Yahya Sinwar, head of the Hamas political bureau in Gaza who sought Egypt’s help to reconcile with Fatah; who reconciled with Mohammed Dahlan, whose people were tossed from roofs by Hamas members in 2007; who arranged security coordination with Egypt and agreed to close the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, to cameras in Rafah, and to the arrest of jihadists suspected by Egypt; who said he would be willing to subordinate the weaponry of the Al Qassam Brigades to the PLO, which signed the Oslo Accords; who established a joint operations room to rein in Islamic Jihad and the rebellious factions; who left Islamic Jihad on its own in the battle in two previous military rounds — launched the massive attack on Israel in part to repair his reputation.
When Qatar noted Sinwar’s bet on Egypt-UAE-Dahlan, it understood that he was endangering its plans and the plans of the Hamas external leadership to turn the governmental entities in Ramallah and Gaza into municipal entities, to restore authority to the PLO — once it subsumed Hamas and Islamic Jihad — on matters of war and peace, and eventually to install Khaled Meshal as its leader.
The new Hamas political document, 2017, which was designed to make it a legitimate political player, was apparently part of this plan. At the time, Sinwar, the man from the military wing who was elected head of the political bureau three months earlier, was still adjusting to “wearing the politician’s coat.”
Rather than challenge the Hamas leadership over the content of the document, Benjamin Netanyahu tossed it into the dustbin and said simply that Hamas is a terror organization and that the document is a fraud.
A year later, with Qatar’s cooperation, the suitcases of cash began to be sent to Hamas. Israeli officials were convinced that Sinwar would become addicted to the money and agree to an economic peace, and Qatar was banking on Sinwar’s silence and Israel’s being lulled in order to realize its plans.
The funds tagged Sinwar as a collaborator with Israel, a man who wasn’t able on his own to protect and support the Palestinian family, and who sold out Palestine for a mess of Qatari pottage.
Sinwar, who eliminated collaborators with Israel, could not abide having any doubt cast upon his heroism, masculinity and patriotism, and that someone even had the gall to attribute this to his life having been saved by an Israeli doctor.
Shortly after receiving the Qatari suitcases of money, he made a speech while waving a handgun taken from an Israeli commando during a secret raid in Gaza that was exposed. In March 2021, he almost lost out in the Hamas institutional elections to Khaled Meshal’s candidate, and was only reelected thanks to the Al Qassam Brigades.
In August 2022, after he declined to join Islamic Jihad in its military clash with Israel, a cartoon appeared in the Qatari-financed Al-Araby Al-Jadeed depicting Sinwar as a collaborator with Mahmoud Abbas and Israel against Islamic Jihad.
All this happened while he was contending with a wide array of rival masculinities: the hegemonic Israeli masculinity, which sought to isolate him from the Palestinian communities; the feeble masculinity of the Palestinian Authority, which worked to weaken his governance and stir an uprising against him; the nonviolent masculinity of the civil society organizations, which preferred life over death; the subversive masculinity of Hamas’ Salah al-Arouri, who was trying to set the West Bank alight and, in August 2023, conveyed a message to Sinwar and Mohammed Deif that if they did not put the planned military attack into action, he would become the Hamas chief of general staff and South Lebanon would become an alternative arena; the violent masculinity of Islamic Jihad, which demanded fealty to the Islamist ideology and dragged him into military conflicts with Israel; the hedonistic masculinity of Meshal, who is off living the good life far from the battlefield and called for a jihad against Israel and for a new Abdullah Azzam, who laid the foundations for Al Qaeda.
In a patriarchal society rife with cultural norms and codes about heroism and masculinity, Sinwar and Deif preferred to be perceived as “heroic martyrs” who did not betray their people, and who managed to humiliate the Israeli army and free all the Palestinian prisoners.
But they failed to account for the real strength of the IDF and the resilience of Israeli society, and rather than be considered the heirs to Salah ad-Din and Omar ibn al-Khattab, as they dreamed, they will become the new edition of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, whose name is tied to the Nakba and lives in infamy, if at all, in the Palestinian collective memory.
Israel will have to make sure that whoever succeeds Sinwar is not another ISIS-style jihadist, and the date October 7 does not become attached to a Palestinian state — which would be a prize for Qatar and Hamas, the parties responsible for the atrocities of that day — but rather to normalization with Saudi Arabia and the igniting of a regional peace process that would include a fight against radicalization, and a political accord with the Palestinians.
First published in Haaretz, 13.03.2024
