Israel Understands the Enemy It Faces — Do the Rest of Us? Douglas Murray
From the book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, by Douglas Murray. Copyright © 2025 by Douglas Murray. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.
Today the government most responsible for spreading the accusation that Israel is expansionist and colonialist is the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which has spent recent years assiduously expanding its colonies. What has Gaza become but a colony of Iran? What has Iraq become since Iran moved into the vacuum left by America after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? Or Yemen? Or Syria, into which Iran had 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. Why did the mullahs order Hezbollah to engage in the Syrian civil war except to prop up Syria as a forward base of Iran? And what of Lebanon, which even in 2006 still had a government able to distance itself from the actions of Iran’s army, Hezbollah. By the time Hamas started its October 2023 war against Israel and Hezbollah joined in, Lebanon had become practically a colony of Iran — with Hezbollah ruling the country by terror and setting up its weaponry among Lebanese civilians. For years Hezbollah had set up checkpoints at Beirut Airport for passport control and had acted as the government of that country, whether the people wanted that or not. And there is much evidence that they do not.
Everywhere the same rule holds. Groups like Hamas that delight in their bloodlust accuse the Israelis of being insatiable killers. Palestinian groups and their supporters who encourage their youth to view death through “martyrdom” as the highest form of valor claim that the Jews are bloodthirsty child-killers. People who use rape as a weapon of war accuse the Israelis of insatiably raping prisoners in Israeli jails.
On January 31, 1979, a flight took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Its destination was Tehran, where it would land the following day. The plane was carrying the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fanatical Shiite leader who had been living in exile from his native Iran for more than 14 years. His return heralded the end of the reign of the shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), the overthrow of the shah’s government, and the turning point of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Khomeini and his supporters swiftly seized power, took 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran, and proceeded to kill their domestic political opponents. This included the communists and trade unionists who had struggled alongside the Islamists to overthrow the shah.
Despite this, many Western intellectuals and journalists celebrated the flight of Khomeini from Paris. Among them was Michel Foucault, the left-wing French philosopher, who saw Khomeini as bringing a spiritual revolution to Iran that would finally do away with the Western sins of capitalism and materialism. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton, greeted the Iranian Revolution by reassuring readers of the New York Times that the depiction of Ayatollah Khomeini “as fanatical . . . and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” In a subsequent piece for Foreign Policy (“Khomeini’s Promise”), Falk added that “Khomeini’s Islamic republic can be expected to have a doctrine of social justice at its core; from all indications it will be flexible in interpreting the Koran.”
It was soon proved that nothing could have been further from the truth. From 1979 to the present day, the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran has subjugated the Iranian people, condemned women to second-class status, imprisoned and tortured Iranian students, and instituted public hangings for people accused of “crimes” such as homosexuality. The hope that, given time, a “moderate” Iranian revolutionary leader would emerge proved false. And while the new government in Iran railed against the West for the sins of “colonialism” and much more, the regime spent its decades in power taking over not just Iran but the wider Middle East.
In the 1980s, Iran fought a bloody war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in which around half a million people were killed. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Iranian theocracy moved in to colonize and dominate postwar Iraq. It was the same playbook that the regime had followed in the 1980s in Lebanon. As that country had fallen into civil war, the Iranians used their proxy armies, notably Hezbollah, to dominate first Shiite communities and then the whole country. They eventually took over the security and government in much of Beirut and colonized vast swaths of the country with their forces. Similarly, after the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Tehran’s armies, including Hezbollah, moved in to prop up and dominate the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And when civil war broke out in Yemen in 2014, the mullahs backed and armed the Houthi-led militias as they took over that country.
While decrying Western imperialism, the Iran of the ayatollahs became one of the biggest imperial powers of the age. At every military parade in Tehran, and at Friday prayers across the country, the regime called for “Death to America,” calling America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan.” While accusing Israel of being a colonial outpost of America, Tehran was busy setting up colonial outposts everywhere. At a “World Without Zionism” conference held in Tehran in October 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated a famous phrase of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. The “Jerusalem-occupying regime,” he said, “must be erased from the page of time.” For years Western academics and politicians debated whether Iranian leaders meant what they said.
In May 2024, the supreme leader of the revolutionary Islamic government, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote a letter to the students of America. In his opening, the leader of the Islamic Revolution thanked and praised the students protesting on American campuses: “You are now part of the Resistance Front, and you have begun a dignified struggle under the ruthless police pressure of your government that evidently defends the oppressive and brutal Zionist regime.”
