The fortuitous killing of Yahya Sinwar, de facto leader of Hamas who master-minded the horrific 7 Oct. 2023 attack on Israel, while celebrated by Israelis and others hoping for a halt in the Hamas-Israeli war, may not dim the desire of Israeli far-right elements for a permanent occupation of Palestine, to consummate the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, in line with the century-old Zionist vision.
By Chudi Okoye
He was found dead in a refugee camp in Tel al-Sultan, Gaza, looking nondescript amid a pile of refuse and rubble in a building the Israeli forces had destroyed in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. His end was in some ways redolent of the unceremonious denouement of Saddam Hussein, fished out by United States forces from a hole in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit, in December 2003; that of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian-born Islamist dissident and founder of al-Qaeda thought to have coordinated the 11 September 2001 attack on the United States who was killed by US forces in May 2011, unarmed, in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after a barely resisted 40-minute raid; and that of Muammar Gaddafi, apprehended in October 2011 by the NATO-backed Misrata militia whilst hiding inside a drainage pipe at a construction site in Sirte.
After an intensive year-long manhunt, on 16 October Israeli soldiers found Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, de facto leader of Hamas and presumed planner of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, apparently killed by chance through a gunshot to his head and wounds to his arm and leg. Initially uncertain who he was, the Israeli soldiers found him in combat fatigues, seemingly fighting as he died, with defeat and defiance equally registered on his pain-corrugated face.
Sinwar died only a few days shy of his 62nd birthday. He had been born in 1962 to a refugee family fourteen years after that family was expelled by Zionist forces from Majdal, a depopulated Palestinian village now part of Ashkelon, a coastal city in the Southern District of Israel. The family was part of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their lands amid the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, as Zionist forces enacted ‘Plan Dalet’, a military operation aimed at securing territory for the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel after the collapse of the British Palestinian Mandate. Sinwar had dedicated himself to fighting the Palestinian cause, was arrested several times and at a point served 22 years in Israeli prison, and has now been eliminated. Israel has finally “settled the score” with him, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted as he toasted Sinwar’s demise.
Yayha Sinwar could be consigned to the dustbin of history as an inglorious terrorist, as the Israeli government and many in the West are wont to do. He certainly had his faults, a hard-edged militiaman who fought with all available means. But, in some circles he might be placed, with his passing, in the long line of militants and freedom fighters finally felled by imperialist or reactionary forces determined to curb their revolutionary endeavor. It’s a line that stretches from Spartacus who led a massive slave revolt against the Roman Republic and died in a final confrontation with the Roman army in 71 BCE, to the Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata, assassinated in April 1919; to Patrice Lumumba, who sought to liberate Congo from Belgian colonial rule and was assassinated by local opponents in January 1961 with Belgian and CIA support; to Che Guevara, a Marxist revolutionary who played a major part in the Cuban Revolution and was assassinated in October 1967 by Bolivian forces, also with CIA support; to Fred Hampton, the 21-year old revolutionary and deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party who fought against fascism and racism in the US and was assassinated by the FBI and Chicago police in December 1969; to Salvador Allende, the Marxist President of Chile who pursued socialist policies and was assassinated (some claim he committed suicide) in 1973 in the CIA-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet; to Amílcar Cabral, a pan-Africanist, revolutionary nationalist, poet and intellectual who fought for Guinean independence from Portuguese colonial rule and was assassinated in January 1973; to Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement assassinated in September 1977 by South African police whilst in their custody; and to Archbishop Óscar Romero, an El Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop who spoke out against poverty, social injustice, and government repression and was assassinated in March 1980 whilst celebrating Mass.
This is in no way an exhaustive list of fallen freedom fighters. Some may question the dare in placing the Palestinian politician and militant, Yayha Sinwar, in that list. But, however objectionable his tactics might be deemed, they were in service ultimately of Palestinian nationalism. But now, silenced by Israel’s superior firepower, the question is: Will his demise bring this sordid war to a solid close? Will it break Palestinian resistance or instead stiffen it, likely causing the slaughter of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, thus triggering further escalation? Will Israel now accept a ceasefire so the hostages can be released? Or will the Palestinian carnage continue, preventing the possibility of a peaceful resolution?
Is there more, one may ask, driving Israel’s current onslaught than its desire to avenge the 7 October attack by Hamas and free the hostages?
On current evidence, I certainly think the latter. Israel doesn’t seem like it’s done; it is on a streak and won’t be stopped – not by the world’s wobbly institutions or the weak-willed waverers in Washington – except when it chooses. Israel has set its sights far beyond freeing the hostages.
Hostages to Misfortune
It might seem to some a totally outlandish presumption, an idea too cold-blooded to be contemplated by Israel. But it is very likely the calculation of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, at this point, that there’s a higher strategic gain in sacrificing the remaining Israeli hostages being held by Hamas than in actually rescuing them.
