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

by Douglas Murray 

Broadside Books 

240 pp., $30.00

Some books provide far more benefit to their authors than to their readers. Douglas Murray’s latest, a tribute to Israel as the bright light of world civilization, is one such example. The author’s long career as a neoconservative apologist, from his role as a director of the Henry Jackson Society in England and his book-length defense of neoconservatism to his repetitious attacks on critics of Israel in the New York Post, indicate that Murray might not have produced his latest book as a dispassionate exercise in scholarship. 

In fact, it is hard to imagine anyone who, after reading this promising entry for the neoconservative Book of the Year Award, would have his mind changed about anything significant. Israel, we are told, is fighting against its Arab enemies in the name of democracy, human rights, or whatever else Murray thinks we should believe. There is therefore no need to consider opposing positions, except to condemn them.

My critique is in no way intended to dismiss the desperate problem Israel faces in the continuing danger of terrorist attacks. But there is a hyperbolic tone that runs through Murray’s book, and his special pleading is not likely to convince anyone who doesn’t already share his convictions. Lest anyone doubt Murray’s passionately communicated message, however, Fox News celebrities, most prominently Greg Gutfeld, have been lately waving his book in front of their viewers. Meanwhile, an entire segment of Fox’s evening news hour has been devoted to hyping Murray’s work. 

Allow me to raise certain questions about the “facts” presented in this book. Is someone’s failure to rally without qualification to the Israeli side in the war with Hamas evidence that one belongs to a “death cult”? Someone taking that position may be right or wrong, but I’m not sure that such a person is necessarily in favor of an “infrastructure of terror.” 

And why must I look at pro-Hamas demonstrations to understand the growing dominance of lunatic leftists in Western societies? Unhinged demonstrators have been running amok in America since I was in graduate school in the mid-1960s. Before American universities began celebrating Hamas terrorists, they were glorifying Communist butchers and Black Panther rapists. The cult of the drug addict and petty thief George Floyd erupted on the scene in 2020 and led to mass violence across American and European cities. That was before our university students and faculty took up the cause of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas official who helped plan the massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and whom the IDF killed in a skirmish in October 2024. 

Contrary to Murray’s depiction, Sinwar was not some inexplicably psychopathic murderer. He was the offspring of Palestinian parents from Ashkelon, in the south of Israel, who were driven from their home; not at all surprisingly, their son grew up in a refugee camp. Sinwar became an Arab nationalist while a university student and thereafter dedicated himself to taking back the land from whence his parents were driven. This biographical background does not excuse Sinwar’s indiscriminate, vicious behavior in planning the massacre of Oct. 7, but the historical situation is far more complex than our embattled narrator suggests. 

Murray also has a way of telling his reader part of a story while neglecting to include information that may introduce inconvenient details. He links the relentless war among Muslims to take back Palestine and expel its Jewish inhabitants to the continuing influence of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was Hitler’s guest in Germany during World War II. Unlike other Nazi war criminals, whom Murray believes received their deserved comeuppance at the Nuremberg Trials, this villain got off entirely free. “Everybody else who had led the way in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews was either dead or in hiding,” Murray writes. “Al-Husseini was the only Nazi leader who returned to his country after the war in triumph and as a hero.”

Although it seems from the evidence that the Mufti approved of the destruction of European Jewry, or of any effort to keep Jews from immigrating to the Muslim Middle East, there is no evidence that he was an active participant in Hitler’s Final Solution. One may note this without being guilty of showering praise on a sinister figure. After the war, al-Husseini was held by the French as a political prisoner, but not as a war criminal. Eventually, the French allowed him to go to Egypt because they mistakenly believed he might become a force for moderation. Contrary to Murray’s assertions, the Grand Mufti never returned to his Palestinian homeland.

Murray is right that, after the war, al-Husseini and other Nazi sympathizers ended up in Egypt, where Arabic copies of Mein Kampf began to circulate in large numbers. But Nazi anti-Semitism was not primarily what fueled anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist activities. Israeli historian Benny Morris documents in his studies of the Palestinian refugee problem that close to 300,000 Palestinians fled from what is now the territory of Israel between 1947 and 1949. Some of these refugees fled before the Israeli Army reached them; others, particularly in the north, were the victims of ethnic cleansing. Most of the refugees and their families, wherever they went—whether to Jordan, Gaza, Egypt, Syria, or Iraq—remained enemies of Israel.

There’s no reason to think the Palestinians, had they won, would have behaved any better than the Israeli military forces; and my guess is they would have dealt with their defeated foe even more ruthlessly. But let’s not forget that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is an essential cause of the strife we have now. We miss that by focusing excessively instead, as Murray does, on the exportation of German Nazi anti-Semitism to the Middle East. 

Murray’s latest book seems to be an emotionally fraught exercise in stream-of-consciousness writing. It offers almost 200 pages of often repetitious invective against those who don’t share Murray’s feelings about Middle Eastern strife or who applaud the Manichean way in which he engages world history. It seems that unlike Americans, Israelis understand how to prepare for war; and this reminds Murray of the efficient, dutiful way in which his family “went away to war in 1914” and “then again in 1939.” On both occasions, they knew that “the fight against tyranny was real,” although as far as I can determine, Murray’s ancestors would have done well not to get themselves killed in the Great War, which was a European civil war between very similar societies. 

One gets the feeling that Murray’s complaint that Americans are “driven mad by war” really describes himself. He is obsessed with fighting (or getting others to fight) those whom he perceives as the enemies of democracy. He makes absolutely no allowance for the fact that most conflicts involve shared responsibility. His treatment of the Russo-Ukrainian war is mostly a diatribe against Putin’s side, which fails to note anything the other side might have done to precipitate this brutal invasion. That may illustrate what distinguishes Murray, a partisan journalist, from someone trying to explain historical situations fairly.

One final observation: Murray’s insistence in his book and during his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast that he is somehow privy to a special understanding of the situation he writes about by virtue of having “gone to Israel,” is poppycock. From all indications, his mind was made up about his subject even before he jumped on a plane headed toward Ben Gurion Airport.

(Correction: The 11^th paragraph of the original version of this book review incorrectly stated that Murray’s ancestors were Australian.)