Following Thursday’s news that Israeli troops had killed Yahya Sinwar, the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, wrote an article. This was Israel’s “biggest victory so far in the war against Hamas”, he said: Sinwar had made Hamas the “fighting force that inflicted the biggest defeat on the state of Israel in its history”.
Interesting, Bowen’s deployment of that word “defeat”. It usually refers to battle – Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar, Montgomery defeated the Germans at El Alamein. But Bowen was talking about the events of October 7, 2023.
On that day, what happened was no battle (though a few Israeli soldiers tried to rescue the situation). These were planned attacks by armed terrorists against civilian non-combatants in their own homes or at music festivals, in their own country. The terrorists raped those civilians, kidnapped or killed them (or, in some cases, did all three). Those civilians were not “collateral damage” in a war fought under rules: they were the targets of barbarians.
Were they “defeated”? Implied in that word, as in Bowen’s phrase “fighting force”, is state-of-war legitimacy. Would he say that Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, during the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe, “defeated” the civilians (most commonly Jews) whom they lined up and shot in their tens of thousands over several years? Did Stalin’s men “defeat” the 22,000 Poles they shot in the Katyn forest in May 1940? Wouldn’t “murdered” be a more accurate word? No law of war sanctions murder.
Bowen’s words are those of a moral imbecile, and call into doubt his professional detachment, but I am almost glad he uttered them. His thinking accurately reflects Hamas thinking. When we understand that thinking, we can see just how right and how important is Israel’s killing of Sinwar.
If “defeat” of your enemy means the intentional, longed-for killing of civilians, and a “fighting force” means those who exult in killing the old, the women and the children because they were (with a few exceptions) of the Jewish race, then the world should be able to see what Hamas is. It is not an army engaged in a conventional conflict about borders, but a set of death squads explicitly trying to wipe out an entire state defined chiefly by its ethnicity. The accurate word for that is genocide.
If genocide is the aim, then October 7 was its greatest day and Sinwar, who planned it and personally enjoyed killing, is its greatest hero. So of course Hamas will seek many more such days. It said as much yesterday.
That is precisely why Israel has to do what it is doing. Not only are most of its actions morally justified: they are existentially necessary. Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif, and now, above all, Sinwar – these were the Hamas leaders whose one serious policy was to kill every Jew “from the river to the sea”. Their successors think the same. Israel cannot negotiate them out of psychopathic anti-Semitism. They and their operatives must be rendered inoperative.
So must other groups with the same intent – the executive chairman, Hassan Nasrallah, and main board directors of Hezbollah – seven of whom, including Nasrallah, Israel has killed since June. Its booby-trapped walkie-talkies and bleepers have killed or crippled hundreds more, breaking Hezbollah’s communications network in the process.
The policy of Israel’s European and American allies is made to look risible by these events. Cease fire, say the Bidens, Harrises and Starmers, at each new twist. Talk! Get round the table! Give diplomacy a chance! Israel does indeed do diplomacy behind the scenes. But it will not pass up the chance to hit its deadliest and most active enemies when armed with the intelligence and know-how to do so. The video of Sinwar’s last moments shows him ineffectually hiding, his forces having disappeared when routed by a superior enemy. It is unimaginable that Israel would not seize comparable future advantages.
The pattern is that Israel hits its “high-value targets”, with literally deadly accuracy, and then the Western democracies who told them not to do so admit the efficacy of their victories. “Take the win!” they exclaim, using Israel’s latest success to beg it not to try for another one. Don’t escalate the confrontation with Iran, warned our chancelleries, but then Israel killed Haniyeh at the heart of Tehran itself and the regime could manage only a token counter-attack.
President Biden described the killing of Sinwar as “a good day for the world”. But this is the same President Biden who, months ago, urged the IDF not to enter Rafah. It was in Rafah this week that the IDF found Sinwar and killed him.
How could Israel follow such muddled advice from those who say they are its friends? One’s best hope must be that the Western powers know they are talking nonsense but feel they must keep up the “peace” patter for domestic reasons and to ward off international condemnation. This may indeed be the case, because that much tougher-minded side of Western governments which handles military affairs, security and intelligence knows the realities well. We and Israel are trusting and partially interdependent on such matters: even politicians know that.
Yesterday, on the BBC Today programme, Jeremy Bowen was asked to analyse the state of play after Sinwar’s death. His villain, as usual, was Netanyahu, thanks to whom “the war very much goes on”. Bowen made no suggestion that Hamas should or would down tools. Yes, he said, Sinwar had been “a big block to negotiations” but “so has Netanyahu”, as if the terrorist aggressor was the moral equivalent of the democratic leader of the nation which that terrorist attacked. Netanyahu has got his “victory picture”, said Bowen with distaste, but “to get a ceasefire and a deal you need every side really in it”. It sounded like an almost desperate plea for poor little Hamas to be kept in the game.
What are the lessons which Israelis will derive from the story so far?
One is that the West, though full of moralistic condemnation, will want to bank their success. Another is that Israel can, in military and intelligence terms, beat the terrorist proxies financed and run chiefly by Iran.
A third is that Sunni Arab countries detest the thought that Shia non-Arab Iran should control the future of the Middle East. Continuing Israeli victories will embolden them to re-engage with the genuine peace process of the Abraham Accords.
A fourth lesson is that Western countries like ours with large, sometimes angry Muslim populations may secretly welcome a situation in which Israel shows who’s boss and the extremists are losing.
A fifth is that although Western domestic audiences rightly feel uneasy about civilian suffering in Gaza and Lebanon, many are elated that men like Sinwar and Nasrallah are getting their comeuppance. Britain’s new Defence Secretary, John Healey, struck the right note by saying he would not mourn Sinwar’s passing.
Perhaps the biggest lesson concerns Iran. If its proxies lie in ruins, what is the state of the Islamic Republic itself? Perhaps Israel, with some surreptitious help, now has the power to decapitate Tehran’s own ayatollahs and politicians or even attack Iran’s nuclear weapons sites. Why shouldn’t it? This is not a rhetorical question: there may well be good reasons why such attacks would be a step too far. I should like to hear them.
But Israel, by its courage and skill, has now shifted the burden of proof on to Western countries who wring their hands. All these Bowens have been insisting since October 7 that Israel cannot win. Perhaps their real fear is that it can.