Douglas Murray: A Time of War The West is ‘drunk on peace.’ What will it take to wake them up?By Bari Weiss
When we planned this episode of Honestly, I thought we would be looking back at the past year from a slightly quieter vantage point. We were going to release it on October 7. But quiet is the last thing happening in the Middle East right now. The war that Iran outsourced to its proxies since October 7, 2023 has now become a war explicitly between Iran and Israel.
Hours before I sat down with Douglas Murray in New York City, Iran launched over 100 ballistic missiles toward Israel. As Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled in bomb shelters, a handful of them made a direct impact. For a lot of Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it is not.
There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil. This is one of them. This is a war between Israel and Iran. But it’s also a war between civilization and barbarism. That was true some 360 days ago. And it’s even more true today. And yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.
Consider a few examples from the last week. At the United Nations, 12 countries, including the U.S., presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who, The New York Times described as “beloved,” “a towering figure” and “a powerful orator.” Here in New York, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale this week, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all martyrs we salute.” That’s just a few examples from the past week.
No one I know understands the moral urgency of this moment better than Douglas Murray. Douglas isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members, although I know a lot of Israeli families who consider him an adoptive family member. And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.
Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, of course, to Israel, where he has become a celebrity. When you walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with Douglas Murray, it’s like being with The Beatles. He’s also the best-selling author of seven books, a regular contributor at the New York Post, National Review, and most importantly, at The Free Press, where he writes the beloved Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. There is just no one I would rather be sitting with as we watch the Middle East and, really, the world transformed before our eyes.
To watch the Honestly episode with Bari and Douglas, click here:
Click below to listen to our conversation or scroll down for an edited transcript:
On what brought us to this moment. And what’s next after Iran’s missile attack on Israel:
Bari Weiss: We are speaking on the eve of what some people are saying feels like the beginning of World War III. And I guess the first question I want to ask you is, how did we get here? How did we get to a moment where Iran is dropping 100 ballistic missiles on Israel? And, you know, Israel is vowing to respond to it. What are the factors that led us to this moment?
Douglas Murray: Probably with the plane that took off in 1979 from Paris, taking the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran[, Iran]. This is one of the worst journeys of the twentieth century. All of this starts from there.
Iran had the opportunity to be a progressive country in the region. In the 1970s, Israel had an ambassador in Iran. There was the opportunity for normalization. But the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran chose a different path. It’s an apocalyptic terror movement. The revolutionary Islamic government decided to oppress the people it presumes to govern and try to expand itself across the region. And my worry early in the period after October 7th was always that Hamas would take up all of the energy and that Israel wouldn’t be allowed, as it were, to do what else needed to be done. But as it happens, as we come to the first anniversary, the tide has turned. And the Israeli government and the Israeli armed forces and military have shown that there was a price to pay for trying to eradicate the Jewish people. And the price is high, and it should always have been high, and it will probably get higher.
Hamas is almost completely destroyed. Its cowardly leader, Yahya Sinwar, is hiding in the tunnels somewhere in the south of Gaza surrounded by what he would regard as the best hostages. That’s his end. In less than two weeks, Hezbollah has been utterly destroyed. Three thousand of his operatives, they couldn’t trust their cell phones, decided to go to old-fashioned pager devices. But someone we don’t know put explosives in all of those pager devices. And so 3,000 of their operatives in one moment across Lebanon and Syria all suffered grievous injury. The next day, their walkie-talkies blew up. By day three, they couldn’t trust putting on a kettle in Beirut. Then, best of all, when Benjamin Netanyahu came to New York last week, he went onstage to the UN. I watched from the gallery as the traditional walk out of various despots and dictators and their minions occurred. Somewhere in Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah was watching Benjamin Netanyahu on television, and that’s when Hassan Nasrallah went to meet his maker.
BW: It’s like the baptism scene from The Godfather.
DM: I was told by a Jewish friend the other day that apparently there is something in the Torah that says one should not take enormous delight in the decimation of one’s foes. But I’m not Jewish, and so I don’t have to follow this.
