. And that they were proud of their actions.

It was an extraordinary claim to make, in some ways. But as George used to explain, while Hamas, al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others had so far not managed to be as genocidal as the Nazis, there was no doubt that they would be if they could. Still, there was something about their actions and their motivations that made them distinct. George would be the last person to ever downplay the culpability of the Nazis who had killed so many of his friends and family. But he noted, as many historians have, that as evil as they were in general, the Nazis attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes.

I also wondered why the citizens of Israel seemed so unique among victims. Why they seemed to be the only people on earth who, when savagely attacked, either didn’t gain the world’s sympathy or gained it only for a matter of hours—if that.

Few armies in history have had to fight a war in such a concentrated, built-up, and booby-trapped area, in which the other side has deliberately placed its military infrastructure within and amid civilian buildings—including mosques, schools, homes, and hospitals. None has had to fight against an opposition whose leadership (as intercepted messages from the leader of Hamas in Gaza have made clear) sees the loss of their own civilians as desirable because of the advantages it can bring them in the war for international public opinion. Because in this era war is not just waged on the battlefield, but in the efforts to delegitimize a conflict abroad, turning victims into culprits and culprits into victims. It seems to me that the right of Israel to fight and win such a war is vital not just for the sake of that country, but so Britain, America, and every other Western country will be able to fight such a war if—or when—the time comes.

The story of the suffering and the heroism of October 7 and its aftermath is one that spells not just the divide between good and evil, peace and war, but between democracies and death cults.

Hamas knew what they were doing in not just killing but also kidnapping Israeli civilians. Part of the social contract in Israeli society—and the Israeli military in particular—is that no person should be left behind. A core tenet of the state is that if one Israeli is caught, then the government and people will do anything they can, at any price, to get the hostage back. When they are initiated into the army or heading off on dangerous missions, soldiers are told that “if you fall into enemy hands or if anything goes wrong, the State of Israel will do all in its power to bring you back home.”4 To take even one Israeli hostage is to have an inestimable advantage over the country. To take hundreds of hostages is to have a strategic advantage over Israel that is incalculable.

In 1948, the year of Israel’s independence, the non-Jewish population of Israel was 156,000. By 1970 the non-Jewish population of Israel (mainly Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, and Druze) had almost tripled. By 2000 it had reached 1,413,900. By 2015 the non-Jewish population was 2,078,000. In 2024, amid Israel’s supposed genocidal war, the non-Jewish population of Israel was 2,653,000. In other words, from 1948 to 2024 the non-Jewish population of Israel had grown almost exactly seventeen-fold.5 While the government in Tehran and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah consistently claimed that the Israelis were “ethnically cleansing” Jerusalem of non-Jews, the same pattern emerged. In 1948 the Muslim population of Jerusalem was 40,000 people. By 2022 the Muslim population of Jerusalem had grown by over nine times, to 371,400.6 Some genocide. Some ethnic cleansing.

If Israelis lived in an apartheid system then perhaps even Israelis at a dance party could be seen as colonialist aggressors and any attack, even on them, as “resistance” to this injustice. Again, the claim is based on pure misrepresentation. The State of Israel has equal rights for everyone in the country. The Arab and Druze population of Israel makes up around 20 percent of the country’s population and they have equal health care, housing, and voting rights as anyone else. Even the most cursory look around Israel—even a walk around any Israeli city—would reveal a population that is bewildering in its racial and religious diversity. There are Ethiopian Jews and Israeli Arabs, Arab Christians and Ashkenazi Jews. There are Jews whose ancestors fled Europe, Jews who have been indigenous to the land for generations, and Jews who fled from Arab lands before or after the creation of the State of Israel. These people fled from pogroms and massacres sometimes predating 1948, sometimes coming after it.

