On Democracies And Death Cults

What happens when a society built to protect life confronts an adversary that openly sanctifies death? In On Democracies and Death Cults, Douglas Murray argues that October 7, 2023, made this conflict in values painfully visible. He contends that Israel’s sudden exposure to mass atrocity—and the West’s whiplash-inducing reaction—revealed a fundamental divide between liberal democracies that struggle toward law, restraint, and human dignity, and movements like Hamas (and their state backers) that instrumentalize civilians, glorify martyrdom, and weaponize moral language. To see the stakes clearly, Murray insists, you must look squarely at what happened, who did it, how they did it, and why so many in the West rushed to invert victim and perpetrator.

Murray’s core claim is both moral and strategic: democracies cannot survive by denying evil, minimizing its methods, or outsourcing their security to illusions, euphemisms, or international bodies that will not uphold basic norms. The book combines frontline eyewitness reporting, interviews with survivors and first responders, conversations with military and political leaders, and encounters with captured perpetrators. It then pans out to show how Iran’s revolutionary project and its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis) have built a regional war machine—while Western elites and institutions indulged fictions about “proportionality,” “genocide,” and “apartheid” that invert reality and paralyze necessary action.

What this summary covers

You’ll start with the day itself: the Nova music festival massacre, the sacking of kibbutzim like Be’eri and Nir Oz, and the mass kidnappings that turned families into hostages to strategy. You’ll see why Israelis felt a promise was broken—the implicit social contract that “the IDF will be here in minutes”—and how that breach produced both trauma and resolve. Then you’ll trace the “conception” inside Israel’s security establishment: the hubris that Hamas had been deterred by money, jobs, and the creature comforts of power; the overconfidence that Iron Dome plus superior intelligence could indefinitely substitute for defeating the threat at its source.

From there, you’ll examine Hamas’s specific methods: tunnels woven into homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals; civilians used as shields and props; the deliberate blending of fighters into crowds; and the manipulation of media and casualty data. You’ll stand at Gaza’s Salaheddin “humanitarian corridor,” watching soldiers plead over a loudspeaker for any Israeli children in the crowd who understood Hebrew to step forward—no one does—and you’ll follow the evidence trail through Shifa Hospital’s underground complex. You’ll also meet heroes—Jewish, Muslim, and Druze—who ran toward the chaos: United Hatzalah volunteers, an Arab-Israeli physician used as a human shield, a lone major battling for hours with a handgun, and a wounded police officer defending Sderot’s station rooftop for nearly a day.

Why the world turned—and what it tells you

The book then turns to the West. Why did cities fill with celebrations, not vigils? Why did elite campuses devolve into revolutionary cosplay—encampments chanting for “intifada,” administrators parsing calls for genocide as “context dependent,” and foreign actors (including Tehran) amplifying the fire? Murray situates this in a deeper moral confusion: a generation schooled to see their own countries as settler-colonial and structurally evil reached for the only script they knew. They projected their guilt onto the Jews by repackaging old hate as new justice (see Vasily Grossman’s insight below). The result: posters of kidnapped toddlers ripped down with glee; leading newspapers hedging rape reports; and an international legal class that equated the arsonist and the firefighter.

A mirror for moral failure

“Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” —Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)

Why this matters to you

Whether or not you follow Middle East news, Murray’s point is personal: in a world where war, atrocity, and information warfare collide, your instincts—when to doubt, when to name evil, when to act—decide whether a democracy can defend life without losing its soul. You’re asked to discard comforting illusions: that “managing” threats is the same as defeating them; that right words can replace hard choices; that institutions committed to neutrality will protect you from actors committed to your destruction. The book demands moral clarity: the difference between a society that builds safe rooms for its children and a group that stores RPGs beneath a baby’s crib is the difference between civilization and its sworn enemies.

In the final chapters, Murray returns to first principles. Democracies can defeat death cults not by mirroring their methods, but by refusing to equivocate about what’s at stake. That means telling the truth about how the atrocities were done, understanding the regional architecture that sustains them, and reclaiming the West’s moral vocabulary from those who have turned it upside down. It means honoring ordinary courage—parents holding safe-room doors, medics driving into ambushes, students resisting intimidation—and refusing the temptation to outsource judgment to those who confuse balance with blindness. The throughline is simple and demanding, drawn from Deuteronomy: “Choose life.”

