Perhaps you’re old enough to recall the New Atheist movement and the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism,” a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Christian eschatology, or theology of the end times.
Inspired by this quartet, I have been cataloging the “Four Horsemen of New Zionism,” focusing on pivotal commentators and propagandists devoted to contemporary Israel and all the destruction that comes with it. So far, we have covered: Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, and Ben Shapiro. I am uniquely positioned to write this series because I spent over eight years propagandizing American Christians on behalf of the State of Israel, focused largely on Christian Zionists who are thirsty for Armageddon, and I became an atheist in the process.
Behold our Fourth Horseman of New Zionism, Douglas Murray, the Horseman of War. Murray has been a public intellectual for decades and, like Sam Harris, was associated with the aforementioned New Atheist Movement. You would be forgiven for believing he would never be seen again following his epic defeat at the hands of Dave Smith on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but still he lurks onward, like some undead neocon creature, ever in the service of the most militaristic factions of the State of Israel.
I do mean that literally. It was uncovered that Murray doesn’t just defend the Israeli government at every opportunity; he literally wrote speeches for former Israeli United Nations Ambassador Ron Prosor, something one would think a journalist ought to disclose. It isn’t so much that Douglas has a side gig as an Israeli speechwriter, but more that he moonlights as a serious journalist. I too used to write speeches for Israeli government officials, even during the Gaza War. I guess you could call Douglas and I blood brothers. In that vein, it is difficult for me to capture just how much I wish Douglas Murray were right about all of this, and how tempting it was to nod along to his war drums to assuage my own guilt.
I actually agree with Murray on many topics. There is plenty of wisdom to be derived from his critique of the excesses and hypocrisy of woke culture warriors, his consistent condemnation of Islamist ideology, and his honest assessment of threats posed by groups like Hamas. Still, like his friend and fellow horseman Sam Harris, Murray’s own hypocrisy, his willful blindness, and inability to appreciate the detrimental cascading effects Israel’s battles will have on global civilizational struggles he himself cares about is his undoing. Murray is simply too quick to cheerlead the spilling of blood and too quick to point the finger when victory isn’t quickly clinched. In Israel’s wars, just as in Iraq, when things inevitably go awry and chaos ensues, Douglas will blame anyone and anything except his warmongering overlords, and he will never look into the mirror.
Despite his affiliation with the New Atheist movement, Douglas can’t seem to ever find time to condemn the doomsday cult of Christian Zionism, which treats Jews as objects or pawns in an apocalyptic holy war or the Judaic terrorism running rampant in the West Bank. Murray’s worldview is constructed around defending Western civilization against ideological fanaticism, but his allegiance to Israel has made him incapable of recognizing when the Israeli state exhibits precisely the characteristics he condemns in its enemies.
Douglas Murray is intelligent, and that is exactly what makes his apologetics for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government so irritating. Take it from a former propagandist guilty of self-deception; Douglas Murray is the victim of his own propaganda, so conclusions are established before evidence is considered. He understands that religious fanaticism is dangerous, that ideological certainty blinds people, and that civilizations can destroy themselves. Yet whenever Israel is involved, these insights evaporate. Its enemies possess agency, but Israel only reacts. Its adversaries are responsible for the consequences of their decisions, yet Israel is responsible only for the nobility of its intentions. Its tactical achievements are celebrated as strategic triumphs, while its strategic failures become evidence that the West has insufficiently supported its civilizational war. In Murray’s telling, Israel can do no wrong; it can only be wronged. It cannot lose; it can only be denied victory. A worldview in which every outcome vindicates the original premise is no longer serious geopolitical analysis. It is an unfalsifiable article of faith.
Tragically, many Israeli decision makers share Murray’s perspective. Throughout all my years at the Consulate listening to Israeli officials, being briefed on conflicts by Israeli diplomats, and even discussing these issues with them directly, I don’t recall it ever being suggested that an adversary took a course of action in response to something Israel or the United States did. It was as if there was no concept of blowback, as if Israel was a permanent victim of circumstance, incapable of actually impacting its neighbors. Consider the counterargument one is often presented with whenever acknowledging Israeli airstrikes on civilian targets, that Israel is only targeting terrorists who are entirely responsible for the bombing due to their proximity to these places. The closest one gets to hearing proponents get torn up about bombing a hospital or a school is when Golda Meir said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
A chilling sentiment that Israeli officials don’t even approach today; as things have gotten so much worse, some officials argue there are no innocents in Gaza. Regarding civilian casualties, Douglas Murray said, “I think they’re all the responsibility of Hamas for starting a war.” Israeli officials knew all the way back in 1967 that transferring civilian populations into the occupied West Bank would be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, yet it was done anyway. It would seem international law is weaponized when it is convenient and discarded when it is not.
