Western leaders who have been silent for more than a year while genocide is carried out against Palestinians in Gaza found an occasion to come together to condemn ‘terror’. As Brian Kelly reports, it wasn’t the terror of the rich and powerful they stepped out to denounce, but the resistance of the oppressed.
The Tal Al-Sultan refugee camp, where—after a year of relentless pursuit—the Israeli military cornered and then executed heavily-wounded Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar on the 16th October, featured briefly in news reports from Gaza in late May. It was here, just east of Rafah, that the Israeli Air Force incinerated some fifty Palestinian civilians—mainly women and children—who were huddled in their cramped tents after being forcibly displaced to an area the IOF had designated a ‘safe zone’. The firebombing (with US-supplied munitions) was widely interpreted as Netanyahu’s rebuke to the International Court of Justice, which only two days earlier had ordered Israel to halt its genocide.
At the time the ‘Tent Massacre’ marked a shocking new low in Israeli depravity, though the world has seen countless similarly gruesome incidents before and since, including a horrific attack on the tents of displaced civilians at Al-Aqsa Hospital just over a week ago, where patients were burned alive while still attached to IV drips. Indeed, by the time of Al-Sinwar’s execution, the IOF had been laying brutal siege to north Gaza for 11 days, pummelling the Jabalia refugee camp—birthplace of the First Intifada in 1987—in what civilians describe as a campaign of annihilation.
‘This time,’ one civilian eyewitness reported, ‘they no longer want us to leave or go to the south, the only goal is to kill us, and that alone will satisfy their wrath’. At the time of writing, Israeli operations have killed more than 700 Palestinians in North Gaza over the course of an 18-day siege. Many—including Israeli military personnel—have concluded that the siege signals enactment of the ‘General’s plan’—a campaign of extermination advocated by retired general and former National Security Council member Giora Eiland, and heavily promoted by the Zionist Right.
In the deranged judgment of the Monsters who run our upside-down world, none of this depravity qualifies as terrorism. Confronted with unspeakable horrors day in and day out for a year, their mercenary spokesmen in US State Department briefing rooms, the UK Home Office and the press room at the EU Parliament struggle to conjure even a word of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israeli genocide. All of them seem privy to some special algebraic formula that helps gauge the point at which the IOF crosses the line between acceptable ‘collateral’ damage and ‘too many’ civilian deaths. Every now and then the bumbling idiot in the White House—who has signed off on nearly $23b. in military aid to Netanyahu over the past year—emerges to warn that Israeli actions may have gone ‘over the top’ in Gaza.
Rationalising Genocide: Anti-Palestinian Racism and Dehumanization
Miraculously, those who have orchestrated and supplied the genocide seem to have found their collective voice in the days after the murder of Yahya Al-Sinwar. From the Biden-Harris White House to Starmer in Britain, Macron and Meloni, Scholz in Germany and Von der Leyden at Brussels, the same rogue’s gallery that have enabled the slaughter made a rush for the press scrum to gloat over the Hamas leader’s death and offer up pious hypocrisy on the west’s determination to stand against ‘terrorism’. The odious Anthony Blinken, son of extreme privilege and Biden’s frontman in organising diplomatic cover for genocide, called Al-Sinwar a ‘vicious and unrepentant terrorist’. Despite overwhelming evidence that Netanyahu and his cabinet have deliberately sabotaged every attempt to agree a ceasefire, Blinken repeated the outrageous lie that Hamas has been the main obstacle to peace. His boss Biden welcomed Al-Sinwar’s execution and declared it a ‘good day for the world’.
Within 1948 Palestine and among supporters of the Zionist regime internationally, the relentless dehumanisation of Palestinians as ‘savages’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘vermin’ and ‘human animals’ borrows unapologetically from deep reservoirs of anti-Arab racism, colonialist supremacy, and rank Islamophobia that underpin the so-called ‘War on Terror’. But in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th attacks, the Israeli state launched an unprecedented propaganda campaign aimed at rationalising the genocide they’d prepared as a response.
