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 their soon.
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.
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?
Like errr OK yaha..?
Never seen a commentator on unherd use monster to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Why the double standards?