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

by Douglas Murray

Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing. The morning of October 7, 2023, was just such a moment. That morning air-raid sirens went off all across Israel. This was no unusual thing in itself. Certainly not in the south of the country that had for seventeen years been within rocket range of Hamas. Nor in the north of the country into which Hezbollah had fired rockets since the 1980s. But in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the sirens sounded too. People woke up that Saturday morning to the realization that something very unusual was happening. Soon social media and various messaging platforms began blowing up with people relating the unimaginable. Reports from people in the south suggested that there had been a major terrorist breach from Gaza into Israel. This strip of land had been dominated by the terrorist group Hamas almost immediately after Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005.

Across the south of Israel first responders rushed to the scene and found sights of butchery and chaos. The volunteer group United Hatzalah has volunteers all across Israel. Their citizen members are trained to respond to road crashes and other emergencies. Members of the public call in and a volunteer in the area will get there as soon as possible. That morning, as the head of the group would later tell me in their control room in Jerusalem, their situation screens started to light up with incidents. Indicating the huge map in their control room, Eli Beer told me that thirty years of incidents all combined didn’t add up to an hour of what happened that morning.

Israel is a country with a population of just 9 million people. America is a country of some 333 million people. To put it in perspective, the death toll on October 7 was the equivalent of some 44,400 Americans being killed by terrorists on a single day. Or around fifteen 9/11s. The kidnap toll if it had happened by ratio in the US would have been almost 10,000 Americans taken from their homes as hostages. It would be the equivalent of some 5,000 Canadians being killed in a single day and a thousand taken hostage. Or 8,400 French or British people being slaughtered in a single day and another 1,750 taken hostage.

I was at my home in New York when—like the rest of the world—I started trying to absorb the news. Though not Jewish myself, I had visited Israel many times since the 2006 war. I had friends there, and as the day went on I did what many people around the world did, and tried first to find out if they were all right. The next day I heard news of a major demonstration that was due to take place in Times Square. It had been swiftly organized and hastily publicized. But it was not a protest against the horrors of the previous day. It was not a protest against the terrorists of Hamas. It was instead a protest against the State of Israel and the citizens of the world’s only Jewish state. Hundreds of people were gathered in Times Square that lunchtime. Some came with homemade signs. One headscarf-covered woman was smiling gleefully, waving a sign that said “Zionist nightmares. 10/6/73 Egyptians. 10/7/23 Palestinians. #Long Live Intifada.” As I photographed her with my phone she punched the air and screamed with joy. Another participant held a sign saying “Land Back”—an American movement that seeks to give the land of America and other Western countries over to their “indigenous peoples,” and which is also used as an attack on Israel.

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 the governments of all these countries had been funding the Palestinians in Gaza for years. They had given billions of dollars in foreign aid direct to the Hamas government there, through UN organizations among many others. This money had been used by Hamas’s leaders to either enrich themselves (the group’s leaders became billionaires) or to build the infrastructure of terror inside Gaza that allowed the group to carry out the October 7 attack, steal Israelis, and hold them hostage inside Gaza. With all of this going on, I decided that I should get to Israel as soon as I could. Several things persuaded me. The first was that sight in Times Square. The knowledge that if there was celebration of these attacks in New York, then there would soon be celebration around the globe. A second was a certainty that the scale of the atrocities carried out that day would soon be passed over. Not just because on that day, the 7th, long before the scale of the attack was underst...

I left with an old friend of mine from the British media, a journalist in his seventies who has seen his share of war. It took a long while for either of us to find any words as we walked along the gray, leaf-covered streets of London. Eventually he did manage to say something. “Bastards,” he said. “Bastards,” I agreed. Of course that didn’t do justice to what we had just seen. Nothing could. 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.

as many historians have, that as evil as they were in general, the Nazis attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes.

