Journalist and author Douglas Murray warns that failing to stand behind Israel will haunt the West 

Photos: Moshe Mizrahi and IDF spokesman

“What happened in Be’eri is a warning for what will happen in Europe, again.”

This is how Douglas Murray — a high-profile British journalist, author, and public intellectual — describes the response to October 7 among a growing segment in the West. The associate editor at the British Spectator, the world’s oldest magazine, has seen his profile rise in the US in recent years, and since the war began, he has become one of Israel’s most unapologetic defenders. Murray’s recent appearance on Piers Morgan’s talk show — recorded from the Gaza border — went viral due to the uncompromising moral clarity he wielded in making Israel’s case.

Murray first made a name for himself as a staunch critic of immigration and Islam. London’s Jewish Chronicle recently noted that Murray (who isn’t Jewish) has called for supporters of Hamas in the UK “to be treated exactly the same way as supporters of ISIS,” and quoted his speech at a recent Jewish leadership event: “If you stand in Britain with the Hamas flag, you should not be allowed to be free in Britain. You should have your citizenship withdrawn. You should have your passport withdrawn. You should be deported.”

Murray’s books include Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2005), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), and The War on the West (2022). He has also served as a war correspondent, covering multiple conflicts on site, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Murray sat with Mishpacha magazine for a wide-ranging discussion on Israel’s war against Hamas, the effects of social justice theory (known as “woke-ism” in America), the impact of Muslim immigration on Europe, and American media coverage of the Middle East.

Douglas Murray, you’ve reported on several wars on location over the years, and you embedded with the IDF in Gaza. How does this war compare with the others you’ve seen?

I’ve covered quite a few conflicts my life. I was in Ukraine last year when Ukrainian forces took Kherson and Mykolaiv. I think there’s something especially shocking, in the history of war, in the way in which Hamas behaves.

By which I mean not just the brutality, which is obviously of the kind that everyone in Israel knows, although not necessarily the wider world. But perhaps more personally, it’s also the glee with which they did it, which still hangs heavily on me. You know, the Russians are brutal in conflict. But I think the average Russian soldier doesn’t rejoice in the killing of children. In most armies, that type of person is a psychopath, who you wouldn’t want fighting, because that’s unstable. But this is an army of psychopaths. I know this from watching the raw footage from October 7, at one of the Israeli embassies, before coming here. It’s the thing that everyone who has seen it can’t get out of their head — why are they all so gleeful?

Hamas is an army of psychopaths who appeared to take great glee and joy in murdering Israelis. And everyone in Israel now understands that. Does the wider world understand it? A lot will depend on that question’s answer.

Although the rest of the world reacted with revulsion in the immediate aftermath, since then it seems they’ve reverted to form, scolding Israel about proportionate responses. Is this due to anti-Semitism?

I think it’s several things. I think the rest of the world really doesn’t understand the scale of it.

I don’t think I did, quite, until I was actually here, which is one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to see conflicts with my own eyes, because you always learn something you wouldn’t have learned otherwise. But one of the first things I reported here was just the sheer scale of the attack. I’m struck by the sheer battalion-sized nature of the terrorist attack. I didn’t realize how extraordinarily widely they rampaged.

So until you see this with your own eyes….

I think the scale of the attack is not widely enough understood outside of this country, and that’s perhaps because it just wasn’t reported enough. But also because, of course, the international media, in which I include most of the British and American media, is very keen to move straight on to the question of the Israeli response.

They gave you something like 24 hours of semi-sympathy. And then it’s all Israel’s response.

Many of them argue that they’re trying to be evenhanded.

Well, we know it’s not equal anyway, because there’s a very basic fact of journalism, which is that you can only report on stories you can report on.

It was extremely difficult for journalists to report from inside Syria, from very early on in the conflict, because so many of the jihadist groups wanted to target journalists like they did in Iraq. Almost no Western journalists have been able to report truthfully from inside Gaza. And most news organizations have relied on Palestinian reporters, who are compromised, to a greater or lesser extent by Hamas, in order to operate in Gaza. We all know this. The media is cut off from being able to cover the story of what is happening inside Gaza in real time.

But when Israel responds, well, they can all sit in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem and file reports from a war zone. While ordering a cocktail by the pool. They will say, “from the occupied Palestinian territories,” by which they mean the bar, in the American Colony Hotel.

It’s galling that when they file these reports from inside Israel, they still manage to be so sympathetic to Hamas’s side.

