Still a “Light to the Nations”

In On Democracies and Death Cults, Douglas Murray presents himself in the first instance as a seasoned journalist, with extensive experience in Israel and other hot spots in the world; then as a pointer-out-of-dots that need to be connected, and that point to overlapping networks of not just anti-Israel but anti-Western civilization agents and ideologies; and finally, as a meditator on the reality and mysteries of war, both in general and between Israel and Hamas. Along with life’s fragility, war underscores the preciousness of life, while it also reveals the full spectrum of human character, from heroic to demonic; in the instant case of Israel and Hamas, it also reveals who loves life and who loves death. In Murray’s judgment, in its life-and-death battle with Hamas, Israel is once again a light to the nations, letting those who have eyes to see grasp the true nature of the enemies not just of Israel but of the democratic West.

The Journalist

Having spent considerable time in Israel since the early 2000s, as soon as he could, Murray went to Israel to find out and give “witness” to what happened on October 7, 2023, to Israel and Israelis. Past experience had taught him that soon the world’s attention would turn from the horrific scene and its victims and perpetrators to “concerns” about Israel’s possibly “disproportionate” response. In a steady stream of vignettes drawn from eyewitnesses, relatives of the murdered, traumatized survivors, and civilian and military responders, he brings home the surprise, the terror, and the god awfulness of the premeditated attacks, along with multiple acts of heroism on the part of Israelis (a category that includes Christians, Muslims, and Druze) to save life. Through these petites histoires, he portrays a country that was caught off guard, complacent about its security and intelligence capabilities, but one that displayed remarkable heroism in the face of surprise and horror. In particular, he points to young Israelis, male and female, in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), who are mature beyond their years.  For them, patriotism, duty, and sacrifice are living realities.

More broadly, Murray emphasizes that the social contract that binds Israelis — the state will do everything possible to win back hostages, even engaging in disproportionate exchanges of large numbers of known terrorists for a handful of innocent hostages —  is at once a national badge of honor, a factor of social cohesion, and a vulnerability for which it has paid dearly more than once.  The “mastermind” of the October 7th attacks, Yahya Sinwar, was himself a returned terrorist. Adding insult to injury, his life had been saved while he was in prison by the detection and then removal of a brain tumor by Israeli doctors.  

In his case, however, a mite of justice was exacted in a denouement that Murray presents in telling detail. He is what Charles Péguy called un cas eminent, a paradigmatic case.  On the run after Israel entered Gaza to destroy Hamas’s leadership and infrastructure and to rescue hostages and trying to escape from an IDF battalion that had spotted him, he was finally shot dead by “a nineteen-year-old serving his first year in the army.” As such, he “would not even have been in uniform when the [Oct 7th] atrocity was carried out.”  Thus, Murray comments, “there was no way that Sinwar or anyone else could have known that the war he started produced a new generation of fighters – including the young man who would finally part him from this life.”  

As for the place where he met his end, Rafah, “the city was utterly destroyed,” and Murray imagines him looking out on the ruin to which his decision to attack Israel and butcher Israelis had led. Completing the story, however, are “intercepted messages” from Sinwar, where he distinguishes Hamas militants, who have the right to be sheltered in underground tunnels, from ordinary civilians, who are shields and sheep for the slaughter, their chief value as corpses to sway international opinion. Sinwar embodied and led a death cult, whose real concern was not the Palestinian people, but to eradicate an Israel whose cardinal sin is to exist.

Tunnels Everywhere

Because of ongoing military operations, Murray’s access to the Palestinian side was much more restricted than to Israel, but there too he provides telling vignettes, including the one just recounted. The active reader can place these in various categories and then bring them together to construct a composite picture from which to draw lessons.  For example, the image of “innocent Palestinian civilians” runs up against a number of counter facts.

A “large number” of civilians, “women and men,” accompanied and followed Hamas militants into Israel on Oct. 7th to join in the looting and the capture of hostages, often serving as scouts for the militants, and at least once lynching a poor victim they had discovered. On a more granular level, Murray cites at length a facetime exchange between a Hamas terrorist slaughtering Israelis (“I killed ten! I killed ten!”) and then calling his exultant mother, father, and brother, who thank Allah and commend him for his deeds. Videos of “ordinary” Palestinians wildly celebrating the arrival of Israeli hostages, including beaten and raped women, into Gaza provide another glimpse into the population. While there is no doubt that Hamas terrorizes and tyrannizes the Palestinian population, vignettes like these indicate that the simple moral calculus – Hamas, bad, Palestinians, good and innocent – is not the whole truth. This considerably complicates the conduct of war as well.  

