There is not a day when I look at my own grandchildren – a toddler who never stops playing and a baby who never stops smiling - and don’t think of the dead and maimed grandchildren of others – in Israel in Gaza, in Lebanon. Almost all of whom would be alive or whole now if it hadn’t been for the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.
I don’t mean by this that the Israeli government had absolutely no option but to conduct its war against Hamas – and latterly against Hezbollah – in the way that it has. It has had quite a few choices available to it in the last dreadful year, none of them good although some far less destructive. But when Sinwar gave the order to proceed with the unprecedented attack on Southern Israel 12 months ago today, what did he expect to happen? What did he want out of it?
This is in every sense an asymmetrical war. One leader is hardly ever off the airwaves stating his position or making statements to his parliament. The other has never been on the airwaves since this war began and was rarely interviewed before. You don’t get to ask Sinwar how he thinks it’s all gone since that day and whether it’s been worth it.
The balance sheet as of now is not just the dead 1200 Israelis and the remaining hostages (if any are alive), the tens of thousands of dead Gazans, the hundreds dead in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. There’s also the survival and now the strengthening of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history – one determined to de facto annex as much of the West Bank as possible. And for what, if you are a Palestinian? Pride in the logistics of the original massacre? Those solidarity demonstrations on American campuses?
One explanation I’ve heard is that Sinwar and his comrades never expected their attack to be so successful in overcoming Israel’s border defences and penetrating so far and so fast. This left them with a murderous version of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s catastrophic Brexit victory, which neither expected nor really wanted. Did Sinwar only mean to blow the bloody doors off? If so the bestial behaviour of his “soldiers” when they got over the fence may have horrified even him.
Another theory posits a possible belief by Sinwar that the anticipated Israeli reaction to the attack would somehow bring Hezbollah and Iran fully into the conflict against the enemy. If so, this was a rash calculation. Hezbollah managed to do just enough to goad the Israelis into decapitating its leadership and much of its cadre and into invading southern Lebanon. Iran managed to support its proxies just enough to give Israel justification for assassinating top IRGC men in Damascus and then running up an escalatory ladder which ends God knows where – one which has a few rungs left, each worse than the last.
Yet a third and more plausible theory is that Sinwar thought that after an initial onslaught Israel would negotiate for the release of the hostages and that the position of the Palestinians would be once more be a focus for international attention. Everyone would return to the status quo ante, except with Palestine higher up the agenda. The many deaths caused in the meantime could be justified by the outcome.
Then there is a fourth theory. Maybe I think this one is true. That like the Russian nihilists who believed that the assassination of the tsar was bound to lead to fundamental change and that this change was bound to be for the better, Sinwar had no clear idea of what came next. The nihilists discovered that what did in fact come next was an even worse tsar.
It is hard to proceed with life and diplomacy using the assumption that your opponent is mad. It has often enough been true that armed terrorists have been transformed into democrats, or at least into peacemakers. So back in 2005 there seemed a genuine possibility that - Hamas – recently elected to run Gaza – despite its sometimes millenarian religiosity and its penchant for suicide attacks against civilian targets - might spawn its own “moderate” wing.
Leftists like Judith Butler talked of Hamas (and Hezbollah) being “part of the global left” despite their unfortunate but presumably reformable gay-slaying tendencies. And Jeremy Corbyn referred to them as “our friends”. I remember Michael Levy’s son Daniel (who had served in the IDF) advocating recognising the elected Gazan administration in order, not least, to show that democratic norms could work for Palestinians. I thought he had a point. Making peace means taking risks. In Northern Ireland the young, savage men of bomb and bullet, turned into grandpas who wanted something better for their successors.
Instead of a peace process what we got over Gaza was a mutually convenient state of armed paralysis in which Hamas never had to face another election and Israel never had to make any concessions to the Palestinians. From time to time a pattern of rockets followed by bombing would break out and be succeeded by a period of Qatari money helping to make the situation in Gaza just about stable. Keen listeners for nuance may notice that a strip that was supposed to be intolerable to live in and akin to the Warsaw Ghetto, turned out to have been a “thriving community” before it was bombed into the Stone Age in this last war.
The problem with the terrorist-turned statesperson meme is that it as often untrue as it is true. The mad Maoists of the Peruvian Shining Path did not make it into government. Nor did Al Qaeda and nor in any sane sense did ISIS. “Too long a sacrifice” wrote Yeats, “can make a stone of the heart”. Too crazy an ideology can make a psychopath out of the man. As for Taliban 2.0…
Then there’s the problem of being hoist on your own rhetoric. No one forced Hezbollah to fire rockets into Israel the day after the October 7th attack; the late Nasrallah and his extant Iranian paymasters (and maybe many of the rest of us) utterly failed to understand how the massacres a year ago had changed the calculus inside Israel. They evidently imagined a few demonstrative explosions south of the Good Fence and then a return to what went before.
However, look at this. In 2018 Sinwar was interviewed by the pro-Palestinian Italian journalist Francesca Borri. They were talking about a long-term ceasefire between the Palestinians (including Hamas) and Israel, based on paper called the National Unity Document. This, in Sinwar’s words, meant “a state within 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. And with the right of return for refugees”.
Well, with a more progressive Israeli government and a very fair wind, a version of this – along the lines of the deal offered by Ehud Barak back in 2000 - might have been the basis for a negotiation of the two-state solution. Might. Possibly. No right-of-return to be sure, but compensation and a recognition of Palestinian loss, perhaps?
“Can we imagine what happens if a ceasefire works?” Sinwar asked Borri. “Because it might be a powerful motivation for doing our best to make it work, no? If for a moment we imagined Gaza as it actually was, not a long time ago—have you ever seen some photos of the 1950s? When in the summer we had tourists from everywhere? Have you seen how brilliant our youth is? Despite it all. How talented, how inventive and dynamic they are? With old fax machines and old computers, a group of twenty-somethings assembled a 3D printer to produce the medical equipment that is barred from entry. That's Gaza. We are not only destitution and barefoot children. We can be like Singapore, like Dubai. And let's make time work for us. Heal our wounds.”
The full interview is here:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5364286,00.html
Maybe Sinwar was playing Borri for a fool, his real objective still being the utter destruction of Israel. It hardly matters now. As of today a large part of that Gazan youth he praised so highly are dead or wounded and most are homeless. If he is still alive in a bunker full of booby-trapped hostages as some believe, is he happy with that day’s work of a year ago?
Meanwhile, and also a year on, why does no one on any campus anywhere give a damn about the poor Sudanese? Are their kids not kids too? Or are they just too far away?
Excellent piece.
It's very clear how Hamas saw things. They spent two decades building bomb proof bunkers and tunnels, provoked Israel, then when bombs started falling denied their civillian population entry. To my mind, that is a deliberate genocide of their own people.