"Human beings were abstractions to him" (Credit: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty)
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind who had the bad luck of crossing paths with a team of 19-year-old Israeli grunts in Rafah on Wednesday morning, was an intractable religious ideologue who saw his life’s purpose in extravagant historical terms. He was someone whose actions corresponded perfectly to his beliefs, and who treated reality as a thin and temporary illusion concealing the God-given triumph to come. Sinwar was, in short, exactly the type of leader that citizens in democratic societies can’t easily comprehend.
Speculating about Sinwar’s motives became an analytical cottage industry after October 7. Observers of the resulting conflagration have been told that Sinwar ordered his invasion and kidnapping spree because he wanted to derail Israeli-Saudi normalisation; put “the Palestinian question” back on the table; bait Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war; bleed his enemy through an insurgency; fracture Israeli society; or undermine Fatah’s rival claims to leadership of the Palestinian struggle. There’s a category error behind every one of these claims. If Sinwar had been a normal warlord in pursuit of mundane objectives, he could have pursued a less spectacular course that would have greatly improved his chances of remaining the uncontested theocratic dictator of a Mediterranean coastal enclave with two million subjects. More than that, he could have retained a local military-industrial complex, extensive foreign relations, and subsidies from friendly regional governments and the UN. But Sinwar operated beyond the limiting realm of normative politics. He is arguably the first Palestinian leader who ever thought to test the proposition that his people could decisively settle their conflict with the Jews of the Middle East solely through violent means.
A significant body of facts suggests that Sinwar believed he would succeed in destroying the state of Israel on or about October 7, 2023. A few years before the attacks, he co-sponsored a conference at a Gaza City hotel entitled “Promise of the Hereafter: Post-Liberation Palestine” — and in which participants discussed topics such as the enslavement of educated Jews and the mass execution of alleged Arab collaborators in the aftermath of Israel’s imminent violent destruction. “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh,” read Sinwar’s contribution to the event, which was delivered by a senior colleague in the Hamas political bureau. Sinwar added that “the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river” was “the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision”.
He meant this all literally. Documents recovered by the IDF in Gaza showed that Hamas planners anticipated the October 7 attack would reach much further into Israel than it actually did. In recent weeks, IDF units in Lebanon have discovered extensive evidence that Hezbollah’s Radwan forces had pre-positioned weapons and attack teams for an invasion of the Galilee in the months before the October massacre. Sinwar, for his part, had a plausible theory of victory, especially in light of the disarray of Israel’s initial response. If Gaza’s Hamas fighters could make it 30 miles across the desert to their comrades in the West Bank, they could bisect Israel while their Hezbollah allies struck from the north. All the while, he envisaged Arab-Israelis rioting, in a repeat of the country’s 2021 unrest, while Iran lobbed ballistic missiles, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and maybe even Turkey joined in too — and the cherished dream of the Muslim conquest of Palestine became dazzlingly real.
Sinwar was a committed ideologue, a man of unwavering and sinister integrity. We are not used to world events being driven by figures whose motives are as pure and uncomplicated as his. Sinwar was reportedly furious at the 2011 deal that freed him after more than 20 years in an Israeli prison: he thought Hamas should have accepted nothing less than the release of all of its prisoners in exchange for the kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. While in prison for the alleged strangling of Palestinian informants, Sinwar promised one of his Israeli interrogators that the tables would eventually turn — that one day he would be Sinwar’s prisoner, and that the now-jailed Hamas leader would be grilling him instead.
To put it differently, Sinwar had the quasi-Napoleonic notion of a total social inversion, one he would personally bring into being. Yassir Arafat, who came to deploy a clever interplay of violence and diplomacy, and who turned the Palestine Liberation Organization into a patronage system that was entirely dependent on his leadership, was a corrupt gradualist compared to Sinwar, who represented the total rejection of all pragmatism. Human beings were abstractions to him, the raw material for the new world he would single-handedly forge.