Murray begins where every argument must: with the day itself. If you were asleep in another time zone, you woke to videos that looked unreal: paragliders coming in over the Negev, trucks careening through the gates of a festival, and terrified calls from safe rooms asking parents what to do as men with rifles worked door to door. To understand everything that follows, you need to see October 7 through the eyes of those who were there—and through the simple promise that failed: “Don’t worry. The IDF will be here in minutes.”

The Nova festival and the kibbutzim

At Re’im’s Nova party, about 3,500 young people gathered to welcome the sunrise with trance music. When the rockets began at 6:30 a.m., the music kept playing—sirens were familiar in the south. What wasn’t familiar: paragliders with mounted guns, ambushes at the road out, and looters in civilian clothes signaling to terrorists which cars still had living people inside. Portable toilets became death traps as terrorists fired through every door. By day’s end, 364 were murdered and dozens kidnapped. Survivors later spoke from psychiatric wards; some took their lives (a grim testament to shock colliding with psychedelics—an effect the book describes with compassion and clinical detail).

In Kibbutz Be’eri, more than one hundred terrorists overwhelmed the thirteen-person security team in minutes. The Bachars’ story captures the day’s cruelty and clarity. In their safe room, bullet holes through the door and smoke from a fire set outside forced Avida (shot in both legs) to tell his wife and children to breathe through blood-soaked towels. Grenades came through the window; his wife Dana died; 15-year-old Carmel was shot and asked to be buried with his surfboard. Avida told his daughter, “Mommy’s okay. She’s good.” Hours later, soldiers arrived. Eighty-six Be’eri residents were murdered; thirty-two were kidnapped. Among the dead was Vivian Silver, a Jewish-Canadian peace activist who ferried Gazan children to Israeli hospitals; she was burned alive in her home.

The rupture of a social contract

Talk to Israelis and you’ll hear a refrain: the unthinkable wasn’t only the massacre; it was the breach of a national promise. Parents across the south told their children to hold the safe-room handle tight: “The army is coming.” For hours, no one came. Murray captures the moment of disillusion, not to assign quick blame but to show a society discovering its existential vulnerability. From Tel Aviv’s morgues to Nir Oz’s charred houses, the book documents how quickly homes became crime scenes—and how equally quickly ordinary people acted as first responders and defenders, long before the state could.

In Nir Oz, you walk house to house with community member Ron Bahat: safe-room doors splayed open by explosives, blood trails of seventy-five-year-old language teacher Ada Sagi dragged from the wall she tried to cling to, Thai agricultural workers concentrated into a bomb shelter and machine-gunned—blood up the ceiling, shell casings on the floor. You learn the family names: the Katzirs, the Shalevs, the Cuneos, the Taasas. You see the marks on the walls where hands tried to keep hold of life. And you meet the dead—Bracha Levinson, 74, child of Holocaust survivors, filmed by her killers and uploaded to her Facebook page as a taunt to friends and family.

Hostages as strategy, families as movement

Hamas didn’t only kill; it kidnapped roughly 250 people to break Israeli morale and leverage the country’s ethical reflex: “Bring them home.” In Tel Aviv, a Hostage Families Forum became an organizing center and sanctuary. You meet Malki Shem Tov, who saw a Hamas video of his son Omer handcuffed in a pickup and turned his grief into a movement with 15,000 volunteers. You meet Danielle and Sharon, sisters kidnapped with their toddlers; and 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Yaffa Adar, paraded on a golf cart in Gaza. The West ran no mass protests to free them. Posters of kidnapped infants were torn down across European and North American cities.

The moral pivot

“If the murder of young women for the crime of being at a concert shouldn’t make you angry, then what should?”

The point for you is simple: before debates about “proportionality” or “ceasefires,” you must name the reality of the day. The stories—of bravery, terror, and love—are not anecdotes. They form the moral floor on which any argument about war, law, or diplomacy must stand. Murray’s reporting forces you to look long enough for the categories to settle: who built safe rooms to shield children; who stuffed RPGs under cribs; who filmed murders with pride; who begged their children to keep holding the handle just a little longer.

