Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of the West arrives in the aftermath of the most consequential and controversial event in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since the Second Intifada, perhaps even since 1948. Its premise is unsubtle: October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack, is not merely an act of terrorism but a civilisational showdown. An epochal clash between the democratic, life-affirming West and the death-worshipping hordes of the global South, of Islam, of Palestine. It is a provocation in search of an excuse. And what it seeks to excuse, what it demands we morally sanction, is not only Israel’s military response, but the logic of settler colonialism and the permanent siege that underpins its existence.
“October 7 doesn’t challenge Murray’s worldview; it affirms it. He does not emerge changed, only more certain.”
Murray has spent the better part of two decades giving ideological shape to the far-right’s civilisational paranoia. His earlier books Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, The Strange Death of Europe, The Madness of Crowds trace an increasingly paranoiac arc. First came the rehabilitation of post-Iraq hawkishness, then the racialised panic over Muslim immigration, followed by a polemic against “woke culture” cast as totalitarianism in drag. At every stage, Murray casts the decline of Western hegemony as a moral crisis, and insists that its restoration depends on the reassertion of borders, binaries, and bloodlines. On Democracies and Death Cults is simply the next instalment, same siege mentality, same colonial nostalgia. Only this time, the blood is real.
He adopts the register of the witness, the war correspondent, the reluctant chronicler of horror. Yet this stance is a performance. For all his talk of bearing moral responsibility and “telling the truth”, Murray is no independent journalist. He has repeatedly appeared in government-aligned media and IDF-coordinated reporting: official media tours, slick documentaries, interviews with military spokesmen in which he performs the role of sympathetic amplifier. His closeness to the Israeli military-political apparatus isn’t incidental, it’s foundational. In 2024, he was publicly recognised for his supportive coverage, receiving an honorary award from President Isaac Herzog and Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli for being “a friend to the Jewish people” and “fighting the resurgence of antisemitism.” He is hailed in some quarters as a successor to Christopher Hitchens, though the comparison flatters only him.
This is no 9/11 moment for Murray. There is no reckoning, no shift, no tragedy severe enough to unsettle his ideological reflexes. Where Hitchens, after 9/11, at least underwent a visible rupture, one that many of us would come to criticise, but which was undeniably a turning point, Murray experiences no such convulsion. October 7 doesn’t challenge him; it confirms everything he already believed. He emerges not wiser, but more zealous.
The book’s first chapter, a litany of violence committed on October 7, is rendered in such graphic, fetishised detail that the tone slips from moral indictment to something closer to voyeurism. The liturgy of severed heads, violated bodies, and grieving families isn’t merely reported, it’s lingered over. The strategy is clear: overwhelm the reader with visceral revulsion and shut down the possibility of political context.
There’s no attempt to ask how Hamas came to be, or what life under siege in Gaza for seventeen years might produce. No mention of occupation, checkpoints, house demolitions, sniper fire at protests, bombed apartment blocks, or the killing of journalists. Just the moment of atrocity, dehistoricised and sanctified.
Murray’s moral world is split in two. On one side stands Israel: the lone democracy, the liberal stronghold. On the other: Palestinians, their sympathisers, campus protestors, anyone who refuses the script. It’s not a clash of policies, it’s a clash of beings. Samuel Huntington rewritten by a Spectator columnist in flak gear.
The notion of Israel as a beacon of democratic modernity is repeated like catechism, never examined. When Murray engages with critics of Israeli policy, it’s only to smear them: deluded fellow travellers or outright antisemites. The reality, that Israel has occupied the West Bank for over half a century, that Gaza is an open-air prison, that it privileges one ethnonational group over others in law and practice, is airbrushed out. The 2018 Nation-State Law, which codifies Jewish supremacy in constitutional form, is absent. So too is the daily structural violence faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel. To name it apartheid is, for Murray, not just wrong, it is profane.
His argument leans heavily on the arithmetic of suffering. He invokes the Holocaust not to understand atrocity, but to sanctify the state’s response. Israel, he insists, is eternally vulnerable, even as it possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries, nuclear weapons, and unconditional U.S. support. October 7 is framed as “the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” and with that framing, any criticism of Israel becomes a moral obscenity.
At times, it seems Murray has absorbed the very cult of death he claims to expose. The language of martyrdom saturates the text. “We must stare into the face of evil,” he intones, echoing Bush-era theatre. But evil is not examined; it is declared. A mystified force that relieves power of responsibility. Don’t ask what made these men. Don’t ask what they endured. Don’t ask why they hate, because asking is complicity.
“Don’t ask what made these men. Don’t ask what they endured. Don’t ask why they hate, because asking is complicity.”
When he turns to the West, Murray is incandescent. Protesters in London, New York, Berlin: ghouls dancing on graves. Student activists: saboteurs of civilisation. Even the chant “Resistance is justified” is, for Murray, an affront to moral order. Any resistance to Israeli power is terror. Any solidarity with Palestinians is betrayal.
And yet, for all his venom directed at the left, Murray says nothing about the far right. Not a word about Orbán, whom Netanyahu courts and Murray admires. No mention of Trump, Bolsonaro, or Meloni, figures who have openly flirted with antisemitism while championing Israel’s war.
The contradiction at the heart of Western support for Israel goes unexamined. It has little to do with Jewish safety. It is an imperial compact, marketed as moral clarity, underwritten by fear, enforced through Islamophobia.
By the end, the book descends into civilisational McCarthyism. The real enemy isn’t Hamas, Murray suggests, it’s academics, protesters, journalists, and NGOs. He’s not calling for policy. He’s demanding a siege.
This is the classic reactionary move: collapse history into morality, morality into identity, identity into violence. He isn’t defending Israel. He is defending a worldview in which the West is always righteous and always under attack. A world where questioning power is treason, and solidarity is terror. He cannot explain why millions march for Palestine. Why “Land Back” movements gain ground. Why the old colonial maps no longer hold.
To such questions, he offers no argument. Only rage.
And yet the book is revealing, not because of what it argues, but what it betrays. The civilisational project Murray champions is in retreat. Its ideological foundations, liberalism, Zionism, whiteness, are no longer assumed but enforced, ever more violently. On Democracies and Death Cults is not prophecy. It is reaction. The spasms of a dominant-class ideologue watching history slip from his grasp.
“This is not prophecy. It’s reaction, the spasms of a dominant-class ideologue watching history slip from his grasp.”
Like much of Murray’s output, this is not a work of argument. It is affect. It doesn’t want you to think, it wants you to feel: horror, panic, vengeance, and above all, loyalty to the powerful. This is empire for the digital age, where atrocity is live-streamed and judgement arrives pre-assembled. Its aim isn’t understanding. It’s reinforcement, of the idea that this world is natural, permanent, and moral.
What damns the book most isn’t its politics, repulsive though they are. It’s the poverty of its vision. Murray cannot imagine freedom that isn’t paid for with someone else’s blood. So he clings to myth: the myth of civilisation, the myth of moral war, the myth that the good must kill the evil, forever.
It’s not journalism. It’s not history. It’s propaganda. And badly written propaganda at that.
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