No one will say openly, of course, that the remaining hostages are expendable. But why pursue a vigorous rescue when you can exploit the moral outrage at their continued hostage, visceral in parts of the world, to advance Israel’s greater strategic goals: further decimate, dispossess and displace the Palestinian population; scuttle or at least put off the prospect of Palestinian statehood; permanently cripple anti-Israel insurgency – whether by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or any other, and in the process also, perhaps finally, completely neutralize Iran; create deterrence through de facto Israeli military hegemony over the entire Israeli and Palestinian territories, in line – as Netanyahu has admitted – with the “iron wall” principle set out in 1923 by the Zionist militant leader and writer, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who called for Jewish “colonisation of Palestine.”
There is much potential gain for Israel in strategic adventurism than in focusing on hostage rescue. The poor hostages could be sacrificed for the greater good of Israel, could they not?
And what better time than now to push for a ‘final solution’ to the pesky ‘Palestinian problem’? The world is in a moral haze over the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 incursion into the Gaza Envelope of southern Israel, the first invasion of Israeli territory since the Arab–Israeli War of 1948. The attack resulted in 247 Israeli civilians and soldiers being kidnapped and 1,139 killed (including 695 Israeli civilians – about 14 of whom were actually killed by the Israeli forces under the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ to prevent their kidnap, 71 foreign nationals and 373 members of the Israeli security forces).
The October 2023 Hamas-led attack was a devastating surprise which has elicited a disproportionate counter-attack by Israel, armed and funded by the United States, which in turn has resulted in Israel’s massacre of Palestinians and destruction of Gaza, acts carried out with the severest intensity. The scale, extent, and pace of Israel’s destruction of buildings and facilities in the Gaza Strip is said to rank among the most severe in modern history, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II, with greatly more shells and bombs dropped on Gaza in just the first three months of Israeli reprisals than the United States dropped between 2004 and 2010 after its invasion of Iraq. So far, over 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than half women and children, and hundreds of thousands are maimed, missing or displaced. There is a massive humanitarian crisis. Parts of Gaza, a city of 2.3m, now lie in ruins, following the damage or utter destruction of apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, factories, shopping centers, refugee camps, religious sites and other civilian infrastructure. After a year of Israeli shelling and bombardment of Gaza, the UN estimates that a total of 42m tonnes of rubble clutter the Strip, and that it might take up to 80 years and cost over $80 billion to clear the rubble and rebuilt the city. The scale of Israel’s destruction of Gaza has prompted some international legal experts to raise the concept of ‘domicide’, referring to “the mass destruction of dwellings to make [a] territory uninhabitable.”
Hamas’s action, though not unprovoked, has been widely condemned; but so too has been the brutality of Israel’s response which far infringes the norms of proportionality in international law. UN agencies have consistently documented the atrocities committed by both sides. On 20 May, with a cycle of rising atrocities seven months into the war, the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he would seek arrest warrants against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh (all of whom have now been killed by Israel) and also against Israeli leaders Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, all for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice has also taken up a case brought by South Africa in which it accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, citing as well in the case Israel’s 75-year apartheid, 56-year occupation, and 16-year blockade of the Strip. The ICJ is considering the case, having concluded that it is plausible Israel’s actions in Gaza could amount to genocide; and has issued provisional measures ordering Israel to allow humanitarian flows and stop offensive action in parts of Gaza.
Israel has ignored the order. It has instead launched diatribes against the UN, accusing it of anti-Israel bias. It is vilifying an organization which had promptly recognized the state of Israel in 1948 (within one day of it being declared) and had admitted it as a full member only a year later, even whilst to this day denying Palestine a full membership. Brushing aside all pleas for restraint and having overrun Gaza, Israel has now also invaded southern Lebanon, recently killing several Hezbollah leaders and myriad civilians there. It has attacked Houthis in Yemen, and also lobbed attacks at Syria and Iran, and is threatening further actions which some fear could spark a regional war.
A wearied world looks on, unable to stop an implacable and unbounded Israel backed by an America in the grip of a powerful Israeli lobby. America, the only force that could potentially restrain Israel, is all the more hobbled being in the midst of a highly competitive presidential election in which none of the leading candidates dares speak against Israel, lest they be labeled anti-Semitic. Never has a superpower been so pinioned by its own policy tradition. It prompted a pensive poem I penned earlier in which I coined the word “stooperpower” to describe America in its current crouch.
It is the perfect cocktail for Israel to strike a decisive blow and assert what it considers its biblical claim in the historical struggle for the land of Palestine. In subsequent parts of this essay, I will explore the historical and biblical backgrounds to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as signposts to Israel’s ultimate goal in the current conflagrations.
