Why defend Israel? British journalist Douglas Murray says it’s about knowing ‘good from bad’

Murray was received to thunderous applause and an outpouring of love in Jerusalem

Over the past year of war and heartbreak at home, and numerous anti-Israel protests abroad, many Israelis have felt like they are alone in the world. Therefore, they have embraced their few international defenders all the more warmly.

The British author and journalist Douglas Murray has established himself at the forefront of the PR fight for Israel, sparring with TV hosts and anti-Israel activists around the world to defend the Jewish State.

In the process, he has become one of the most beloved foreign figures in Israel and was received to thunderous applause and an overwhelming outpouring of love and appreciation at last week’s “Freedom of Zion” conference, even overshadowing Jewish U.S. conservative leader Ben Shapiro, who is married to an Israeli.

“For Israelis in general, you have become a symbol over the last year,” former International Spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Doron Spielman told Murray, as they sat down for a discussion.

“Many of them under really uncovered you on October 7,” Spielman continued, recounting a joint trip they took just weeks after the catastrophe to visit IDF soldiers in the field.

“The soldiers were fighting in Gaza, and they had a few minutes off, and they heard that you were with me and with their dusty uniforms, they stood in line. Now, that was their few hours to sleep, and they just wanted to get a hug from you and a picture with you to send to their family,” Spielman said.

“And this has come at a price, I think, a personal price. You’ve taken arrows for defending the Jewish people. Some of your events have been cancelled, [or] had to move. You've been threatened online… At what point did you decide to stand on the line of fire for the state of Israel and the Jewish people?”

“I don't think I have suffered any arrows at all, and if anyone has tried to fire them, they haven't hit,” Murray stressed in response, adding that he has admired Israel since first visiting the country some 20 years ago.

Among the reasons he continues to defend Israel, Murray said, “is an issue of what I simply think of as intellectual honesty, which is I was brought up to know right from wrong, good from bad, firefighter from fire.”

Secondly, he noted there was “just wild injustice about what happens with this country and its treatment abroad. And that is the injustice which I've identified a lot since October 7 of the Jewish nation being the only nation in the world which, when it gets attacked, then gets attacked again, whose victims are not treated with the empathy that they should be, the understanding they should be, and the love that they deserve. But rather, as we've seen too many times in the last year, are treated somehow as people you can still victimize even after they have been made victims.”

“I also greatly admire this country for not being a victim,” Murray said, referring to an earlier comment made by Shapiro about “the strange, strange place that much of the rest of, all of the rest of, the West has ended up in, where the more victim you are, the more you win. And I don't think Israelis do that.”

“I was brought up in a society like this one, that admires courage and admires virtues,” Murray concluded. “And I suppose finally I would say that it's because I over time [sic], it's come to be personal.”

“I always think of the first time I covered a conference here in 2006 and I was in the north in Safed when it was being shelled. And the next day there was nothing on the BBC about the shelling of Safed, it was just, you know, Israel bombs Lebanon. And I just thought then, the wild injustice of that needed correcting. And so I suppose it's my self-appointed task to try to do some of that.”