A poll carried out last year found that only one in four British Muslims believe Hamas carried out rapes and murders on October 7, 2023. It is a figure that should have caused significant soul-searching in this country. Why do so many people in our society believe lies?
I went to Israel as soon as I could after October 7, to interview those who had been attacked that day, to speak to rape victims and survivors of the massacre. I went to the hospitals, the morgues and the massacre sites and was embedded with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza and Lebanon to see the Jewish state’s response to the events of October 7.
Part of the reason I did that was because I knew that the facts about what happened on that terrible day — when 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage — were likely to be passed over, denied or forgotten by the world. Not least as it focused on Israel´s military response. I suspected from the earliest stages of the massacre, as I saw people celebrating the terrorists in London and New York, that the facts would be ignored. And so I went to bear witness with my own eyes and report what I saw.
But the second reason I spent most of the past year and a half in the region was because I wanted to think and write about another question which arises from the first. The events of October 7, 2023 constituted the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. What almost nobody has wanted to ask is why there are so many people in our country who side with the death cult — who side with Hamas.
There are those, to be sure, who believe that the Palestinian people should have another state in the region and that until they do there can be no peace either in the Middle East or around the world. What they fail to contend with is that in 2005 the people of Gaza were given a state. When the IDF tore the last Jewish families from their homes and even relocated Jewish graves in Gaza, the Palestinian people there had a choice. In the subsequent election they voted in Hamas.
Hamas is a designated terrorist group in this country and many others. Their stated aims include the annihilation of the Jewish people. Their desire is to finish the job that Adolf Hitler started. As soon as they were elected, Hamas murdered fellow Palestinians — from the rival faction of Fatah — and for the 18 years after gaining Gaza they made the strip an enclave of their own. They could have tried to make Gaza flourish and its citizens live in peace with their neighbours. But they didn’t. Instead they spent their 18 years preparing for war.
They taught their children to hate their neighbours. Even if their actions did not speak for themselves, their textbooks and schoolbooks do. The billions of dollars of international aid that poured into Gaza — from this country among others — could have enriched the Palestinian people. Instead, the leadership of Hamas all made themselves billionaires. People like Ismail Haniyeh bought themselves luxury apartments in Qatar and when they died — as most of the Hamas leadership have in the past 18 months — they did so with wealth beyond most people’s wildest dreams.
They also used the money to build a tunnel network and other terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza. Against every law of war they embedded this terrorist infrastructure in civilian homes, mosques, hospitals and much more. They used these places to stockpile rockets, grenades and other military hardware. When one of the leaders of Hamas was asked last year why the vast tunnel network — longer than the London Underground — could not be used for Palestinian citizens to shelter in, his response was clear. The tunnels were for Hamas fighters and their arms. They were not for the use of Palestinian civilians.
On October 7, Hamas started the latest phase of the conflict. As their own GoPro footage and other videos of the day — taken by Hamas — show, these terrorists took a delight in death.
If anyone thinks that the people they targeted had any such dream then they know nothing.
What did the young people dancing at the Nova party want? They wanted to dance. And from speaking to many of the survivors of that festival I know that not one of the people dancing in the early morning when the Hamas army came in and butchered them did not dream of the day they could dance with their Palestinian neighbours.
But when 4,000 terrorists invaded Israel that morning they killed that dream. They killed the idea of co-existence. Instead of bringing up a generation to live in peace, Hamas nurtured a people who sought war. The story of the period after October 7 is the result of that.
It is a war I have seen up close. A war in which Israel has sought to achieve its twin objectives of getting the hostages back and killing or capturing the leadership of Hamas. That war has without doubt devastated Gaza. It has led to civilian casualties — as Hamas hoped it would — but nowhere near the numbers that Hamas´s own “health ministry” have claimed.
My new book raises a question. When a death cult attacks a democracy, why do so many people in our midst side with the death cult? Our own future depends on answering that question.
Douglas Murray is a journalist and author
On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West is published by HarperCollins and out now