The execution, though, was off. Sinwar turned out to have a poor understanding of both his friends and his enemies. We might never understand why Hezbollah didn’t launch its own ground offensive against Israel on October 7, despite being fully prepared and deployed. Hamas and Hezbollah’s Iranian sponsors clearly knew Sinwar’s war plans, but didn’t fully commit themselves to the fight when the moment came. Israel, meanwhile, proved it could sustain an unprecedentedly long and difficult urban war without losing all international support. Surely Sinwar wasn’t counting on the Israeli-developed Trophy system neutralising Hamas’s anti-tank weaponry, nor on his enemy’s remarkable willingness to send its soldiers and combat engineers into Hamas tunnels. Hamas, meanwhile, fought the IDF with a distinct lack of skill and courage. Its fighters fled from frontal confrontations with the IDF, and failed to protect its infrastructure or halt the Israeli advance through the Strip. All the while, it lost any ability to fire rockets at Israel, and suffered an estimated 19,000 combat deaths since October 7. That’s six times more than all the Palestinian fighters lost in the Second Intifada, and the previous four Gaza Wars combined. A year ago, Hamas had 40,000 combatants, and ran the longest-tenured Sunni Islamist governing project in modern history. Now, though, they’re a glorified protection racket, far more capable of terrorising displaced Gazans than they are of threatening Israelis.
Sinwar’s continued rejection of US-brokered ceasefire agreements, any one of which would have saved his life, only makes sense if he believed his recalcitrance could eventually force Hezbollah and Iran’s other proxies to escalate the war on his behalf. He believed a longer and bloodier conflict favoured him. This was wildly incorrect. A long war actually favoured Israel, which learned how to fight him. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s limited participation in the conflict dragged on long enough for Jerusalem to lose patience and wipe out the group’s entire high command, along with a reported two-thirds of its missile arsenal.
Sinwar’s loss will still be deeply felt. He killed more Israelis on Israeli territory than anyone else in history, and on October 7 he gave his people an exhilarating taste of what a divinely ordained final victory would look and feel like. Pragmatism may seem lame or even dishonourable in light of that righteous blood orgy, a proof of concept for some future, final cleansing of the land. And he’ll have a potential afterlife as a leading 21st-century theoretician of violent revolution, having pioneered the idea of war as mass protest and an expression of popular rage. The “Tufan Al-Aqsa System” — the Hamasnik phrase for the October 7 attacks — is people power focused towards militant ends, an unstoppable, raging human flood. Sinwar understood that he had the backing of a global and increasingly important institutional Left, an elite constituency in Western countries that rapidly embraced his cause after October 7. “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians,” Sinwar told Vice News in 2021, anticipating the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book The Message.
But it wasn’t just Leftists who provided cover for Sinwar’s agenda. The surviving senior Hamas leadership is now based in Qatar, a US ally which is home to the largest American military base in the Middle East. Hamas leaders have been feted in Turkey, Russia, and South Africa over the past year. Hamas’s moral legitimacy and international standing arguably grew after October 7. Sinwar showed that raping and butchering Israelis did not automatically make you an enemy of civilisation — not even for the United States, which long opposed any Israeli operation in Rafah, where Sinwar was killed, and spent nearly a year pushing for a ceasefire that would have preserved Hamas’s rule in the Strip. Sinwar’s career may have shown that it is self-destructive in the near term for a Palestinian leader to provoke a full-on war with Israel. But he will have inspired a future generation of extremists to dream big.
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SubscribeWhat’s really radical – and practical, traditional, green, and definitely ‘sticks it to the man’ – is family interdependence. Reject the generational-divide-and-conquer doom rhetoric in this essay: no future, no jobs, no kids, no homes, no money, no food, etc. The fact is that parents/elders share and pass on their wealth, knowledge, homes, and stuff to their kids and grandkids. Many will share their time by caring for grandkids. The kids will help care for their elders eventually. It is this massive intergenerational wealth transfer and the whole non-GDP family sector that ‘the man’ wants to colonize. It’s a policy called defamilialization. Demanding gov’t subsidies for institutions like schools and daycares and elder care rather than for families feeds ‘the man’ and disempowers families.
Well, from an American perspective, it is interesting that an entire generation of elite British youth have had their brains destroyed, just like in America.
As far as I can see, the omnicause in question is Antonio Gramsci and George Lukacs’ aim to spread despair, doom and cultural self-hatred in the West. His thoughts were operationalized with Critical Theory, which looks at the disadvantages of Western civilization and its people and ignores its advantages, failing to compare with existing alternatives.
As a result of The long walk through the institutions starting at Uni in ’68, Critical Theory’s view of society and people is today omnipresent.
Exceptionally well-written analysis. I haven’t anything to add.
Children who have grown up wanting for nothing and feeling entitled to everything. The oil people’s lives depend on petroleum-based products and they are either too ignorant to know that or too self-righteous to admit it. And so we get mindless stunts that persuade no one. On the contrary, they harm the cause and make it even more incoherent than it already is.