Several of the vignettes involve the ubiquitousness of tunnels in Gaza, which bring home a fundamental truth about Hamas and the situation Israel confronted. In addition to siphoning off billions to enrich themselves, Hamas’s leadership spent billions to prepare the infrastructure to destroy Israel rather than to build up Gaza. (In fact, “they had immiserated their people.”) Moreover, Hamas “deliberately placed its military infrastructure within and amid civilian buildings – including mosques, schools, homes, and hospitals.” Add to that that others (Iran, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) positively assisted them and others (the UN and Egypt) did so by turning a blind eye to what Hamas was doing, and one begins to grasp the adversarial situation Israel lived with for two decades before Oct. 7.

Trusting too much in its intelligence and missile defense, Israel agreed to a Faustian bargain where it would “accept” regular rocket attacks from the south (Gaza) and the north (Lebanon) and retaliate to stop the attacks or to search for hostages, but no more. Oct. 7th put the lie to that indefensible strategy. Hamas and its infrastructure delendae sunt (“must be destroyed,” to employ the famous phrase of Cato the Elder). In addition to freeing Israel from a genocidal enemy, this could provide an opening for the Palestinian people to chart a new path forward.

The Scorecard on the Conduct of War

Murray forthrightly addresses many of the charges and concerns about Israel’s conduct of the war, what just war theory calls the jus in bello. His basic points are 1) that Israel amply forewarns the civilian population before entering the next war zone, and provides safe passage out, often at real risk to its soldiers: war is hell and “pitiful” disruptions there must be, but Israel does its best to minimize civilian casualties by forewarnings. This, of course, also gives Hamas time to prepare or to escape. 2) The numbers of civilian casualties are wildly inflated (and demonstrably so) by Hamas and sympathetic Western media. 3) The actual military-to-civilian casualty ratio is considerably smaller than in comparable instances of urban warfare, which is a testimony to the IDF’s remarkable scrupulousness. 4) The IDF has acknowledged any number of grief worthy misdeeds and mistakes on the part of its soldiers, mistakes which also include “friendly fire” deaths. War is hell on both, or all, parties.

In the final analysis, however, Hamas is morally responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties, in part because it uses them as shields and statistics in a propaganda war, in part by denying them as much as it can exit from declared war zones.  All this is contrary to international law, to basic morality, and the norms of civilized warfare. In these ways, too, Hamas shows itself to be a barbaric death cult, fueled by a combination of rabid antisemitism and an Islamist notion of martyrdom.

Dots to be Connected

Having attended to the status quo ante of Oct. 7th, to the nature and works of Hamas, and to Israel’s decision to eradicate its mortal foe, and its conduct so far, Murray steps back to survey the broader scene. He continues to look through the lens of Israel’s “foes.” These provide “dots” that need to be connected.

He begins with Iran and its proxies (chief among them Hezbollah & Hamas): “But it was the death cults of Tehran that made millions of people live like this in Israel, and as a consequence of that, in Lebanon and Gaza too.” While constantly railing against “the Great Satan” (America) and “the little Satan” (Israel) as “colonial powers,” Iran is itself an imperial power bent on regional hegemony. As the two epithets indicate, it has a decided idea of its primary enemies. Murray wants too-often unheeding Westerners to take the declarations seriously.

He then broadens his view to take in the venomous antisemitism which is found throughout the Arab Muslim Middle East and is exported into the West in ways difficult to track but undeniable in their reality and tendency. Once again employing the Péguyan method, he tells the story of the Hitler-collaborator, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974), warmly embraced by Arab Muslims even after the defeat of the Third Reich. He was an Ur-source of Middle Eastern antisemitism. More contemporaneously, travel has given Murray insight into “the mindset of the region.” “Whenever I have traveled in the Arab and Muslim worlds, I have always been struck by this obsession with Israel and the Jews.” Book stores continue to stock Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Why is this widespread antisemitism important to us Westerners? With Judaism as one of the two “roots” of Western civilization (as Leo Strauss put it), antisemitism strikes at the heart of our civilization. In allowing Middle Eastern Muslims affected with this virus into our democracies, to some imponderable but real extent we import that deadly virus into our already weakened civilization.