It was not the emerging Jewish state that proved unable to tolerate Arabs, but the Arab and Muslim world that proved itself unable to tolerate Jews. If any form of “apartheid” existed in the region before or after the creation of the State of Israel, it was in those Arab Muslim countries that treated their Jewish populations as second-class citizens, constantly taxed and treated as inferior to their Muslim neighbors and living in endless fear of persecution and violence. By contrast, the Arabs of Israel have done exceptionally well in the past eight decades. Consider reporting by the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2021. “New data issued by the Health Ministry in a 2020 report on health care personnel

show that the Arabs and Druze in Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the country’s population, constitute almost half (46 percent) of recipients of medical licenses; half of the new nurses, male and female (50 percent, as compared with just 9 percent in 2000); and more than half the dentists (53 percent) and pharmacists (57 percent).”8 No black South African under apartheid was allowed any legislative or political role. Yet Khaled Kabub (an Arab Muslim) is a current Israeli Supreme Court justice, and not the first. The nation’s national soccer team includes players of all backgrounds. In November 2024, when Israel played Belgium, Dia Saba, an Arab Muslim, assisted the sole goal of the match, scored for Israel by Yarden Shua—a Jew. Arab Muslim parties sit in the country’s parliament (Knesset), where they have the same voting rights as everyone else. And in 2021 the United Arab List, under its leader Mansour Abbas, formed part of the Naftali Bennett–Yair Lapid coalition government. Yet such facts kept getting buried in a world that seemed to want to see Israel as having some original sin. A sin that made them uniquely undeserving of sympathy.

It is a combination of superiority and inferiority complexes, and it helps the sufferer in every way. If the Jews are successful at defending themselves or innovating or growing their society, they can be portrayed as all-powerful. And that provides an easy excuse for the failures of the societies around them.

hidden. The rockets fired from Gaza were also very cheap. It is estimated that a Katyusha rocket costs around $300. In contrast, the cost of a single antimissile rocket fired from the Iron Dome system has been estimated to cost as much as $100,000. Because the Iron Dome would often need to fire two missiles to knock the Katyushas out of the sky, each intercept of a rocket from Gaza could cost up to $200,000, or around six hundred times the cost of the rocket they were intercepting. The Israeli public within firing distance from Gaza may have been able to feel safer with the inception of the Iron Dome, but the math did not work in Israel’s favor. Around two hundred rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza into Israel in August 2011 alone.12 And this was at a time that Israel and Hamas were not in a full-scale war. This became business—or life—as usual.

Critics like Naomi Klein would subsequently not even permit the Israeli people to have such trauma. Writing in the Guardian, Klein would later argue that Israelis had performed a “dangerous weaponization” of their grief and trauma and had done so to justify “imperial aggression and grotesque rights violations.”14 Meaning that Israelis could not even be traumatized without being accused of being traumatized for their own evil purposes.

But despite such an inquiry being currently stalled, some conclusions can already be drawn. The first is that the security consensus in Israel had for many years been unified around what became known as the “conception.” This “conception” held, among other things,

that while Hamas was undoubtedly an apocalyptic Islamist movement, its leadership had fallen into a familiar pattern of terrorist movements that ended up in government. That is, eventually the trappings of power and the enjoyment of the benefits it brings supersede the dreams of the movement’s youth. From the Soviet Union, among other precedents, we commonly see revolutionaries end up simply enjoying being corrupt.

Among a number of other things this “conception” failed to take into account was one of the most cardinal lessons: while it is true that some fanatics can moderate due to the worldly luxuries placed before them, others are simply fanatics. And while some fanatics may be able to be bought off, others simply mean what they say, and the leadership of Hamas were among those types that meant it.

A number of those who survived had been on cocaine, which is a stimulant. Some of them were among those who ran many miles to escape the terrorists. A number of survivors told me that they could not believe how far and how

fast they had run. Looking at maps afterward, they were amazed at their stamina. Of course, some of this was what kicks in for anyone in a “fight-or-flight” situation, where the body is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. Still, the people on cocaine may have had an advantage. Perhaps the worst drugs to have been on when the massacre began were consciousness-expanding drugs, which involve a psychedelic “trip” and can make people feel at peace with the world. These drugs include LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms. People who had taken them would have almost no ability to comprehend the situation they found themselves in. People who had literally prepared themselves to be at one with the best aspects of the universe instead found themselves face-to-face with the worst things anyone could see. Who can comprehend the confusion and terror that many of the young people on one or other of these drugs felt in their final moments? For those who survived, who had been on some of these drugs and had seen the worst of the horrors of that morning, the combination of factors would already be too much. One of the truths about trauma is that anyone who has been through a dangerous situation is in an infinitely better position if they were in some way anticipating the situation or expecting to go into harm’s way. But anyone who comes across such a thing completely unexpectedly is far more likely to suffer long-term trauma from the event. To come across the worst

sights imaginable—of friends being murdered in front of you—at the exact moment when your mind and body are least expecting it, is something very few people could live through. I asked one professional about what had happened to some of the young people who had been sectioned in the hospitals from the party. “Their minds just collapsed,” she expla...

