By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sep 10 2024 – Hungarian-Swedish microbiologist George Klein, who in 1944 escaped from a train destined to Auschwitz, once wrote that his father jokingly used to say that he had caused World War I. While working as a medical doctor in Bosnia he had cured a young boy called Gavrilo Princip from a deadly disease. As an adult Gavrilo shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, whose death became the immediate cause of World War I. Can a single person, knowingly or unknowingly, change the course of history? We talk about “Putin’s war” and “Trump’s USA”. Are individuals so important? Lev Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace that it was absurd to attribute historical events to acts of individuals. The French revolution could quite easily have produced another person like Napoleon. He insisted that the French emperor knew as little of what was happening in the battle of Borodino as the meanest soldier serving under him.
Yahya Sinwar
However, several historians claim the opposite – in times of chaos, and indecision a single leader might make a difference. Accordingly, Mikhail Gorbachev was a driving force in Russia’s and Eastern Europe’s transition from Communism. Had he in the early 1980s been assassinated, the history of Europe might have been quite different. In February 1933, shortly before his inauguration, Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly escaped five bullets aimed at him. During his presidency, a severe financial crisis was amended and the US came a long way to become a social security state, without which the nation might have succumbed to one of the many demagogues who were then stalking the land. On the contrary, unparallelled oppression, torture, murder and other disasters can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. Tragedies, which in the words of the political theorist Isaiah Berlin were “preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.”
Yahya Sinwar, current leader of Hamas in Gaza, was in 1989 sentenced to four life sentences, of which he served 22 years. Before being jailed by the Israeli regime he had led a squad punishing, and often killing, Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, or committing offenses against Hamas’ interpretation of Muslim morality, including homosexuality, marital infidelity, and the possession of pornography. Among others, Sinwar personally executed a barber who kept pornographic magazines in his barbershop and while in prison he arranged for the killing of a fellow prisoner’s sister, who had been unfaithful to his brother-in-law.
Sinwar regarded Israeli prisons as a place to learn Hebrew, as well as the psychology and history of his enemy. “Prison builds you. Especially if you are a Palestinian, because you live amid checkpoints, walls, and restrictions of all kinds. Only in prison do you finally meet Palestinians who have time for discussing and learning. You start thinking about yourself. About what you believe in, the price you are willing to pay.” In prison Sinwar wrote an autobiographical novel – The Thorn and the Carnation. In this novel Sinwar’s alter ego, Ahmad, is harassed by feelings of grief, shame, and humiliation: “Our dreams of returning to our homelands from which we were exiled began to crumble like the sandcastles we used to build as children.” Ahmad’s father dies as a “a martyr for freedom”, while his mother is described as an example of pious nobility. The Israeli Army dominates everything – there are curfews, interrogations, arrests, soldiers storming into houses and harassing people at will. Ahmed comes to the conclusion that only violence and terror can be used against the Israelis.
An Israeli prison dentist, Yuval Bitton, came to know Sinwar as a straightforward man, characterised by no nonsense, no rhetoric, a calculating and very cunning man. However, Sinwar was extremely ruthless, “ready to sacrifice twenty thousand, thirty thousand, a hundred thousand.” A man acquainted with cold-blooded executions, but “so far he did not have Jewish blood on his hands – only Palestinian.” Bitton found that imprisoned Hamas members had better teeth than other prisoners, due to their fervent religiosity they isolated themselves from other prisoners and did not smoke, while being careful about what they ate. Like George Klein’s father, Bitton assumed that if he had not followed his own strict morals, he could have changed the course of history. When he observed the Muslims praying, Bitton found that every time Sinwar rose up he staggered in a peculiar manner. He sent Sinwar to hospital, where he underwent an examination resulting in immediate brain surgery to remove a life-threatening tumour.
Bitton emphasized Sinwar’s appreciation of Jewish intellectuals: “He said that the Jews had once been people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts in mathematics and philosophy. However, they had declined to become experts in drones and extrajudicial executions.” Sinwar mirrored the opinion of other Hamas leaders, who in their propaganda did not refrain from using the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to detail a Jewish plot for global domination. At a conference in 2021, the Hamas leadership expressed its intentions towards the Jewish, Israeli population, after a so far imaginary victory – “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests.”
Until 1948, Sinwar’s family lived in Tel Ashkelon, which is now part of southern Israel. During the war against the newborn state of Israel, they all fled south into the Gaza Strip. Born in 1962, Sinwar grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp. As a young man he met with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The sheik was almost blind, confined to a wheelchair and venerated as a religious and political leader. While studying Arabic at the Islamic University of Gaza, Sinwar grew increasingly close to Yassin and eventually became his personal aide-de-camp. In December 1987, an uprising was sparked after an Israeli vehicle had struck and killed four Gazan men. The day after, Yassin assembled a group of associates and founded Hamas, Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, the Islamic Resistance Movement (in Arabic hamas means zeal, strength, or bravery). Sinwar was chosen to be Hamas’ commander in southern Gaza
The Israeli government held Sheikh Yassin responsible for giving his approval for the launching of rockets against Israeli cities, as well as for terrorist bombings and suicide operations. In 2004, the sheikh was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at him while he was wheeled out from a mosque in Gaza City. The attack radicalized Sinwar, still in an Israeli prison, even further and after his release his grip over southern Gaza turned into a reign of terror, fuelled by religious fervour. Sinwar was respected in some quarters and feared in others. He reportedly carried out his duties with icy efficiency and without a trace of regret. In 2017, Sinwar was elected to be over-all chief of Hamas in Gaza and his military tactics became more aggressive, while he fostered a messianic style of leadership. Several Palestinian opponents declared that Sinwar’s effort to create myths around himself, while indicating he was chosen by God, was a dangerous move from logic to irrationality.