Consider what the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, said in his speech to his most senior lieutenants in October 1943 as he detailed what the Nazis sought to achieve with the Holocaust: “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. . . . I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. . . . It is,” he said, “a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.” Himmler and his SS were among the most evil people in human history, yet even they had sought to cover over their crimes. Here, in 2023, in the form of Hamas, were people who were boasting of their crimes, were proud of their crimes, and indeed wanted to broadcast their crimes for all the world to see.1

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.

One reason why real-crime documentaries and books are so popular is that we imagine that we might be able to discover the source of someone’s behavior. As if even a mass murderer can in some way be explained. But it seems to me that it is we who are missing something. Evil does exist as a force in the world. Indeed, it is the only explanation for why certain people do certain things. On October 7, 2023, many Israelis stared into the face of pure evil—1,200 of them in the last moments of their lives. People begged; people pleaded and in some cases cried for mercy. But they were murdered anyway. At the same time it seems clear to me that such a force as “good” also exists in the world. As I would soon discover, it was displayed by a bewildering number of people on that same day. The fight between good and evil may seem too Manichean for some. Yet it is they—in their search for endless subtlety and limitless understanding—who are actually missing out on one of the greatest divides of all. Perhaps the only force in the world even greater than evil itself is the great, collected, concentrated evil that is war.

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.

On the one hand there was concern about what an independent Gaza might become. On the other, too many soldiers had spent too many years having to guard Jewish and Palestinian families in the Strip. In highly emotive scenes, many Jews who had lived in Gaza all their lives refused to leave their homes. The Israeli government sent in soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to remove these families and tore them from their houses. The Israeli government knew—and the Palestinian Authority had always made clear—that no Palestinian state could have Jews in it. The one absolutely clear precondition for such a state was that no Jews could exist within its borders.

In 1941 a Nazi-inspired pogrom broke out in Baghdad, Iraq. The Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) massacre targeted Iraqi Jews who had been in the country since the time of the Babylonian empire. Some six hundred Jews were massacred by Iraqi Muslims carrying knives, swords, and guns. A red hand (hamsa) sign was painted on Jewish homes to direct the crowds there. As one survivor told the BBC seven decades later, the crowd shouted “Allah” and “Cutal al yehud” (“Slaughter the Jews”). Hiding in a palm tree, the young Jewish boy watched the crowd set upon the house of his mother’s best friend.

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.

Israel’s neighbors had first tried to snuff the state out at its moment of birth. In 1947, when the United Nations voted to approve the partition plan creating an Israeli state and a Palestinian state, there were any number of directions in which history might have gone. The Arab states could have accepted their neighbor, with the area recently ruled by the British under League of Nations mandate divided up as the UN had suggested along clear, agreed-upon lines. In 1948, when the State of Israel was created, it was perfectly possible that a Palestinian state could have been formed alongside it. But the Arab states saw the very idea of a slither of the land becoming a Jewish state as an affront. Instead of accepting their neighbor, they decided instead to kill it. The moment in 1948 when Israel was formally re-created and war was immediately waged upon it by all of its neighbors would not be the last time in the state’s history when dancing and war followed one after the other. Of course, the Arab states failed in 1948. The Arabs inside Israel whom the Arab states told to leave, promising that they would soon return to their lands with no Jewish oppressor, were not just let down but abandoned, becoming in the process citizens of Jordan, Lebanon, and other surrounding countries. At the same time, Jews were either expelled or encouraged to leave the Arab countries in which they had lived for centuries. From Yemen, Iran, and Iraq to as far afield as Morocco, the native Jews we...

the Hamas government in Gaza were already using the international aid they received to develop an elaborate tunnel network under the Egyptian border and throughout the Gaza Strip. Many of the rockets that were being fired from Gaza into Israel were Katyushas—a rocket system developed by the former Soviet Union that is easy to move around and the launchers for which can be easily 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.