This brings up one of the many other things that I think should be kept in mind. There is this movement that I’ve written a lot about in my books and elsewhere that has erupted in the West in recent years — social justice ideology, which, in America in particular, I think you can see now having an impact on the views of the conflicts in this country.

I wrote about this in The Madness of Crowds, a particular type of thinking in modern America. A lot of young Americans, if the polls are correct, have fallen for this idea that Israel is the oppressor, the Palestinian people are oppressed, Palestinian peoples are somehow the indigenous peoples, and Israel is the colonizer, and so on. And that’s something that’s going to need a lot of addressing.

How did Israel become the left’s bogeyman?

When was the last time you heard “Free Tibet”? When I was growing up, if you wore sandals and had a beard and wanted to be vaguely involved in the world, you would be marching for “Free Tibet.” Well, that didn’t work. Tibet remains doggedly unfree, because it turns out the Chinese Communist Party are not persuaded by a small group of activists in, say, England.

The problem with the morphing of “Free Tibet” into this generation’s cause of “Free Palestine” is, among other things, that of course the Israeli government is vulnerable to political pressure, including from outside.

But how can these people think this way, after what Hamas did? The terrorists even publicized their own brutality. Why can’t people see the difference between an army that’s trying to kill terrorists and terrorists hiding behind human shields?

Well, there are several reasons. One is, never underestimate people’s astounding ignorance. There were some vox pops [man-on-the-street interviews], at a recent pro-Palestine, anti-Israeli march in London. An interviewer just shoved a microphone under people’s noses and asked them a question to record their answer. There were these two girls, and the interviewer asked them, “How did you feel when you heard about the Hamas massacre of October 7?”

One of them says, “I don’t really know… I’m not very educated about this. I suppose I should educate myself more if I’m going to, you know….”

And the other one says, “I don’t know if that happened, did it? I hadn’t heard about that.”

So, let’s just start off with the basis that there’s an awful lot of people who are awfully ignorant about an awful lot. If we were to go to this Saturday’s anti-Israel protests in London or Paris or Berlin, I think that some of the Muslim protestors would know where we are currently sitting, if you showed them a map of the world. Among the non-Muslim protestors, I think probably less than one in ten could even approximately point to the region we’re in.

How many of these people marching have heard of the Oslo Accords? I’d have thought, maybe one in 1,000. Maybe? None of the young people will have heard of it. None.

Products of the Western educational system.

Oh, they don’t know anything.

There’s an educational attainment deficit in most Western countries that will stagger most people. Where I live in New York, we pay $30,000 a year to, as far as I can see, educate students into imbecility. About half the students that come out of schools have an ability to read or write, about half have standard math literacy.

So when you say, how do they not understand this ethical distinction? I mean, I repeat, they simply don’t.

What do they understand? They understand the idea of David and Goliath. They understand the idea of punching down, to use one of the terms in the social justice lexicon. And they think that the Israelis are this brutal Goliath crushing this brave Palestinian David.

And that’s why you see them pass by the October 7 massacre as a sort of an encumbrance to their cause.

So then what is their cause?

Well, I think it’s several things. I think at its root, obviously, this is anti-Semitic, obviously, but it’s not the only thing. And a lot of people doing this have no idea… if you and I said to them, “You’re an anti-Semite,” they’d say, “How dare you?!” They don’t think of themselves that way.

There’s a slight distinction, though, which is almost the only thing that most people are taught about in America or Britain is World War II. And they do know that the Nazis were bad.

And they do have one ethical guide, which is don’t be a Nazi.

And we look at these groups like Antifa — “anti-fascists.” They are discovering, or they will someday discover, what several other groups have discovered in the last 70 years, which was that even if you call yourself Antifa, you might be the fascist.

Why do they always use Nazi terminology to defame Israel? Why do they say that Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto? Why do they use these analogies?

Two reasons, a light one and a deeper one. The light one is to hurt Jews, just to hurt. That’s the first reason.

The second reason is deeper, not that most of them realize. It’s that if the Israelis could be Nazis, then it means that what happened in World War II wasn’t that unusual, and it slightly lets people off the hook.

And these people who are protesting at the moment should pray to G-d they never have their wishes fulfilled. Because if they got their way, and from the river they can’t identify on a map and don’t know the name of, to the sea that they also couldn’t name, was actually all Palestinian — which, of course, for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, means no Jews — then either the Jews of Israel would all have to be killed, or they would all have to be deported somewhere.

Which means that these people who believe they’re acting in the name of anti-Nazism would be the Nazis of this generation.