(Context: Jean Hatzfeld’s Rwandan genocide reporting or Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories perform a similar moral function—naming and specifying collapses abstraction. Murray’s method belongs in that lineage.)

Why didn’t Israel see this coming? Murray traces a “conception” that hardened into hubris: the belief that Hamas had been contained by the pleasures and profits of power, and that Israel’s unmatched intelligence and air defenses could manage the residual threat indefinitely. If you’ve ever mistaken control for safety, this chapter will feel uncomfortably familiar.

Iron Dome’s arithmetic—and illusion

Iron Dome is a technological marvel, but it masks a strategic imbalance. Hamas can fire a $300 Katyusha; intercepting it may cost $100,000–$200,000. In 2011, two hundred rockets in a single month could be framed as “routine” because the sirens worked and shelters held. The mayor of Sderot summarized the logic to Murray in a shelter: if people cannot live in Sderot, then they cannot live in Ashkelon; if not Ashkelon, then not Ashdod; then not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Hamas—and Hezbollah in the north—bet on that math. Israelis adjusted to it.

Deterrence also bred a comforting script: Israel’s “arm” reached anywhere (think of Munich’s aftermath or pop-culture series like Fauda). In late September 2023, in New York for the UN General Assembly, Israeli briefers described precision strikes killing Islamic Jihad leaders the moment they were promoted. The subtext Murray heard: we can handle this. A week later, hang gliders landed at a dance floor.

Hamas will moderate—until it doesn’t

The “conception” said that Hamas’s leaders, enjoying Qatari penthouses and billions skimmed through UN and donor flows, would not risk their luxury. Murray shows why that misreads fanaticism. Consider Yahya Sinwar. Imprisoned for murdering four Palestinians accused of collaboration (he once reportedly strangled a victim with his bare hands), he studied Hebrew and Israeli intelligence tradecraft in jail. In 2004, an Israeli dentist, Dr. Yuval Bitton, spotted a brain tumor and saved his life. Released in the 2011 Shalit swap (1,027 prisoners for one soldier), Sinwar immediately called for more kidnappings. He told Bitton, “Maybe in another ten to twenty years you’ll weaken, and I’ll attack.” On October 7, he named the operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” lived in tunnels under Gaza with millions in cash and stolen UN aid, and reportedly described civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices.”

Believing fanatics love life the way you do is a category error. Murray reminds you: some leaders mean what they say. The Hamas record includes open calls to “bring annihilation upon the Jews” and to “attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing.” Treating such statements as posturing is not restraint; it’s denial.

When vigilance is demoted to routine

Unit 414’s spotters at Nahal Oz repeatedly flagged oddities: pickup trucks stopping at Hamas posts and pointing at fences; fighters deep in Gaza practicing “rolling over, shooting.” Warnings went unheeded. On October 7, the base—manned mostly by unarmed female observers—was overrun. Videos show young women in pajamas, bloodied and bound; some were raped; others taken hostage. Sixty-six soldiers (mostly women) were slaughtered. The contrast between their warnings and the neglect above them underscores Murray’s point: when you live beside a fire, vigilance is not paranoia; it is prudence.

A hard lesson

Deterrence does not scale into safety if the adversary prizes martyrdom over comfort, uses your ethics against you, and plans on a different timeline.

For you, the warning travels. At work, in politics, or national security, beware management-by-mitigation: the belief that new sensors, clever interceptors, or “process” can forever substitute for solving the problem. A culture that shouts “context!” at every red flag is a culture that decides to sleep in a house that smells like smoke.

(Context: Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command and Daniel Kahneman’s work on overconfidence both explain how success breeds blind spots; Murray adds the fanatical adversary’s time horizon and incentives.)

