The Legacy of Yahya Sinwar – The Atlantic Ocean

In 2008, Yahya Sinwar – then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel prison – developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-submerged in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a year-long manhunt, but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.

Few world leaders have spent as much time as Sinwar pondering the manner and meaning of their deaths. During his 22-year stay in prison he wrote a novel, The thorn and the carnationin which Palestinians die gloriously, with poetry on their lips. The theme of the novel is martyrdom, and Sinwar seems to have lived in such a way that his own violent death was predictable. The farewell poem of one of Sinwar’s fictional martyrs counsels stoicism: one need not fear death, for on the day it will come, it will come, “ordained by fate.” You shouldn’t fight against what is meant to be. “No prudent person can escape what is predestined.”

Sinwar was rumored to have linked his fate to that of some of the hundred or so remaining Israeli hostages by surrounding himself with them in case of an attack. Israel says no hostages were killed during the operation, but tens of thousands of equally innocent Gazans found their fate forcibly intertwined with Sinwar’s. Hamas had been firing rockets into Israel for years, and Israel had thought it could tolerate them, especially if it could steadily improve its relations with the broader Arab world in the meantime. Sinwar’s attack on October 7 appears to have had the sole strategic aim of disrupting that status quo. And by committing blatant war crimes against vulnerable people, he gave Israel – in a way that a few stupid rocket attacks never would – the justification for a war of elimination against Hamas. The very act of detaining the hostages, rather than immediately releasing them, provided Israel with permanent license to search and destroy Gaza in search of its citizens. His insistence that Hamas did nothing wrong on October 7, and would do it again, and even harder, if given the chance, eliminated any remaining possibility that Israel would seek a solution that would spare Gazans from the total destruction of their country.

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A common Israeli political frustration is that the country is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose wartime decisions are cynical and calculated for personal and political advantage. The Palestinians have suffered an even worse tragedy because they were led by someone who had no sense of urgency to end suffering, because of his belief that a violent death is not only fated, but also noble. (I wonder if Sinwar’s long prison sentence, which reportedly included four years of solitary confinement, warped his sense of time and left him with an unhealthy patience, while a normal human being would be desperate for an immediate path forward, no matter how imperfect.)

What a disaster that someone so fatalistic should make urgent decisions! Rounds of pointless negotiations between Israel and Hamas were extended and then ended inconclusively because Hamas had to consult Sinwar, its commander in Gaza, and he was difficult to reach in his tunnels. This summer, after Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Sinwar was announced as the group’s new top political leader, despite the obvious difficulty of getting a chairman so eager to even move toward outside could be enough to invite a chairman. an Israeli missile attack. But the truth is that Sinwar, as commander in Gaza, already had sole executive authority over the territory, and any other perceived leader of Hamas would have had to ask his permission to make major decisions anyway. So everyone waited for Sinwar, who was waiting for death and was blasé about its timing. That preference fits well with the preference of some Israelis to keep fighting until Hamas is completely eliminated – even at the cost of many Palestinian lives, and probably those of hostages as well.

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Sinwar’s death will solidify the group’s rhetoric but expand some options. By not making deals and instead fighting until his own death, Sinwar showed that he never softened the determination he displayed at the start of the war. If that point is proven, his successors will have less need to elaborate on it further. And Israel will have an opening to say it has achieved a core objective. So far, it has avoided any serious discussion about what Gaza might look like after the war, and who might step in to secure and rebuild it. Sinwar’s assassination marks the first milestone in a long time when Israel could pause and consider a realistic next step.

When the Islamic State lost most of its territory, many analysts hopefully suggested that the mistreatment would be a lesson to other jihadists: any future attempt to build a terror state would end in that state’s destruction. But those analysts did not realize what optimists jihadists can be. Extreme violence may have failed, but it produced more dramatic results than anything else. Sinwar’s death and the total destruction of Gaza could remind Palestinians that enthusiastic killing of Israelis will have unacceptably painful consequences for Palestinians as well. But Sinwar’s example will also show future generations of martyrdom seekers that they can, all on their own, seize the helm of their cause and steer it toward more violence. And if they do, no one will be able to pay much attention anymore. This lesson could be Sinwar’s most lasting legacy.