New York Post

I Think of the Heroes

What I’ve learned since Oct. 7

Adapted from Douglas Murray’s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.

I’VE never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza. I was here in New York on the 7th of October, and on the 8th, I went down to Times Square. And there were these men and women, waving signs, celebratin­g the massacre. They were holding these signs, “by any means necessary.” At a time when we already knew what those means included.

I thought I had to get to Israel as soon as I could, that we were going to see a kind of Holocaust denialism in real time, and therefore I should see with my own eyes everything that had happened.

In Israel, I joined the pathologis­ts in the morgues of Tel Aviv as they were trying to identify the dead. An unbelievab­le task, which they do with extraordin­ary delicacy and religiosit­y.

I had the great opportunit­y to witness firsthand Israel’s response, because unlike some countries today, Israel doesn’t just sit back with equanimity when it’s attacked. Some of the world would like it to do so.

Seeing one of the fences that the terrorists broke into, I thought people aren’t going to realize the scale of this: This was a 4,000-person, battalion-sized terrorist attack that aimed to go all the way up the center of the country.

What do I make of all this? I think often of the line from Deuteronom­y, when God says, “I’ve set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life that you and your descendant­s might live.”

Because when I think of the seventh now, I don’t only think of the victims. I think of the extraordin­ary heroes.

There’s a young man, a friend in his 30s, who woke up in Jerusalem, realized the seriousnes­s of what was going on, got into his car, drove south, collected some guns, left a farewell message to his children and his wife on his phone, got a call from his company commander on the road saying, you have to come back to base in Jerusalem.

And he said, no, we’re needed south now. And his battalion commander said, are you defying an order? He said, yes. We’re needed in the South. And he fought for the next 48 hours, and he survived.

I think of my friend Moshe. I noted he had a bullet mark down the top of his helmet. He explained that it was from the 7th. He drove right into the middle of the firefight on the highway. He got out and he fought and he killed three terrorists with his gun that he carries with him, thank goodness. And he fought for the next two days.

I think of the extraordin­ary people of the Hatzalah, first-responders unit. The head of that organizati­on said in 30 years of doing this job, the whole 30 years altogether wasn’t like one minute that morning. The lights just went off everywhere.

And I think of a young woman who was 23. She was a beautiful girl, a photograph­er. And she decided she had to go and reenlist. Her parents begged her not to, but she said she had to.

And she was killed on her first day by a rocket that landed on her in Sderot. In a letter she left for her parents she said how sorry she was. But she said, I wanted to live life, and now I want you to live it for me.

I think, finally, of the extraordin­ary evening in November last year. I was at the Schneider Children’s Hospital when the helicopter­s came returning the first hostages, the first children who Hamas had stolen from their homes in the south.

But when the helicopter­s emerged in the night sky, the people of Tel Aviv realized what was happening, and every car stopped. And I noticed there was applause from the citizens, the Tel Avivians, and then there was singing, all the way through the streets of Tel Aviv.

They were singing “Haveynu shalom aleichem”: We brought you peace.

Now there’s millions of stories like this across Israel. The country rings with them, it resounds with them. The thing is, perhaps it does require life to become serious again. Perhaps the students that we see at these destroyed universiti­es, perhaps they just need a dose of reality someday. I always pray that that day never comes to them because it’ll be the biggest wake-up call anyone has ever had.

But all I would say is that any country should be so lucky as to have a young generation like that in Israel. They were weighed in the balance since Oct. 7, and they’ve been found to be magnificen­t.

What Israel has been up against is not just a people of death, but a cult of death, a cult which wishes to annihilate an entire race, and which after dealing with that race has made very clear what it wants to do with Christians, everyone in Britain, everyone in America.

I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.