Murray insists on witnessing. That means walking through Nir Oz’s blackened safe rooms, standing in the Thai workers’ blood-soaked shelter, watching pathologists reconstruct bodies from heat-shrunken skulls and teeth, and listening to phone audio of kidnapped children. It also means meeting heroes you wouldn’t expect—and, later, stepping into a maximum-security prison to stare at men recognized from atrocity footage. The goal isn’t shock for shock’s sake. It’s moral clarity: seeing what death cults do—and what democracies must do to stop them.

Ordinary bravery under fire

Some courage looks cinematic; much of it looks like love. Major Nimrod Palmach drove south with only a handgun and nine rounds after hearing that his ex-wife’s partner in Nir Oz was trapped with two daughters. He left a goodbye video for his own children, expecting to die. Near Alumim junction, he fought fifteen hours, helping kill more than thirty terrorists; at Be’eri, he found a Hamas map specifying who could be raped and how many to kill. In Sderot, police officer Harel and six colleagues fought from a rooftop for nearly twenty-one hours, outgunned and grenaded; he was shot by a sniper and lay bleeding for four hours. Yamam special forces finally evacuated him.

Courage also looks like restraint. Tariq, a Muslim Arab doctor from Barzilai Medical Center and a United Hatzalah volunteer, drove to an intersection that looked like an accident scene, was shot in the chest (his vest saved him), tied up, and used as a human shield for hours as Hamas gunned down passersby. He told his captors in Arabic he was Muslim. They didn’t care. When the IDF arrived, the terrorists debated; then shot him in the knee. He survived and said simply, “I am here for my country.”

The pathologists and the little things

At the Tel Aviv morgues, teams identified bodies by charred phone fragments, dental DNA, and “commingled” remains—parents and children fused by fire. They filled sacks with ash, bone, and blood scraped from burned cars, honoring rabbis’ guidance to bury what could be found. One pathologist told Murray the worst part: “The knowledge that you are going to die”—heard in the safe rooms and shelters as families waited for the handle to give.

This attention to detail matters for you because it resists a corrosive flattening. When a news chyron says “civilian casualties,” you can now name the living and the dead: Adi Baruch, 23, who left her parents a letter asking them “to live life for me”; Ben Shimoni, who made three rescue runs from Nova before being killed on the third; Omer Ohana and Sagi Golan, fiancés who agreed to send each other a heart on WhatsApp every hour from their respective fronts—Sagi was killed that night at Be’eri. Such specificity is an antidote to propaganda.

In the prison, no revelations—just recognition

Months later, Murray enters a maximum-security facility holding October 7 perpetrators. He recognizes a young red-haired Gazan who murdered dozens at Nova—now small, even pathetic. He recognizes one of the men filmed in the Taasa family’s living room, moments after a grenade blast that killed the father and tore out the eight-year-old’s eye; the terrorist takes a Coke from the fridge and saunters off. If you expect a cinematic explanation here, you won’t get it. There is no insight to be mined, only a sober conclusion Murray borrows from the late journalist Gitta Sereny: evil sometimes descends like a force. You resist it by recognizing it, naming it, and defeating it.

Why witness?

Because denial is a tactic. It was after the Holocaust; it was in the days after October 7. Without witnesses, death cults get to write the record.

(Context: Vasily Grossman at Treblinka and Philip Gourevitch on Rwanda illuminate the same ethic: the specificity of horror is the ground of judgment. Murray stands in that tradition.)

If you’ve ever wondered why debates about “proportionality” feel surreal, this chapter answers it. Murray details how Hamas wages war from within civilian life: embedding tunnel shafts beneath living rooms, caching rifles under cribs, storing RPGs in UN schools and mosques, and blending fighters into crowds during evacuations. He shows you the operational reality the laws of armed conflict never imagined—and explains why war, in Gaza, has a vertical dimension the headlines rarely capture.

Tunnels beneath everything

Hamas spent its years in power building more than 350 miles of tunnels in a territory only 140 square miles—longer than the London Underground. Entrances are hidden in homes, schools, mosques, hospitals. Murray visits a village near the border where IDF engineers lower explosives to collapse a newly found shaft. A major who has cleared houses for months tells him that in “between every two to three homes” he finds weapons or tunnel openings; the default search now skips kitchens and goes straight to children’s rooms—rockets and rifles are often under the cot.

