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

by Douglas Murray

Yet there was something different here, because at no stage did the world turn on the victims of these other atrocities. Survivors of the Manchester bombing did not get pursued by

mobs of people supporting ISIS. Survivors of the Bataclan did not find that when they left Paris they were treated not as victims but as guilty parties. Yet that is exactly what happened with those who survived the atrocities of October 7, 2023.

Still, the claim that Gaza was ever in any way a “concentration camp” should have been seen as absurd at face value. In 2005, when Israel withdrew all Jews from Gaza, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. By 2023 it was over 2 million. That would make it the first concentration camp in history in which the population actually grew. There was no population boom in Auschwitz in the 1940s. So why the claim? There are many things that Gaza under Hamas may have been called. But why a “concentration camp”? It seems it was for the same reason that Israel was accused of being “Nazi-like” in its actions. The aim of Israel’s critics for many years seemed to be not just to insult Israel and smear its actions, but to try to use the most powerful terms in Jewish history to wound and hurt the Jewish state. It was not enough that Gaza should be said to be under carefully controlled border checks. Or that one supply or other was being unfairly kept out. People had to accuse Israel of running a “concentration camp” in Gaza. Once again it was noticeable that a considerable amount of “projection” was going on, as well as a deliberate attempt to wound Jews as deeply as possible with this claim.

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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. It is as though if the Jews can be accused of running concentration camps and carrying out “ethnic cleansing” today, then it is easier to say first, “You see, we all do it,” then to move on to say, “But the Jews actually do it more.”

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank used these funds for their own purposes, including building mansions for themselves that a homeowner in the Hamptons might envy. But without exception, the money that went to Gaza ended up in the hands of Hamas. Since 2007 there has been no other government in Gaza, and anything that comes in, from the lowliest food truck to the largest suitcase of cash, goes straight to them. For years the Israelis had warned the US, UN, and others that UNRWA in Gaza was part of Hamas’s network and for years the Americans and Europeans continued to throw money at them anyway. Even after up to a dozen UNRWA employees were found to have taken part in the October 7 massacres, support to UNRWA from the British government and others continued. It seemed that these governments didn’t care where the money went in Gaza, just so long as they kept sending it.

If these leaders had simply been corrupt, that might have been one thing—and the oldest story imaginable. And it is true that every dollar they stole was money that could have been used to actually improve the lives of Palestinians. Instead of buying weapons, building tunnels for terrorists, and living the high life in Doha they might have actually created the Singapore on the Mediterranean that so many people hoped for when Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005. Yet while they stole money on an international scale, Gaza until 2023 was not what the Hamas spokespeople abroad said it was. For years the journalist Tom Gross updated an online list of the luxuries and attractions available to people in Gaza. Even in 2010, while Western media talked about a place that constituted one great humanitarian catastrophe, Gaza boasted fancy restaurants, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and shopping malls. As even the Lonely Planet guidebook noted, at the Roots Club in Gaza you could “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu.” Hamas very much ran things their own way, for instance on one occasion burning to the ground a UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children, and threatening the UN staff with murder because it was deemed “un-Islamic.” But still the living standards in Gaza were high for the region.

When the Israelis pointed out that UNRWA was teaching young Gazans not to aspire to a better life but instead to see killing the “Zionists” as the highest value in life, the Western taxpayers kept paying them money anyway. When the Israelis pointed out that food and every other provision was being diverted by Hamas for their own means, the Western taxpayers continued to pour their money in still. And when the world was told that the Israelis were somehow starving the booming population of Gaza all the time, the Israelis knew that the people inside Gaza were preparing for something else.

When people think of a tunnel network many think of small scurry-holes. In fact, besides being longer than the entire London Underground, the network was also much more elaborate. In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6,000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals, and other nonmilitary buildings. Like storing weapons in such places, this is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to preclude an army hiding military infrastructure in civilian buildings. Doing such a thing obviously puts civilians at risk. But this was one of Hamas’s tools of war. Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas always had a stated aim of using them as human shields. They knew that no country would be able to tolerate the buildup of rockets and other military infrastructure to be used against it, but they also knew that whenever Israel targeted a “civilian” facility in which Hamas had put its infrastructure, the world would condemn Israel.