Hassan Nasrallah and the other people who have also gone to the dust, have not just spent recent decades killing Israelis, kidnapping them from the border regions, firing rockets at people and communities across the north of Israel. They killed 241 Americans at the Marine barracks in 1983, and they got away with it. They got away with it. They killed French soldiers. They killed many other foreign nationals. They got away with it. Not anymore.
Hezbollah built up their rocket arsenal, and most of that has been destroyed in recent days. So that’s Iran’s proxy to the north. The Houthis in Yemen, everyone’s favorite new terrorists recently discovered by morons on American campuses—they’re not doing too well either. The mullahs in Tehran no longer have active proxies able to try to destroy the Jewish state. They’ve gone in Gaza. They’ve gone in Lebanon. They’re going in Yemen. So now, it’s the mullahs versus Israel.
BW: So what happens next? You’re deeply sourced in Israel. What do you think the next few weeks look like?
DM: I would just say it seems obvious that if Tehran is going to fire ballistic missiles at Israel, Israel has to be allowed to reply in kind. As Golda Meir famously said, “We can’t afford to lose once.” The mullahs have made their choice. Is it possible they could be punished in a way that would topple the regime? Maybe. I don’t know if Israel can do that alone or if America needs to do it with them.
On winning the peace and why de-escalation isn’t the answer:
BW: We now know from Financial Times reporting over the past few days that Israel, in the days after October 7th, believed it had a way to get Nasrallah, and the Americans stopped them. And the theme that emerges for me is they seem not to view Islamic totalitarianism as the enemy, but escalation itself.
DM: Yes. And the problem is that when you need to win a war, you need to escalate. Absolutely. You need to escalate. Of course, the whole thing is always about de-escalation, always de-escalation. This is just madness—people, governments drunk on peace, thinking that peace is the only thing that should ever happen. And we don’t need to go back to Ecclesiastes to know this, but there is a season and a list. The list includes a time of war and a time of peace. This is a time of war. It was a war started by the mullahs in Tehran when they decided to send their barbarians into Israel on October 7th to rape and burn and murder. They chose the war. The Israelis want a time of peace. Most people in the region want a time of peace. But in order to get to peace, you have to get to victory in war.
BW: I want to quote something from the BBC today. Shortly after Iran launched these ballistic missiles against Israel, one of its commentators said this (and I promise you it is not satire), “The international community has to make sure that whatever Israel does is not upending the regional order as we know it. We’ve been in this for 12 months now of constant red lines being crossed mostly by the Israelis. Hezbollah and Iran have played it fairly rationally, trying to always be cautious in how they respond.”
DM: By the way, this moron is a teacher at King’s College in London. He worked for four years for the Qatari government. He was in the pay of the Qatari government. He now teaches at King’s College London, which is funded by the Qataris. Why the British Broadcasting Corporation should be inviting on people who are in the pay of Qatar, which is the mini terrorist state to Iran’s great terror state in the region, I don’t know. But that’s why you get moronic commentary like that.
We have to ask ourselves in all these institutions, how do you end up with one of these Qatari stooges, who works at a Qatar-funded institution in London, giving his Qatari propaganda for a terrorist state on the British Broadcasting Corporation? It’s rot all the way down. Rot in the media supported by rotted institutions of rotten states like Qatar.
On why conservatives back Israel but have soured on Ukraine:
BW: I want to ask you a question about Ukraine. I think it’s now become the consensus in large portions of the American right that we should support Israel’s war. But Ukraine—let’s give up on those guys—to be very crude about it. I would say Israel has become almost a conservative cause, and Ukraine has become a liberal cause. And I find this quite strange, because the way I see it, these two conflicts are profoundly and deeply linked. But many of your fellow conservatives no longer see it that way. What are they seeing?
DM: Well, of course, Ukraine is obvious. It’s a rather basic lesson from the twentieth century that you shouldn’t be allowed to roll tanks into other countries with impunity. And also, it’s never quite a good idea to start redrawing the borders of the outskirts of Europe because you can open up an awful lot of old enmities that way. There’s quite a lot of trouble in that part of the world.