The Shifa Hospital compound becomes a microcosm. CCTV shows hostages brought in on October 7. Later searches reveal large stocks of Kalashnikovs, RPGs, grenades, and a tunnel network under the campus. When BBC veteran Jeremy Bowen suggests on-air that Kalashnikovs might belong to the security department, Murray notes the media reflex: if weapons are everywhere, responsibility is nowhere. Hamas counts on that shrug.

Civilians as cover, corridors as tests

At Gaza’s Salaheddin “humanitarian corridor,” Murray stands beside IDF soldiers filtering thousands moving south. Over megaphones, they ask in Arabic for civilians to proceed slowly; in Hebrew, they plead for any Israeli child who understands to step forward. No one does. Hamas has reportedly shot civilians who try to leave; elsewhere, fighters emerge from crowds to fire at soldiers who cannot shoot back without killing innocents. This is not “fog of war”; it’s the plan.

When three Israeli hostages waving a white cloth are mistakenly shot in Shejaiya, the world condemns—often as if the IDF intended it. Murray reconstructs the unit’s sleep-deprived context, the routine of ambushes from among civilians, and the family’s own response. Yotam Haim’s mother sends a message to the soldiers: “It was apparently the right thing in that moment.” That note—grief and realism holding hands—shows the gap between lived war and televised certainty.

Clausewitz inverted

Classic doctrine says strike the enemy’s center of gravity. Hamas rejects that geometry. It doesn’t attack Dimona or the IDF general staff; it attacks dancers and kindergartens. It puts its own center of gravity—command nodes and tunnels—under hospitals and mosques. The aim is to force Israel into a tragic choice and then run a global media campaign portraying any response as criminal. Murray argues you cannot judge such a war by the old scoreboard: you must measure intent, method, and the enemy’s deliberate conversion of its own civilians into strategic assets.

On “proportionality”

There is no law of war that requires a democracy to mirror atrocities, or to accept a 1:1 ledger in blood. The object is strategic defeat of the threat—preferably with fewer civilian deaths than any comparable urban campaign (as West Point’s John Spencer has argued about the IDF’s precautions).

(Context: Compare Mosul 2016–17 and Fallujah 2004; casualty ratios and target sets show how uniquely difficult Gaza’s fight is when tunnel networks sit under protected sites.)

If October 7 should have been a moral clarifier, why did it become a moral centrifuge? Murray traces the world’s response—from celebrations in London and Berlin to Ivy League encampments chanting for “intifada”—and argues that a generation taught to see the West as irredeemably oppressive projected that story onto Jews and Israel. Add legalistic evasions by university presidents, foreign amplification (including Iran’s), and a media appetite for equivalence, and you get an upside-down picture: perpetrators cast as victims; victims as colonizers.

Streets and statues, flares and fear

Within hours, crowds gathered outside Israeli embassies chanting “Allahu Akbar,” “Jihad,” and “From the river to the sea.” In London, the Cenotaph and Churchill’s statue were repeatedly assailed; police often stood back, outnumbered. The Metropolitan Police issued surreal clarifications (“jihad” has many meanings, specialists are assessing the clip), illustrating a larger paralysis: when words that typically incite violence are labeled ambiguous because the speakers are numerous and loud, the rule of law becomes a volume meter.

Campuses go performative—and punitive

At Harvard, MIT, and UPenn, student groups declared Israel “entirely responsible” for its own slaughter. Columbia’s greens became encampments chanting “Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too,” and “It will happen…10,000 times!” Professors rejoiced at “exhilarating” violence; others urged “resistance by any means.” Administrators then testified before Congress that calling for genocide was “context dependent.” Meanwhile, Jewish students were harassed with signs—“Al-Qassam’s next targets”—and told to “go back to Poland.”

The irony, Murray notes, is that the same universities that police microaggressions and misgendering defaulted to First Amendment absolutism when the target was Jews. Even AI would not play along: asked the same question members of Congress put to presidents, ChatGPT responded plainly that advocating genocide violates codes of conduct in any context.