Like the dog that caught the car, ever since Israel’s 1967 victory it has remained perplexed as to how to create stability, maintain its aspirational democratic values, and rule over a stateless people as a sovereign for nearly six decades. There has never been a grand strategy or long-term planning, only the ad hoc, piecemeal creation of facts on the ground and the steady erosion of the best parts of Israeli society that come along with that. If you present this to Murray, he will likely retort with the non sequitur that he was offended by what some student at Columbia University said that week.
Israel has demonstrated extraordinary intelligence-gathering capabilities, operational reach, and a remarkable ability to temporarily incapacitate its enemies, but a considerably less impressive ability to eliminate the conditions that produce them. Take note of the contrast between six decades of chaos in the West Bank, the Gaza War, the conflict in southern Lebanon, or the Iran War versus the Israeli beeper operation against Hezbollah. In short, Israel can win almost every battle and still lose a war. What would Murray actually regard as a sustainable political end state? Or does he regard perpetual military superiority a substitute for one? It must be asked, because that is exactly the mentality that led to Hamas being viewed as an asset for Israel on the eve of October 7.
What evidence would persuade Murray that an Israeli military operation was unjustified or strategically counterproductive? When Lex Fridman invited Murray to steelman the case that Israel had gone too far in Gaza, Murray instead rehearsed the horrors of October 7 and Israel’s stated objectives of destroying Hamas and rescuing the hostages. Even when specifically invited to challenge his own perspective, Murray was literally incapable of even considering it.
I’ve watched the same raw footage of October 7 in the type of private screenings that Murray was invited to. You see people being gruesomely murdered in what I can only describe as among the most disturbing images to be seared into my brain. I remember when the lights came up after one of these screenings, the Consul General told the journalists present, “This is why we have to defeat Hamas.” Like Murray, I completely agreed. Around March or April 2025, the Consul General told us in a staff meeting that she didn’t think it was possible to militarily defeat Hamas and that there was a growing consensus among Israeli officials of the same, yet Israel was blocking all aid deliveries and continuing its bombing campaign at the time.
Despite the devastation of Gaza, loss of tens of thousands of lives, and Israel’s initiation of new theaters of conflict, Hamas persists and Israel’s global standing has further deteriorated and its reputation in the United States has been torpedoed. In less than two years, in the eyes of the Israeli government Hamas went from asset to existential threat that must be defeated, to one that couldn’t be defeated, and despite the so-called ceasefire, the blood continues to flow. The Frutiger Aero resort utopia we were promised in a freakish AI video remains unrealized amidst the ruins of Gaza. Murray’s self-deception won’t allow him to consider that Israel has failed or that the type of military victory he desires is not possible, so his conclusion must be that Israel was failed by others: “…the Israelis are never allowed to win, and Hamas, in this case, are always allowed to draw.” More war is always the answer for Murray as he went on to tell fellow Horseman Bari Weiss, “When you need to win a war, you need to escalate.”
For a man who built his reputation warning against the dangers of religious fanaticism, Murray exhibits a peculiar lack of curiosity about the varieties of religious extremism that champion Israel. The Christian Zionists I spent nearly a decade courting for the Israeli government were not merely enthusiastic supporters of a foreign democracy; democracy was a secondary consideration at best. Many viewed the Jewish state as an indispensable prop in an apocalyptic drama, one in which the Jewish people themselves ultimately occupy a rather unenviable position. The Jerusalem Post included Murray, an atheist, among its top Christian Zionists. I can only find two instances of Douglas ever talking about Christian Zionism, one from 2007 when he reviews a book suggesting the movement is exaggerated, misunderstood, and attempts to minimize its craziness, and another from a PragerU event when he defends the movement from an individual claiming it is heretical.
Meanwhile, the messianic ambitions of elements of Israel’s own religious-nationalist movement receive comparatively little attention from civilizational alarmists like Murray. When Piers Morgan confronted Murray about Palestinians being killed and displaced amid expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Murray dismissed the matter as a “second order issue,” before redirecting the discussion toward Palestinian opposition to Israel’s existence. Apparently, fanaticism becomes considerably less threatening when its adherents are on your side.
