Hard Truths on Israel, the West, and October 7

Douglas Murray’s vitally important new book:

One of England’s better defenders of the West against its many enemies is the author, journalist and commentator Douglas Murray. A steady stream of books over the years have focused on various aspects of this life and death struggle, including:

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury, 2017)
The Madness of Crowds (Bloomsbury, 2019)
The War on the West (HarperCollins, 2022)
On Democracies and Death Cults (Broadside Books, 2025)

I have already reviewed or discussed some of his earlier volumes, including in this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/07/a-review-of-the-war-on-the-west-by-douglas-murray/

Here I want to focus on his latest volume. I have mentioned it in previous pieces, but it deserves further attention. Subtitled “Israel and the Future of Civilization,” it really is a must read. It cuts through the plethora of lies, falsehoods and half-truths concerning Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. And it is a heart-wrenching look at the diabolical events of October 7, 2023.

Indeed, much of this book involves his own personal observations and assessments based on time spent in this troubled part of the world. So he does not write as a mere outside observer, but as someone who has been there, and has spoken with so many of those directly involved, including survivors of that horrific day.

In his Introduction he explains his passion for this matter: he states that he cares greatly about “the one thriving democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world.” He goes on to say this: “I believe that what Israel stared into that day is a reality we might stare into again at some point soon – and that some of us have already glimpsed.” (xxiii)

That is the sort of level-headed realism that we all need. It WILL happen again, and not just in Israel. Anyone not hiding his head in the sand, or bound by ugly antisemitism, should be aware of the utterly horrific events of that dark day. They are now well-known.

Murray recounts many of the particulars and paints a picture of unmitigated evil. It was a demonic onslaught – there is no other way to describe it. Yet the only thing as bad and reprehensible as this slaughter is the way most Western nations have turned a blind eye to it and actually sided with Hamas against Israel.

That story has also been told so often now, and Murray nicely summarises the madness that this entails. Consider just one aspect of this: the 250 hostages taken that day – a number of whom still languish in hideous conditions today. Writes Murray:

Hamas knew what they were doing in not just killing but also kidnapping Israeli civilians. Part of the social contract in Israeli society – and the Israeli military in particular – is that no person should be left behind. A core tenet of the state is that if one Israeli is caught. Then the government and people will do everything they can, at any price, to get the hostage back. . . . To take even one Israeli hostage is to have an inestimable advantage over the country. To take hundreds of hostages is to have a strategic advantage over Israel that is incalculable. (p. 11)

But all the West did was to give a muted response to the hostage crisis:

Perhaps it took time for the world to realize the scale of what happened, or perhaps it laboured under the belief that the situation between Israel and Hamas was simply “complex”. But there was no campaign like that for the Chibok schoolgirls. Aside from Jewish celebrities and influencers there was no organized campaign to pressure Hamas to release the hostages. Even the fact that people from a range of nationalities had been abducted on the 7th drew a strangely muted response.

 

The abductees included American, British, French, and German citizens. Yet in each of these countries there was minimal political, diplomatic, or social pressure for the release of the kidnapped. The only place where there inevitably was a huge and immediate campaign was inside Israel. (pp. 51-52)

Obviously the secular left, anti-Israel media in the West also played a big role in this. Other conflicts and wars with vastly greater loss of life are barely ever mentioned. The media instead simply kept its eyes zeroed in on Israel, and its supposed ‘war crimes’ and ‘genocide’. The murderous Hamas however is given a free pass.

And of course various UN bodies and “human rights” organisations did exactly the same. Commenting on one report that just took as gospel the death toll numbers that Hamas threw their way, Murray says this:

It ignored the more than 200,000 people killed in Ukraine, the 400,000 people killed in Yemen, the 700,000 people killed in Syria, and the three-quarters of a million people killed in the Tigray war in Ethiopia. None of these conflicts had received the amount of coverage of the Israel-Hamas war….

 

Besides the old adage that “if it’s Jews, it’s news,” in each of these conflicts there was not a ready-made industry of journalists waiting to cover the war as the propaganda wing of Hamas. Qatar, which helps fund and house Hamas, also funds and houses the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera. Its journalists in Gaza turned out not just to be sympathetic to Hamas but actually part of the group. (p. 181)

The mainstream media and these various international bodies were happy to cover up, if not outright lie about, what was really happening in Gaza under Hamas. It has long been a hell-hole with ordinary Gazans the victims – not of Israeli colonialism – but of the deliberate reign of terror by Hamas and other groups.

Yet “nothing had to be this way in Gaza” says Murray. “For almost two decades taxpayers in Europe and North America poured money into Gaza through direct aid and through international aid programmes.” Consider some stark stats and facts:

-“Since 2009 alone, two years after Hamas took full control of Gaza, the US government sent over $400 million there, mainly through the United States Agency for International Development. Between 2021 and 2024 alone, USAID also sent more than $500 million to the Palestinian authorities in Gaza in the West Bank. After 7 October the Biden administration announced a further $100 million in aid to Gaza and the West Bank. Tens of millions of dollars of additional US funds were sent in the preceding decade through a labyrinthine set of government agencies.

-“In 2023 alone, the European Union sent over 100 million euros to Gaza, and according to the Associated Press, between 2014 and 2020 UN agencies sent almost $4.5 billion to Gaza, with funding from Qatar alone from 2012 to 2021 totalling $1.3 billion. Most of the UN funding to Gaza went through UNRWA. In 2021, the US was UNRWA’s largest contributor, with donations of more than $338 million. Germany was the next-biggest donor, with more than $176 million.”

-“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.”

-“In fact, by the start of 2023 war the international community had made every Hamas leader into a billionaire.”

Murray goes on to say this:

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. (pp. 167-169)

Yet the West keeps running with the insane view that Hamas is just some kindly group, simply devoted to helping the Palestinians become a free and prosperous people. Nothing could be further from the truth. And too many governments and media outlets simply parrot hook, line and sinker just what Hamas wants them to believe.

When we have such a high level of lies and cover-ups, we simply are handing the terrorists their wish list on a silver platter. The enemies of Israel that surround this tiny and beleaguered state have made it clear they want to see it eliminated altogether. And when Israel goes, the rest of the West will soon follow if these thugs get their way.

With this reality in mind, the closing paragraphs of Murray’s book are certainly worth sharing:

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 realised 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 necrophiliac 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 that 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 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. (pp. 265-267)

If you care at all about Western civilisation and its fate, along with that of Israel, you need to get this book, read it, and share it with a friend. It is that important.

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