Don't Make Sinwar Your Hero

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

Last week, Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Those hoping that Israel accomplishing a big part of its stated mission might mean the end of this brutal war may, unfortunately, be too optimistic: Even if Hamas returned all of the still-living hostages (a goal the current Israeli government has not exactly prioritized), there seems, at this point, little question that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes ongoing war is good for him. And so he will keep the war going — with little care for scores of innocents killed across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and now wider into the region. Millions of people around the world have watched civilian casualty counts tick up. We have seen images of limp toddlers held by wailing parents and teenage refugees burned alive, read stories of NICU babies dead in their cribs and women having C-sections without anesthesia, and have said, enough.

Sinwar’s death should make even the most feckless of leaders consider a wind-down. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, as Israel remains led by one of the most depraved, self-interested, and dishonorable men on the planet, who has surrounded himself with terrorists and sociopaths.

Netanyahu, whose corruption and attempts at gutting the independence of the Israeli judiciary made him a much-protested and unpopular figure even before the Oct. 7 attacks and a widely-mistrusted one after, has gotten a bit of a boost with Israel’s successful attacks on Hezbollah. He is also leading an increasingly illiberal society, and even his challengers come from, at best, the center-right. The consensus seems to be that the Israeli left is dead, and the best anyone might hope for is a more-reasonable centrist who will push the far-right Jewish supremacists who advocate the murder, starvation, and displacement of Palestinians out of the sphere of influence.

This is a very bad place to be. And Israelis, as well as supporters of Israel, are making a grave error — and acting with profound immorality — when they excuse or support Netanyahu because, well, these are perilous times. No times are so perilous that they justify backing a man like that, let alone the handful of aggressively evil men of the Israeli far right.

When people are scared, they tend to move inward and often become more conservative — even if, in practice, doing so prolongs the very circumstances that scare them (we certainly see this in the US, with conservatives both fearing crime and pushing for the lax gun laws that make crime in the US so deadly). When people suffer great loss, many try to make meaning from it — and when people understand that something has been taken from them traumatically and unjustly, that meaning-making may involve rage that coalesces into hatred and violence (we certainly saw this fueling the intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict well before Oct. 7). I can wrap my mind around why so many Israelis seem at best indifferent to Palestinian suffering in the wake of 10/7, even as I find that position profoundly unprincipled and morally impoverished. I can wrap my mind around why many Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank may back an armed resistance, even as I am not a person who condones political violence, and abhors it when it is aimed at civilian targets (understanding and condoning are two very different things). I can understand, in other words, how struggling or suffering or hurting or scared people make bad moral calculuses.

I am struggling to wrap my mind around the hero-making of Yahya Sinwar from some on the American left — people who ostensibly oppose murderous religious fundamentalists.

Sinwar stands for just about everything progressives and leftists theoretically oppose. He was a religious zealot, cutting his teeth as a morality-enforcer with Hamas — a man who reveled in punishing, torturing, and sometimes killing (or ordering the killing of) those deemed collaborators with Israel, but also those accused of homosexual acts, women accused of shaming their families by having extramarital affairs or being too sexually loose, and men who possessed pornography. These are the interests of far-right theocratic lunatics, of little religious toads who thirst for power and know they can find it by falsely claiming the moral high ground. These are not men who have a taste for democracy, even though they will happily exploit it to put themselves in power. These are certainly not men who have any taste for leftist or progressive aims.

When we meet these kinds of people in the US, progressives and liberals and leftists alike are very clear on what we see. When we see these hateful fundamentalist bigots in power in Israel, we are very clear on what we see. It is appalling to see not just excuse-making but overt embrace of unvarnished murderous evil, just because it comes packaged in the language of Palestinian freedom.