On Democracies and Death Cults

Douglas Murray, a British journalist and author, presents a firsthand account of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. Blending war reporting, survivor testimony, and historical analysis, Murray argues that the attack exposed a civilizational divide between democratic societies that value life and extremist movements that worship death.

Murray opens by recounting the morning of October 7, when air-raid sirens sounded across Israel. As many as 6,000 Hamas terrorists entered southern Israel by land, sea, and hand gliders. They attacked kibbutzim (small collective farming communities), military bases, and the Nova music festival, a psychedelic trance rave near the Gaza border attended by some 3,500 young people. The assault was timed to the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. The final death toll reached just short of 1,200, mainly civilians, and approximately 250 were kidnapped into Gaza. Murray contextualizes the toll by population ratio: For a nation of nine million, the attack was the equivalent of roughly 44,400 Americans killed in a single day.

Murray traces the historical roots of the conflict, beginning with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the revolutionary government's expansion through proxy forces, including Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. He describes Israel's controversial 2005 withdrawal from Gaza under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, after which Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and consolidated power by murdering members of Fatah, its rival Palestinian faction. Hamas then escalated rocket attacks, using international aid to build a vast tunnel network and stockpile weapons.

Murray provides detailed accounts of the massacres drawn from his visits to attack sites and interviews with survivors. At the Nova festival, terrorists blocked the main road with an ambush, then systematically killed unarmed partygoers hiding in portable toilets, trees, and tents; 364 were murdered and 40 abducted. In Kibbutz Be'eri, more than 100 terrorists entered a community of roughly 1,000. Murray interviews survivor Avida Bachar, whose family sheltered in their safe room, a reinforced space with a steel door found in homes near the border. Terrorists shot through the door, set fire to the house, and threw grenades inside. Avida's wife and 15-year-old son, Carmel, both died. Avida and his 13-year-old daughter survived 14 hours until soldiers arrived.

A distinctive quality of the atrocities, Murray emphasizes, was the terrorists' visible pride. He describes viewing a 46-minute compilation assembled from terrorists' own GoPro recordings and victims' phones, showing attackers celebrating their kills and broadcasting them to supporters. One terrorist called his family from a murdered woman's phone to boast of killing 10 people; his parents celebrated. Murray argues that unlike the Nazis, who tried to conceal the Holocaust, Hamas boasted of and broadcast its crimes.

Murray introduces Yahya Sinwar, the attack's mastermind. Arrested in 1988 for murdering four Palestinians, Sinwar served four life sentences during which he studied Hebrew and Israeli intelligence methods. An Israeli prison dentist, Dr. Yuval Bitton, detected Sinwar's brain tumor and arranged the surgery that saved his life. Released in a 2011 prisoner exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, Sinwar resumed his Hamas leadership and planned the operation he named the "Al-Aqsa Flood." Murray also examines what he calls "the conception," the Israeli security establishment's failed assumption that Hamas's leaders, enriched by billions in aid, would never risk launching a major attack.

Murray documents the hostage crisis, spending time with families at the Hostage Families Forum in Tel Aviv and contrasting the muted international response with campaigns mounted for previous hostage situations. He recounts acts of heroism on October 7, including a reservist who drove south with only a handgun and fought for 15 hours, and a Muslim Arab Israeli doctor used as a human shield for three hours while terrorists killed people around him. Murray also describes entering Gaza himself, where he observes the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) discovering tunnel entrances hidden behind civilian homes.

A substantial portion of the book examines the international reaction. Murray argues that sympathy for Israel lasted hours at most. By the evening of October 7, protesters gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London to celebrate. Within weeks, marches swelled to over 100,000 in London alone. American universities became the primary focal point, with tent encampments at Columbia University featuring chants supporting Hamas and vows to repeat October 7 "10,000 times." At a December 2023 congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus conduct codes; all three hedged that such calls were "context-dependent." Polling found that 51 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 believed Israel should be ended and given to Hamas, and 60 percent said the October 7 attacks were justified.

Murray devotes attention to what he calls the "disconnect" between reality and perception. Hamas's tunnel network stretched over 350 miles with approximately 6,000 entrances hidden in mosques, schools, and hospitals. An IDF officer estimated that between every two and three civilian homes in Gaza contained weapons or tunnel entrances, often in children's bedrooms. Billions in international aid had been diverted by Hamas leaders who accumulated an estimated $11 billion in personal wealth. Murray challenges the accusation that Israel's military response constituted genocide, noting that even by Hamas's own casualty figures, the civilian-to-combatant death ratio was approximately one-to-one, which he calls the lowest in modern warfare.

Murray analyzes anti-Semitism as a historical pattern, drawing on Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman's insight from the novel Life and Fate that anti-Semitism functions as a mirror: Those who accuse Jews reveal their own guilt. Iran accuses Israel of colonialism while colonizing neighboring countries; Hamas accuses Israel of bloodlust while glorifying death. Murray traces the persistence of Nazi-era anti-Semitism in the Muslim world to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who allied with Hitler in 1941 and was the only major Nazi collaborator to return home after the war as a hero, welcomed by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The book's final section chronicles the war's dramatic turning point. In September 2024, Israeli intelligence caused thousands of Hezbollah pager devices to explode across Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 and injuring thousands. Air strikes then killed much of Hezbollah's leadership, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iran responded by firing 180 missiles directly at Israel, most of which were intercepted. Murray enters southern Lebanon with the IDF and discovers Hezbollah tunnels and weapons caches built under the noses of UN peacekeepers. A captured Hezbollah fighter confirms that the group had planned an October 7-style ground invasion into northern Israel.

In October 2024, IDF troops spotted Sinwar in Rafah. After a firefight, the mastermind of October 7 was found dead, his body carrying cash, passports, and UN identification documents suggesting he may have been attempting to flee to Egypt. Murray travels to the site and sits in the chair where Sinwar died, surveying the destruction. He reflects on the 19-year-old soldier who killed Sinwar, a young man not yet in uniform when October 7 occurred, representing the generation of fighters the war produced.

Murray closes by confronting the jihadist taunt he had long feared was unanswerable: "We love death more than you love life." The Israeli soldiers he observed fought not because they loved death but because they loved life, fighting for the survival of their families and their people. He frames the commandment from Deuteronomy, "Choose life," as both a Jewish and a Western value, and argues it is the basis on which civilization can prevail.