From very early in the conflict he and his team had worked out where to search whenever they entered a civilian house. If they were looking for weapons, rockets, or tunnel entrances they no longer searched the main rooms, the kitchens, or the parents’ bedroom. They now went straight to the children’s bedrooms, since that was where tunnel entrances and weapons were generally located—including under kids’ cots. While Israeli families built safe rooms to protect their children from rockets, these Gazan families actually used their families to protect their rockets.

It was the same in every UN school they went into. And every mosque and place of worship. While Hamas was claiming their members were devout Muslims, they had no problem at all putting tunnel entrances and hiding large stores of weaponry—again against every rule of war—inside Gaza’s mosques. Whether schools, hospitals, or mosques, Hamas’s cynical strategy turned out to work. If they could hide their armory in civilian buildings, then whenever the IDF even searched such a building Hamas could rely on the world condemning Israel for such a flagrant breach of etiquette.

But the international condemnation over what Israel was and was not doing grew in part because the only casualty figures that were used came from the Gazan Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas government. If the highest Hamas casualty figures that were lapped up by the international press were true, then by the end of the first year of the war, the casualty rate inside Gaza was some 42,000 people. Hamas simultaneously claimed that such numbers consisted entirely of civilian casualties while frequently posting about the “martyrs” of their movement who had been killed in battle with the IDF. If the Hamas figures were true and the Israeli figures for Hamas operatives killed in Gaza are accurate, then at the very most this would mean a civilian-to-terrorist death toll of one-to-one. That is a terrible figure, to be sure, but it would also be the lowest civilian death toll

per enemy combatant in military history. Both the British and American armed forces have in recent years operated on a rough estimate of one enemy combatant killed for every three to four civilian deaths. Until the Gaza war this was regarded as a low level of civilian casualties in a heavily built-up conflict zone. But when ISIS was expelled from Mosul, or even when the Taliban and al-Qaeda were in Afghanistan, there were no serious accusations that these ratios counted as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or a “war crime.”

Judith Butler and other “gender theorists” even came up with a term, pinkwashing, to describe anyone who even pointed out that Israel has equal rights for gay people. This allowed people like Butler (who identified as lesbian before identifying as nonbinary) to try to rationalize why they had openly landed on the side of people who would kill them if they actually lived under the governance of the groups they were supporting.

The fact that people like her and Western organizations such as “Queers for Palestine” can support groups that would kill them is often described as “cognitive dissonance,” but that is not accurate. Such groups are not “confused.” They are simply betraying a completely different agenda. For them the most important thing is to support the revolutionary left and the overthrow of Western liberal democracy. Supporting armed Islamic movements that rape and murder and execute is a necessary condition to achieve this goal. This could, at best, be described as psychotic. But it is telling how effective this thinking has been, and how ardent they have been in pushing away every argument and fact that runs against their campaign: to make reality a footnote in their far more important ideological struggle. Watching Western would-be revolutionaries do this to everything involving Israel is like watching someone playing chess and trying to cut off any move their opponent can make. Every fact can be dismissed. When it comes to Israel the difference between “equal rights” and “hanging gays

from cranes” is waved away as mere Israeli PR. Notice the difference between living and being hanged and you will be accused of “pinkwashing.” Point out that Israel is a liberal democracy with all the benefits and complexities that that entails and you will be told that you are excusing “genocide.” Notice that Israel is a pluralistic, multiracial, and multicultural society and you will be accused of being an apologist for “apartheid.” It is a game set up for one side to lose.

In Kagan’s view Europe had even decided to draw down its defense spending because, in the most generous interpretation, they genuinely saw war as something that was no longer possible. A more cynical explanation was that European governments believed they could outsource their defense—including their defense spending—to the United States. In Kagan’s view, America was, by contrast, fated to be stuck in history. The world’s superpower was not able to live in this Kantian peace or even dream these Kantian dreams. The US was destined to stay in a Hobbesian world in which might still mattered, and in which power needed to be exerted, not least because if it wasn’t exerted by America it would be exerted by one of its rivals or enemies.

Unfortunately for them, young Israelis do not have the luxury of deciding whether they like war or develop grand ideas such as “war doesn’t solve anything.” But that makes them unusual among young Westerners today. None of this is theoretical and none of it has to be imagined. Time and again in the months after October 7 I was struck by the young Israelis who went about work that their contemporaries in the West could never imagine.

