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.
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SubscribeThe civilised world is a much better place without Sinwar: a blood-thirsty tyrant who cared little for his own people, who were all cannon fodder for Allah in his warped imagination. The institutional Left in the West really ought to be ashamed for their craven gutlessness, not least because, if Sinwar had succeeded in his ultimate vision of bringing the West down, these leftists would have been among the first to face the firing squad. There is no question that the likes of Sinwar despised their ‘liberal’ views; he was merely goading them as useful idiots for his own blood-soaked cause(s). Good riddance to him!
Nasrallah & Sinwar RiH – Rot in Hell.
I pray that Khamenei joins his puppets there soon.
Yes totally agree. Don’t expect any shame, embarrassment or contrition from those on the left who are still running cover….
Leftist in the West share Sinwar’s attitude to other human beings as raw material for their ideology. Being so self-complacent prevents them to see that they are abused by Islamists as useful idiots with a very limited shelf-life.
The expression ‘inshallah’ which one hears a lot in islamic countries carries with it a lot of magical thinking. It moves supposed possibilities firmly into areas which we in the West would describe as ‘impossible’ or ‘extremely unlikely’. If for no other reason we should energetically support Israel for its sheer rationality. In the long term none of us in the West can afford to indulge the useful idiots and fifth columns in our midst who have been supporting Hamas recently. Eventually our political class will have to recognise this and acknowledge that they don’t look ‘tolerant’ but just pathetically weak.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. True, Hamas and Hezbollah are wholly destructive forces, and not part of any peaceful solution. There will be a lot of sighs of relief in Arab capital cities at Sinwar’s demise, as well as in the West. Good riddance. Give the IDF soldiers concerned a medal.
This does not mean we should give Netanyahu, or any Israeli leader, a blank cheque. The treatment of the Palestinians by the West Bank settlers is not something any decent human being can support.
Isn’t it possible that had the Gazans given up on trying to remove the Jews from Israel and used the money to build a functioning little economy, perhaps a Mediterranean holiday paradise, they might have been better off?
I know I’m being simplistic and that there’s much that I don’t know and, maybe, the Israelis would have prevented this (there are nutters among them too) and, yet, don’t you think it might have been worth a try?
Their repeated attacks, small on large, on Israel have failed. They have failed their own people. Sometimes, like the Germans and Japanese after WW2, you have to accept your defeat.
A Mediterranean paradise? You would be quite right, if Gaza was a functioning democracy where the rule of law prevailed. Sinwar saw these things as Western decadence. Which is why all that aid money to Gaza went into building up Hamas as a military force, while the Gazans rotted in poverty. As Goering so aptly put it, (in a similar context) “Guns before butter.”
Do you genuinely believe that Israel has a ‘rational’ society? If by ‘rational’ you mean ‘secular’ then you are not going to like the next few decades much.
I have one regret about Sinwar’s death – that the Israelis only got to kill him once.
Oh is it. Israel have killed a lot of innocents in the past year in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria and over the last 76 years. Would that be some kind of solace to you?
Now, now. Lots of people have killed lots of innocents over the years. It’s part and parcel of war. We should be able to distinguish though, between those who deliberately target innocents from those who don’t.
But yes, I agree that Paddy Taylor’s comment was tasteless.
Sinwar, as the man behind the Oct 7th pogrom, was the literal equivalent of Adolf Eichman.
Would my comment, if made about Eichman’s death, also be in poor taste?
If you think so, then I’d struggle to know how to explain it to you.
The thing is this is not war this is ethnic cleansing and a genocide of Palestinians. But the West likes to call it war.
Sorry? Are you conflating Yahya Sinwar with Innocents?
He was a monster – he deserved to die, and not well. The world is a better place for his death.
Any rational person would agree with you Paddy. I use the word rational in the context of a post-Enlightenment view of our humanity and personhood. Sinwar represented the ideal of a bloody warlord similar to his more successful ancestor Mohammed who invented a belief in an entity called Allah, congruent with his ravaging era. This view places humans secondary to the whims of this Allah as written by Mohammed. Sinwar’s attempt to complete the Islamic mission was met as it should have been by death. His distaste for decency and humanity left Israel with not just a need to execute him but a duty to do so.
Yes, and they were put into the line of fire by guys like Sinwar. Thus the comment.
Hamas might yet win a Nobel Peace Prize for concealing the daycare center inside the weapons cache.
My only regret is that they released the footage of his final moments. I think that was a dreadful miscalculation. He went from being a rat hiding in a tunnel while his people were killed to a martyr fighting back with his dying breath. Generations of jihadis will watch that video.
This is how to fight to win. No more faux cease fires. No more acceptance that one’s dedicated enemies should control the narrative.
“The same type of racism that killed George Floyd”? What type of racism is that? That is the Fabricated Racism of the Progressive Liberal Woke Left in the USA. That is the lies and propaganda the Left in the USA keeps repeating to divide the people. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a myriad of useful idiots continue to use racism as a political tool.
What a grotesque picture that is at the top of this piece.
Sources: trust me bro
What Sinwar and Hamas did will most likely destroy the Palestinians chance of improving their situation for a generation, at least. They will live like beasts in the ruins of their homes.
They are now essentially without friends. None of the other Muslim states are going to have anything to do with them, other then by voting for those useless UN resolutions. The Israelis have destroyed too many valuable things; murdered too many of their chosen targets at will (in too many “safe havens”) . And no one can reasonably blame them. The supposed “problem” of the Jews is not worth any more risk or loss.
Any of the surrounding nations with functional governments of any sort, will gradually begin to accept Israel’s existence; diplomatically at least; and then with trade and exchange.
And as for the Western Left…they probably won’t ever grow up, but they, notwithstanding their fervor, will quickly forget the whole issue and go on to something else.
Inshallah.
Sinwar saw himself as the Lenin of his people.
He performed one useful thing, if we have the wit to discern it and act upon what we discern: He demonstrated the close affinity of the Extreme Right and the Extreme Left, joined in their hatred of Jews and their love of the most extreme violence to settle accounts with all other parts of society.
Our idiotic masters have denied this for 70 years or more, and continue to be unable or unwilling to see the face of irreconcilable evil, as they concede more and more ground to it. And, in the end, it will do them no good. They are as the appeasers Churchill warned would briefly delay, but not escape, being eaten by the crocodile they appeased.
Like errr OK yaha..?
To say Sinwar was a monstrous ideologue is akin to saying Churchill was a monstrous ideologue.
What Sinwar’s progressive fans overlook is that he wasn’t really much different to your average IDF thug, just on the other side. In the end he met his death at the hands of men much like himself.
Never seen a commentator on unherd use monster to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Why the double standards?
If you’d be happy living in the kind of world that Sinwar wanted to bring into being, then yes, go ahead and talk about double standards …
Eh?
Are you drunk or stoned, or a comedy account?
Genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.
“indigenous”… Definitely a comedy account then