British writer and political commentator Douglas Murray is no stranger to covering war zones.
He has borne witness to fighting in Ukraine, and the first time he visited Israel was during the Second Lebanon War. Murray spent six months in the Holy Land following the October 7 massacre and left the country just before the Iranian drone and missile attack on April 13.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Murray spoke about his views on Hamas and Israel’s prosecution of the war against the terrorist group and his warnings about the Iranian regime at the heart of the conflict.
Murray said it had always been his view that “Israel had to be extremely careful not to win proxy wars and for no one to ever be able to take out the cancer at the heart.
Iran's threat to the entire world
“Obviously, that’s not Israel’s job, but the job of the Iranian people and others,” said Murray. “But it seems to me that the regime in Tehran, the revolutionary Islamic government, showed once again what it is, and what it would like to do. And this isn’t just Israel’s problem, it’s the region’s problem. And the world’s problem.”
The Iranian attack was a massive escalation, the first time the regime had attacked Israel directly, said Murray.
“The eternal unbelievable humbug of what the Iranians and their supporters say when they fire missiles at Jerusalem and still claim themselves to be defenders of the holy places,” Murray scoffed.
“Give me a break.”
The defense against the barrage was a success, shooting down 99% of missiles and drones, in part thanks to US, British, and Jordanian military efforts.
While reassured about the IDF’s capabilities Murray doesn’t see it as a win, but the prevention of an atrocity.
He also rejected the sentiment in Washington that this was the end of the story and laughed at the idea expressed by some analysts that Iran was only trying to send a message.
“There are other ways to send signals than sending munitions against your cities,” said Murray.
The attack was worrying and ominous to Murray, who explained that he had observed during his tour of the North of Israel how Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network, had always seemed to be testing the Iron Dome. He had seen the Lebanese terrorist group’s threat to places like Meron and Metulla. Iran could also learn from its attacks and “at some point, you can obviously swarm the system.”
Murray had seen the results of another of Iran’s proxies overrunning Israel’s defensive systems. He had visited just about every kibbutz that had been assaulted on October 7, and some towns like Ofakim.
He had also seen the devastation that Hamas had invited upon itself with the pogrom. It was much like other war zones that Murray had beheld but with added complexities. The IDF has had to overcome the challenges of a dense population and civilian infrastructure, and an enemy that engages in perfidy by dressing as a non-combatant in civilian areas.
“There’s the additional problem that the structure that Hamas has been able to build in the last 18 years means that you don’t really know where anyone’s going to come from, and that at any moment, as the soldiers are well aware, people might pop up from a tunnel or out of a building,” said Murray.
“I think that makes it different from any other war zone I’ve seen, because in Ukraine, for instance, the Russians haven’t been in Kherson or other cities for 18 years. And so when the Ukrainian forces were able to take those cities back with them, there were booby traps that the Russians left behind – they’re very good at that like Hamas – but they didn’t have this vast infrastructure that they had built.“
Unfortunately the complexity of the battlefield in Gaza, even in relation to conflicts like Iraq, is poorly understood by many, said Murray. When appreciated, it is understandable how friendly-fire accidents like the shooting of the three hostages and the World Central Kitchen (WCK) tragedy can occur.
“People think how on earth could that happen? And it happens because as many soldiers have described to me, it’s every day there’s people coming out of buildings, waving white flags, and then from their midsts come Hamas terrorists firing. It’s incredibly complicated,” said Murray.
Such accidents are ammunition for Hamas, “who know very well how to wage not just a war, but also a media war, and an international opinion war. And they’re very practiced at that.”
Hamas operates the way it does, near aid workers like those from WCK, in hopes of turning the tragedies into opportunities.
The world is ignorant of how Hamas operates
“The world is very ignorant of what Hamas does, how it operates,” said Murray.
It doesn’t help, in combating such propaganda, that abroad some interpret everything Israel does in poor faith to suit their own machinations.
“Some of them is because they want to eradicate the Jewish state,” said Murray. “Some of them, it’s just that they want to bring down the wider West. There’s no coincidence at all that the people who are most anti-Israel are always anti-West in general.”
A third cohort, according to Murray, isn’t initiated in the intricacies of the conflict. When they see on the news a tragedy like aid workers caught in the crossfire the assumption may be that it would be deliberate because of the work by malicious factions pushing such a narrative on behalf of Hamas.
The British writer saw much of Hamas’s propaganda success partly due to these foreign narrative subcontractors.
“As if the Israelis would want to deliberately kill the foreign nationals or anyone else involved in delivering aid,” Murray said, shaking his head. “A lot of people will be fooled by Hamas’s tactics or be ignorant of Hamas’s tactics, and then pushed by the second group who are very, very good at getting their interpretation out.”