Young people today, like everyone else in the West, are among the top one percent of all people who have ever lived. They have the luxury of marinating in first-world problems but not the self-awareness to realize what they’re doing.
All these callow kids need is a Mao figure and they’ll destroy the country with a simple-minded new Cultural Revolution.
It seems to me there are very different groups of young people: those who need to work feed, house and entertain themselves, and those who shout loudly about saving the world. The first whether academic or practical, or both, just get on with muddling through as we have done for generations, the others don’t need to work to live, and spend their time making life more difficult for the rest, they are just the modern version of the offspring of the aristocracy.
Why is a lack of intra-generational solidarity baffling? Selfishness is a trait of almost all young people. The young follow one another ardently, yet willingly change their ideas as quickly as they change friends and idols, and can hardly be expected to walk in step with their elders.
Intra-generational not inter-generational.
Bang them up until the ceremony is over and then release them with a caution.
I congratulate the author with observing these patterns. I always wonder when this generation is going to wake up and see that they themselves are being exploited like no other generation since the war.
That 1.2 million in state benefits is probably an underestimate if one considers the trillions of central bank money, simply given to asset owners since 2008, while the real economy stagnated. That is a big reason why younger people are literally driven into homelessness in many Western countries.
The activism seems to be a bit of a LARP version of the 60s counter culture. Back then the cultural revolution might have seemed silly as well but the status quo definitely took notice when they actually did tune in and drop out – at least for a bit. Not to forget that in France they actually got de Gaulle fleeing the country when they allied themselves with the working class. Such solidarity is hard to imagine today. Of course there were many of them and only a few zoomers. But perhaps the lack of potent activism also shows that the mechanisms to manufacture consent, co-opt and distract simply work pretty well.
Not the most informed generation I have taught.(sample size 250 UGs annually). Many of them appear to have entirely outsourced their world view to a single data source of choice.
Not their fault – they have not been taught critical thinking, and have little exerience of handling seconday data. Overlay that with a lack of curiosity or willingness to engage with the “unknown” and you can be faced with neither skill nor motivation.
Of course this doesn’t apply to all. Some are brilliant. Eastern Europeans in particular have clearly been well schooled in how to think rather than what to think…
Useless, entitled and I’ll educated, these young people are not so much being prepared for the world at their “Universities”, as being rendered permanently unemployable.
They are not in a position to demand anything.
Get a job, ( make it part time perhaps, after your six hours of contact study a week). Pay some tax. Support yourself. Stand for election or work for someone who does.
In short, grow up. Behaving like an earnest fourteen year old all your life will mean people will always treat you as a fourteen year old, and not a smart fourteen year old either
I’d like to see a breakdown of that ‘intergenerationally inequitable’ £1.2m benefit that somebody born in 1956 is likely to enjoy. Is that net of taxes and NIC paid in? Does ‘benefit’ include the state pension that those born in ‘56 will have paid into for 40 years?
And so on – there’s a lot of this casually inaccurate lambasting of the vile boomer generation leaking into the discussion these days – yes We Are All Guilty, but get the argument right. I’m still having nightmares over 21% inflation and 15% mortgages, and that was over 40 years ago.
“Youth Demand would lead you to think that the young had no political causes of their own worth pursuing and so had generously moved on to solving the world’s problems.”
Your typical Youth Demand member isn’t representative of the young. Wealthy parents, child free, still in education, and not working, these are often the progeny of the extremely privileged (mum and dad have solved all their problems thus far – with at least a handful avoiding legal punishment because mum or dad has a friend in chambers!) with nothing useful to keep themselves busy.
And on that point of childlessness, a whole host of demographic issues arise that are the root of the 1996 cohort’s financial problems. Firstly, the author misleads when he writes a person born in 1956 will get twice as many state benefits as someone born in 1996. The CPS study compares net benefits after tax. Someone born in 1996 will have to cough up hundreds thousand more in tax because the dependency ratio – the ratio between workers and those retired (or not working) – has fallen and will now collapse.
Spending an average of 4 more years in education and a far higher rate of sitting on incapacity benefit are two causes of a lower dependency ratio. The largest cause though will be the children of 1996 refusing to have their own children, unwilling to make the enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifice having children has always entailed. From this perspective, suggesting those born in 1956 were better off glibbly ignores the financial cost they paid for having children that kept their dependency ratio that much higher, their taxes that much lower, and their cumulative net benefits from society that much greater.
