Douglas Murray: A Time of War

When we planned this episode of Honestly, I thought we would be looking back at the past year from a slightly quieter vantage point. We were going to release it on October 7. But quiet is the last thing happening in the Middle East right now. The war that Iran outsourced to its proxies since October 7, 2023 has now become a war explicitly between Iran and Israel.

Hours before I sat down with Douglas Murray in New York City, Iran launched over 100 ballistic missiles toward Israel. As Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled in bomb shelters, a handful of them made a direct impact. For a lot of Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it is not.

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil. This is one of them. This is a war between Israel and Iran. But it’s also a war between civilization and barbarism. That was true some 360 days ago. And it’s even more true today. And yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

Consider a few examples from the last week. At the United Nations, 12 countries, including the U.S., presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who, The New York Times described as “beloved,” “a towering figure” and “a powerful orator.” Here in New York, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale this week, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all martyrs we salute.” That’s just a few examples from the past week. 

No one I know understands the moral urgency of this moment better than Douglas Murray. Douglas isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members, although I know a lot of Israeli families who consider him an adoptive family member. And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires. 

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, of course, to Israel, where he has become a celebrity. When you walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with Douglas Murray, it’s like being with The Beatles. He’s also the best-selling author of seven books, a regular contributor at the New York Post, National Review, and most importantly, at The Free Press, where he writes the beloved Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. There is just no one I would rather be sitting with as we watch the Middle East and, really, the world transformed before our eyes. 

To watch the Honestly episode with Bari and Douglas, click here: 

Click below to listen to our conversation or scroll down for an edited transcript:

On what brought us to this moment. And what’s next after Iran’s missile attack on Israel:

Bari Weiss: We are speaking on the eve of what some people are saying feels like the beginning of World War III. And I guess the first question I want to ask you is, how did we get here? How did we get to a moment where Iran is dropping 100 ballistic missiles on Israel? And, you know, Israel is vowing to respond to it. What are the factors that led us to this moment? 

Douglas Murray: Probably with the plane that took off in 1979 from Paris, taking the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran[, Iran]. This is one of the worst journeys of the twentieth century. All of this starts from there. 

Iran had the opportunity to be a progressive country in the region. In the 1970s, Israel had an ambassador in Iran. There was the opportunity for normalization. But the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran chose a different path. It’s an apocalyptic terror movement. The revolutionary Islamic government decided to oppress the people it presumes to govern and try to expand itself across the region. And my worry early in the period after October 7th was always that Hamas would take up all of the energy and that Israel wouldn’t be allowed, as it were, to do what else needed to be done. But as it happens, as we come to the first anniversary, the tide has turned. And the Israeli government and the Israeli armed forces and military have shown that there was a price to pay for trying to eradicate the Jewish people. And the price is high, and it should always have been high, and it will probably get higher. 

Hamas is almost completely destroyed. Its cowardly leader, Yahya Sinwar, is hiding in the tunnels somewhere in the south of Gaza surrounded by what he would regard as the best hostages. That’s his end. In less than two weeks, Hezbollah has been utterly destroyed. Three thousand of his operatives, they couldn’t trust their cell phones, decided to go to old-fashioned pager devices. But someone we don’t know put explosives in all of those pager devices. And so 3,000 of their operatives in one moment across Lebanon and Syria all suffered grievous injury. The next day, their walkie-talkies blew up. By day three, they couldn’t trust putting on a kettle in Beirut. Then, best of all, when Benjamin Netanyahu came to New York last week, he went onstage to the UN. I watched from the gallery as the traditional walk out of various despots and dictators and their minions occurred. Somewhere in Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah was watching Benjamin Netanyahu on television, and that’s when Hassan Nasrallah went to meet his maker. 

BW: It’s like the baptism scene from The Godfather. 

DM: I was told by a Jewish friend the other day that apparently there is something in the Torah that says one should not take enormous delight in the decimation of one’s foes. But I’m not Jewish, and so I don’t have to follow this.