Part of this involved misrepresenting Hamas’s astonishingly effective assault on Israeli military outposts in the so-called Gaza Envelope—’the greatest military-intelligence deception in [Israel’s] history’, Haneen Odetallah calls it—as an atrocity aimed deliberately at civilians, with widely repeated claims of ‘systematic rape’ that have been effectively debunked, and which one critic calls a ‘racist trope of the savage, predatory Arab’. The most credible and systematic analysis of the October 7th action—by an Israeli Jew who compares it to the 1943 uprising in the Nazi’s Sobibor concentration camp, reminds us that the ‘atrocity propaganda’ churned out after October 7th ‘has been the narrative engine of the genocide’.
Domestically the state’s efforts were boosted by a mainstream Israeli media dominated by the Right, which sees its job as ‘imbu[ing] the public with a sense of righteousness’ around Gaza, ‘rallying around the flag, amplifying state narratives, and marginalizing any critical coverage of Israel’s brutality’. This means that the aggressive anti-Arab racism that has always permeated the settler movement has become generalised across Israeli society, and weaponised in the service of genocide. In what other context could you watch soldiers who’ve openly admitted to raping prisoners lauded as heroes on day-time television? Anyone listening to the language used by Israeli officials to describe Palestinians can’t help but being struck by the way it borrows promiscuously from the rhetoric and imagery deployed by the Nazis to dehumanize European Jews in the 1930s. Open and unapologetic racism has not only infected the entire military: it permeates every corner of Israeli popular culture.
Zionists’ insistence that Palestinians (and Arabs generally) are sub-human, that the Palestinian resistance is motivated by an irrational religious fanaticism or—as even ‘liberal’ Zionists assert—by some kind of twisted death cult, is in many ways a necessary counterpart to their determination to deny the immense, ongoing crimes essential to Israel’s survival. Not a word can be uttered publicly about the Nakba or the state’s foundations in ethnic cleansing; make no mention of the occupation, or of apartheid, or of the increasingly inescapable parallels between Zionism’s bellicose anti-Arab racism and the Nazi’s weaponisation of antisemitism in the darkest days of the 1930s. Five years before the October 7th attack, the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell warned of the ‘toxic ultra-nationalism’ propelling the Zionist Right, in which ‘we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages’.
Al-Sinwar: Myth and Reality
The toxic mix of crude Islamophobic filth and hasbara aimed at justifying genocide was concentrated, over the past year, in attempts to vilify Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar. Israeli tabloids dubbed him a ‘little Hitler’. The IOF insisted that he was ‘terrified’ and ‘running from tunnel to tunnel, like a crazed rat’, desperate for a deal that could save him. Al-Sinwar was ‘out for his own survival’, US “security experts” agreed. Although the IOF could not put their hands on him for more than a year, that did not stop them from regularly speculating that Al-Sinwar was moving about in women’s clothing, that he was hiding in the tunnels surrounded by hostages as human shields, that he was living the high life—his pockets overflowing with cash while Gaza starved in the rubble. For some weeks before his death they began to suggest publicly that he had left Gaza and escaped to Egypt.
This farcical rumour campaign rested on the IOF’s bizarre calculation that they could turn the very people they were slaughtering daily into allies against the Palestinian resistance. But in trying to demonise Al-Sinwar Israeli propagandists could not seem to get their message straight. It turns out that the leader whose primary concern was allegedly saving his own skin had rejected offers to guarantee him safe passage out of Gaza: Al-Sinwar’s ‘fatal mistake,’ the Wall Street Journal insisted, was his refusal to abandon besieged Gaza in return for allowing Egypt to take over negotiations on Hamas’s behalf.
Setting aside the crude Hasbara and the heavily sensationalised character assassinations littering western media, there is no mystery behind Al-Sinwar’s influence in Gaza. His ascent to leadership of the Palestinian resistance there corresponds closely with the emergence of Hamas—and of Islamist currents more generally—after the sharp decline of secular nationalist and left-wing tendencies like Fatah and PFLP from the mid-1980s onward.
Tolerated, even favoured by Israel in its early development as a harmless rival to PLO and the other armed factions, Hamas’s ascendancy after the mid-1990s owed much to its unsparing critique of the Oslo debacle, and of the collaboration and rank corruption that marked the Palestinian Authority. When it surprised even itself by winning US-sponsored elections there in 2006, the Bush administration tried to organise an armed coup under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan: Hamas’s decisive rout of the coup-makers (invariably presented by the west as a ‘power grab’) left it without any serious rivals in the Strip.
