On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West
Douglas Murray
May 2025
Douglas Murray’s latest book 
arrives with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Framed as a “harrowing journey” through the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Murray weaponises visceral atrocity testimonies to construct a Manichean fantasy: Israel as the last bastion of Western enlightenment battling a Palestinian “death cult” in thrall to nihilistic evil. For Murray, this conflict isn’t geopolitical—it’s metaphysical. Yet as global sympathy for Israel hemorrhages, particularly among the young and the Global South, Murray’s polemic feels less like clarion call and more like a eulogy for a dying narrative.
Moral Clarity as Intellectual Laziness
Murray’s thesis rests on four pillars. It begins with another iteration of the White Man’s Burden, an argument that pits Civilisation against Barbarism. For Murray, Israel embodies “…fundamental Western values—capitalism, individual rights, democracy, and reason.” Hamas, by contrast, “…openly proclaims its love of death over life.” This binary excludes all nuance: Palestinian resistance is stripped of historical context and reduced to pathological evil.
We then have the “Flare” of October 7: Murray writes that the attacks revealed the conflict’s “true nature.” Murray insists this “flare” illuminates Israel’s victimhood and Hamas’s genocidal intent, dismissing decades of occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion as irrelevant. For this faux-intellectual, time began on this fateful day and all subsequent actions by the Occupation are justified by it.
Not only resistance movements but all critiques of Israel are merely repackaged Jew-hatred. Anti-semitism is at the heart of what the outrage is about, not Israel’s utter depravity and the slaughter of tens of thousands of children. Using Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s maxim—“Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of”—Murray pathologises solidarity with Palestinians as Western “self-loathing”.
His final argument whitewashes the West’s complicity, arguing that campus protests and calls for ceasefire are not moral dissent but active enablement of a “death cult” that threatens all liberal democracies.
The Fatal Omissions: Why Murray’s Framework Crumbles
Murray’s “flare” illuminates only what he wishes to see. It’s a flare that keeps history in the dark; the Nakba? The 56-year occupation? The blockade of Gaza? Murray dismisses these as “excuses” for Hamas’s savagery. When he briefly addresses apartheid accusations, he cites Arab Israelis in the Knesset while ignoring Amnesty International’s meticulously documented 280-page report on Israel’s actual two-tiered system [1]. His claim that Palestinians “have done exceptionally well” under Israeli rule is grotesque amid West Bank home demolitions and Gaza’s rubble.
His ‘flare’ disfigures the Palestinians: for Murray, Gazans are either Hamas fanatics or dupes. Murray visits Israeli prisons housing October 7 attackers but refuses to speak with them, fearing their humanity might “…unsettle his conviction that evil is something that just descends on the world”. He absolves Israel of responsibility for 50,000+ child deaths alone [2], insisting “…the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is all down to Hamas. All of it”. The atrocious logic has been a key feature of Hasbara Israeli bots that have plagued social media posts that showed even a shred of solidarity towards Palestinian suffering. It’s a line of thinking that is never to be applied to Israelis and Westerners voting and supporting convicted war criminals, but only to Palestinians to justify collective punishment on a hapless population.
However, this type of mud slinging has not helped Israelis win the court of public opinion and leads Murray to misdiagnose Zionism’s crisis: Murray blames Israel’s nosediving global support on Western “self-hatred” and “ignorance.” He ignores the elephant in the room: Israel’s own actions. The far-right government’s rejection of Palestinian liberation, ministers advocating ethnic cleansing, and IDF sniper videos mocking dead Palestinians aren’t Hamas propaganda—they’re self-inflicted wounds. Even Murray admits to the “…unmistakable, nauseating stench of hubris” in Israel’s pre-October 7 security posture.
The Irony: Murray Embodies the Hubris Accelerating Zionism’s Decline
Murray’s worldview is not just simplistic—it’s strategically suicidal for Israel. While Murray scorns campus protesters as “Nazis,” polls show that the majority of young Americans want to see Israel ‘ended’ and dismantled as an apartheid state [3]. His sneer that they “…confuse colonialism with coffee shops” ignores how Israel’s own demographic destiny—20% Arab citizens demanding equality, ultra-Orthodox Jews rejecting Zionism—mocks his democracy-vs-cult binary. Trump’s attempt to ban the enrolment of international students at Harvard University to chill protest movements across the US is indicative of the desperation to claw back the narrative for Zionism. [4]
When Murray mocks Egypt’s “6th October Bridge” commemorating the 1973 war as delusional, he misses the point: For billions, Palestine is Vietnam or South Africa redux. Israel’s US-backed impunity (F-35s, $3.8B/year aid) frames it as Goliath, not David. Murray does his best to paint Israel as the first line of defence for the West: a fledgling outpost of civilisation surrounded by countless hordes and orcs of the Muslim world — when it is in fact a rabidly barbaric, highly-armed, highly-funded nuclear state that has wreaked chaos across the Middle East for nearly eight decades. The credit Israel gained from abusing the memories of the holocaust has run its course as a live-streamed holocaust in Gaza takes its place for over 600 days.
The resistance movements thrive not because Palestinians “love death,” but because Israel’s occupation created despair—and Hamas offers resistance. As one critic notes, if Jews stole land from Buddhists or Hindus, identical movements would arise. Murray’s solution—annihilation of Hamas—ignores that radicalism flourishes in ruins.
Conclusion: The Mirror Murray Refuses to Face
On Democracies and Death Cults is less a book than a funhouse mirror. Murray accuses protesters of projecting Western guilt onto Israel, yet his own narrative projects Israel’s existential fears onto a “civilizational war.” The tragedy? Israel is fighting for survival—but not against cartoonish barbarians. It’s fighting history, demography, and its own erosion of democratic ideals. By reducing Palestinians to a “death cult,” Murray doesn’t defend Zionism. He buries it.
As Western governments distance themselves from Netanyahu and the ICJ investigates genocide allegations, Murray’s moral certitude feels like the last gasp of a vanishing era. The flare he brandishes illuminates only this: Israel cannot bomb its way to legitimacy. Until it confronts the occupation, the world will keep choosing Palestine—not out of hatred for Jews, but out of solidarity with the severely oppressed. Murray’s book, for all its thunder, is the sound of an unheeded warning.
[1] Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians cruel system of domination and crime against humanity, Amnesty International, 2022, MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf
[2] ‘Unimaginable horrors’: more than 50,000 children reportedly killed or injured in the Gaza Strip
[3] Majority of young Americans feel Israel should ‘be ended,’ given to Hamas, poll shows