Foreign hands on domestic kindling

By July 2024, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence publicly assessed that Iran was providing financial support to protesters. Hamas’s Khaled Mashal thanked the “great student flood” and mapped it into a strategy of legal, media, and financial “floods.” Iran’s Ali Khamenei wrote an open letter to American students praising their “resistance”—the same regime that shot its own student protesters in 2009 and hanged gay men from cranes.

Projection as program

Vasily Grossman’s rule applies: movements accuse the Jews of precisely what they practice—imperialism, racism, ethnic cleansing—because it masks their own failures and justifies violence.

For you, the lesson is practical. When institutions swap moral language for moral theater—when “decolonization” justifies lynch talk and “care” excludes the kidnapped toddler—you must revert to first principles: equal standards, empirical evidence, specific harms. Don’t outsource your judgment to crowds, credentials, or choreography.

(Context: Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists shows how postwar German leftists, determined to be anti-Nazi, allied with PLO factions and ended up dividing Jewish hostages by “selection” at Entebbe. Murray suggests today’s campus movements risk repeating that grim cycle—cleansed vocabulary, same results.)

Accusations of “genocide” and “apartheid” carry unique moral heat—and Murray argues they have been weaponized to invert reality. If you’ve felt overwhelmed by dueling claims, this chapter arms you with facts and frames that travel: demographics, legal rights, and the mirror logic that exposes projection.

Genocide claims versus population facts

“Genocide” implies intent to destroy a people. Yet Israel’s non-Jewish population grew from 156,000 in 1948 to more than 2.6 million in 2024—roughly a 17-fold increase. Jerusalem’s Muslim population grew more than ninefold since 1948. Gaza’s population more than doubled after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. Even during war, these trends continued. That doesn’t negate suffering. It does cut against claims that Israel’s aim is extermination.

Apartheid claims versus civic life

Apartheid South Africa legally segregated, disenfranchised, and excluded. By contrast, Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court (e.g., Justice Khaled Kabub), play on national sports teams, and over-index in medical professions (Haaretz reported Arabs and Druze constitute about half of new doctors and over half of new pharmacists). Parties representing Arab citizens have sat in governing coalitions (e.g., Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List in 2021). None of this is utopia; it matters for the label.

Meanwhile, much of the Arab world expelled or terrorized its ancient Jewish populations (see the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad) and still bans Jews from residency in proposed Palestinian jurisdictions. If “apartheid” exists, Murray suggests, it has historically run the other way—Jews as permanent dhimmi, not Palestinians under Israeli law.

The mirror test

Grossman’s insight—that accusations reveal the accuser’s guilt—fits. Iran accuses Israel of expansionism while colonizing Lebanon (through Hezbollah), Syria (propping up Assad), Iraq (post-2003 militias), and Yemen (arming the Houthis). Hamas accuses Israel of “child-killing” while placing arsenals under cots and sending teenagers to plant bombs in UN bags. Turkish leaders accuse Israel of “occupation” while occupying Northern Cyprus since 1974.

A practical filter

When you hear a charge, ask: does the accuser do, endorse, or benefit from the same behavior? If yes, you’re likely looking at projection, not principle.

(Context: Ian Buruma’s writings on mirrors in politics and Frances Fukuyama’s on thymos—status claims—help explain why moral language gets flipped when identity, not truth, is the core metric.)

To make sense of Gaza, you have to follow the power lines. Murray sketches Iran’s long game since 1979: a revolutionary regime preaching “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” while building imperial reach through proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, IRGC-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. He argues that while Western elites denounced “colonialism,” Tehran practiced it—arming, funding, training, and embedding itself in neighboring states until it could ignite multi-front war.

From Khomeini’s promises to Khamenei’s proxies

Murray reminds you that Western thinkers once cheered the Iranian Revolution (Michel Foucault saw a “spiritual revolution,” Princeton’s Richard Falk imagined a socially just Islamic republic). The reality: women’s subjugation, public hangings for homosexuality, torture of dissidents, and regional aggrandizement. Iran’s “world without Zionism” rhetoric translated into concrete strategy: capture or coerce weak states; stockpile rockets; surround Israel; and keep its enemies divided over language while united in logistics.