Within a year of the October 7 attacks, an emerita professor at Harvard, Ruth Wisse, made a point that was so searing, nobody else had dared raise it. Israel and Jews around the world had often pointed out that the massacres on October 7 had been the worst atrocity carried out against Jews since the Holocaust. But, Wisse pointed out, saying this puts the emphasis on the Jews—on the victims. Some had the courage to mention this and to note its significance, but what almost nobody had the courage to address was who the people are who had carried out this massacre. If the Jews were the victims of the 7th, then why did nobody want to dwell on just who the anti-Semites and Nazis were this time? Why was there so little concentration on the ideology that drives Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic government in Tehran? Were people not interested? Wisse raised another question: If people recognized the scale of the atrocities of Hamas—atrocities that Hezbollah joined—then why was there such large-scale support in the West not for the people who had suffered the massacre, but instead for the people who had perpetrated it? Some people had compared the outbreak of radicalism from October 2023 to the student protests of 1968. But while the protesters in the 1960s had their wilder aspects, they did not generally take the side of groups who wanted to massacre Jews. Nor were they in the main supporters of Nazism and genocide. What did it mean that on the streets of every major Western city,...

Was this coincidence? Or was it because people are brought up with and educated into a particular ideology? One idea that is widespread across Muslim populations in the West is that Israel is always the aggressor in the region and Palestinians are always the victims. But might it, in fact, be worse than that? The visible dominance of Muslims at the protests in London and other Western cities suggested that this was very much falling along sectarian lines. And perhaps there were reasons for it.

But there was one Nazi leader who managed to leave the inferno of Europe with his head held high. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, distinguished himself in 1941 by actually going to Adolf Hitler and offering the services of his people. It was the Mufti’s view that he and Hitler should be in alliance because they had a natural common enemy—the Jews. Newsreel footage from their meeting shows the Mufti doing a Nazi salute before shaking Hitler’s hand, as well as inspecting Nazi troops. The official record of their meeting shows that Hitler agreed to have no territorial claim on Arab lands so long as the Mufti helped him with the extermination of the Jews in the Middle East. Al-Husseini was only too pleased to oblige and helped to set up a division of Germany’s Waffen SS in his region to clear the Jews from the Middle East. Through his military and political leadership as well as his Arabic tirades on public radio, he repeatedly made it clear that his aim was to kill the Jews.

All this and more had been done under the noses of the United Nations, which at the very same moment was once again demanding a cease-fire. But seeing what they had allowed to go on for the past eighteen years, I wondered what might have happened if the UN had actually done their job. Also, if they were so keen on a cease-fire, could they ever take any responsibility for having overseen the rearmament that allowed Hezbollah to re-start the war?

If all religions and ideologies can produce extremists and fanatics, which they can, then it is not just what they do but also how they are remembered, and whether they are widely venerated, that reveals the deeper truth about the society.

Of course there was no chance that Hamas or any government that protects Hamas would hand over any of the group’s leaders for such a proceeding. But the ICC prosecutor knew that. What the world didn’t immediately realize was that this was a massive overreach in international law. Neither America nor Israel is a signatory to the ICC. Although the court had threatened similar moves against Vladimir Putin

over the war in Ukraine, threatening Netanyahu and Gallant constituted the first time the ICC had dared to threaten the elected leaders of a democracy. What is more, at the time of the announcement Khan had carried out no investigation and gathered no evidence. Still he allowed himself to level these charges and interfere in the workings of a democratic government for the first time, and not over what the relevant ministers had done, but over what Khan claimed they might have done.

It struck me then as it had many times over the previous year, that everything was the wrong way around. Young people at institutions across the West were judging the actions of their contemporaries in Israel. They were throwing slur after slur at them and reigniting every blood libel of the past in a modern guise. Yet it was their contemporaries in Israel who were the ones they should have looked to not as a scapegoat but as an example. Whatever the years ahead hold 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. Finally, I also realized that I had found the answer to a question I had mulled over for almost a quarter of a century. All my adult life I had heard the taunt of the jihadists. “We love death more than you love life.” I had heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments. And it had always seemed to me not just a necrophilic utterance but one that appeared almost impossible to counter. How could anyone overcome a movement—a people—who welcomed death, who gloried in death, who

worshipped death? Was it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West could not possibly win? That is what I feared for many years. Yet this year I saw an answer to it. Of all the soldiers I saw in war, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none take a joy or pleasure in the task they have to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted cannot be taken so. 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 they are willing to fight for it. “Choose life” 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.