Turning our attention for the moment to people in the West who are more moderate than the marchers in London: There are many voices urging Israel to allow the Palestinian Authority to take control in Gaza after this war, and to advance the two-state solution. What is your take on this?

You know, it’s easier to pretend that Hamas are a rogue terror group who are oppressing the Palestinian people, and sometimes attacking the Israelis. And if only the great Palestinian people in Gaza could be liberated from Hamas, they wouldn’t vote them in again.

It’s a nice fiction. It doesn’t work. The other day when I was in Gaza, I said to one member of the IDF, “When were you last here?”

And he said, “I was last here in 2005 when I was pulling family friends out of their houses. Eighteen years later, and here I am again.”

I do know that inside Israel, there is an awareness of this. And outside of Israel, there isn’t. The Israelis will continue to be told that the Hamas massacre of October 7 just shows that we need to reinforce our search for a two-state solution.

That’s what the Americans say, it’s what the Europeans say. And they’re very, very ignorant. And again, don’t forget that my country of birth, Great Britain — I spend most of my time in America these days — upholds the foreign policy that the Golan Heights are illegally occupied.

And as I’ve said quite often in the last ten years: Who should we give it back to, Bashar Al Assad? It’s true that he hasn’t burned enough terrain. Give him something else to ruin.

I highlight this because all of these countries are running on fictions, total fictions.

I would like to hear your opinion about the recent election in the Netherlands. It doesn’t seem like Geert Wilders’s victory is related to the events that happened here. But is this a case of the fiction breaking down?

Well, I haven’t seen Geert Wilders for some years, but I first met him in about 2004. He’d been chucked out of the VVD, the main conservative party, and founded his own party. It’s very interesting to me that the man I first knew as a one-man party now has the biggest party in the Netherlands.

It’s extraordinary, considering that only in 2008 or 2009, Geert was meant to come to the UK and was barred entry by the Home Secretary.

And, oh, by the way, the same with Giorgia Meloni, now Italy’s prime minister. She and I have had our disagreements, partly because I described accurately the fascistic tradition from which her party comes, but which she has dropped. But nevertheless, I was at a conference with her in 2020 in Rome, and the British media tried to get a British MP have his whip withdrawn [barred from Parliament] because he had come to a conference with Meloni.

Three years later, she’s in Downing Street, having meetings with the British prime minister. So this stuff moves, it can move very fast.

Do you think this trend has any connection to the events here?

Well, I think that the real question, if I can say so, is, do people think that Israel is the cause of problems in Europe? Or a warning?

Could someone actually think that Israel is the cause of problems in Europe?

Yes. A lot rides on this. A lot rides on this.

But that would just be anti-Semitic.

Well, of course. But remember that when Osama bin Laden first came to prominence, people often said, “If only we could solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all this would stop.” There’s no connection. But this is the fiction that we’ve lived through for last 20 years.

People had a magical belief — and I’m saying this in the past tense, because I hope it’s in the past — but they had a magical belief, which was that if the Palestinians had a state, and they lived side by side with the Israelis in great peace and harmony, and all ate hummus together, the economy of Yemen would boom. The women of Saudi Arabia would suddenly have equal rights. Gaza would be Singapore.

It’s like a drug, people cling to magical thinking.

They do. Well, as I say, these things can break down, sometimes the delusion dies. The wiser observers will have noticed that this is a delusion. And will step away from it, fast or slow. Most people step away slow and don’t admit that they’ve changed.

But the other side of the question, as I said before, is that perhaps Israel offers a warning to Europe. People like Wilders say, Israel is the canary in the coal mine. You know, the expression, if Israel is in trouble, then we’re all in trouble. I think that’s absolutely accurate. And it’s not just Wilders who said that. What happened in Be’eri, and so on and so forth, is a warning of what will happen in Europe, again….

I mean, this is obvious to us, and it’s obviously not going to be the point we’re going to make, but it’s not just, like, slightly surprising figures like Wilders who say this. José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, has said many times that where Israel goes, the rest of the West goes.

But there are movements on the left and right in Europe who want to blame Israel. The left blames Israel because it’s allowed itself this fiction about Palestinians. And there is a movement on the right in Europe, on the fringes now, but I worry about it becoming more mainstream, and I’ve written about it a fair amount. It’s actually the same thing that Elon Musk trod on the other day, about the ADL — there are people who say, “Look, the Israelis allowed themselves to have borders, a strong and clear migration policy. And yet there are these groups like the ADL who push mass migration on us.”