When speaking of Israel, Murray often replicates some of the rhetorical behavior he condemns among identity-politics activists: moral absolutism, ideological purity tests, guilt by association, and a tendency to interpret dissent as evidence of depravity. For example, when “debating” Dave Smith, who is Jewish, Murray implied that he was being antisemitic merely by mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle played a role in pushing for neoconservative regime-change wars, because it would foment antisemitic conspiracy theories, saying Smith was “opening up a world of madness.”
Murray frequently frames the Israel–Hamas conflict through a distinction between a liberal democracy defending Western civilization and a jihadist organization. A democracy and a terrorist organization can have fundamentally different political structures and objectives, while the democracy’s particular military actions can still be unjustifiable. Likewise, an enemy’s murderous intentions do not automatically make every strategy employed against it effective or morally legitimate. Murray overstates Israel’s moral superiority and confuses the relative moral standing of the combatants with the moral legitimacy and strategic wisdom of individual military actions.
In contrast to Murray’s disposition, what actually worked for Israel was the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty. Trading land for peace did effectively take Egypt out of the equation. I doubt that deal could happen today. Murray has often argued that Israel deserves credit for the “success story” of Arab Israelis because of their political equality. So, if the relative stability of relations between Jewish and Arab citizens demonstrates that coexistence is possible, shouldn’t the political conditions that make that coexistence possible also inform Israel’s long-term strategy toward Palestinians in the occupied territories? For the record, the leaders of both major Jewish-led political blocs during this past election campaign said they did not want to form a coalition with Arab parties, there was a push not to allow the Arab parties to compete in the election at all, and interfaith marriage remains unlawful in Israel, so it is pretty rich to insist this is a harmonious pluralistic society.
The question isn’t simply whether Israel can militarily defeat an adversary. It’s whether the United States should accept the risks of becoming involved in conflicts whose political end states remain poorly defined and could easily lead to devastating, unintended consequences elsewhere. The bombastic military confidence and moral certainty of Murray simply are not warranted in light of the complexity of geopolitics. Regardless of how one feels about American security posturing across the world, Murray takes on the most hawkish stance and views it as a civilizational struggle for the West, from NATO and Russia to Israel and the Middle East to China and Taiwan.
Consider the following: taking his lead from Israeli officials, Murray will insist upon the wisdom of Israel’s Gulf partners like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in regard to Islamism. When critics of Israel’s Gaza policy refer to it as a genocide, Murray will challenge them by countering that they are obsessed with Israel and do not spend enough time condemning the genocide in Sudan, but the UAE is supporting the Rapid Support Force (RSF) that is committing the genocide in the first place. Along with Israel, Murray will celebrate the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, as if the West should be grateful that the country is now led by a Bin Ladenite terrorist, because Iran will be next, an ominous foreshadowing for his support for the disastrous Iran War. Murray will insist that NATO is paramount. Turkey is undoubtedly the second most important country in NATO, yet Israel insists that Turkey is the new Iran. Donald Trump’s Iran War reveals the limitations of American military capabilities, diminishes military supplies, and stretches our forces thin. All of this happens as the United States and Israel slide further down the democratic spectrum into authoritarianism, compromising the very Enlightenment values Murray claims to hold dear. At time of writing, Murray can’t even bring himself to comment on the David Milstein scandal or the brutalization of European diplomats and a Jewish American journalist in her 60s by fanatical settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Murray demands decisive victory, raising the question: Victory toward what end? He has no answer. He equates criticism of a government’s policies with opposition to the country’s existence and focuses more on the rhetoric of blue-haired undergrads a world away than the policies of a military at war. This is why whenever he is challenged on Israeli conduct, he usually retreats to say something about the atrocities of October 7, which is not a panacea or magical incantation to allow one to shut off one’s brain. October 7 explains why Israel began another military campaign in Gaza. It does not, by itself, answer every question about how Israel conducts that war, what political objectives it hopes to accomplish, or what costs the United States should accept. Hamas’s actions do not absolve subsequent Israeli decisions from independent scrutiny. The fact that Hamas is worse in some relevant respect does not render every Israeli response either moral or wise.
Israel’s October 27 election offered voters an opportunity to pass judgment on Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, including the catastrophic security failure of October 7 and the wars that followed. Legal trouble surrounding Netanyahu’s corruption charges persist. During the glaze fest that was Douglas Murray’s interview of the prime minister, Murray asked Netanyahu about his legacy. I can think of one possible contribution to his legacy that Murray neglected to mention: a prison sentence.
