The Death of Yahya Sinwar

Neither Victory nor Defeat

Surely by now readers will have heard of the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at the hands of Israel Defense Forces troops in Gaza. His killing has been greeted both with celebration and mourning, including paeans to his courage in fighting to the end. Both responses strike me as fatuous.

Whatever extraordinary elements of his character, Sinwar is merely the latest in a line of Palestinian militant leaders eliminated by Israel. Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were also killed by Israel, along with countless other “terrorists” up to Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. The military wing of Hamas, until recently lead by Mohammed Deif, bears the name of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a guerrilla leader killed by the British Palestine Police force in 1935. Given this history, whatever satisfaction there is for Israel and its friends in killing Sinwar, it’s not likely to be lasting. His martyrdom will inspire others to continue his fight. It’s perhaps difficult now to imagine a more cruel or ingenious successor—surely they got the worst of them all—but history has a way of handing out unpleasant surprises. I, for one, remember when Yasser Arafat, who appears like a humane and wise statesman compared to the lot we have now, was presented as the most evil man in the world.

Did Sinwar deserve to die? None of us are God, but he undoubtedly ws a bloody man that had no compunctions making that decision for thousands of others. He had the integrity at least to fully understand that violent death was his fate in his chosen path. But this also makes the celebrations of his death fall all the more flat: it’s not like he didn’t want to die in the service of his cause. That was his whole life’s meaning and direction. Once again, Israel gave him exactly what he wanted.

Those mourning his death and lifting him up as a symbol of resistance should take stock of his actual legacy. It is mostly death and destruction brought upon on his own people, whom he fought for as an abstract whole while being callous to their particular fates. If one day his goals are attained, will it have been worth the death of even one child who could’ve grown up to live just the most modest, normal life in Gaza? It’s tempting to romanticize even the most fearsome of men for their sublime indifference to pain and death and their dedication to their cause. But if one faces the facts, Sinwar was a murderer, pure and simple. Nor were all his victims the enemy and their collaborators. See, for example, this episode, recorded in David Remnick’s profile of Sinwar earlier this year:

Sinwar’s co-conspirator was a fellow-inmate, the Hamas commander Mohammed Sharatha. The two had become cellmates in 1997, when Sharatha was in the middle of a long sentence; as part of a Hamas security force called Unit 101, he had participated in the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers. He wasn’t especially remorseful about the operation (“I did what I did, and I don’t regret it,” he said later), but he was troubled about something. As Sinwar wrote in a confession included in the interrogation file, “I felt that he was sad most of the time.” Sharatha eventually explained the source of his despair: his sister, back in Gaza, was dishonoring the family by having an extramarital affair. Could Sinwar help find a way to have her appropriately punished? Sinwar promised to get word to his brother, Mohammed, a leading member of the Hamas military wing in Gaza. (Hamas prisoners routinely smuggled out messages through visitors.) The interrogation record notes that the deed was soon accomplished by one of Sharatha’s brothers: their sister was found dead in the Strip.

There is a lot of speculation of what Sinwar’s actual goal with October 7th was: was it to push the Palestinian question back into the public eye, disrupt the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states, and trick Israel into such a terrible response as to diminish its international standing? Or, was it fully apocalyptic? Did he believe he could drag the region into a final showdown and really defeat Israel in battle? There is some evidence that he nurtured such a vision. But I think for Sinwar the means justified the ends: he was a hard man, forged by imprisonment, occupation, and all the repressive tools Israel could throw at him, and hardness was his solution for everything.

If there is any justice, this killing will not be seen as an accomplishment of any kind. It’s yet another murder in a seemingly endless line. Whatever the extent of Sinwar’s crimes, his death does not justify the thousands that were killed to get to him. And who exactly gave him permission to martyr thousands of innocents on the way to his own martyrdom? There’s some faint hope that this will provide a punctuation mark on the present slaughter and allow its perpetrators to claim victory. If this ends it, his death will have served some good at least.

The same day as Sinwar was killed, Haaretz reported that a 59-year-old Palestinian woman was shot and killed by the IDF while harvesting olives on her own land. Her name was Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh. She was every bit as much of a real human being as Yahya Sinwar, who now will be immortalized with thousands, even millions, of words.