Hamas, the Right to Resist, and a Strategy for Liberation
Al-Sinwar’s ascent embodied this major shift in the character of the resistance: the son of refugees forced out of Al-Majḍal (present-day Ashkelon) in 1948, a child of the Khan Younis refugee camps who came to regard Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin as his personal mentor, Al-Sinwar became a prominent target of the Israeli occupation from his youth: he was arrested at age 20 for student activism at Islamic University, re-arrested in 1985 and again in 1988, when he was sentenced to four life sentences—426 years in jail. He went on to spend 23 years in Israeli prisons—four of them in solitary confinement—establishing himself as a leader among prisoners, becoming fluent in Hebrew, and refining plans for the Qassam Brigades’ armed resistance. Reviewers in Mondoweiss identified two things that stand out most prominently in Al-Sinwar’s autobiography, Thorns and Carnations: ‘the chronic and sustained violence, destruction, and deprivation from early childhood right through his entire adult life’, and ‘an obsessive and creative focus on the project of building an infrastructure of resistance’.
There are urgent debates to be had around the strategy pursued by Islamist currents (including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’) in the present emergency, and socialists must strike the right balance between defending the Palestinians’ right of armed resistance with a frank and honest assessment of the political orientation of those forces fighting for Palestinian liberation.
Within the global solidarity movement we hear often of the need to centre ‘the Palestinian voice’, but Palestinians embrace a range of sophisticated perspectives on the way forward, grounded in their own experience. As Tarif Khalidi and Mayssoun Sukarieh have written, ‘Gaza may at times appear to be on a faraway planet, yet the Gazans themselves, though entrapped and suffocatingly besieged, are remarkably aware of their regional environment and ever eager to learn its lessons’. The fallout from the slaughter in Gaza will demand a wide-ranging discussion of the way forward, both within occupied Palestine and among their allies across the Middle East and internationally.
A Final Act of Defiance
The IOF’s profound miscalculation about the impact that footage of Al-Sinwar’s final, defiant moments would have across Palestine is symptomatic of the ways its colonialist outlook renders the most resource-spoiled military in the world an amateur operation. For decades Israel has been assassinating resistance leaders on the assumption that this will deliver Palestinian submission, but it has almost always had the opposite effect.
As Abdaljawad Omar has noted, the strategy is rooted in the ‘racist and orientalist fantasy’ that ‘Arabs are little more than disorganized tribes poised to crumble with the death of their “sheikh”’. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative has rightly insisted that blaming Al-Sinwar for the ongoing war amounts to ‘victim blaming’: ‘If the Israeli occupation had ended before, there would not have been [leaders] like Sinwar or [resistance groups] like Hamas.” Hamas itself has said much the same: although it is ‘distressing to lose beloved people’, the Israelis are victims of their own racist delusion. The IOF issued ‘those same statements when they killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. But each time, Hamas became stronger and more popular’.
The footage of Al-Sinwar’s final act of defiance reveals the IOF not as triumphant ‘conquerors’, Omar writes, but as a ‘motley assembly of tribal marauders’ firing tank shells at Al-Sinwar ‘from a distance rather than face him as he stood confronting their drones and machines’. In the end Al-Sinwar reminded the Israelis that ‘Palestinians will neither yield nor submit, and that surrender is not in their vocabulary’. Much to the consternation of those managing the genocide across the west, that is a message that seems to resonate deeply among Palestinians regardless of their attitude to Hamas, and even among those critical of the October 7th attacks. ‘They said he was hiding inside the tunnels. They said he was keeping Israeli prisoners next to him to save his life. Yesterday we saw that he was hunting down Israeli soldiers in Rafah, where the occupation has been operating since May,’ a displaced 42-year-old mother of four children told the journalist Nidal Al-Mughrabi in Gaza. “This is how leaders go, with a rifle in the hand. I supported Sinwar as a leader and today I am proud of him as a martyr’.