There’s more than one irony in this, but in the years since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, have killed, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of Iranian students — especially when they have protested against their own government. In 2009 alone, during the thwarted “Green Revolution,” many students came out onto the streets of Iran. The government’s Basij security forces shot them in public. The young Iranian philosophy student Neda Agha-Soltan was shot through the chest by a member of Khamenei’s police force; the shooting was caught on camera. After the crackdown, the Iranian authorities ordered the digging of mass graves for the bodies of those who were murdered and tortured. Students who were detained in the regime’s prisons in the aftermath of these protests attested to having been raped in prison with batons and bottles.
But the ayatollah wasn’t going to allow something like his own track record to get in the way of destabilizing America. In his letter to American students, Khamenei talked about “Zionist” and U.S. government involvement in “state terrorism and ongoing injustice.” He said, “I want to assure you that today, the situation is changing. Another fate awaits the sensitive region of West Asia. Many consciences have awakened on a global scale, and the truth is becoming clear. The Resistance Front has also grown stronger and will continue to strengthen while history is also turning a new page.” He concluded his salutations with citations from the Koran and said, “I empathize with you, young people, and I respect your steadfastness.”
The fact that 2024 saw a record surge in executions inside Iran was left out of Khamenei’s letter to American students, as was the fact that his regime publicly executes people convicted of homosexuality by hanging them from cranes. Khamenei was clearly pleased with the ignorance of America’s students and his own ability to foment dissent in the land of “the Great Satan.”
One of the most striking things about this is that all of it has happened before. Most Israelis of a certain age have a very clear memory of the people who joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in its early years.
The PLO was founded in 1964. Yasser Arafat, who was born in Egypt, became its chairman five years later. For those people in the West who chant about Israeli “occupation,” the year 1964 ought to be suggestive. After all, when Arafat and his friends founded their movement, they did so in order to object to “Israeli occupation.” Yet 1964 was three years before the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel defeated a coalition of Arab armies and took control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza. The Israelis did so in order to prevent Israel from being invaded from these territories. While the legal status of the West Bank is still disputed, what cannot be disputed is that Israel’s holding the hills of Judea and Samaria prevents the thin slice of land that is Israel from being under constant rocket attack from those hills. Go to the hills of Judea and Samaria at night and you will see the lights of Tel Aviv blinking clearly in the distance.
In 1964, these territories were not in any sense “occupied.” You might say that they were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, but in no sense were they occupied by Israel. But Arafat and his friends also called for the liberation of the “occupied territories” a full three years before the war of 1967. Part of Israel’s response to its threatened annihilation in that war was to seize control of the Golan Heights from Syria. Again, if an enemy army occupied the Golan Heights, the rest of Israel would be in rocket range. The official view of the British Foreign Office, among others, remains that the Golan Heights are “occupied” and that the Israeli government should hand this territory over to the Syrian regime, as if Syria did not have enough land in which to massacre its own people after 2011. But whatever the status of the Golan Heights today, there was no occupation in 1964. The PLO was set up in 1964 because it believed that all of Israel was an occupying force and that nothing but the complete “liberation” of every piece of the land, including Tel Aviv and Haifa, would be sufficient.
But even then, many Western celebrities and intellectuals joined in the Palestinian liberation movement. The PLO may have been kicked out of Jordan in 1971 after bringing terrorism there. And it may have been kicked out of Lebanon in 1982 after bringing terrorism to that country. And it may have finally left Tunisia in 1991 after bringing violence to that place, too. But the organization could always rely on a certain type of Westerner to sprinkle some celebrity stardust on its campaign. The gay French author Jean Genet wrote an entire love letter to the Palestinian liberation movement in an obscene 1970 book called Prisoner of Love.
In 1977 the British-born, Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave even made sure to have herself filmed dancing around a campfire with the PLO, waving a Kalashnikov rifle. She could hardly have claimed ignorance about the movement she had joined. This was just five years after the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics, and just a year after Israeli special forces carried out a raid in Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue hijacked passengers.
In 2023, a month after the October 7 massacre, another actress, Susan Sarandon, addressed an anti-Israel protest near Bryant Park in Manhattan. At that protest, the crowds chanted “From the river to the sea,” “Israel is a racist state,” and “There is only one solution — intifada, revolution.” It was a reminder, if such was needed, that there is always a type of Westerner who is desperate to see the land soaked with blood — so long as it is not their own.
From the book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, by Douglas Murray. Copyright © 2025 by Douglas Murray. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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