It is a statement of the obvious, of course, but it still needs to be said that all wars have at least two sides. That does not mean, as many Western journalists seem to think, that those sides are morally equal—any more than they will be militarily equal. One side starts a war and the other responds, though who started it can also be disputed. But it is somewhere in the melee of the response phase that many reporters and others become lost. If they cover the punch, they must also cover the counterpunch. And if the counterpunch is seen as being in some way excessive or even carrying horrors of its own, then it is perfectly possible to get lost yourself. Something that has dogged Israel in each of its recent conflicts is the idea of “proportionality” and “disproportionality.” It is a curious concept that has gained prominence almost solely in wars involving Israel. For years, whenever Israel had responded to an assault on its people, the world’s media has fallen into a debate on “proportionality.” By contrast, it is rare to hear a discussion of whether the Ukrainian response to Russian aggression is “proportionate” or not. Or whether the

Western and Kurdish assault on ISIS strongholds like Mosul, Iraq, was “proportionate” or not. As it happens, there is no law of war that says you can start a war and then complain when you begin to lose. And there are no wars in human history in which the response to aggression can be exactly calibrated as equal to the initial aggression. Early in the aftermath of October 7, a number of media outlets started to ask the traditional question of whether Israel’s response to the attacks was going to be, or was already, “disproportionate.” As I explained to a number of them early in this process, the very idea is absurd. If an enemy breaks into your country, murders your citizens, rapes women at a music festival, and carries hundreds of your citizens into captivity what is the “proportionate” response? Would Israel be permitted to call it quits if it killed precisely the same number of men, women, and children as Hamas had killed that day? Or raped precisely the same number of women? Or kidnapped precisely the same number of innocent civilians from their homes and then held them in underground tunnels? Of course not. In fact, the world would rightly condemn any such move. There are laws of war. And there is a rightful concern with arbitrary or excessive use of force. But the aim of a war can never be to simply even the scores or respond in kind. The aim of any war is to achieve a strategic, and preferably also

moral, victory. Also, one must deter the enemy or any future enemy from trying to achieve their aims in a similar way. For any country as small as Israel, the necessity of deterrence is absolute. Israel could not fight a war of parity with any of its enemies or neighbors. Iran, for instance, is a country of 88 million people, which is almost ten times the population of Israel. There is no way that in a conflict between Israel and Iran—which trains, sponsors, and funds Hamas—either country could accept the same...

The Israelis had two stated objectives: to free the hostages and to destroy Hamas. Inside Gaza there was now a third objective, which was to separate out the civilian population from the combatants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups. It was already clear that this third objective could be as difficult as the first two. Hamas was reported to be stopping people in the north from leaving their homes, making sure that their fighters who wore civilian clothing and operated from civilian buildings continued to blend in among the civilian population as much as possible. Out of uniform an enemy combatant and a civilian are difficult—sometimes impossible—to tell apart. But that was how Sinwar and Hamas wanted it. They wanted as much confusion as possible. Added to this is Hamas’s well-documented and long-running practice of using civilian infrastructure for military purposes. Although this is against the Geneva Conventions, Hamas has long used civilian homes, mosques, schools, and hospitals (among much else) as sites to store weaponry, create entrances to the underground tunnel network, and—it was already believed—hold Israeli hostages.

History gets rewritten all the time. But it gets rewritten especially fast in wartime. Within a couple of months of the war starting there was a narrative that went something like this: Israel had the world’s sympathy and support in the immediate aftermath of the 7th, but had squandered it by prosecuting its war against Hamas in Gaza.