Sinwar’s policies were reinforced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “conception tactics”, intended to contain Hamas while weakening the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He allowed Qatar to funnel billions of dollars into Gaza, supposedly for civic projects and governance, though with full knowledge that Sinwar was siphoning much of the money to buy arms, while expanding the Gaza metro, the system of tunnels and bunkers. Sinwar’s anger and general prestige soared when Trump’s son-in-law and special envoy, Jared Kusner, helped drafting the Abraham Accords, aiming at normalizing relations between Israel and Sunni-ruled states, sidelining Palestinian and Iranian leaders, who as a result intensified their cooperation, in spite of the fact that most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims, while Iran’s rulers are Shiites.
Sinwar became the main designer of the unleashing of the Al-Aqsa Flood, the most devastating attack on Israel in half a century and the cause of senseless destruction and the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. He is still hiding with his fighters in bunkers and tunnels in Southern Gaza. Sinwar’s adversary is Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving prime ministers in Israel’s history. Netanyahu was born in Jerusalem 1949, but between 1956 and 1958, and again from 1963 to 1967 he lived in the US, attending high school there. Between 1967 and 1973 he served in a special forces’ unit. After leaving the military, Netanyahu returned to the US, studying architecture and political science at MIT, but his PhD studies were broken up by the death of his brother in the 1979 Entebbe raid, and he returned to Israel.
Between 1984 and 1988 Netanyahu was Israeli ambassador to the UN and became close friends with Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump. He was also influenced by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, by many of his followers believed to have been the awaited Messiah. According to Netanyahu, Rabbi Schneerson was “the most influential man of our time”. Like his religious role model, Netanyahu is convinced that Isarel is a bulwark against “anti-Western nations”. He has been opposing peace negotiations with the Palestinians, stating that he would accept a Palestinian state if Jerusalem remains the capital of Israel, the Palestinians are disarmed and if they give up their demands for a right to return. He is also actively supporting Jewish settlements in occupied territories, stating that he approves of their “natural growth”. After winning the elections in 2023, Netanyahu’s government legalized nine new settler outposts in the occupied West Bank and in six months 13,000 housing units were constructed in the settlements, almost triple the amount advanced in the whole of 2022.
After the Hamas lead attacks on Israel in October 2023, Netanyahu has threatened to “turn all the places where Hamas is organized and hiding into cities of ruins”. He has been using a religious rhetoric by comparing Hamas to Amalek – “You must remember what Amalek has done to you … And we do remember.” In the Bible (for example in Deuteronomy 25) are Amalkites described as the Israelites arch enemies and they are by God commanded to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven”. In 1 Samuel 15, God orders the Israeli King Saul to destroy the Amalkites, by “killing man, woman, infant and suckling.” The religious rhetoric used by both Sinwar and Netanyahu, identifying opposing groups with an entire people – men, women and children – have throughout history had horrible consequences. It could suffice to remind about horrors befalling the Jewish people. As an example – a Polish youngster, Herschel Grynszpan, did in November 1938 shot and kill a German diplomat in Paris, out of frustration after the Nazi regime had dumped 18,000 Jews, among them his parents, on the Polish side of Germany’s border. As a revenge the Nazis incited German citizens to burn down 177 synagogues, severely damage some 8,000 Jewish business premises, while killing 100 Jews and send 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. It became much worse when war had broken out, with thousand of examples of mass killings triggered off as revenge for acts committed by a few opponents. One example of many – when 43 German and Romanian soldiers had been attacked and killed in Odessa in October 1942, between 18,000 and 20,000 Jews were rounded up and shot just outside the town, while a further 20,000 were massacred in nearby Dalnik.
To let hostile actions of opponents lead to the death of tens of thousands of innocent people. To equal a group of enemies with an entire ethnic population, have accordingly had horrendous consequences, damaging both perpetrators and victims. Sinwar and Netanyahu seem to be obsessed by ideas characterized by ethnic cleansing and a desire for revenge. If one, like Isiah Berlin, assumes that human crimes can be averted, how do you then stop individuals like Sinwar, Netanyahu, and Putin from inciting and carrying out their destructive schemes? Maybe it is impossible – a proverb says “you can’t teach old dogs to sit” – though human empathy, logic and decency require that we have to try to make sense prevail.
Main sources: Berlin, Isaiah (2014) “The misguided search for a single, overarching ideal,” The New York Review of Books, October 23. Klein, George (1992) The Atheist and the Holy City: Encounters and Reflections. Chicago: MIT Press. Remnick, David (2024) “Notes from Underground: The life of Yahya Siwar, the leader of Hams in Gaza,” The New Yorker, August 12. Stone, Dan (2024) The Holocaust: An unfinished History. London: Penguin Books.
IPS UN Bureau
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