And by the way, one of the least helpful pieces that any Israeli has written in the last six weeks was the recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, by two Israelis saying that the West should take in the people of Gaza. That was, like, wow, how to make anti-Semitism just rocket on the right, you know, just rocket!

So, you know, there’s a lot of stupidity around. There’s enough for everyone. But those are the main two problems for Israel outside of this country. The second is much less politically pertinent. The first, the sort of leftist pro-Palestinianism, is obviously the more urgent.

What about celebrity activists like Greta Thunberg, the truant Swedish school girl? What do they have with the Palestinians?

So I would say they are “Free Tibet,” these people who’ve been led into an interpretation of what happens in this region that is totally fictional, but which gives you good brownie points, a good public image, a halo effect, if you’re on the side of the Palestinians. That’s grown for a generation.

One of my best friends died some years ago now, George Weidenfeld — he was Chaim Weizmann’s secretary at the founding of the state here. And I said to George once, “What was the biggest change in your lifetime in attitudes towards Israel?”

He said, “It was ’67 and then ’73, just clear as anything. Before that, we had all of the left on our side. It wasn’t hard to make the case for Israel. Then suddenly, when Israel looked strong, the left left. And it’s been like that ever since, and it’s gotten worse and worse.”

It’s the oppressor-victim narrative, which makes Israel perpetually the oppressor and the Palestinians perpetually the victims — which of course is disastrous, among other things, for Palestinians.

Do you see any chance to save your own country?

I mean, there are attacks going on all the time from illegal migrants on native people, and the press tries to avoid it. And, in fact, I’ve had some criticism, because since the start of this conflict in the Middle East, here in Israel, I’ve pointed out how interesting it is that people seem to fall out along ethnic lines, or at least religious lines. [Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak and [former home secretary] Suella Braverman, who are Hindu, are pro-Israel.

Anas Sarwar, the head of Labour in Scotland; Humza Youssef, the first minister of Scotland; and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, are all anti-Israel. Does this have anything to do with them being Muslim? I would have thought that it’s at least an interesting question to raise. But I can’t tell you how hard of a question that is to raise.

When people leave their country of origin, they do not arrive in the new country and take on all the views of that country. They come with baggage. And some of that baggage will never leave them.

We have, for instance, Hamas commanders who live in the UK. I want them deported. I’ve actually told the British government that if they don’t take action against them, then I’ll take private action against them. But it’s an outrage, right? This is very straightforward. You’re a member of a proscribed terrorist group. Why are you here?

Let me give one other example. We have living, in Harrow, on the outskirts of London, the former deputy prime minister of Iran, whom Ayatollah Khomeini asked to write a book justifying why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for Satanic Verses was correct. This is a man who wrote a book justifying the murder of a British novelist. And now it’s Salman Rushdie who lives in hiding, and is attacked, and it is this man who lives comfortably in the leafy suburb of Harrow. That’s madness, complete madness. And I’ve pointed this out all my adult life, and what I mean, what more can I say? I’ve said it for years. I’ve shouted myself hoarse.

Do you see any chance that Europe will wake up?

Well, sorry to return to the question of Israel, as it affects Europe, but is very, very central. Israel knows how to defend itself. I don’t think Europe does yet. Israel can look after itself, in my view. But can countries like Britain and France and Germany? I don’t know.

What if you were the prime minister of the UK?

Well, I’d do a lot of things. The pro-Hamas Palestinian march on November 11 — what they called a “Million Man March” — turned out a couple of hundred thousand people. They organized this on Armistice Day in the UK, when we commemorate the dead of the two World Wars. And that was a massive overreach. That was something which really, really upset the British.

We’ve spent more than 20 years now being told about Islam’s feelings. We have these idiotic terms like Islamophobia thrown around. We have talk of blasphemous novels, turns out you can’t draw a cartoon if it offends Muslims, and all this stuff. So we’ve heard an awful lot about the sensitivities of Islam. And the holy places of Islam.

Well, we have holy places, too, and the Cenotaph is one of them, the memorial to the dead of the wars, and the 11th of November as well, is one of them. Because everybody who is British has stories of their family, of what they did in those two wars, and what they sacrificed.

So I think this was a massive overreach. The pro-Palestinian community effectively committed blasphemy against the British public.

And I know from polling I’ve seen that a friend carries out each week that the feelings against these marches, among ordinary British people, rocketed. The detestation of what is happening rocketed among the British public.

So you might have a groundswell of support for controlling immigration?

