If you want to understand the intellectual rot at the heart of Britain’s culture war, you need only listen to Douglas Murray’s latest outburst on the Apocalypse Now podcast. There, the author of The War on the West and Israel Defence Forces groupie-in-residence managed to accuse the entire Glastonbury Festival of being in thrall to Hamas, declared Palestine a “fetish” of the left, and (most grotesquely) suggested that perhaps the only way Glastonbury-goers would finally see the light is if they experienced a terror attack themselves.
Let that sink in. A man who regularly tours Israel under IDF escort, whose career has been shaped by the PR arm of the settler-colonial state, casually fantasised about British festival attendees being raped or murdered to teach them a moral lesson.
The Daily Mail expects us to take this man seriously.
The Spectator’s favourite bigot has long traded in the idea that to defend the Palestinian people is to hate the West. That it is a “fetish”, as if the desire for Palestinian liberation is a kink or affectation, rather than a cry for justice in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and war crimes. What’s more, he wants us to believe that any critique of the Israeli military is an incitement to genocide, because, as he reminds us, the IDF is a “citizen army”.
Let’s pause here. That’s the same “citizen army” currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza. The same army that bombed schools, hospitals, and aid workers. The same “citizens” whose chain of command is implicated in deliberate collective punishment and starvation as a weapon of war.
Murray calls the IDF a “citizen army”, as if they were some ragtag battalion of idealistic conscripts, a sort of Zionist Dad’s Army, armed with pluck and moral purpose. But the reality is far darker. Gaza is not just a battlefield. It’s a laboratory. A live-fire testing ground for Israel’s military-industrial complex. Drones, AI-powered surveillance, smart bombs, and “precision” missiles are trialled on a captive population of over two million people, half of whom are children.
Palestine isn’t a fetish. It’s a wound. One Murray prods for applause and profit.
The IDF doesn’t simply defend borders. It enforces siege. It flattens schools and refugee camps. It has turned Gaza into what human rights groups call the world’s largest open-air prison, where every wall, sky, and signal is weaponised.
To chant against that isn’t hate. It’s the bare minimum of human conscience. The real moral reprobates are those who defend this machinery of death while wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of civilisation.
If you chant “death to the IDF”, you’re condemning a war machine, not each and every 18-year-old conscript. But Murray, like all defenders of colonial violence, collapses state and people, military and citizen, to shield power from critique. It’s a cheap trick. A dangerous one.
Murray then takes aim at Bob Vylan, the punk-rap duo who dared to lead a crowd in protest against the IDF. For Murray, this is not just immoral, it’s “hypocritical”, because apparently to shout down colonialism in Palestine is, somehow, to colonise Britain. His logic is as deranged as it is revealing: any resistance to Western hegemony must be projection, any solidarity must be self-hatred. The left, he says, supports “literally anyone else” as though caring about genocide were a failure of loyalty rather than a demand of conscience.
But it is Murray who has turned other people’s suffering into a fetish. His is the fetish of Israeli power, of Western supremacy, of the bomb dropped in the name of democracy. He fetishises military strength, not because he misunderstands the violence, but because he adores it. When Murray speaks of civilisation, he means empire. When he speaks of democracy, he means subjugation. And when he speaks of peace, he means silence.
There is no moral equivalence between the music festival in Re’im and the music festival in Somerset. One took place under the shadow of military occupation, barbed wire and watch towers, the other in a country whose government sells the weapons that make that occupation possible. The horror at Nova was real, and inexcusable. But it is no justification for further massacre, and it is obscene to use it to fantasise about reprisal on your political opponents.
Douglas Murray doesn’t want peace. He wants obedience. He wants Glastonbury to become a stage for national mourning, but only for those deaths that support his politics. He wants music to be apolitical. Unless of course, it’s waving the Israeli flag. He wants free speech, until it says the wrong thing. The thing he disagrees with. He is the cultural commissar of imperial grief, policing whose pain is valid and whose is treason.
We know where that leads. It leads to the arrests we’re now seeing. The censorship. The threats to prosecute musicians and students. It leads to a future where solidarity is criminalised, and the only acceptable protest is silence.
That, not Palestine, is the fetish that should truly frighten us.
