Douglas Murray’s War on Terror: Neo-cons and the Israel-Gaza Conflict

Rev Dr Ian Stackhouse, Guildford

‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

……. a time for war and a time for peace.’ Ecclesiastes 3:1,8.

It was my sister who several years ago put me onto Douglas Murray as someone I needed to read. I was not disappointed. The Madness of Crowds is a tour de force of political and historical analysis and served me well during the chaos of the pandemic. I also think the hypothesis behind The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason is sound as well as brave. These and other works have established Douglas Murray as one of our foremost philosophical conservatives and a natural successor in many ways to Roger Scruton, not least in his strange love affair with the Church of England, which in Murray’s case is more about a cultural form of Christianity rather than the Christian faith itself. Indeed, it is this cultural wistfulness on Murray’s part, with not a little myth-making thrown in, that is beginning to blind him, in my opinion, not only to the radicality of Christian ethics (has he ever read the Sermon on the Mount?) but also to the reality about what is actually happening on the ground, particularly in places like Gaza and the West Bank.

Murray prides himself, as I do in my own very different vocation, on being someone who visits the places he is concerned about. I admire him for that. But if one’s ideological commitments are already set, as they very much are in Murray’s case, then one wonders what the travelling achieves, other than confirm prejudices. One observes this in his recent travels to Israel, documented in his latest book On Democracies and Death Cults (Harper Collins, 2025). It’s not his championing of Israel that bothers me. Of course not. Nor his unsentimental approach to conflict. As the Bible reminds us, there is indeed a time for war (Ecclesiastes 3:8), and war means killing. There is no easy way around that, however grim it sounds. Indeed, what was Israel supposed to do in the wake of the unspeakable barbarism of 7 October? Where I take exception is Murray’s failure to recognise that so much of the war in Gaza, as it has developed, is not just grim but grotesque. Yes, urban warfare is complex, and as with all wars one must reckon on collateral damage. That much we can agree upon. But this is not collateral damage. The razing of Gaza to the ground is collective punishment on a grand scale – something Murray gets dangerously close to admitting (you can listen to him on Israel and Gaza by way of numerous interviews on-line). Furthermore, as is now becoming clear, the stated aims of the Netanyahu coalition, which includes extreme Zionists like Ben-Gvir, are nothing less than displacement, even ethnic cleansing, not just from Gaza but also the West Bank. To evade this charge, which Murray does by simply not answering the question, is not just disingenuous but moral complicity.

Critics of my approach will be quick to argue that groups like Hamas are avowedly genocidal (certainly in the past) and merit, therefore, the utmost disdain. For Murray this justifies going beyond the limits of proportionality to the prosecution of complete victory. Fair point, in one sense (though questionable in terms of just war theory). Murray notes: ‘there are no wars in human history in which the response to aggression can be exactly calibrated as equal to the initial aggression.’ But what he fails to register, before we even get to the words of Jesus, is that retribution on the scale we are witnessing in Gaza is indeed disproportionate as well as indiscriminate. The methods may not be as medieval as 7 October, but the death count of women and children in Gaza ought to be just as disturbing, no matter how many evacuation warnings are supposedly given. Furthermore, despite Murray’s protestations, history has proven that such punitive actions will indeed incubate a new generation of terrorists. All this is not an argument for pacifism, less so for progressivism, which is largely ignorant of the history of the conflict, but an obvious summation based on a deep sadness that the vengeance exacted by Netanyahu’s government, the scale of it as well as its recklessness, is stripping Israel of her moral integrity on the world stage. To use the language of psychology, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, even before 7 October, skirts dangerously close to the pathology of the abused becoming the abuser.

No doubt Murray and others would deem such a comment antisemitic and be offended by the suggestion of equivalency. It is indeed a shocking claim that I am making. But how else are we to interpret what has taken place in Gaza? Every country has a right to defend itself. Of course it does. And hostage taking is reprehensible. But as Mirjana Spoljaric, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, so courageously voiced to BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen (4th June), what is happening in Gaza by way of blockade and bombardment ‘surpasses any acceptable legal, moral and humane standard.’ This concern can be found in Israel itself (IDF reservists, former Prime Ministers like Ehud Olmert, Jewish Voices for Peace) as well as the wider Jewish diaspora. The irony of a warrant being placed by the ICJ on an Israeli Prime Minister for war crimes has not been lost on someone like me.

Like Douglas Murray, I love the Jewish people. This is a time to stand in solidarity. But solidarity does not mean collusion with some of the darker aspects of Jewish existential fear. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once put it in Future Tense: A Vision for Jews and Judaism in the Global Culture (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010):

‘Israel must prevail over its fears and not see every criticism as a form of antisemitism or Jewish self-hatred. Jews must stop seeing themselves as victims. They should remember that the word ‘chosen’ means that Jews are called on to be self-critical, never forgetting the tasks they have been set and have not yet completed.’

My own reflections on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict addressed the ideology of Christian Zionism, which informs the politics of people like Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel. I completed the manuscript of what is a short memoir in September 2023, so my initial thought after October 7 was to scrap the project completely, not least out of sensitivity. As the conflict developed, however, and as the Israeli military began to exact reprisals on Gaza, I recalled what drove me to write in the first place – or at least one of the reasons – and it is the exact opposite of what I hear from people like Douglas Murray. According to Murray, barbarism justifies killing, on a scale that eliminates the threat of Hamas. For friends of Israel, which I count myself to be, not only is such an aspiration fantastical, but it also mimics the very barbarism one is trying to counter (Bishop George Bell said much the same in 1944 concerning the Allied bombing of German cities). We are now seeing this on a grand scale and, as our Prime Minister stated recently, it is intolerable. Exceptionalism, such as Israel believes itself to possess, which the United States most definitely espouses, does not permit recklessness but responsibility. It is time to exercise that before it is too late.

Rev Dr Ian Stackhouse, author of Beyond Christian Zionism: A Travelogue of a Former Ideologue (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2024).