If you don’t control the borders, you don’t have a country. But until now, that was not politically achievable.

Because look, the social cost of being against immigration was that people thought you might be racist. And if racism is the worst thing in your society, then you don’t want anyone to think you’re racist. So, you avoid anything that seems to be racist.

There are plenty of reasons to be against immigration. A very good one, which the left used to say very often — in fact, even Bernie Sanders used to say it — was the unbelievable undercutting of the native workforce in terms of competition for jobs. If you bring in cheap foreign labor, it means your labor force is undercut. That has a massive effect on an economy.

Now, the left used to make that argument, but then the left got terrified by the racism accusation, so they stopped. None of this has to be a left or right thing. But the problem can’t be solved if it is viewed that way.

Yes, there is a social cost to being anti-immigration, and people were scared.

And you think that recent events have changed people’s minds about immigration?

Well, I’ll tell you that there is a slow movement in Europe. And you can see it. I said this in my book The Strange Death of Europe — that when the Bataclan terrorist attack happened in Paris in late 2015, there was a very interesting moment of silence from Angela Merkel and the head of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who had both pushed the illegal migration that year. There was a very interesting moment of silence. I knew exactly what was happening in the Bundestag and at the European Commission — they were thinking, “Please, G-d, let none of the attackers be recent arrivals.”

Now, as it happened, they weren’t recent arrivals. But they had used the illegal channels to slip in and out of Syria, where they got their training.

Juncker and Merkel just dodged that one. One day, something will happen that people like that cannot dodge.

And you don’t know and I don’t know whether that’s because it’s a mass atrocity that is just so appalling that something has to be done. Or, and this is what makes it much more dangerous for politicians, it could be something that comes out of absolutely nowhere and is relatively small, but lights the spark.

There was a young girl murdered by an immigrant in Paris last year. This girl’s murder was particularly brutal. It didn’t make much news outside France. In France, it was huge. And the feeling in the public….

Now, that’s what you do when you make your society highly unstable. You make it susceptible to anything like that. That’s what we’ve done.

Maybe we could avoid such a situation if we just slowed immigration, without shutting it off.

There are three things that matter in immigration: speed, numbers, and identity.

If you try to integrate a small number of people slowly, you can do it. If the identity is somewhat aligned, even then, it takes a long time. It took England a couple of hundred years, several hundred years actually, to integrate about 50,000 French Huguenots.

Now we are talking about people much, much more different than French Protestants going into a British Protestant world, when you talk about a Somali Muslim going and living in Sweden.

Getting back to Israel, what can the country do to change the world’s attitude toward it?

Well, everyone here complains that Israel doesn’t do enough, but it’s my observation that actually in this conflict, Israel has done better in communications than in any previous conflict I’ve witnessed.

One issue is just structural, which is you’ve got dozens of countries aligned against you. I’m just saying one should have realistic assumptions of what can be done. I think Israel is, on the whole, doing a lot of good things. I think the Abraham Accords are amazing. I think adding other countries to them is fantastic. I think it massively undermines the Palestinian narrative, of course.

The one thing I do know is that the Palestinian question is an insoluble problem. And it’s a problem which the Jews have been given to solve. And that’s not fair. You should only give an insoluble problem to somebody you really dislike.

But you can’t be stuck in this position of always being demonized unless you give people who want to kill you more rights and more statehood. Which I think is madness. Maybe things will change if some of the facts on the ground change.

Do you want to try to forecast where we are headed?

I have no idea where it’s going. I think only a fool would make a prediction.

One of the most powerful conversations I’ve had since I was here was with a father who lived with his family on one of the kibbutzim, and his wife and son were killed in front of him in their safe room. And he survived, lost his legs, and his daughter is fine.

He said to me, at the end of our interview, “You know, I’ve been a leftist all my life. We cannot live with these people. I want to see nothing but potato fields from here to the sea.”

I think whatever happens, there cannot be another return to the status quo ante. A phrase I remember using here in the 2006 war, in this very room, is that Israel has to be allowed to win. It has to be allowed to win.

Israel is never allowed to win, which means that there is perpetual conflict. The day after Hamas is nominally destroyed, a very similar thing will pop up. Hamas has had 18 years to indoctrinate an entire generation in hating Jews.

All I know is that whatever it is that Israel needs to do to win, it needs to do it. And it has to be allowed to win, because what should not and cannot happen is that something pulls to a close in the coming weeks or months, and I see you back in this room in five years, with the same thing happening again.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 990)