ON DEMOCRACIES AND DEATH CULTS

Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West. This bestselling book from a controversial author has aroused strong feelings on both sides of the debate around the Israel-Palestine conflict. Starting with the massacre by Hamas on 7 October 2023, Murray analyses the ideological background, arguing that Hamas fighters worship death over life, while the traditional Israeli ideology foregrounds life over death. As a journalist who covered the Israeli-Lebanon war in 2006, Murray took a keen interest in the international responses to October 7, noting "there was not a single protest against Hamas in any western city", as synagogues were firebombed and bookshops vandalized round the world. When the Jewish state failed to protect its citizens on 7 October, ordinary people rose to help, including a reservist, Nimrod, who recorded messages on his phone for his children, expecting to die as he went to the aid of massacre victims. The kidnap of civilians alongside the killing was planned to activate the Jewish military principle of never leaving anyone behind, making sure Israel would have to negotiate their release. When journalists saw the 46-minute footage made from the terrorists' own recordings, they were all silenced. Murray compares the terrorists' open claims of violence with the secretive words of the SS commander Himmler saying they would never speak about the Holocaust in public. Ethnic cleansing accusations against Israel are countered by statistics: since Israel's inception in 1948, the non-Jewish population has increased seventeen-fold and the Muslim population ninefold. Murray takes the story back to the beginning of Iran's Revolutionary Government in 1979 and the move into Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with America as "the Great Satan" and Israel as "the Little Satan". He has interviewed numerous eyewitnesses to the 2023 killings and also to antisemitism on university campuses, comparing indifference to the massacre with proactive attitudes to attacks on Black or Trans people. Back in Israel, although the Iron Dome for intercepting the constant rocket attacks is universally praised, the downside is that none of the failed attacks ever make the news. 287pp.