Douglas Murray: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, the book, On Democracies and Death Cults, is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that’s been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that’s been going on a lot longer. Also, I suppose on what, for me, is one of the overwhelming questions which I’m sure we’ll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world. Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things, like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the communities in the south, very peaceful, peacenik [inaudible 01:07:41] free communities of the kibbutzim as they’re called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped. Of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party, and rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, on places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well. We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, but the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrote Israel from the center. The interesting reason why I think, it’ll be found out in the future, but why they didn’t coordinate better was Hamas didn’t trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that wouldn’t be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might’ve thought they were capable of. nd arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might’ve thought they were capable of. I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem, what a lot of military commanders and others described to me as the conception. The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security, military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That’s the first thing was there was just a massive era of the conception in Israel. And then, the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day. There already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that and their, doubtless, will be in the future as well. The single thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that they’d said to their children, “Don’t worry, the Army will be here in minutes,” and they weren’t. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there. There are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very, I discovered, were very human failings. I don’t want overstress the failure of the army, because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There’s a unit, Duvdevan, who got down to the junction by within about an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting, and joined in the fight. And then, there were self-starters, who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, “We’re needed in the south. Go.” And fought very hard for hours, days in some cases. But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable, I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can’t see when you are in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them. There’s a Muslim doctor I quote in the book, I interviewed, who describes how he was going to his… He’s an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he’s a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rocket started first and then the full invasion. He described to me how… He’s one of the members of this group, United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group, and they get an alert and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby, and they put on their first aid kit and so on and go. members of this group, United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group, and they get an alert and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby, and they put on their first aid kit and so on and go. He got one of those alerts at one of the junctions, and realized there was a car that something had happened and there were some dead bodies. He stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers, and he’s wearing his Hatzalah gear and they start firing at him. And he just thinks, “What the hell? What the hell is going on?” They turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault. In the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He’s a very, very brave man. So, there was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father I interviewed, she was at the Nova party. I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after, and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. He described how in the last moments of his daughter’s life, she phoned him on her phone, like a lot of people. He reassured her that Army would get there and so on. Her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked. They’d managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a community where they thought they’d be safe in the south of Israel. They were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman, and he wasn’t the policeman. He was Hamas dressed as police and she died. She was shot and killed as well. So, there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, the world will find out exactly what went wrong, Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe, but, I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.…

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