Nor is this a matter of speculation. “In the past fifteen years alone America and Europe had seen a spate of attacks on Jewish sites. Not Israeli sites, or “Zionist” sites, but Jewish sites.”   As for the “early celebrations” of Hamas and the massacre of Israelis that took place in Murray’s home country, the UK, “the vast majority of the participants were British Muslims”. The fact that many of these did not come from the Arab Middle East increases the problem, pointing to the antisemitism indigenous to Islam, and to the deeper problem that Islam construes the human world in terms of a dichotomy between “the house of submission” and “the house of warfare”. Muslims as such necessarily bring that division and that attitude to Western host countries, which are incompatible with Western civilization.

The umma is a human association that differs in kind and is fundamentally antagonistic to the Jewish articulation of “Israel and the nations,” the Christian articulation of a universal humanity beloved by the Father-Creator and calling its errant children into the bosom of His Son’s Body, the Church, and the liberal articulation of humanity as composed of individuals possessing rights.

The Left and Settler Colonialism

Murray then turns in another direction and connects anti-Israel antisemitism with the international Left. Here, too, he employs the method of eminent cases, in this case, two figures:  Wilfried Böse and Yassar Arafat, the former a leader of “the postwar German left,” the latter the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from 1969 until he died in 2004. The story Murray tells can be quickly summarized. The international Left initially favored Israel, born as it was with major socialist commitments. “Time spent working on a kibbutz in Israel was almost a rite of passage for leftists in those days.” But after its victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars showed that Israel was no weakling to put in the camp of the “oppressed,” it turned to Arafat and the PLO, and started championing a new underdog, “the Palestinians.” Here began a new trope: Israelis are the “new Nazis,” with all the delegitimization the characterization entails.

In due course, these developments were connected to the most recent Leftist ideology, settler colonialism, which, as post-Oct 7th demonstrations indicate, has a significant presence in elite colleges and universities, among teachers, students, and DEI administrators. During these demonstrations and protests, Murray took receipts and reprints several. I’ll quote two.

“As the massacre was going on and news of civilians being murdered was already out, Yale University professor Zareena Grewal issued a tweet saying, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Among the first out of the gate to comment, one sees the intellectual grid within which events are placed and judged in Grewal's terminology: the ideology of settler colonialism. In its Manichean optic, judgment “is not hard.”

And representing students of this ilk, “a range of student groups at Harvard University … issued a joint statement: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The blank check given to Hamas is breathtaking. This, too, is the way that ideology speaks.

A bit disappointingly, Murray does not investigate this ideology, perhaps taking its falsity for granted. Others, happily, have. Adam Kirsch, himself galvanized by the anti-Israel protests that sprung up immediately and that immediately condemned the victims, not the perpetrators, took it upon himself to study the underlying ideology and published an incisive dissection On Settler Colonialism.  

Along with Muslim antisemitism, indigenous to the religion, widespread in the region, and exported with immigrant communities, settler colonialism is an important piece – a major “Dot” – of Murray’s litany of foes of Israel and Western democracies. In the wider perspective, Israel is “just” the first target of attack, with other Western democracies logically to follow. Hence his credo:

I believe that what Israel stared into that day is a reality we might all stare into again at some point soon – and that some of us have already glimpsed.

Western Democracies

This prospect causes him to cast his gaze on the democratic West and to wonder about its capacity for dealing with such prospects and threats. He is not very sanguine. He sees a West that is relativistic, so stark contrasts and real battles between good and evil are denied a priori; and he sees a West that is effectively pacifist, so the reality of war and the legitimacy and necessity of applying the categories of nobility and justice to it are dismissed as “warmongering”. To these broad characterizations, the journalist Murray adds a tendency on the part of the legacy media to side with opponents of the West and to create Narratives that serve as blinders to entire populations.  

Given its existential situation and its mission and character, none of this is an option for Israel. Truth is a matter of life-or-death, evil is real, and war conducted for life is the antithesis of war conducted for death. By its very existence and its resolute response to genocidal enemies, it puts the lie to the pacifists and relativists, and the haters of Western civilization, among us. While being a sign of contradiction, it is also a light to the nations, at least for those who have eyes to see.

Paul Seaton, an independent scholar, is the translator of The Religion of Humanity (St. Augustine Press) and the author of Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us (St. Augustine Press).