Lebanon as a case study

UN Resolution 1701 (2006) was meant to demilitarize southern Lebanon after the war with Israel. Instead, Hezbollah built an arsenal of 120,000–200,000 rockets and integrated into the Lebanese state. Murray reports from the border: UNIFIL patrols drive out; Hezbollah fires rockets overhead; patrols U-turn back to base. He later enters southern Lebanon with IDF units and finds tunnel shafts just hundreds of feet from UN bases, camps wired to villages for power and water, and caches of Iranian- and North Korean-made weapons. The reality is not peacekeeping; it’s war-watching.

After October 7, Hezbollah’s daily rocket fire displaced tens of thousands in Israel’s north. Murray describes Safed under barrage and a Druze hospital director who remembers 2006 and longs to host him “in peace next time.” Iran’s fingerprints appear again: sophisticated drones switching to battery to evade heat-seeking defenses; mass barrages designed to saturate Iron Dome. When Israel struck back with intelligence coups (e.g., sabotaged pagers and walkie-talkies that exploded and maimed operatives; strikes on senior leadership), Western papers wrote obituaries praising Hezbollah leaders as “towering figures.”

Gaza connected, not isolated

Hamas’s October 7 plan was not standalone; it was the southern prong of a hoped-for pincer—Hezbollah attacking from the north in parallel. Communications security concerns may have prevented coordination on the day, but the strategic logic stands. Murray’s point is clear: if you silo Gaza, you misread the war. The enemy thinks in theaters—Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen—and in timelines. You must too.

Policy implication

Appeasing proxies while courting the patron doesn’t work. Neither does trusting international monitors that refuse to monitor. Strategy must connect nodes and hold enablers accountable.

(Context: Michael Doran’s “Strategy of the Counter-Alliance” and Kim Ghattas’s Black Wave offer complementary portraits of Iran’s regional design; Murray adds ground reporting from the tunnels to the tribunals.)

Murray closes where he began—on first principles. The book’s title isn’t rhetorical; it’s a claim about survival and meaning. Death cults declare, “We love death more than you love life.” Democracies answer, “We choose life”—not as a slogan, but as policy, culture, and courage. If you want a practical ethic for a violent century, this chapter gives you one.

Life, filled even if it breaks

Drawing on Oriana Fallaci, Murray writes that war intensifies everything: love, purpose, risk. He sits with parents reading their daughter Adi’s letter—“I wanted to live life, and now I want you to live it for me”—and attends a rooftop moment in Tel Aviv when helicopters deliver freed hostages to Schneider Children’s Hospital while citizens below sing, “Havenu Shalom Aleichem.” He watches IDF pilots compete for the honor of flying rescue missions. This is what “choose life” looks like in practice: devotion to your own people’s survival without denying the humanity of others corrupted by their rulers.

Clarity without cruelty

Choosing life doesn’t mean refusing to kill when necessary. It means refusing false parity. Murray praises Israelis who sent messages of comfort to soldiers who made tragic mistakes in combat; parents who insisted on returning kidnapped children before counting costs; and a society that debates proportionality while tunnels run under cots. He contrasts this with Hamas leaders who gloat when their own children die for the cause, or who organize “honor killings” from prison. The difference isn’t cosmetic. It’s civilizational.

Courage you can emulate

You meet Izzy, a one-armed sharpshooter who lost his limb in a 2009 Gaza blast, hung up his rifle, then flew back from California on October 8, 2023, to re-enlist. He waited outside a base for two weeks until someone let him back in; he found his adapted rifle exactly where he’d left it. Later, he walks ahead of Murray into southern Lebanon and jokes, “Stick with me; lightning won’t strike twice.” These stories aren’t just inspiring. They answer the campus chant with a better creed: loving life more than your enemies love death means risking yours for others—without making them collateral in your myth.

Your takeaway

Refuse euphemism. Name evil. Support institutions that defend life. And practice the small, concrete loyalties—family, community, country—that keep civilizations from hollowing out.

(Context: Compare Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning on choosing meaning amid suffering, and Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power on Europe’s pacific illusions; Murray argues democracies can retain moral purpose while retaining the will to fight.)