By Cory Franklin

June 6^th, 2025

The optimal ingredients for a good nonfiction book include a talented author writing well, abetted by a capable editor who organizes the writing. Douglas Murray has written a new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, and the first half of that recipe has produced a must-read, essential book on the current Israel/Hamas war. With more effective editing, what was excellent might have been even better.

In On Democracies, the formidable polemicist Murray is simultaneously foreign war reporter, domestic correspondent, historian, social critic, and political commentator. That is the book’s strength and to a lesser extent its weakness.

Murray’s role model as a war reporter is the legendary World War II Russian-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, who chronicled the terrible Nazi-Soviet conflict in Russia. After October 7, 2023, Murray spent the better part of 18 months in Israel and Gaza, documenting the Hamas invasion of Israel and its aftermath. His account of what Hamas invaders did is informative, harrowing and tragic: indiscriminate rape and murder, including that of babies and the elderly; families burned alive when attackers could not breach their safe rooms and subsequently set their houses afire; people gunned down inside portable toilets at the Nova music festival (a festival of love and peace); and unarmed Gaza civilians storming into Israel to loot and alert Hamas gunmen to anyone still alive after the assault.

Murray points out that in contrast to the Nazis, who tried to hide evidence of their mass slaughter, Hamas videotaped and proudly broadcast it.

“In a video from that morning, young Israeli women, in their pajamas, covered in blood, are being tied up by Hamas terrorists wearing military combat gear and carrying rifles. ‘You dogs, we will step on you,’ one of the men says to them… at various points in the footage, the young women are streaming with blood lower down, the results of rape, bullets to their lower bodies, or knife cuts to their tendons to keep them from running away. In one exchange, a male terrorist points to the handcuffed girls and says, ‘Here are the girls that can be impregnated. Here are the Zionists.’”

There was also the notorious terrorist who called his parents in Gaza and boasted, “Hi Dad, open my What’s App now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Put Mom on.” His mother expresses regret – that she was not there with him to savor the moment.

Murray then adopts the role of domestic correspondent and destroys the myth that the world’s sympathy and support was with Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7, and that the country forfeited that support with its invasion of Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth – unless it’s the trope that it was not about antisemitism but about Zionism. He documents the immediate reaction to the massacre in London and on Ivy League campuses in America – protests which were not entreaties for peace but calls for the eradication of Israel and death to Jews.

“October 9 (two days after the Hamas invasion and several days before the IDF response) thousands of anti-Israel protestors gathered outside the Israeli embassy in the Kensington section of London to celebrate the attacks, carry out acts of criminal damage in the area, and attack Israel in their own way…other celebratory crowds gathered outside the prime minister’s house at 10 Downing Street, again lighting flares, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and carrying signs praising the massacres.” The London police were completely outmanned and adopted a laissez-faire approach, the first of many similar law enforcement responses, there and in other places.

In the US, some student groups at Harvard issued a joint statement, within 24 hours of the massacre, while Hamas terrorists were still murdering innocent Israeli civilians, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” After a congressional committee questioned the leaders of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as to whether calls on campus for genocide of Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, none of the three leaders gave a straightforward answer. Murray asked the same question of ChatGPT and concluded, “Chat GPT was distinctly more moral than the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT.”  

Reading coverage today of the Hamas/Israel war, the past history of the region is likely to be glossed over. Murray clarifies some of the misconceptions by going back to the post-World War II era when there was no Israel and no Palestine – merely Arabs and Jews living in close proximity amid intermittent violence. (This region, of course, is where Jews lived in Biblical times.) After the Holocaust, Jews from all over the world fled to the area and the United Nations granted them the land that became Israel. The Arabs were offered a nearly equal parcel of land, an offer they turned down. In the next 25 years, there were four Arab-Israeli wars that were existential for the Jews: a defeat in any of them would have meant the end of Israel.

The author notes that Israel is not a white settler-colonial construction as so many protestors in the West insist. At least half of the Israelis today are not white – they are emigres from North Africa and the Middle East (Muslim countries have effectively eradicated Jews in these areas). Israel is not the colonialist entity, and one of Murray’s most important points is the real colonialist entity in the region is in fact Iran.

