On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, Douglas Murray, Broadside Books, pp. 209, $24 hardcover.
In On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, Douglas Murray argues that Western democracies face an increasingly dire moral and political challenge in confronting extremist movements that reject liberal values while exploiting the openness of democratic societies. Murray frames Israel and the war that began on Oct. 7, 2023 against Hamas as a test case for how democracies should respond to nihilistic violence, in which Western hesitation or moral confusion enables extremist groups to thrive. Murray also addresses related questions—such as how democratic states can defend themselves without abandoning their own principles, and why public debates about Israel often become symbolic of broader anxieties about cultural confidence and national identity. His book offers a powerful contribution to debates about the future of Western liberalism and the battle—fought mostly via “information war”—to overthrow it.
For Murray, a West unwilling to support Israel’s self-defense will fail to support its own values and borders against similar attacks and thus assist in the victory of movements that glorify death. “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.” These Western youth did so in support of jihadists who proclaim, “We love death more than you love life.” (196)
Murray, who spent seven months in Israel and made several trips to Gaza during the height of hostilities, does a thorough job of describing Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attack that killed around 1,200 people and resulted in 250 held hostage in Gaza. Murray’s reportage describes Hamas’s tactics of embedding among civilians and Israel’s efforts to limit civilian casualties as it endeavored to eliminate Hamas and rescue hostages.
After about a year, the war’s dynamic shifted. Despite pauses for hostage deals and U.S. pressure to withdraw, Israel continued a slow, grinding campaign that killed a large share of Hamas forces, severed its supply lines from Egypt, and eliminated Yahya Sinwar and much of the group’s senior leadership.
Israel also struck decisively at Hezbollah to its north. With the use of innovative military tactics, Israel managed to destroy much of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal, dismantle its fortified positions in southern Lebanon, and kill Hassan Nasrallah and other top leaders. A frustrated Iran launched two massive but largely ineffective missile attacks on Israel—actions that preceded Israel’s later two-week offensive that crippled Iran’s air defenses, missile infrastructure, and, with U.S. help, significantly set back its nuclear program.
Israel’s success on the battlefield did not meet with international approval. Instead, there was global condemnation and increasingly shrill accusations of genocide and mass starvation. In answer to these accusations, Murray cites John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, and tallies up the numbers. Spencer reported that “the IDF had implemented more precautions to prevent civilian deaths than any military in history—far beyond what international law requires.” (135) While there is no widespread agreement on casualty numbers from the war, Murray reports that the Hamas-run “Gaza Health Ministry” claimed 42,000 deaths after one year (Hamas does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths). When this is joined to Israel’s estimate of Hamas combatants killed (around 20,000), the resulting ratio of civilians to combatants killed comes to about 1:1. By comparison, the U.S. and Britain typically had ratios of 3:1 or 4:1 in dense urban combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Murray’s book is infused with frustration with what he sees as the international community’s failure to recognize a clear moral asymmetry between Israel and its adversaries. He portrays Israel as a democratic state that seeks coexistence and aims to limit harm to civilians. By contrast, he sees Hamas, Hezbollah, and other elements of the Iranian-backed “ring of fire” as movements guided by an extremism that glorifies civilian sacrifice in pursuit of broader political or religious goals. Murray cites statements from Hamas leaders—including Yahya Sinwar’s reference to civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices” (132)—to explain why these groups strategically embed military assets within civilian areas and then leverage the resulting casualties to generate international criticism of Israel. (127)
Murray argues that these differences in goals and strategies are known to global observers whose slavish commitments to post-colonial ideology and realpolitik necessitates a regime of double standards they apply to the conflict. He contends that Israel is frequently judged by unusually strict expectations—particularly with respect to civilian deaths—while the actions of its adversaries receive comparatively less scrutiny or are contextualized in ways that diminish their agency.
According to Murray, this dynamic is not accidental but part of a broader information struggle in which local actors are supported by international networks of sympathizers on both the far left and within radical Islamist movements. He claims that similar rhetorical patterns appear in debates about the democratic West more broadly, where criticisms of liberal democracies render authoritarian or extremist groups or regimes more attractive.
One blatant double standard is the one used to assess the goals of the combatants. Israel is accused of being a racist apartheid state, of being colonialist and imperialist. But, while Israel extends equal rights to all of its citizens and has repeatedly been willing to accept Palestine as a twenty-second Arab state, its enemies have mostly refused to accept Israel’s existence and long ago expelled their own Jewish populations. For Murray, focusing on Palestine and Palestinians is a way of cropping the picture to conceal the fact that Palestinian Arabs are the figurehead of a regional and global coalition of extremists who seek Israel’s destruction rather than Palestinian Arab statehood.
The Arab countries that repeatedly invaded Israel and sought to steal the land they 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.” (114)
Israel’s Sunni Islamist enemies, now led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey, and her Shia Islamist enemies, led by Iran, continue to pursue a global caliphate to this day.
Murray argues that the information war against Israel waged by the far left-Islamist (“red-green”) coalition has become a central front in the larger internal fight for the ideological soul of the West, a fight often played out on America’s elite college campuses.
At elite universities in the U.S., Murray describes whole-of-institution efforts to denigrate Israel: professors provided ideological leadership; organized, externally-financed extremists often broke the law and violated codes of conduct; and university bosses often did little or nothing and sometimes offered support. Murray notes the “top-down” ideological leadership of professors on October 7 and in the days after, posting in support of the massacre: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state,” “Zionism is … a genocidal disease,” The 10/7 massacre was “exhilarating.” (88-9) Murray describes the activists’ “revolutionary cosplay,” in which destroying Israel and killing its Jews was cast as the latest iteration of the glorious civil rights and antiwar protest tradition, only this time adopting “the slogans and struggles of the most extreme Palestinian groups,” (101) and harassing and intimidating Jews and other “Zionists.”
Administrators typically tolerated the rule-breaking and often went on to negotiate collusive agreements, which endorsed or empathized with activists’ viewpoints and made institutional commitments to propagate them in future hires and events. Murray quotes from the infamous House of Representatives hearing, in which Harvard, MIT, and UPenn bosses, when asked whether “calls on their campus for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying and harassment,” responded that it was “context-dependent” (96-7)—implicitly, given their inaction, taking the position that their codes of conduct had so far not been violated.
The American left’s war on Israel uses institutional power and privilege in now-familiar ways—promulgating an ideological party line from the universities and echoing it in mass and social media. Demonizing slogans such as “From the River to the Sea” and charges of “genocide” are used as “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 … It is intended to beat another party into submission. (102)
Polling shows this method to be disturbingly effective. Among the university-age cohort, support for Israel’s destruction now exceeds already-high levels of hatred for America and the West.
Murray’s account is both diagnosis and warning. The October 7 attacks and the war that followed exposed not only Israel’s deadly predicament but also the West’s fading moral confidence. He argues that a society that cannot distinguish a democracy defending its citizens from movements that glorify death has lost faith in its own principles. In the fight over Israel, Murray sees a stark moral choice: whether the West will uphold truth, freedom, and human dignity or yield to ideologies that glorify barbarism. Murray maintains that such clarity is essential if the West is to relearn how to defend its own values and institutions.
Shale Horowitz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He last appeared in AQ in the fall of 2024 with “Harmful Therapy for Children and the Seduction of Parents,” a review of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
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