Avida had, by his own admission, always been a man of the left. He had believed in the idea of peace. But now he felt differently. “The enemy has changed,” he said. Even between two enemies “there is a contract: what you can do and what I can do. And the contract was broken. Something changed.” As he saw it, there was nothing Israel could do about Egypt or Lebanon. But the country could choose if they wanted to live beside Gaza. Because the residents of Gaza had changed. “The young people burn us, the others shoot us, and the old ones kidnapped us.” He could see no way in which Israel could live beside Hamas-run Gaza. “We need potatoes. We need peanuts. We need orchards. And we need avocadoes. Until the sea. All the way.” It is hard to say how many people from the community would feel that way now, or would say what Avida did—even in the aftermath of what happened to the community in Be’eri. But as the story came out—of the number of people from this small place who had been killed, injured, or kidnapped—some of the most telling testimonies were from the people who could no longer speak.

There is an old line that Jews everywhere in the world know: wherever they are in the world they should keep a bag packed in case they had to leave. The expulsions of Jews from England in the thirteenth century and from Spain in the fifteenth century left a long memory. The forced flight of Jews from across the rest of the Middle East in and after 1948 created another one. For decades the conversation around Friday-night dinner tables across the diaspora regularly turned to this question, often to the tedium of the younger generation, who thought that their parents were simply paranoid. The conversation from Sephardic Jews who had once lived with Muslim neighbors and been expelled from their countries was especially easy for young Jews in the West to dismiss. These were different times. The situation today is not the same.

“I saw Auschwitz before my eyes,” he told me. “So many dead bodies, many were mutilated.” He looked disillusioned as he spoke. “Our army was caught by surprise that day. I now know what happens to the Jewish people when they are without an army, even for half a day. Women were raped, kids were killed in their cars, families burned, some with body parts, some without. The damage to buildings was like a tornado had passed through.” Nimrod was clear about what it meant for him now. “That day I promised I would be a combat soldier for the rest of my life. I also promised myself that I would tell the story for those that cannot.”

As the evidence on the floors, walls, and doors showed, in house after house these were the places where Ron’s neighbors’ stories ended—with people desperately trying to hold their door handles closed. On one side that morning were the Hamas terrorists. On the other were people, sometimes alone, trying desperately to keep them out. We stood in one of these rooms. What had happened here? It was one of his neighbors who “couldn’t hold the door.” The community found blood on the floor. The army found their bodies on the ground outside the kibbutz.

The house of the Katzir family—where seventy-nine-year-old Rami was found dead inside, his wife, Hanna, kidnapped into Gaza. The house of Adina and Said Moshe, whose safe room door once again had shots fired through it. Inside, the walls were all covered in gunshots. Ron found the body of Said on the floor. His seventy-two-year-old wife was kidnapped into Gaza.

As the weeks went on the need for some kind of care for these young people became increasingly obvious. At any time there are stories that the press in any liberal country can barely cover—not because they are ordered not to cover them, but because to reveal certain things (particularly in wartime) could be so terrible for public morale. When it came to the survivors of the Nova party, there was one story in particular that the Israeli media barely mentioned: in the aftermath of the party a number of the young people who had survived had been sectioned into mental institutions. A number had killed themselves. Others had tried to kill themselves in the hospitals. There was one particular reason why again the media did not like to discuss this. Obviously many of the young people at the Nova party had been on drugs. Obviously most of those drugs are illegal in Israel. But nobody wanted to be seen to be either condoning their use or blaming the victims for having been on them. Health care professionals and therapists I spoke with circled this question often. In time, they said, studies would be made of the drugs that people were on, the effects they had on them, and the way in which some drugs may have helped people to survive while others clearly hampered their chances of survival. 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 no...

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 explained. The mixture of openness and horror, tranquility and terror was too much for the brain.

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.

