Douglas Murray: Israel can’t leave Hamas in Gaza

Despite mounting international pressure and war costs, Israel cannot afford to end its war “with Hamas in power in any form,” British public intellectual Douglas Murray told JNS last week.

The prominent journalist — who last month published a book titled “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization” — justified Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to keep fighting until Hamas is dismantled, and downplayed concerns that doing so would leave Israel isolated.

“Anything short of victory is defeat,” Murray told JNS at a conference organized by the European Jewish Association in Madrid on combating antisemitism.

Israel’s decision this month to intensify the fighting until Hamas is removed from power in Gaza has triggered a coordinated effort within the European Union and beyond to punish the Jewish state for what its critics call war crimes.

Last week, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada published a joint statement threatening “concrete actions in response” to the war. The European Commission on Tuesday decided to review its trade agreement with Israel, citing concerns of human rights abuses.

According to some reports, the war is also straining the US-Israeli alliance and pressure to end the war short of achieving its main goal is mounting internally in Israel. Yair Golan, the leader of the far-left The Democrats party, last Tuesday implied that Israel was insane, as “a sane country does not kill babies as a hobby.”

But “the reality is that Israel must see this war through. Anything less invites the next one,” Murray said in Madrid, where the director of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, presented him with an award honoring his fact-finding missions in Israel and his support of the Jewish state.

Murray had covered the war in Ukraine intensively when, on Oct. 7, 2023, war broke out between Israel, Hamas and several other Iranian proxies. The British journalist subsequently spent weeks in Israel, where he documented atrocities committed by Hamas.

On April 10, Murray defended Israel on the podcast of Joe Rogan, where he challenged Rogan, the world’s most listened-to pundit, on perceived unfairness and laziness in discussing Israel’s war. That exchange had more than four million listeners.

Murray does not believe in continuing the war regardless of its cost, but rather that this cost is still manageable, despite attempts to raise it for Israel.

“Not at any cost,” Murray said about the terms for continuing the war. As it appears now, the cost of not dismantling Hamas may end up exceeding that of terminating its reign, he argued.

“Keeping Hamas means another war at some point,” Murray said. “So anything short of victory is defeat — and we can’t afford a defeat. It’s unaffordable.”

The Israeli economy is straining under the cost of the war. It prompted Israel’s treasury to impose a 3% pay cut on all public sector employees this year.

In his new book, Murray posits that hating Israel has given students on Western campuses a way to atone for the colonialism that far-left academics have taught them to assign to all white people collectively.

“It’s psychological projection on a massive scale: These students and academics assign to Israel, which is the opposite of colonialist, their own perceived colonialist sins,” he said.

Despite this dynamic, Murray warned against overestimating the external pressure put on Israel to end the war prematurely.

Talk of a collision between Israel and the United States over the war is “vastly exaggerated,” he said. As for Israel’s critics in Europe, Murray acknowledged the concern of isolation but differentiated between genuine allies and habitual critics.

“Losing the support of people who are supporters would be a problem. But the countries that want to make Israel a pariah state will do so no matter what,” he said.

On May 14, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for the first time called Israel a “genocidal state,” speaking during a Q&A in parliament. Ireland and Malta are also on record of accusing Israel of genocide.

On May 11, Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, said that “we wanted to take the hostages home, but Israel doesn’t seem ready to stop the war yet.” His remark prompted speculation in the media that there were disagreements on the war between the Trump administration and Netanyahu.

“We will take over Gaza, and our security control will be there forever,” Netanyahu said on May 12, shortly before he announced an intensification in the fighting in Gaza.

The intensification is envisioned as the final stage of a war that broke out on Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 251. Israel says it has killed more than 20,000 terrorists in Gaza since then.

As centrists and left-wingers turned against Israel since Oct. 7, right-wing politicians in key European states have embraced the Jewish state and called for tough action in their countries against perpetrators of anti-Israel riots and antisemitic attacks.

Some of these emerging forces are legitimate and significant allies for Israel that mainstream media tend to ignore so as to “bolster a narrative that Israel is a pariah nation,” Murray argued. But others are less straightforward, and should not be embraced too closely by Israel at this stage, he advised.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is one of Israel’s most outspoken allies in Europe, and has blocked many foreign policy initiatives against Jerusalem that require consensus within the EU. A social conservative who opposes immigration, he is reviled by many on the left and routinely accused of antisemitism for his opposition to the political projects of George Soros, a far-left billionaire who is Jewish.

In the Netherlands, the staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom are similarly accused of racism, often in connection with Wilders’ 2020 conviction for saying his voters want fewer Moroccans in their country.

Both Wilders and Orban are legitimate partners and allies of Israel, Murray said.

But other right-wing parties that have embraced Israel are “not straightforward,” he added, naming the Alternative for Germany party and France’s National Rally as examples of actors that “have problems.”

In February, Israel lifted its longtime boycott of the National Rally. The shift came as French President Emmanuel Macron changed his rhetoric about Israel, imposed an arms embargo, accused Israel of “barbarism” and threatened to downgrade EU-Israel trade as well as to recognize a Palestinian state.

Since Marine Le Pen in 2011 took over the National Rally party that her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, established, dozens of activists have been kicked out of the party for antisemitic speech and Holocaust denial. Marine Le Pen eventually kicked out her own father. Murray is not convinced that National Rally is a legitimate partner, he said.

“I think that the National Rally is one to keep a very close eye on. And I think the Alternative for Germany is a much more complicated one because it’s newer,” he said.

Supporters of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, often say that the party is moderate compared to other European parties on the ideological right, but that it is singled out because it is German.

Murray acknowledged this bias and justified it, arguing it was not the result of animus or bigotry, but flowed simply from the importance and power of Germany, and what that could mean for the rest of Europe.

Israel should engage with all those parties, though stop short of embracing them, he said.

“It’s not that there’s a magic solution for Israel. But you should keep dialogue open with everybody, because everybody can be in power,” he said.