“(Iran) has spent recent years assiduously expanding its colonies. What has Gaza become but a colony of Iran? Or Iraq after Iran moved into the vacuum left by America after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? Or Yemen? Or Syria, into which Iran has poured Hezbollah and other forces? Iran and its proxies and mouthpieces in the West have spent years accusing Israel of being a colonial, expansionist state while all the time expanding and colonizing everywhere they can reach in the region.”  

Besides settler colonialism, Murray debunks some terms used to describe Israel that are little more than code for antisemitic slurs, including genocide (the Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank is expanding rapidly) and apartheid (Arabs in Israel have essentially the same rights as Jews except in security risk areas like the West Bank). These terms are used, not because they have any basis in fact, but simply to portray Israel as evil.

As a social critic, Murray condemns the antisemitism in the coverage of the conflict. Commentators routinely engage in moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel: Hamas killed women and children, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed women and children in their Gaza invasion, so the two are both equally reprehensible morally. Ignored is the fact Hamas killed their victims deliberately, while the IDF was countering fighters who used these victims as human shields and saw their deaths as a tactical advantage.

The IDF sent texts, calls, and leaflets to minimize civilian casualties. No military in the world has ever done as much to avoid killing civilians, and Murray cites John Spencer, a West Point war scholar, who states the ratio of civilian to enemy combatant casualties is the lowest in the history of urban warfare. To claim moral equivalence between Hamas and the IDF recalls William F. Buckley’s famous line, “That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around.”

Murray notes, “One of the former executive directors of Human Rights Watch, now running a group called Dawn, claimed that Hamas’s figure of 32,000 civilian deaths meant that, ‘ISRAEL’s daily death total of Palestinians in Gaza surpasses that of any other conflict in the 21^st century…such statements show absolutely knowledge of the non-Israel wars of the 21^st century. It ignored the more than 200,000 killed in Ukraine, the 400,000 killed in Yemen, the 700,000 people killed in Syria, and the three-quarters of a million killed in the Tigray in Ethiopia. None of these conflicts had received the amount of coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” 

Murray traces the close ties between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Adolf Hitler during World War II (Yasir Arafat was a distant relative of the Mufti.) The Muslim-Nazi relationship still exists today. “From a Cairo train station to the houses of Gaza, the Middle East is the one region on earth where Nazi antisemitism is not seen as a strand of losing, toxic ideology, but as the stance of victors and a hope for the future.” 

As political commentator, he searches for the answer to the jihadi taunt that they love death more than life. How to defeat the death cult promoted by Hamas, ISIS, and other violent Islamists? So many Western intellectuals are either unwilling or unable to take Hamas and its charter seriously. There is no ambiguity in their explicit call for the death of all Jews.

Murray discovers the answer is found in the bravery of the Israeli people and one of the most important commandments in Judaism – to choose life. He writes, “On October 7, 2023, many Israelis stared into the face of pure evil – 1200 in the last moments of their lives. People begged; people pleaded and, in some cases, cried for mercy. But they were murdered anyway.”  The author describes the inability of so many in the world to recognize and acknowledge evil, a concept that often goes unmentioned in other accounts. This failure to acknowledge evil may be the book’s most crucial observation.

One criticism of the book is that the editing seems rushed, and the author must go back and forth to make his points. Better organized chapters would have been more effective. The reader constantly has to jump between well-written but often unrelated topics. The book is nearly 200 pages yet divided into only five chapters that provide insufficient information of what they are about, and each chapter contains long passages lacking transition. In many cases, chapter breaks were of little help and there is no index. More and shorter chapters that dealt primarily with single issues (the attack, the military response, the protests, etc.) would have made for a tighter, easier to read book.

None of this ultimately detracts from Murray’s brilliant narrative. Along with Brendan O’Neill, he is one of the two best writers in the English language about this conflict (ironically, neither is Jewish). As Murray notes, history is constantly being rewritten and that’s why this book is so important. Twenty-five years hence it will stand as the first and one of the most important accounts of a critical 21^st century tragedy. This book can best be summarized briefly in a quote is by former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

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Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine. 

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.