"Aim of Any War"

In fact, while the Israeli Air Force began carrying out targeted strikes against Hamas positions inside Gaza within a week of the 7th, major ground operations did not begin until the 27th. Shortly after they had begun I sat down in Tel Aviv with a retired IDF general who had been involved in the “conception” and in planning for such an eventuality in Gaza. I asked him why it had taken the IDF such a long time to go in. Would it not have been better to go in immediately and to try to chase after the Hamas terrorists right away? He was adamant that this would have been wrong. He was one of the architects of the plan that was currently unfolding. He said that if they had gone in straightaway they would not have known exactly where they were going and they would have lost many soldiers. The fighting would have been chaotic. He insisted that the IDF needed the weeks after the 7th to get its plan in order, train for the specifics of the operation, and ensure that the response was as clinical and precise as possible.

History gets rewritten all the time. But it gets rewritten especially fast in wartime.

In city after city across the West, Jewish communities and others put up posters of the kidnapped Israelis. And in city after city, they were torn down. In almost no place outside of Israel did these posters stay up. Cities in which a poster of a missing dog would be left up with reverence seemed to have a colossal problem with allowing posters of missing Israelis to be put up in the same way.

Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than “Sieg heil” is a phrase that simply means “Hail victory.” Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an “intifada” against the Jewish state. The First Intifada (1987–93) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005) were among the bloodiest periods in Israel’s history. During those periods Israelis could not board a bus without wondering whether a Palestinian terrorist was going to detonate a suicide vest and turn the vehicle into a charnel house. Terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for years. They often targeted people of the same age as those who spent the aftermath of October 7 calling for just such a thing.

Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than “Sieg heil” is a phrase that simply means “Hail victory.”

In December 2023, just two months after the Hamas massacres, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll asked Americans about their support of Israel. Overall the survey found that 81 percent of respondents backed Israel in its fight against Hamas. The only age demographic in America in which this was not the case was the youngest one. Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds polled, an extraordinary 51 percent said they agreed with the statement that Israel “should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” Fully 60 percent of people in the same age bracket agreed that the attacks of October 7 were justified. When the questions came closer to home, the poll showed that 53 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds believed students should be able to advocate the genocide of the Jews without sanction.34 It is bewildering that these opinions come from the exact same generation of students who were brought up to believe that words are violence and that silence is violence. Yet calls for genocide appear to be just about the only thing that is not violent.

As it happened, a friend of mine at MIT called me after these hearings. I remarked that the college presidents’ replies all sounded like they had been produced by artificial intelligence, so devoid were they of any human feeling. My friend suggested we try something out and ask ChatGPT the same questions that Elise Stefanik had asked the three Ivy League presidents. The results were enlightening. When we asked ChatGPT whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct, the app replied, “Advocating for genocide violates Harvard University’s policies against hate speech and harassment, which are outlined in their code of conduct. They prioritize creating a safe and inclusive environment for all members of the community.” We went on to ask the app, “Are there any contexts in which it is permissible? Yes or no?” ChatGPT replied, “No, advocating for genocide is not permissible in any context at Harvard University or in most ethical frameworks.” Finally we asked, “You say ‘most’ ethical frameworks in which it is permissible?” only for the app to reply, “Advocating for genocide is generally considered unacceptable in nearly all ethical frameworks due to its severe violation of human rights and moral principles.” So there we had it. Artificial though the answers of the college presidents may have sounded, the exercise suggested something rather different, which was not just that artificial intelligence expressed a better knowledge and intelligence than the...

The poster seemed innocuous. “Thank you for masking” was the headline. Beneath it the poster stated: “Disability oppression is intertwined with Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine.” You may have thought, like me, when you read that, Huh? But the explanation continued. It claimed that Israeli officials had refused to distribute Covid vaccines in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is a flat-out lie. The Israeli government handed Covid vaccine distribution over to the Palestinian Authority, partly because it was unclear how many Palestinians would even take a vaccine that was given to them by the Israelis. Still the poster continued, “Covid continues to spread unchecked in Palestine today.” And “Covid is still a global struggle.” But the crux of the matter was that, as the poster concluded, “Disability justice and anti-imperialism includes wearing a mask beyond the encampment.” In other words, when a student wore a Covid face mask they could do so safe in the knowledge that they were not just protecting themselves from being recognized, but were also—in the act of wearing a cloth mask—fighting imperialism in America and the Middle East. Whether it was Covid protocols or the Middle East, it was clear that the Jews were the focus of any and every problem.