BW: But tell that to J.D. Vance or Donald Trump.
DM: Well, I think they get that. I think they get that. I think the problem that’s happened with the right on Ukraine is, well, you’re right. It’s become a sort of left-wing shibboleth. You know, the people who’ve never been there.
BW: The same people that put up the black square on social media in 2020, and then put the pronouns in their bio, then put up the Ukraine flag.
DM: Which is all true. And I mean there are a lot of irritating people out there. But just because people are irritating does not mean that you can form your foreign policy in opposition to irritating people. The thing that has changed on the right with Ukraine, as I see it, is that after the spring offensive last year failed, it seems that there’s going to be some kind of negotiated settlement, which will include a change of borders in the region. And once people started to see that, then, yes, a lot of support fell away.
On how the Middle East could thrive without the mullahs:
DM: Now, look, Ukraine has fallen into a sort of torpor as a war. And a lot of people want to end it, and a lot of people think it will probably just have to be settled by some gruesome and difficult land swap. Who knows? Israel is different on this because there is the glimpse, a clear sight at this point, particularly after recent weeks, there is a sight of what victory looks like. And that is what makes these conflicts at this stage different. It makes it wildly different because it is clear at this point how this war in the Middle East could end.
If you didn’t have that terror regime oppressing the people of Iran and spreading their terror around the region, look at what’s possible. Look at what Bahrain has achieved in recent years. Saudi Arabia has done extraordinary things. And the same with the Emiratis. I mean, you know, you have Israelis holidaying in the [United Arab Emirates], and you have international businesses doing business in Saudi. You have pop concerts in Saudi again. And there is this opportunity to say, Look, how about if everything was normalized?
Look at what the Israelis could do with these countries in terms of water supplies, or technology, or crops, or new energy, or all of these things. And there is a possible future for the region. It does not involve the mullahs in Tehran having power. And it is not predicated on Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas or the Palestinian Authority or whatever comes next in Gaza creating the perfect Palestinian state. The region cannot wait for that. It has waited for that for decades.
BW: But what do you do if you’re Israel? In other words, I don’t disagree with the idea that if the Palestinians of the West Bank were given a state tomorrow, it would likely turn toward Hamas.
DM: It’ll be another failed Arab state. And most likely it will just be another Iranian proxy state.
BW: But then occupation forever?
DM: No.
BW: Then what?
DM: Whatever happens in Gaza should be a regional agreement with regional investment. Regional security deals. But the absolute bottom line is never again will young Israelis have to lose their lives going into another conflict to get Iranian rockets out of Gaza. My hope is this is the last Gaza war, the last Lebanon war.
On what can be done about the growing antisemitism in the West?:
BW: How do you square the possible victory for Israel abroad and the reality for Jews here in America who always believed, or at least since 1945, have believed, that this country was exceptional for us? Talk to us a little bit about how you see ascendant antisemitism and what can be done about it.
DM: Well, one of the things I was very struck about in Israel after [October 7th], as delegations started to come through from America and Canada and Britain and elsewhere, delegations of Jews and Christians and others just trying to show support, really often doing menial tasks like picking fruit in the south that needed fixing and that sort of thing. A large number would say things along the following lines: I can’t understand what’s happened, Douglas. I’m a liberal. I was there for #MeToo. I was there for BLM. And after the seventh, no one was there for me. And I always said the same thing, which was, Welcome.
BW: What do you mean by that?
DM: This was always going to be the case. You’re a fool to think that BLM wouldn’t go the way it did or that Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t. Why do all these movements go to antisemitism straight away? The rancid movements based on half-truths and lies will always fall into the supreme paranoid lie, which is antisemitism. Antisemitism is a psychosis that human beings are very vulnerable to.
And the Jewish tragedy is that they provide such an easy excuse for people who are failing in their lives in all sorts of ways. And as I’ve often said, you know, the amazing thing about antisemitism is the Jews can simultaneously be accused of being rich and of being poor, of being integrated and not integrating enough, and of being stateless and of having a state.