Having children in a postwar economy with its welfare states, affordable homes and stable work is different than having children in today’s climate where having a home is increasingly not possible at all. Of course one can endlessly debate on who’s life is harder, but boomers were at least living in a world of hope where things got progressively better instead of the other way around.
Does that have to do with children? I’m a bit skeptical about the entire narrative that a growing working population always brings wealth and an aging population is a huge problem. That might have been the case in early industrial society but do you really think that another army of consultants and lawyers is truly going to pay for pensions? Yes, of course, according to abstract economic models it does. But when we empirically investigate these things we often find that, fundamentally, the entire neoclassical economic narrative might simply be completely wrong. Constant economic crises also point at this.
Back in the physical world we were able to keep society running with only a tiny group of ‘essential workers’ during the lockdowns. In fact, that was already the case in the time of Bertrand Russell, who noticed a war economy functions just as as well or even better with only a fraction of the workers. Why? Probably because we technologically achieved the capacity to massively overproduce a 100 years ago. Machines are orders of magnitude more productive than workers and we can automate a lot more than we actually do already.
The problem, then, is never to sustain supply, it is to sustain demand. It seems to me that all of this has much more to do with power structures and not so much with an actual physical problem of taking care of retired people. The only physical problem we do have is a limited amount of resources and energy, which will run out. That only gets worse with more people in the absence of innovation.
Excellent comment, especially:
“do you really think that another army of consultants and lawyers is truly going to pay for pensions?”
There was a serious housing shortage until the mid 1970s. By serious, I mean people living in severely overcrowded accommodation, quite literally slums. A problem orders of magnitude worse than anything experienced today because first the Germans destroyed millions of homes, then there was a population boom, and then the planners pulled down a lot of Victorian housing in our big cities. Homes were not affordable: as many people in the 1960s were in private rental as today. Do you honestly think conditions are worse today than at any point in the past when birth rates were far higher???
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: I would wager that the first two ( ie Physiological ( air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sleep, and health ) and Security ( personal security, financial security, and health and well-being) are being provided by their social status and the bank of Mum and Dad. This then leaves them free to pursue the next two ( (Belonging and Self Esteem) through faddish protests and ineffectual stunts.
In reality though, the very nature of the ‘omnicause’ will never lead to the final level of Self Actualization. ( which includes acceptance)
The vast majority of the ‘real world’ ( including myself ) are still struggling with levels 1 & 2…..
That there is a lot wrong with our political administrations,full stop,is obvious,but these youthful persons do nothing to ameliorate the situation and a lot to make it worse. Are they actually being organiser by the forces of tyranny and oppression to create a justifiable pretext for yet more scrutiny,regulation and control. These young people are not from council estates,they are from affluent,upper middle class homes,they go to private schools,a trust fund will pay their university debt off. They can afford to bum about in their 20s enjoying picturesque poverty,it’s so exotic,in dosses and inner city squats. They will make friends with beggars and dealers but leave them in the gutter when on hitting 30 they want to join the real world and that’s easy because Mummy and Daddy have lots of friends in the media and business etc. These young people have Grandma as their role model. They admire but also envy her. She was AT the Grosvenor Square riots. She smoked weed. She had sex with Mick Jagger. Oh! Those glory days. Just like Grandma in her Prada outfit and Hermes scarf they get past Security and get up close to valued cultural objects because they DONT look like BAD PEOPLE. They are tastefully well dressed,they are well spoken and polite,they pass all the acceptability tests. Some of them must realise they are being used so presumably there must be something in it for them.
Luxury beliefs. These privileged whingers have nothing else to worry about because Mummy and Daddy are doing very nicely thank you. They have to scratch around to find things to complain about as their lives are pretty much spot on……apart from their “mental health”
Anything to not get a job. Plenty of vacancies in care homes, construction, teaching maths and science, engineering including renewable energy sources.
You expect posh kids like Indigo or Tristan to wipe old peoples bums.
This is what Mercy Killing is for.
They spray-painted Taylor Swift’s jet? The monsters!
Must have been a fix. Or how’d they get close enough. It’s all illusion.
They’re having fun! And they are soooo cool. It’s not dumb. Lots of people are dumb. It’s pathetic, it’s conformist.
Interesting essay for sure. – one that might merit further investigation. It’s baffling why these students are so passionate about issues they cannot possibly influence and why they choose protests that do nothing but breed ill will from others.
