The Buckley Beacon’s exclusive interview with the renowned British author and conservative commentator.
Owen Tilman
Editor-in-Chief, The Buckley Beacon
Last Wednesday, the Buckley Institute hosted renowned British journalist, neoconservative commentator, and New York Times bestselling author Douglas Murray for a conversation at Yale University.
In his inaugural event with Buckley, Murray emphasized the difference between “self-criticism” and “self-destruction” on the part of those living in the West, and reiterated his long-standing support for the state of Israel. Murray is the author of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025), in which he documents his experiences reporting in the Middle East and explains his appreciation for Western democracies.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead, approximately two-thirds of whom were civilians. According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel’s subsequent military offensive has since killed over 67,000 Palestinians, allegedly a third of whom are under the age of 18. In the month leading up to Murray’s visit to Yale, the first phase of a twenty-point peace plan negotiated by the United States effected the release of 20 living Israeli hostages, and the bodies of 23 deceased hostages, held by Hamas in Gaza since the October 2023 attack.
While questions loom over the long-term stability of the U.S.-negotiated peace plan, Murray credits the Trump administration with reaching a temporary halt to the war.
“I think there’s more chance of stability with this administration than almost any other,” Murray told The Beacon. “And there’s a very positive aspect to it all which is that President Trump has made himself the head of the Board of Peace.”
The “Board of Peace” refers to a group of international leaders assembled and led by President Donald Trump, which features former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair. In addition to Blair, Murray also pointed to other international actors like Turkey and various Arab nations as potentially playing a role in the peace negotiations.
“It needs fleshing out, former Prime Minister Tony Blair is on it. I suspect we’ll hear that various Arab leaders in the region may join,” Murray said. “I’m very positive about this because this shows that the president will remain committed to the plan. And therefore that the various parties who have signed up to it very surprisingly, like the Turkish government, will know that they have to also fulfill what will be their side of the bargain. So I’m more positive than I ordinarily would be about that. But phase two is not straightforward.”
A key component of the “rebuilding” process, as Murray put it, involves restructuring the education system in Gaza. In 2022, United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was responsible for serving the education of over 291,000 children in Gaza. Reiterating the accusations of many UNRWA critics, Murray believes that the organization has been instrumental in fomenting anti-Israel sentiment among Gazans.
“For me, there’s the obvious issues of security, rebuilding, and all that, but for me, maybe the biggest one is who will be in charge of education,” Murray said. “It clearly cannot be a U.N. body, because the U.N. body overseeing it in the last 20 years was one of the things that led to this catastrophe. The education system in Gaza has to accentuate the importance of the Gazans for living in peace with their neighbors, not seeing the greatest joy in life and the greatest purpose in life in killing their neighbors.”
Since the October 2025 release of Israeli hostages, videos began circulating online showing Hamas militants executing Palestinians in Gaza City, with some speculating that the executions targeted alleged collaborators with Israeli intelligence.
“It’s appalling, of course. There’s been almost no international protests again about this, because no one ever does protests against Hamas,” Murray said of the executions. “People who have risen up in Gaza against Hamas are incredibly brave. But to keep paying for that with their lives is monstrous.”
Murray’s visit to Yale comes at a time when support for Israel among American voters appears to be souring. Earlier this year, Pew Research Center polling indicated that over half of Republican voters under the age of 50 in America disapprove of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military offensive in Gaza. In April, Murray appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where he clashed with podcasters Joe Rogan and Dave Smith over U.S. support for the states of Israel and Ukraine.
“Both of the people you just mentioned are libertarians,” Murray said, referring to Rogan and Smith. “I’m intensely suspicious of libertarians. They would never be on board with any agreed-on conservative foreign policy anyway. What I do see happening is a swing of the pendulum, which is the result of the perceived failure of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rewriting of them as being completed failed.”
Between 2003 and 2012, the U.S. spent approximately $728 billion on its invasion of Iraq, in which almost 4,500 American service members and roughly 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Between 2001 and 2021, the U.S. spent close to $1 trillion on the war in Afghanistan, and close to 2,500 American service members were killed, in addition to tens of thousands of Afghani civilians, military, police, and Taliban fighters.
In light of the grim statistics, Murray insists on the need to substitute “endless” for “judicious” American involvement in the world.
“I do believe that a conservative should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be able to have a domestic policy and a foreign policy, and a foreign policy requires American involvement in the world. That doesn’t mean permanent involvement. It doesn’t mean endless involvement. But judicious involvement, sure,” Murray said.
Murray also alluded to the U.S.’s relationship with NATO, and commended President Trump for repeatedly pushing NATO member countries to spend a minimum two percent of their GDP on defense.
“American taxpayers should not have the piss taken out of them by having to pay to cover the military defense posture of allies who can afford to have their defense. All for that,” Murray said. “I think Donald Trump has done a fantastic job in persuading Europeans to do that. So no, Americans shouldn’t be taken advantage of by its allies in providing security guarantees and so on.”
This Friday, the Buckley Institute will host Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (YC ‘01) as the keynote speaker for its fifteenth annual conference.