Who was Sinwar anyway?

Or: how to write an obituary for a ghost

Photo by MikhailMishchenko at iStock

At last I can truly say I’ve seen inside Yahya Sinwar’s head. Literally. As I write on Friday, having woken to news of the Israeli military’s killing of Hamas’s leader in Gaza, the sewer we call social media is awash with an image of him caked in dust in blissful union with 72 virgins. His head has been blown open.

Believe me, I only ever wanted to see inside Sinwar’s head metaphorically. To understand what made him tick. Get a sense of his internal calculations at critical junctures during the past terrible year. Learn a little about the shifting tensions within his organisation and the Iranian-led jihadi axis in which it sits. Get some understanding about whether his blood-soaked rule is firm or shaky. 

But his was perhaps the greatest disappearing act of our times. Slipping out of view and into Gaza’s vast tunnel network, shielded there and above ground by Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians respectively. As far as the media was concerned it was out of sight, out of mind. We saw a smattering of “who is Hamas again?” explainers in the immediate aftermath of last October’s massacre and since then almost nothing on the subject. 

To much of the leftist intelligentsia the only protagonist in the Gaza war is Israel, cast as a natural-born villain. (The fact Israel happens to be the world’s only Jewish state being merely a wild coincidence.) Hamas is erased. I was thinking of setting up a prize for the most breathtaking example of a public intellectual erasing Hamas and jihadism from the narrative of this conflict. I reckon Ta-Nehisi Coates, winner of many literary awards, knocks it out of the park. In his newly-released book of essays, The Message, Coates has a long chapter on Israel-Palestine (spoiler: Israel emerges as the villain) reportedly without once mentioning the word “Hamas,” let alone the terror group’s suicide bombings and actions on October 7. He criticises “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality in the Middle East debate” — only his aversion is not to “factual complexity” but to facts. 

“Who was Sinwar?” ask today’s headlines, which I take as an admission we’re likely to have forgotten who he was or never really knew in the first place. Still, it’s an important question. If nothing else the tens of thousands of innocent Gazan dead deserve an unvarnished answer, especially when Iran’s mission to the United Nations vows the “spirit of resistance will be strengthened” with Sinwar’s death.

“It might surprise people, but Sinwar wrote a semi-autobiographical novel while in an Israeli prison,” writes the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Eric Tlozek. “In it, he describes the crushing nature of Israel’s occupation and the failure of all but violent efforts to stop it, detailing a need to ‘change the equation’ by forcing a decisive confrontation, an indication of the belief that led to the October 7 attacks.”

It is indeed surprising that while in prison Sinwar penned the violent Islamist’s answer to Mein Kampf. Tlozek’s colleagues at Australia’s public broadcaster could have reminded us every now and then about Sinwar’s auto-fiction. As journalist Matti Friedman reminds us in The Free Press, when in May 2018, the Hamas government in Gaza tried to breach the Israeli border under the cover of protests known as the “March of Return,” Sinwar, who had become Hamas chief the previous year, was caught on camera screaming in Arabic at followers to cross the fence and “tear out the hearts” of Israelis. 

“Most reporters either ignored this call for violence, or decided it was some kind of colourful metaphor,” Friedman writes. 

The ABC’s Tlozek, having told us about Sinwar’s literary streak sums up his political legacy this way: “While he undoubtedly shook the Middle East and renewed the international focus on the plight of Palestinians, this approach has left more than 42,000 Palestinians, 2,000 Lebanese and 1,200 Israelis dead, Gaza in ruins and the Middle East on the brink of a regional war between Israel and Iran.”

Sinwar is bad then — on balance. To be fair, jubilantly sacrificing more than 42,000 Palestinians is one way of renewing the international focus on the Palestinians’ plight. 

“Another surprising fact is that Sinwar, who founded Hamas's internal security unit, was not jailed for killing Israelis, but for killing four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel,” Tlozek continues. That’s surprising indeed!

“He reportedly said it was acceptable for 100,000 Gazans to die if their deaths freed 100 prisoners. Along with the celebrations in Israel, there will be Gazans experiencing some relief and hope after his killing.”

Again— all of this is revealing, if somewhat belatedly imparted. It might have been useful to know that there were Gazans hopeful at the prospect of Sinwar biting the dust. Who knows, such reporting might even have changed the trajectory of the past year. Look, maybe the earthquake of Sinwar’s death was necessary before The New York Times could find 22 year-old Mohammed, repeatedly displaced in Gaza during the war, who said the news of Sinwar’s death marked “the best day of my life” as “he is the one who made Israel do this.” 