It’s a shame really as there are plenty of issues affecting young people in their early-mid 20’s (and older for that matter) that do need dealing with and where the grievances are genuine. Housing, (renting and buying), living costs, wage depreciation, student loan interest rates, how the state and markets make it more or less impossible to raise a family, attacks on their freedom by the state etc that could get a solid and broadly popular movement going. In the age of social media, it’s shocking that a campaign hasn’t even begun on this. Instead, everyone just makes memes.
Good points, but the idea that it’s “more or less impossible to raise a family” surely isn’t intended seriously?
Yes, the birth rate is declining; yes, it’s arguably harder than it was a couple of decades ago – but it’s far from “impossible” when millions of young families in all levels of society continue to grow around us and their children populate our classrooms. The “impossible” hype isn’t helpful.
I wouldn’t be so sure. The local authority I’m working at has been talking of possibly closing schools due to there not being enough children. Doubt we’re the only one. Even now though, most people often only have one child and sometimes two nowadays. Growing up in the 90’s and 00’s, it was typically two children with some having three.
Yes. But they are taught certain opinions. And it is these opinions they shout out loud. They don’t appear to have any of their own. They all say the same things, at least the self flagellating minority do.
During the #MeToo movement, it was said that it was a smokescreen, a distraction from people coming forward to out Hollywood Paedophiles. If true, it was incredibly effective.
Perhaps the same is at play here, distracting them from the true problems they are to face at a time when they have the freedom to mobilise.
The affordability crisis is an existential threat. Unfortunately their solution to everything, more government, just makes it worse.
So they have to concentrate on bigger issues to get through angst.
For me, watching them show up is like the circus coming to town.
They just dont realize they are the clowns. And not the friendly type either.
Yes, but it’s not at all baffling. It’s right on brand for an age cohort vastly more concerned with looking good to peers (especially the comely female ones) than with making any kind of sense. They’ve been putting the culture through convulsion after convulsion since the 60s.
It’s very easy to understand actually. If you have a simple ideology of oppressed on one side and oppressor on the other, you have something to believe in, a sense of community with like minded and a social life. Add in a sense of moral righteousness and being protected from any serious scrutiny because your potential interlocuter deserves cancellation due to their privilege and it’s more difficult to understand why there aren’t more. What I find is more difficult to understand is why they think they’re rebelling against anything when the Establishment is itself busy with social “justice” activism. Far from rebelling, they are giving support to the current hegemony. Their lecturers are more likely than the average person to be joining them in their performance politics.
Perhaps one reason is precisely because they cannot influence those issues. Their “protests” are more performative than anything else. No actual work is required, just empty posturing.
It is less baffling when one realizes that careful articulation of rational political interests is about 1/10 of what (consciously or otherwise) motivates people’s political activity. A very small percentage of the electorate votes based on policy; we vote based on character, likeability, what our friends are doing, etc.
No, what motivates people is the Queen of the Sciences – theology, broadly understood. People want to have some sense that what they do matters, that their lives are significant, that they are doing ‘right’ in life. People are looking for meaning… and particularly when you are young, without a career or a family, daily enjoying the simple delights of youth, this need for meaning will express itself in socially-acceptable ways. No longer does that mean prayer and church-going and so forth. Now it means – finding “something bigger than yourself to live for” and then “doing something” about it. Perhaps it’s marching and/or rioting at your moral indignation that two hundred years ago slavery existed. Perhaps it’s obstructing traffic and/or gluing yourself to art because fossil fuels have an impact on the natural world. Perhaps it’s trolling social media upset that women don’t want mentally ill men in their private spaces. Whatever it is, you are simply looking for some way to prove to yourself that you matter.
It’s a very old saying… “If you’re a conservative at twenty you’ve got no heart. If you’re a progressive at thirty you’ve got no brain.”
It’s not just that they can’t influence these issues; the vast majority of the protestors don’t have the faintest idea about their complexity.
All I know is the pathetic (attempted) destruction of art and free speech makes me reflexively hostile to anything the youthful Left may promote… Sure, their immature tantrums do not change the realities of climate change etc. that must be dealt with but their imbecile tirades help nothing…
I take your point, but I am reflexively hostile to anything the less-than-youthful Left may promote too.
Eternal juveniles.
There is the world of difference between promoting and enforcing.
You can’t ” deal with” the climate. It’s a million times bigger than us. It was before we were here, and it will be when we are gone.
I couldn’t agree more! But this is precisely what these “herdy rebels” are incapable of fathoming: in their ignorance-fuelled minds, nothing is bigger than us/them and everything that existed before we/they were here must be destroyed, branded as being tainted by patriarchy/colonialism/systemic racism/transphobia, etc.