A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israelâs conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and âarmed resistanceâ can be romanticized or excused.
 Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Douglas Murray has never lacked critics. That is the inevitable consequence of writing about immigration, identity politics and the Westâs growing loss of confidence in itself. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West, provoked fierce disagreement, but they were treated as books that demanded engagement â reviewed, debated and rebutted.
On Democracies and Death Cults, published last year, received something different.
I believe the reason is plain. This was the first Murray book whose principal purpose was not simply to criticize fashionable ideas in the West but to defend Israel during the most contentious conflict of our time.
Had he written 250 pages arguing that Israelâs campaign in Gaza was criminal, reviews would almost certainly have followed. Instead, he argued that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the Western left has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy from an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians, including on its own side.
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it exists at all. Its central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition â and that this is controversial â says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Murrayâs achievement is not merely to condemn Hamas but to explain it. He rejects the comforting fiction that it is simply another national liberation movement employing regrettable tactics. Barbarism, he argues, is not incidental to Hamas. It is intrinsic to its worldview.
Hamas does not merely accept death as the price of war. It glorifies death, sanctifies martyrdom and exploits the deaths of its own people as readily as those of its enemies. Its objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israelâs destruction. Unless one regards Israelâs very existence as an occupation to be liberated, Hamasâs own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
The distinction is visible not merely in military conduct but in culture. When General Gadi Eisenkot, now running for prime minister, lost his son fighting in Gaza, Israel mourned with him. When Ismail Haniyehâs sons were killed, Haniyeh publicly celebrated their martyrdom. One response grieved the loss of life. The other glorified it. That is not merely a political distinction. It is a civilizational one.
Yet the most unsettling chapters are not really about Hamas or Hezbollah.
They are about us. Murray argues that large parts of the contemporary Western left have become incapable of recognizing jihadist movements for what they are because they increasingly interpret every conflict through a single moral framework: oppressor and oppressed. Once Israelis are cast as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed, every other moral consideration recedes. Terrorism becomes âresistance,â massacres become contextual, and universal moral standards give way to political tribalism.
That, he argues, explains not only why so much of the world glosses over Hamasâs obvious evil, but why so many people seemed incapable of extending even the most basic sympathy to the victims of Oct. 7. Why were posters of kidnapped children, elderly civilians and Holocaust survivors torn down on Western campuses? Why was the instinct not to mourn, but to explain away, relativize or even celebrate?
He also asks why the outrage is so selective.
Do those denouncing Israel know that while more than half a million Arabs were displaced during the 1948-49 war, an even greater number of Jews were driven from or compelled to flee Arab countries, most of them finding refuge in Israel as citizens? Do they know that Palestinian refugee status â in neighboring Arab countries culturally and ethnically practically indistinguishable from the Palestinians! â has been uniquely preserved and inherited across generations, while other refugee crises have generally been resolved through resettlement and integration?
Do they know how many Muslims are dying today in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa with scarcely a fraction of the attention devoted to Israel? Do they know that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Partition of India uprooted many millions of people â Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs â in one of historyâs largest and bloodiest population exchanges?
Why does none of this provoke anything resembling the same moral fervor?
Israel is a tiny country, scarcely larger than New Jersey even including the Negev Desert, and closer in populated area to Rhode Island. It is fighting organizations openly committed to its destruction. Yet it has become the singular obsession of the activist left.
Is this extraordinary fixation simply the product of ignorance? Do many of those chanting Hamas slogans know little of the history they claim to invoke? Or is something darker at work? Is Israel judged by standards applied to no other nation because it is the worldâs only Jewish state? Is it actually antisemitism??
One need not answer that question categorically to recognize that it cannot simply be dismissed. The sheer selectivity of the outrage demands an explanation. Pretending it does not is no answer at all. And yet the worldâs media has ignored the main and probably only book written by an outsider that tries to set the record straight, despite his status as a celebrity public intellectual.
Many of us now occupy an uncomfortable place. We believe Hamas is evil and that Israel has every right to defend itself against organizations committed to its destruction. We believe Western civilization, for all its undeniable failures, deserves defending because it produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and the very tradition of self-criticism that allows us to acknowledge its mistakes.
At the same time, we believe in climate science, vaccination, expertise, the rule of law, sensible gun regulation and a robust social safety net. We reject identity politics that reduces history to oppression, but we reject populism that dismisses knowledge, institutions and liberal norms just as firmly.
And we know Netanyahu is a vile and venal schemer who cannot be trusted. We also know the West Bank occupation is not sustainable and plain wrong â even if the Palestinians twice rejected fair offers for a partition and a state.
Twenty years ago, those views would have described a fairly conventional liberal. Today they seem to describe almost no political constituency at all.
You do not have to agree with everything Murray says or believes or does to understand that On Democracies and Death Cults deserves engagement.
The lack of engagement with On Democracies and Death Cults is almost more revealing than the book itself. Murrayâs central claim, that Hamas is a murderous, nihilistic organization whose ideology glorifies death, and which helps the Palestinians not at all, ought not to require elaborate demonstration. It should be self-evident to anyone with any information and minimal intelligence.
Yet much of the mainstream intellectual and media establishment simply chose not to grapple with the argument. That silence reflects a profound unseriousness. Institutions that pride themselves on intellectual openness inadvertently reinforced Murrayâs broader thesis: that important parts of the Western intellectual establishment have become unable â or unwilling â to make moral distinctions that once lay at the heart of liberal civilization.
I am not prepared to believe that this battle for liberalism has already been lost. Perhaps liberals can beat back the progressive challenge. But it is a battle that must be fought. If the political right continues its descent into populist illiberalism while important parts of the left continue to abandon the moral clarity that once defined liberal democracy, then we are in very deep trouble indeed.
Real talk: I hate that there are so few writers who fall into this niche:
politically progressive (or, at least, not right-wing)
able to unequivocally condemn Hamas and October 7 and able to say that Israel's basic and fundamental reason for fighting in Gaza, even if not necessarily its conduct, was undeniably reasonable.
I do not want to be in the same circles as Douglas Murray, a man who has declared that " 'Gender affirming surgery' puts a feel-good phrase on child butchery" and that "there is no such thing as 'non-binary'", which is evidently "a recent invention by people who want to identify as 'Look at me.'", wondered why asexual people might dress in revealing clothing, misgendered a nonbinary person, et cetera.
But the fact is that I do not think that Douglas Murray wants me dead for being nonbinary. I think that if Douglas Murray got his wish, things would be bad. But I do not think that Douglas Murray wishes trans and nonbinary people dead.
I cannot say the same of Hamasniks and Jews ("Zionists"). As such, I will very reluctantly be in the same circles as Douglas Murray.