In the year that followed October 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?

Most curious of all—and perhaps more extreme than anywhere else—was the response in the US, where there were street protests against Israel from the moment that October 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.

As replica protests sprang up at campuses in the UK and Canada, there was speculation about what level of coordination was going on, and who was paying for these often significant-sized protests. By the following July, US director of national intelligence Avril Haines released a statement in which she gave her assessment that the Iranian government, which was the prime backer, financier, and trainer of Hamas, was also “providing financial support to protesters.”27 Iranian agents had already been caught in 2022 attempting to assassinate former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national security advisor John Bolton.

On American soil. But this seemed to be an intervention in American society at least as brazen as these acts, and markedly more successful. It was striking from the outset that the same misunderstanding seemed to have broken out. This misunderstanding centered on the idea that the university in question was somehow involved in the purported Israeli “genocide” that was taking place. It was a claim that was almost never explained. In what way were these campuses “investing” in or “supporting” genocide? In the search for someone to blame for the funding of a foreign war, an Ivy League campus in another country seems like a surprising place to start. And while the claim was never explained, the delusion that America’s universities were somehow part of Israel’s war machine emerged almost everywhere. Perhaps some of the students—and certainly those who were directing them—knew that their institution was not in any way involved in supporting Israel’s war against Hamas. But they wanted to protest the war and so pretending their university was somehow central to the conflict gave them something close to home at which they could direct their rage.

From snapshots like this it was unclear whether there was more encouragement of protest and radicalization among the tents on the university’s South Lawn or in the teaching activities inside Columbia’s classrooms. As people who had been on faculty told me during the period in which the encampment was going on, for many years the faculty had expressed a number of views to students as points of truth. These included (as K had said) the idea that the highest expression of higher education in America is to be found in creating “activists”—people who will know that when their time comes they can have their own 1968 moment, or perhaps something even grander. Second, there was the idea, apparently baked

into the curriculum across every discipline, that America itself was a colonialist, racist, and apartheid state in its past—and potentially in its present—but that anyone who wanted to identify a state guilty of all of these crimes and more could find its most egregious exemplar in the State of Israel.

It was also perfectly obvious to members of the congressional committee that no other minority group in America would be expected to put up with the type of incitement that had become the norm against Jews at American Ivy League campuses. If there had been even one call for, say, the lynching of black Americans or the killing of trans people, it could be said with a considerable degree of certainty that such a student would be detained, carted off campus, expelled, and most likely hit with criminal charges. Yet when it came to open calls for genocide against the Jewish people, Gay and her fellow college heads suddenly became First Amendment absolutists and more.

There was a virtue in wearing these masks, of course, which is that if you are joining in calls for terrorism against a minority, it may be wise to cover your face—as the Ku Klux Klan also did. The masks suggested a certain coyness or shame among many of the protesters—as though they had one eye on the global revolution and the other on their future job prospects. But as one of the posters I saw plastered all over Columbia showed, everything can be connected.

During these protests a number of interesting things emerged. The first was that a form of revolutionary cosplay appeared to be going on. Students did not require “humanitarian aid,” but a large number seemed to enjoy the pretense, as well as the identity that the protests gave them. After the first encampment at Columbia was cleared, a second encampment sprang up. And like the first, it seemed that part of what was on offer was an identity for students who clearly felt they didn’t have one but deeply needed one.

But two further aspects of the protesters’ behavior stood out. The first was the idea that chanting something repeatedly, day in and day out, might achieve something. Many of the protesters shouted themselves hoarse by chanting “From the River to the Sea” and similar slogans. What is interesting about this is that it is the absolute antithesis of what communication in a university is meant to be about. Academic life is meant to be about reasoning, winning arguments with facts and persuasion. What the protesters were doing was the opposite of such communication. At the same time they were demanding that the American and Israeli governments should do what they want, they were communicating their message by a form of intellectual bludgeoning. It was as though to say a thing again and again might, in time, force the people they were trying to persuade to change their minds. That is an odd art of persuasion, for it expects not a change of mind but a demand that another person accept their attitudes. It is like hitting someone over the head repeatedly. But it is not intended to persuade. It is intended to beat another party into submission. The second aspect of the protests that were interesting was the way in which the protesters aped one aspect of the behavior of Hamas at a lower level of violence. At the campuses where police were deployed, it seemed that the students wanted the police to harm them—or at least harm the student next to them. This was a version of the radicalis...

