During the 22 years he spent in Israeli prisons, Yahya Sinwar busied himself learning Hebrew, translating the autobiographies of Israeli military and security leaders into Arabic, studying Israeli news and, perhaps more surprisingly, writing a novel. The Hamas leader, who was killed by Israeli troops on 16 October in Rafah, in the south of the besieged Strip, was 49 when he was released in a hostage exchange deal in 2011. He became the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2017. He is said to have promised the prisoners he left behind that he would gain their freedom, presumably through a similar deal.
His novel, The Thorn and the Carnation, smuggled out of prison in short sections, follows two men brought up in a refugee camp in Gaza. The narrative spans four decades, as one cousin joins the Palestinian political party Fatah and the other, Ibrahim, opts for armed resistance with an Islamic movement. Near the end of the book, when Ibrahim is released from an Israeli prison, his first words are to denounce the myth of peace with Israel, a myth “promoted from time to time to deceive our people, denying them their freedom and dignity”. Then, an explosion rings out as an Apache helicopter strikes the car Ibrahim is in. Sinwar knew what to expect after he made his choice to join Hamas.
The last sections of the novel are a defence of the brutal suicide bombings carried out during the Second Intifada, responsible for the deaths of many innocent civilians in Israel. Behind his defence of the violence, it is possible to detect an existential dread: might the Palestinian people grow tired of their long and brutal occupation, and decide they want to rest and forget? For Sinwar, it seems, resistance was a struggle against forgetfulness: the harsher conditions of life become for Palestinians, the more brutal the methods must become, not only against the occupier but also against their own yearnings for peace.
“The enduring people are ready to sacrifice everything dear for their honour, dignity, and sanctities,” The Thorn and the Carnation asserts. The attacks of 7 October, which Sinwar planned, were to be a Third Intifada. In his mind, perhaps, the last and decisive one.
“Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while being killed?” he asked in a 2021 interview. Acceptance was his greatest fear. In another interview, from 2018, he argued that if peace means that Gaza does not get bombed, “but still we have no water, no electricity, nothing, then we are still under siege, because we are not beggars. We want to work, study, travel. Like all of you, we want to live, and to stand on our own. Not the peace of the graveyard.”
Another passage in his novel describes the general content of the conversations among Gaza refugees. “A minute of living with dignity and pride is better than a thousand years of a miserable life under the boots of the occupation.” A striking formula, but many or all the Palestinians I have met in the West Bank and in Egypt over the past year rightly point out that it was not for Sinwar to decide what they should sacrifice and how, or whether one minute of war or revenge is worth more than a life. The sacrifice now threatens to be total, a desperate gamble to ensure that Palestinians never forget about their national dream – provided there are any Palestinians left in Gaza when the bombs stop.
Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, when Gaza was still under Egyptian rule. His family had been expelled from a Palestinian village in what is now Ashkelon, north of the Gaza border, in 1948. As a young man, Sinwar grew close to the Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, who appointed him to lead the Majd, a counterintelligence unit charged with punishing Israeli collaborators and spies. In that role, Sinwar acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty. In 1988 he was sentenced by Israel to four life sentences for murdering Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the enemy.
His time in prison was transformative. Hamas elects the leaders for its prison units, and Sinwar held several leadership positions. Years later, he described Israeli prisons as a school. He had more books to read than in Gaza, and meeting other Palestinian prisoners no doubt helped awaken his revolutionary consciousness. In his novel, Sinwar exhibits a sharp sense of the history of political revolutions, often dependent on individual acts of will. Within Hamas, he was regarded as a hardliner, convinced that negotiations with Israel would never lead anywhere in the absence of armed resistance.
In 2021 he survived an Israeli assassination attempt. By that time Sinwar had already eliminated most of his internal opposition in Gaza and started to plan a major attack against Israel, leaving the Hamas political leadership outside the Strip largely in the dark.
After Sinwar was killed by an Israeli combat team in Rafah, there was a brief moment of hope that an end to the Israeli military operation might finally be in sight. After all, eliminating Sinwar had always been seen as one of the main strategic goals for Israel. Hamas had expressed its willingness to release all remaining hostages in exchange for peace. Having destroyed its military leadership and much of its tunnels and infrastructure, what more could Israel demand? Does eliminating Hamas mean eliminating everyone who has ever considered joining it, or perhaps everyone who has ever exchanged words with a Hamas member?
But the war has continued and intensified. At least 87 people were killed in an Israeli attack in Beit Lahiya, an area in the northern Gaza Strip, on 19 October. On the same day, images from the Jabalia refugee camp shared on social media showed an Israeli drone targeting a child, followed by an air strike on those trying to save him. Three Israeli reserve soldiers in Gaza told the Haaretz newspaper that the goal is to give Palestinians who live in the north a deadline to leave. “After this date, whoever will remain in the north will be considered an enemy and will be killed. People sat and wrote a systematic order with charts and an operational concept.” Likud, the party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has issued an invitation to an event titled “Preparing to Settle Gaza”.
If Sinwar feared that Palestinians would one day resign themselves to living forever under occupation, then he must have died in peace and, cold and cruel as we know him to have been, untroubled by all the destruction he helped bring about. None of the horrors from 7 October and since will ever be forgotten.
Nor will the death of a sanguinary leader bring about peace. Israel has tried that before. Yassin was assassinated in March 2004. His successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was killed a month later. Al-Rantisi was driven into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood, and later Hamas, after witnessing, as a boy, Israeli soldiers executing hundreds of Palestinians in Khan Younis in 1956. According to the American diplomat Ryan Crocker, “The Israelis are thinking in terms of a prolonged military occupation of Gaza and that will simply produce a prolonged insurgency.”
There is also the matter of how Yahya Sinwar died. For reasons that remain unclear, the Israeli authorities opted to release testimonies and videos that show a severely injured Sinwar, one arm almost severed, a keffiyeh wrapped around his face, throwing a stick at an enemy drone in a posture of open defiance. Reports from Gaza published by the Financial Times tell us that the video has electrified its inhabitants. Criticism of the late leader disappeared, and children have started to imitate him. Sinwar has received an unexpected gift from Israel in his deadly war against forgetfulness.
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate