The killing of Yahya Sinwar
Some people here in Israel reportedly cried tears of joy over the killing by the Israel Defence Forces of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Rafah area of Gaza on Wednesday. Others were jubilant.
Melanie Phillips
I was not.
Yes, there’s enormous relief. There’s huge satisfaction that, at last, Sinwar has met his long overdue fate. The world is a better place without him.
It’s also an immense victory for the Israel Defence Forces. And it’s another vindication of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to send the IDF into the Hamas stronghold of Rafah in the teeth of the huge pressure by the Biden-Harris administration not to do so. (See here U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan last March declaring the administration’s opposition to a major IDF ground operation in Rafah.)
Netanyahu faced down this pressure with all its accompanying threats and bad-mouthing. As a result, Hamas has been decimated and Sinwar has been killed. If Biden and Harris had prevailed, Hamas would still be strong rather than on its knees, and Sinwar would still be alive and directing its vile operations.
But far, far too much has happened for joy or jubilation. Far too much still remains to be done.
There are still 101 Israeli hostages in Gaza. We don’t know how many are still alive. We have a very good idea of the appalling conditions in which they have been held for the past 12 months.
Israel is the one and only refuge from the world’s never-ending attempts to destroy the Jewish people. On Oct. 7, 2023, it failed in this core purpose. Every day since then that the hostages have remained incarcerated or have been murdered has reopened that existential wound.
The hostages’ fate, along with the murders committed on Oct. 7 and the deaths ever since of hundreds of young Israelis in military service who have given their lives in defence of their country, tears many of us apart. It haunts this brave and beautiful country, and will haunt us here forever.
The battle with Hamas is also far from over. It may have been destroyed as a serious military threat to Israel, but it still has weapons and troops that can continue to do great harm and it still poses a mortal threat to the IDF soldiers who are steadily rooting it out from its many remaining bolt-holes.
Most important, the key part of the war still remains to be won—against the Iranian proxies in Yemen, Iraq and Syria; in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria where Israeli troops are battling daily against a terrorist infrastructure posing a mortal threat from within the Israeli heartlands; and above all against the head of the snake itself: the Islamic regime in Tehran.
More profoundly, although Sinwar is now no more, the evil he perpetrated has not died with him.
Sinwar didn’t create this evil. He was the product of it, and was one of its many diabolical avatars. What created him was fanatical, genocidal Jew-hatred, the desire to remove Israel and the Jewish people from the face of the earth as an Islamic religious duty—the evil that animates the Palestinian Arab cause, the evil that has taken thousands of Jewish and Israeli lives without remission for the past century, the evil that has infused what the Palestinian Arabs have taught their children for generations: that their highest and most sacred calling is to kill Jews and take all their land.
This evil has not just corrupted the Palestinian Arabs but has also taken monstrous root throughout the West. Its media outlets pump out Hamas propaganda and blood libels demonizing and delegitimizing Israel through the Palestinian cause.
This cause has fried the Western brain with a psychopathic, murderous narrative that masquerades as justice and compassion. It has created followers in the West with minds sealed shut against truth and morality and turned others into shallow and confused fellow travellers. They may believe they are supporting the rights of “oppressed” Palestinians but what each and every one of them is supporting—including, tragically, too many diaspora Jews—is a creed of murderous Jew-hatred.
This profound evil is now everywhere in the West. It is promoted throughout the institutions of civil society—in the medical and legal professions, among welfare workers, trade unions, university lecturers and students, the civil service, the literary, theatrical and artistic worlds and throughout the Church of England. It is systematically robbing Jews of their own history, obscenely turning the supreme victims of genocide into the alleged perpetrators of genocide and turning the victims of the Holocaust into the perpetrators of a holocaust—demonizing Jewish victims as victimizers to delegitimize them as the prelude to erasing them from the world.
Israel’s task now is to retrieve the hostages alive or dead, finish the destruction of Hamas in Gaza and above all to neutralize the Iranian regime, thus removing for ever the evil it has inflicted upon the Jewish people and the world.
This will happen, whatever the cost. It’s just a matter of time. Israel will stay the course and will win this terrible war. It will do so because it has no alternative.
But the evil that has been unleashed in the West is, alas, a different matter.
Originally published at melaniephillips.substack.com.
It’s a mistake to generalise Yahya Sinwar in the way Melanie Phillips does, allowing him to be a mere product of Jew hatred and somehow inferring that as bad as he was his death does not change much. Yes, so much has happened and there is so much yet to do, but, please, don’t take away from us the respite of a few moments of joy at the successful IDF procedure that saw the death of this singularly important person who, with his special knowledge of Israeli mentality and the Hebrew language and his many years of particular terrorism, indeed his planning and instigation of the event of October 7 that will forever live in our memories and has changed Jews everywhere to live interior lives of a different kind, stands out from most.