In May 2024, one of the leaders of Hamas, Khaled Mashal, addressed a conference in Istanbul hosted by the Muslim Brotherhood. The conference was called “Flood of the Free.” During his remarks the Hamas leader made sure to thank the “great student flood” that had emerged at American, British, and other Western universities. Mashal also spoke of the multipronged international strategy that he and his colleagues in Hamas were pursuing. In his words there needed to be a “financial flood” to supply the Palestinian people with weapons. He called for an even greater “media flood” to spread the narrative that Hamas endorsed. He called for a “legal flood” involving moves such as those already afoot at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute Israel’s leaders. He reminded his audience that there should also be a flow of blood, specifically a “jihadi flood,” from holy war. In the words of Hamas’s own leadership, what students on Western campuses were doing was all part of Hamas’s plan. A plan that led direct from campus demonstrations in America to jihad on the streets of Israel.

But the most interesting development was the movement’s adoption of the Palestinian cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel, something crucial shifted in the international left’s attitudes toward the Jewish state. From 1948 until 1967, Israel had broad sympathy and support from the international left. In part this was because of the leftist origins of the state itself including the kibbutznik movement. Time spent working on a kibbutz in Israel was almost a rite of passage for leftists in those days. At that time there was no contradiction in a figure like the British Labour Party leader Harold Wilson being an ardent Zionist and even writing a book (The Chariot of Israel, 1981) that expressed those sentiments. Leftists supported Israel for a number of reasons, but one that has often been a baseline of left-wing politics was support for the perceived underdog. From 1948 to 1967, Israel was the plucky underdog in the Middle East. Its neighbors had attempted to wipe it out but the Israelis had seen them off.

Then in 1967, and even more so in 1973, something changed. If Israel had been David up until this moment, a number of its supporters now saw it as having transformed into Goliath. The fact that Israel was still a tiny country with a tiny population in comparison with its neighbors was not the point. It now came to be seen by many as the overdog. The change came about in part because Israel had won those two wars with relative ease. Also, they had taken ground from the places their enemy had attacked them from (principally Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights). At the same time the idea grew that the Arabs who lived in Israel were not to be referred to as Arabs, like their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, but rather as “Palestinians” with a unique and long-recognized identity of their own. With the turning of the Arabs into Palestinians it was now the Palestinians who were the beleaguered minority and the Israelis who were seen as the oppressive majority. So the Palestinians became the new Jews, with the Jews becoming the imperialist, brutish overlords.

But it turned out that “anti-Nazism” was not enough. The German left of that generation showed that somebody’s whole political foundations could be based on anti-Nazism, only for them to end up behaving exactly like Nazis.

For anti-Semites the history of anti-Semitism is itself a justification for anti-Semitism. In their rationale the fact that

the Jewish people have been so hated and so persecuted so often is proof that there is something wrong with them.

The scene neatly encapsulates one of the tragedies of anti-Semitism. The older Jewish woman stands out because she is Jewish. For that reason some people dislike her. Yet when she tries to be like the non-Jewish people around her, she is despised afresh. This is just one of the impossible moves that the anti-Semite condemns the Jews for: integrating and not integrating. There are a number of other versions of the same impossible conundrum. For example, historically it is the achievement of the Jewish people to be able to be hated for being rich and also for being poor. Much nineteenth-century anti-Semitism was based on the idea that Jews were poor and dirty. This was in part a reflection of the Jews from czarist Russia and Eastern Europe who escaped pogroms and went west with nothing to their name. Yet at exactly the same

time in history the Jews were stereotyped for being rich. The Rothschild family, among others, came to be seen by anti-Semites as almost typical Jews. Jews could also be hated for being religious and for being atheistic. This was never more so than after Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Finally, for centuries Jews were hated for being stateless. “Rootless cosmopolitans” was one of the phrases that the extreme right once used in their discussions of Jews. The idea of the Jew as stateless and therefore likely to destabilize any country they were in was a commonplace of anti-Semitism for centuries. Yet from 1948, the Jews once again had a state—reestablished in their ancestral homeland. Today the only acceptable form of anti-Semitism comes in hatred of the Jews for having a state.