There is one question that must at some point be confronted: Why the Jews? It seems to be an eternal question. Why have the Jews been singled out and hated by so many people throughout history? Why are they still hated by so many people today? 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.

"Why have the Jews been singled out and hated by so many people throughout history?"

Anti-Semitism provides a perpetual conundrum for Jews. But the thing that makes it stand out as a challenge for non-Jews is what it says about a society that indulges in it. Because a final aspect of anti-Semitism that is worth dwelling on is what it in fact means. There is enough evidence to say that anti-Semitism does not just pose a challenge to Jews. It also presents a surefire way to diagnose the health of the wider society.

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 “colonialism” yet the whole history of Islam has been a history of colonialism. The only reason the Islamic empire grew was what we would now call “colonialism.”

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.”

In March 2024, two survivors of the Nova party traveled to the UK to talk about their experiences as victims of terrorism and to raise funds for a nonprofit organization they had cofounded to help other victims. The men, brothers Neria and Daniel Sharabi, had saved the lives of a number of other partygoers on the morning of the 7th. Both reportedly suffer from PTSD. They arrived into the UK through Manchester Airport, arriving in a city that might have been able to share their experiences. But as they went through British customs they were detained by immigration authorities. Asked what they were doing in the UK, the brothers said that they were survivors of the October 7 massacres and were here to share their story.

Whenever the Israeli authorities worried about building supplies entering the Strip they were told by the international community that these were vital. But the Israelis knew that much of this material would be used by Hamas to build its tunnel network. And it was.

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.60 In an interview in August 2024 for the YouTube channel SamaQuds, one of the sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh even boasted how wonderful Gaza had been. Abd Al-Salam Haniyeh said on camera: After the 2008–09 [war], the world opened up [to Gaza]. For the first time, a huge thing happened. There were twelve hundred martyrs, and there was destruction. . . . I don’t know . . . The world, Al-Jazeera TV, the media, there was an Arab summit, and people were sympathizing. It was a big deal. The convoys to break the siege started. . . . These convoys started, the tunnels began to be active, and whatever. . . . Then there was the Arab Spring and t...

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.

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.

Al-Husseini was the only Nazi leader who returned to his home country after the war in triumph and as a hero. The bacillus of Nazi anti-Semitism returned, unmoderated, with him.

In the aftermath of the pager and walkie-talkie explosions much of the senior leadership of Hezbollah met up in a building in Beirut. The Israeli Air Force then struck the building they were in, killing much of the leadership. Then, in perhaps the ultimate blow to the organization, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who had rarely appeared in public since the 2006 Lebanon War, thought that Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to speak at the United Nations in New York in late September was an opportunity to meet with Hezbollah’s senior remaining leadership in Beirut. It appeared to have been a double bluff by the Israeli prime minister. He ordered an air strike on Nasrallah and the other Hezbollah leadership just before stepping onstage at the UN. By the end of the day it was confirmed that Nasrallah and most of the rest of the leadership of Hezbollah had been killed. The New York Times would go on to say in their obituary of the terrorist leader that he was “beloved,” “a towering figure,” and a “powerful orator.”78 America’s president acknowledged that the death of a terrorist who had been behind the killing of 241 American service members at the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, was a good thing.79 Emmanuel Macron’s thank-you for bringing the killers of fifty-eight French paratroopers to justice was to impose an arms embargo on Israel.80 Whatever his oratorical skills, Nasrallah and his group had waged war on the West for decades. They had fired rockets at Israel daily...

