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

by Douglas Murray

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 September. That is when her father-in-law ethnically cleansed the PLO from Jordan; casualties were somewhere between the official figures of several thousand dead Palestinians and Arafat’s claim that King Hussein massacred as many as twenty-five thousand Palestinians.