One vehicle for Hamas’s message is the marches that have gripped many Western cities. Murray characterized these demonstrations as pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism.
“They call simultaneously, obviously, for a ceasefire and for an intifada,” Murray ridiculed, noting that far being motivated by peace, they attacked those carrying signs that declared Hamas a terrorist group. They’re on Hamas’s side. They’re on the terrorist side. Ergo, these are terrorist marches. I can’t have any of that small minority bulls***, because it’s just happened too often.“
While the marches were motivated by spreading a pro-Palestinian message, Murray noted that he suspected that “the sheer violence of the rhetoric and the behavior of many of the anti-Israel protesters has put off some of the softer public, the softer, wider public who might otherwise be there.”
There were two driving forces for the protests according to Murray. One was Muslim immigrant communities, and the other was the radical Left.
The radical Left, said Murray, was a group of socialists and anti-capitalists that could be found anywhere there was agitation. Many in the Muslim immigrant background communities were motivated by classic Islamic antisemitism and Islamic anti-Zionism. They were bused in with what he said was “suspicious efficiency” from Muslim-dominant towns to scream outside the BBC offices or Parliament.
Murray said that while the importation of the conflict to Britain through immigration and the marches might be an important matter for the public, it was not a great matter in British politics.
He noted that Labor would likely win a landslide victory, and it was likely to become a fringe issue.
“I don’t think it’s possible for Conservatives to turn around the polls, and in any case, this has happened on their watch for 14 years. It’s very hard for the Conservatives to turn around and say, ‘We don’t like all this pandering to Islamists, and we don’t like all of this mass illegal migration and mass legal migration,’” Murray assessed.
“They’ve had an awfully long time to get some of these things out, and the Conservatives have done some things in government, but none of them have affected the deep societal issues which the British electorate are very, very agitated by.”
A Labour victory, which has many Muslim voters, would likely not be better for Israel, but he expected it to be similar to Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s policy but weaker.
He credited Labor leader Keir Starmer for his work to improve the party and “lancing the worst of the antisemitism” but the foundations of the political movement were still radical.
Cameron “has been pretty bad as a friend of Israel during this conflict. His own anti-Israel sentiment seeps out fairly regularly.”
“I don’t think there’ll be that much difference to begin with,” said Murray. “The problem is always whenever a conflict emerges with Israel involving any of Israel’s neighbors, it doesn’t matter what size the conflict is, actually.
The responses to it get more and more vicious. And that’s something I’ve noted for a long time now, and I’m deeply concerned. This is a relatively large war compared to previous Gaza wars, but it’s not a large war compared to some others in Israel’s history. How the Labour Party will behave when they’re in government, we’ll see.“Back in the UK after almost six months in Israel, Murray said he was struck by how Israelis had met the challenges before them, but also how they were still dealing with the societal tremors of October 7.
“I’m deeply moved and inspired, really, by the young men and women of Israel,” said Murray. “I think they’ve been absolutely remarkable. I think the question which every society that isn’t completely asleep always asks itself is, ‘Would we be what our fathers or grandfathers or forefathers were in the time of trial?’”
He said that in the West, they had not been tested in such a fashion in a long time, and some older Israelis doubted the newer generations’ ability to stand fast. He said the older generations were no longer worried.
He met many soldiers serving in the Gaza and West Bank arenas, and in his eyes, “this generation of Israelis has stepped up to a historical moment, and they’ve been shown to be magnificent and brave and courageous.”
As he told President Isaac Herzog in a recent meeting, “They don’t do any of it out of hatred. They do it out of love. Love and the desire to defend their loved ones, their families, their people, their nation, their home. I see no hatred in the hearts of the young soldiers I meet. I see just the desire to live in peace and the knowledge that in order to live in peace, you must sometimes wage war, especially when war is waged upon you.”
While the soldiers fought, the country still grappled with a trauma that Murray said is still being processed. It was a trauma that many in the world did not understand.
He had spoken to Nova massacre survivors and their therapists, and they told them it was too soon to talk about PTSD.
“This country is still in the trauma,” said Murray. “I think that will be the case for a long time to come. The trauma being the deterrence that Israelis have believed they had for 50 years now broke down.”
Some of the wounds could be healed to a certain extent “with the return of any hostages that can be returned, but also with the reestablishment of Israel’s deterrence in both the military and intelligence fields. I think that’s the real end to it, to this conflict. The real end is when Israelis in the North and the South know that they can sleep safely in their beds. I spent many months living with the displaced people from Kiryat Shmona and elsewhere. I think of these people every day. Even when I’m not with them. They have to be allowed to return to their homes in safety.”