And yet The Free Press managed to partner with the Center for Peace Communications, a US-based non-profit, to publish the voices of ordinary Gazans opposed to Hamas. Clearly, where there’s a will to amplify narratives casting doubt on Iran’s insistence that Hamas’s “resistance” enjoys popular support within Gaza, there is a way to do that. There are prominent Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and ex-Muslims who dissent from the self-defeating orthodoxy that Israel is illegitimate and must be dismantled as the price of peace. 

But you would be unlikely to find Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, John Aziz, Hussain Abdul-Hussain or Bassem Eid, to name a few, on The Guardian’s op-ed page, or in The Age or SMH. Meanwhile anti-Zionist Jewish commentators are a staple, the subtext usually one of brave souls speaking out against powerful interests. Well there’s brave and there’s brave and exposing oneself to risk of beheading by speaking out against jihadists belongs in the second category. 

**

In any case, I’m nostalgic for a time when terrorists were given the respect to be unsentimentally reported as real people facing real-life dilemmas. I felt like I knew Yasser Arafat, I understood him as a man of his time and a leader of great power. Not so Sinwar and the zany back-catalogue of Sinwar trivia, including his willingness to sacrifice 100,000 Palestinian civilians for 100 Palestinian prisoners, of which we’re given only a glimpse only after he’s snuffed it. 

That Sinwar never lived in public consciousness as anything beyond a vague shadow until the hour he died alone “wrapped in blankets like a rheumatic housewife,” as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s Alex Ryvchin, himself a writer, puts it, owes a lot to a shift in how journalists define their mission. 

This is a theme on which Friedman writes definitively. 

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Friedman joined the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press in 2006. In the wake of Israel’s 2014 conflict with Gaza he penned two essays on the media’s chronic malpractice in reporting Israel-Palestine. While acknowledging that many practical obstacles play a role in the lopsided nature of the reporting, Friedman concluded the most important factor was a new, aggressive activism among his colleagues whose goal was no longer to describe reality but “to usher readers to the correct political conclusion.”

“By selectively emphasizing some facts and not others, by erasing historical and regional context, and by reversing cause and effect, the story portrayed Israel as a country whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies,” recounted Friedman last month in a column entitled, “When We Started to Lie.”

Ten years later Friedman understands that what he diagnosed back then is not limited to Israel. 

Where once journalists saw their mission as answering the question, “what is going on?” they now increasingly ask of a story, “who does this serve?” 

The new (non) journalism largely explains why in a war that has killed tens of thousands and convulsed societies as far away as Australia, the leader of one side is treated as a bit player. Sinwar is irrelevant to the meta-narrative that smothers nearly every report on the war in the way the new activist journalists (somewhat redundantly) demand it should in their open letters and petitions. 

**

While I never really knew Sinwar, I’m delighted he’s gone. I’ll share a small, somewhat parochial, anecdote. Last night my daughter and I were heading to the car after her dancing class. It was raining. Dodging puddles, we came face-to-face with a group of young orthodox Jews in black hats carrying palm branches and a thing called an etrog, a yellow citron, which has significance during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles. The festival commemorates the period when the Jews wandered in the desert after the Exodus living in fragile huts. 

As I’ve explained here before, Judaism is not a proselytising religion — except when it comes to fellow Jews. Last night the Orthodox kids asked if we were Jewish and if yes would we like to say a prayer on the palm branches and the citron. I gestured to my daughter that it would be ungracious to say no considering these youngsters were prepared to roam the streets getting soaked so as to offer their fellow Jews a chance at sanctification. So we said the prayers and shook the palm branches as is customary. Shook the branches on the street in St Kilda in the rain. One of the prayers, recited on most Jewish festivals, gives thanks that we have arrived once again at this time and at this season. Gives thanks that we’re still here, basically. 

Driving home afterwards, I saw on the wall of an abandoned milk bar a mural of young women held hostage in Gaza. For the rest of the drive home, I wept for all the people who didn’t make it to this time and to this season, and for the people who made it to hell in the tunnels of Gaza.

“His death is a significant moment,” tweeted Anthony Albanese about Sinwar. “He was an enemy of the Israeli people and an enemy of peace-loving people everywhere.” 

“Australia joins with the international community in renewing our call for the return of the hostages, urgent humanitarian support for civilians in Gaza and a ceasefire that will break the cycle of violence and put the region on the path to an enduring two state solution.”

I wish I didn’t feel moved to quibble with sentiments that are essentially sound, but it’s wild that even at this significant moment for peace-loving people everywhere Albanese has trouble seeing past the voters of western Sydney. It’s not simply the zombie-like incantation of a “two state solution.” It’s also the reference to breaking “the cycle of violence.” 

There is no cycle of violence, only crazed and evil holy warriors who forced Israel into a defensive war and keep it going still, refusing for all eternity to lay down their arms. Only a man who wanted to tear out the hearts of Jews and succeeded.