by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization begins with an observation about the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel that those on all sides of the debate can surely agree with: “Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.”
I expected Murray’s book to be a personal eyewitness account of his time with the IDF on the frontlines of the war in Gaza. It is not. Aside from a few anecdotes—including a powerful reflection on his visit to the bombed-out building in Rafah where October 7 architect Yahya Sinwar bled out and breathed his last—this book is primarily a reconstruction of the atrocities of October 7 and the global spasm of Jew-hatred that followed.
There are those who might wonder if such a book is necessary almost two years later. There have been press reports; documentaries such as We Will Dance Again and One Day in October; several books. Murray makes it clear that the answer is yes, and the testimonies of survivors and grieving loved ones are difficult to read, despite what I already knew. This horror was a flare, and in its grim light, the response of so many to that horror showed us where they were—and are.
Many wish to ignore the response to October 7 and hurry on to a condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza. Their reaction goes something like this: Yes, yes, October 7 was bad, of course. But we must frame that bad event with what came before, and after. It is true that context is important. But only by first understanding the reaction to October 7 can we understand what is going on now, and only by listening to the words of those who perpetrated it is it possible to understand what Israel is doing and believes it must do.
In short: We cannot hurry past the response to October 7, because it told us much about the motives of those currently condemning Israel, and because many are not only unwilling to say that that the atrocities of October 7 were bad, but are happy to say the opposite—frequently into bullhorns, at such a high volume that those who have not noticed this are doing so deliberately. An assumption of good faith is essential to a productive conversation. The collapse of good faith eliminates the possibility of productive conversation. The response to October 7 was a stark revelation of insidiously bad faith.
Read also: Israel is still the world’s scapegoat by Rob Killlick, spiked