What can Western liberal societies do in the face of such movements? What can people who value life do in the face of those who worship death? In April 2024, one of the leaders of Hamas confirmed that three of his four sons had been killed in an air strike in Gaza. All four were also Hamas leaders. Their vehicle was hit at a site near Gaza City. It was reported that four of Haniyeh’s grandchildren were traveling in the same vehicle. Haniyeh’s response to this news was caught live on camera while he was with colleagues in a luxury apartment in Doha, Qatar. To watch his reaction to the news you might think he had just heard of a minor alteration in his schedule. He is not upset, he is not even perturbed. If anything he is joyful. In a statement following the news, he thanked Allah for the “honor” bestowed on him for what he referred to as the “martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren.”85 Perhaps it should not be surprising. This was a man who had spent his life extolling the “martyrdom” of Palestinian children. To choose just one example among many, on January 17, 2017, he said, “Children are tools to be used against Israel. We will sacrifice them for the political support of the world.”86 That is, of course, the reaction of a true fanatic, and not the kind who just wants to sacrifice other people’s children, but one who is equally happy to sacrifice his own; someone who sees all Palestinian children as “tools”—including his own. All to use against the Jews. And whi...

Unlike some Western democracies, in Israel military service is not something that other people do. It is something that everybody who can be conscripted does, and means that for people in the war cabinet or the Knesset, war is something that all of them know about, and deaths in battle are not something that only affects other people. I happened to be in Jerusalem just after Gal’s death was reported. I was due to meet a senior figure in the government to get background on the war and the international situation. When I entered the office, the man had his head in his hands. “We’ve just had the news about Gadi Eisenkot’s son.” I could see that he was about to have to call the minister and give his condolences. Through his grief he said simply to me, “I’ve known him since his bar mitzvah.” There seems to me to be all the difference in the world between these two griefs: the grief of a society that mourns for its sons and friends, and a society that is happy to hear of the deaths of their own family and other people’s family.

The Palestinian Authority and their supporters in the West constantly complained about the security fence that the Israelis had put up between the West Bank and the rest of Israel after the Second Intifada. Suicide bombings that had been constant swiftly fell away to nothing. Yet almost no one who subsequently criticized this barrier, including most recently the visiting American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, made any mention of the reason why it had been erected in the first place: to stop the suicide bombings that caused the death and injury of hundreds of Israelis. If the Israelis didn’t put up a barrier, they got suicide bombings. When they did put it up, and such attacks stopped, they were criticized for putting up a barrier. How dare the Israelis search people coming into Israel from the West Bank? Yet here in Ramallah the people who carried out such attacks and planned them were celebrated.

As far as the eye could see were the consequences of the war that Sinwar and Hamas had started. I found the last chair that he had sat in and took a seat. There were bloodstains on the side. From here you could see nothing but destruction. As I sat there I wondered whether, on this rare, maybe single, trip aboveground, Sinwar had recognized how much destruction he had wrought. Not just on the people of Israel—he would have been proud of having done that—but on the Palestinians of Gaza. As he was bleeding out—isolated, abandoned, and defeated—did he spend any of his final moments wondering whether this whole bloody, unnecessary war that he started had been worth it? Perhaps he had decided on this last trip aboveground to abandon the Palestinian people and flee to Egypt. The cash, passports, and IDs (including UN IDs) found on his body certainly suggested as much. Perhaps he thought he could bribe his way out and become free on the other side of the nearby border? Either way it didn’t work, and this wasteland he had created was where his life ended. What did work was the IDF, its commanders, and the politicians who had directed them. Every expert who had kept telling Israel not to go deeper into Gaza, not to enter Rafah or to reach a cease-fire at the earliest opportunity had been proved wrong. Only military pressure had achieved the release of those hostages who had been freed, and only remorseless military pressure had now led to the death of the enemy. If Israel had follo...

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.

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.