Grossman writes, “Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It 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.”

As Grossman writes: “States look to the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry for explanations of their own failure.” This was as true at the dawn of capitalism as it was during the industrial revolution, the atomic age, and the age of revolutions. Finally, he says, there are three different levels of anti-Semitism. First is the “relatively harmless everyday anti-Semitism.” Grossman elaborates. This merely bears witness to the existence of failures and envious fools. Secondly, there is social anti-Semitism. This can only arise in democratic countries. Its manifestations are in those sections of the press that represent different reactionary groups, in the activities of these groups—for example, boycotts of Jewish labour and Jewish goods—and in their ideology and religion. Thirdly, in totalitarian countries, where society as such no longer exists, there can arise State anti-Semitism. This is a sign that the State is looking for the support of fools, reactionaries and failures, that it is seeking to capitalize on the ignorance of the superstitious and the anger of the hungry. He concludes, “The first stage of State anti-Semitism is discrimination. . . . The second stage is wholesale destruction.”44 Seen in Grossman’s light, much that seems inexplicable becomes explainable, and is as relevant in our own day as it was in his. The Arab countries that repeatedly invaded Israel and sought to steal the land accuse Israel of stealing land. Muslim countries accuse Israel of “colonialis...

of Islam has been a history of colonialism. The only reason the Islamic empire grew was what we would now call “colonialism.” Today the government most responsible for spreading the accusation that Israel is expansionist and colonialist is the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which has spent recent years assiduously expanding its colonies. What has Gaza become but a colony of Iran? Or Iraq after Iran moved into the vacuum left by America after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? Or Yemen? Or Syria, into which Iran had poured Hezbollah and other forces? Iran and its proxies and mouthpieces in the West have spent years accusing Israel of being a colonial, expansionist state while all the time expanding and colonizing everywhere they can reach in the region. Why did the mullahs order Hezbollah to engage in the Syrian civil war except to prop up Syria as a forward base of Iran? And what of Lebanon, which even in 2006 still had a government able to distance itself from the actions of Iran’s army Hezbollah. By the time Hamas started its October 2023 war against Israel and Hezbollah joined in, Lebanon had become a virtual colony of Iran—with Hezbollah ruling the country by terror and setting up their weaponry among Lebanese civilians. For years they had set up checkpoints at Beirut Airport to act as passport control and government of that country, whether the people wanted them or not. And there is much evidence that they do not.

Everywhere the same rule holds. Groups like Hamas that delight in their bloodlust accuse the Israelis of being insatiable killers. Palestinian groups and their supporters who encourage their youth to view death through “martyrdom” as the highest form of valor claim that the Jews are bloodthirsty child-killers. People who use rape as a weapon of war accuse the Israelis of insatiably raping prisoners in Israeli jails. President Erdogan’s regime in Turkey consistently accuses the Israelis of being “occupiers,” while Turkey has been illegally occupying northern Cyprus (part of an EU member state) since 1974. On and on it goes. Within weeks of October 7, before Israel’s war in Gaza had even begun, Queen Rania of Jordan went on-air to claim that the Palestinians in Gaza face “two choices” at the hands of the Israelis: “between expulsion or extermination, between ethnic cleansing and genocide.”45 If Queen Rania is interested in this subject she could have asked her father-in-law, the late king Hussein, about what happened in Black Sep...

This and much more data suggest that young people in the West have a historically low view of the virtues of their own country. A generation has come up that has been taught that

by dint of being born into the West, they have been born into countries built on ethnic cleansing and genocide, founded by people who are settler-colonialist racists, and that their societies perpetuate these evils right to this very day. Perhaps the vast rise in antagonism toward Israel is a manifestation of what psychologists would call “projection.” How does Grossman’s law apply to these people then? Perhaps all that is required is a slight twist to his phrase: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you believe you are guilty of.”