Yahya Sinwar. History will judge the living and the dead.
The political and military leader of Hamas is dead. Some cheer. Some weep. History will judge the living and the dead. I wish Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar had appeared before an international tribunal of judges for their role in October 7th, rather than being murdered by the Israelis. All who committed crimes in the past year should face justice.
He belongs to history now. Watching his final moments was a surreal experience. A living ghost. Seated in a chair in a bombed-out building. Covered from head to foot in something like concrete dust. Barely able to move. I had to view the video twice before I realised what - or, rather, who - I was looking at. The Israelis were obviously pleased with their work - that’s why they shared it with the world. A high-tech drone hovering triumphantly over a dying man, a man they probably saw as a primitive who, at the end, had nothing but a small stick as a weapon. His final act of resistance was to fling that stick towards the drone.
Moments after the footage stops Sinwar is slaughtered. They apparently didn’t know who they were killing until afterwards. Just another terrorist. The man could barely move but – against any sense of human decency – he was executed rather than captured and given medical assistance. Israel’s President made clear in October last year that even Palestinian babies are terrorists. No quarter given for terrorists. No rules of war. People like President Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris don’t have a problem with that. A year ago, the Israeli defence minister made clear that Palestinians are human animals and would be treated accordingly. And they have been. Thus it has been since the 1940s. Resistance to the combined might of Israel and the great white nations of the West is, they believe, futile.
I suspect the BBC and other Western media would not have shown the footage if it had been a white leader or some respectable member of the Western alliance who was sitting in that chair. But this was an untermensch, a member of the underclass and so they showed us. And, to be honest, I’m glad they did. Seated in the chair, unable to rise, he still towered over the Israelis and will for generations to come.
Yahya Sinwar was born in Khan Younis refugee camp to a family who had been driven from their home by Zionist gangs. Sinwar was there at the dawn of Hamas. Sinwar spent over 22 years in Israeli prisons. Sinwar, the fluent Hebrew speaker and translator of Hebrew literature. Sinwar, the intellectual, the man who apparently wanted peace but knew the Israelis only respected force.
He was a tough – many would say ruthless – military leader of Hamas, and the successor of Ismail Hanniyeh who was killed in the Israeli terrorist attack in Tehran.
“Justice has been served,” says US Vice-President and former prosecutor Kamala Harris. An odd sort of justice.
In contrast, Iran’s mission to the United Nations stated: “When Muslims look up to the Martyr Sinwar standing on the battlefield – in combat attire and out in the open, not in a hideout, facing the enemy – the spirit of resistance will be strengthened.”
Palestinians view Hamas and Sinwar very differently from those in the comfortable sitting rooms of the West. Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, in Gaza, says Palestinians admire that he fought to the end.
“The way it’s been perceived, even by those who opposed Sinwar’s strategies, is that he was blessed with a warrior’s death, fighting oppression.”
Sinwar, who committed his life to trying to free his people from the cruel bondage imposed on them by the Israelis and their Western backers. Sinwar, whose head was bloodied but unbowed even at the end, will be honoured for generations by people who fight racism, fascism and whatever other cruel forms of colonial exploitation come next.
“The way it’s been perceived, even by those who opposed Sinwar’s strategies, is that he was blessed with a warrior’s death, fighting oppression.”
Sinwar was one of those who directed Hamas fighters to breach the concentration camp walls on October 7th and take the fight to the enemy. Sinwar felt that if the Palestinians didn’t do something dramatic they would be wiped – literally wiped – from the map of their own homeland as the Israelis sought to create a greater ethno-nationalist state.
Crimes were committed on October 7th. Terrible crimes. Those who commit crimes should face consequences. I don’t think, however, that people like Yoav Gallant or Kamala Harris should appoint themselves as judge, jury and executioner.
I believe we should live by law. I believe justice should be blind - and all who have seriously transgressed should stand before judges for their crimes. I wrote recently about American war crimes in Korea in 1951 - the largely forgotten and unpunished aerial killing of about 3 million people, mostly civilians, in “war by tantrum” after the American army led by General MacArthur had been routed and driven back over the 38th parallel. In that article I quoted Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal, called to try the leading Nazis at the end of WWII. Jackson helped send Nazi criminals like Reichkommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, to the gallows.
I wish Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar had appeared before an international tribunal of judges for their role in October 7th, rather than being murdered by the Israelis. Because I believe in law and justice I would also like to see the entire military and political leadership of Israel, the US, Germany and Britain appear before the same tribunal for their crimes - vastly greatly in scale and devoid of mitigating circumstances. I am unsure what Justice Robert Jackson would have to say about the Palestinian resistance leaders and whether they would be executed - but I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that if the distinguished Jackson, who also served as US Attorney General, was as good as his word, all those Israeli and Western leaders would swing by the neck for their crimes, as would Tony Blair, George W Bush, Barak Obama and so many others who have destroyed the lives of millions, raped countries on different continents and, until now, got away with mass murder. As Justice Jackson said all those years ago:
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes, whether the United States does them or Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others, which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”
But we do not live in such a world. “Justice”, as per Pax Americana, is a scam and a fraud, a charade that ghouls and hypocrites like Antony Blinken like to sermonise about in between arranging death and misery to be visited on people across the planet.
The last moments of Yahya Sinwar’s life.
Until such time as the rules are applied to all parties in an even-handed way, I personally can’t condemn people like Ismail Haniyeh or Yahya Sinwar. Their lives have been book-ended by massive crimes against humanity committed by the very people and regimes that have acted as their judges, their juries and their executioners. In case anyone forgets: legal scholars tell us that genocide is the crime of crimes. The leaders of Israel, the US and the West should face justice - and consequences – for that crime. Until such time as they do let Yahya Sinwar rest in peace.
Eugene Doyle