These are young people searching for a cause. And they’ve been given a cause by wicked people. And they’ll have to decide in their lives what they think about that. If you chant intifada, you are chanting for something like the suicide bomber who went into a university in Jerusalem 20 years ago and detonated in the café, killing American students, among others. Are you happy with that? When you say you want the intifada everywhere, do you really mean you want your fellow students to be blown up whilst buying a cappuccino? Really? Like, have you thought about this at all? Are you this morally frivolous or wicked? These, by the way, these people have joined the losing side. This is very important to stress. They have joined a death cult. They have joined a losing side.
BW: This is one of a lot of alarming statistics: 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, all of them on TikTok, I’m sure, believe that Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and to the Palestinians. What do we do about that?
DM: Well, the first thing is pray they never get what they want. If they got what they wanted, what they chant for, if Iran got the nuclear bomb and the ayatollahs used it, that’s it. The Jewish people who survived the pharaoh, and the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, and the Romans, and [Josef] Mengele would have been done in in our own time. Are you sure you would be happy to live with that, young Columbia student?
BW: I don’t see people just naturally growing out of something that is being reinforced by so many of the institutions in their lives, by the people they admire. Not just by their professors, but by many people in the culture who let these lies go unchallenged.
DM: You know, as I say, there’s a lot of rot in the culture. There’s a lot of rotten institutions.
BW: Is it going to take something catastrophic?
DM: It will take a mass-casualty terror attack. Probably. Sadly. You know, there’s a line from T.S. Eliot, that rather sobering line in Murder in a Cathedral. He says, We do not know very much [of] the future except [that] from generation to generation, the same things happen again and again. Men learn little. And most likely a mass-casualty terror attack could be about the only thing that would bring this reality home.
On why young Israelis give him hope:
BW: You’ve met so many people in your time in Israel. You’ve talked to survivors. You’ve gone to jails where terrorists are being held. You’ve, of course, met with so many political leaders. One of the things you talked about recently is that you’re actually less pessimistic. Give us some reasons why you’ve left some of that pessimism behind.
DM: From my generation in Britain, it was always the question: Would we be able to do what our grandparents had done? You know, living through The Blitz in London night after night and not losing their faith and not losing their strength. And I used to hear terrible stories when I was growing up about what that was like—of those who went and fought, the ones who didn’t come back. And in my country of birth, Great Britain, like in America, every country is filled with family stories. And my grandmother on my father’s side lost her father in the First [World] War and then her brothers in the second, always fighting the Germans. And every family was like that. And it was always this question of, if the time of trial came, would we be up to it?
Everyone in the West, somewhere in the back of our heads, has this thing. Israelis always had it. Since 1973, in particular, the first Lebanon war, the second Lebanon war, always this question of, are the young people going to be up to it?
And I have so much admiration and pride for this generation of young Israelis who were put to the test, and they have been magnificent. And if you see what these young men and women do on a daily basis from the south of Gaza to the mountains of Lebanon and Syria in the north, they don’t do any of it with hatred in their hearts. Some of what they’ve had to do is just beyond description. But they do it from love of their country, love of their people, love of their tradition, defense of their people, defense of their tradition. They know that they are fighting for the Jewish people as their forebears have before, but this time with a state, with an army, with an air force. And they’ve stepped up to this moment, and they have been extraordinary.
People will write books about this generation. And the best thing about it is that it should tell us that there is also a better way. There is a better way than this nihilism and hatred which has been bred in America. There is something else other than this culture of resentment and failure. There is such a thing as gratitude instead of resentment: pride in protecting your people and your faith and your community, and indeed, in my view, the civilized world. Anyone who feels down from spending too much time with people in America should come to Israel. And you will see that, among other things, the people who thought the next generation of Israelis just wanted to party were wrong. It turned out not to be an either-or thing. You can fight for your country and your people, and you can still dance. And that’s what they’re showing.
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