A good day for the world, said Joe Biden. The best day of my life, said Mohammed, a 22-year-old Palestinian in Gaza, who refused to give his last name to the New York Times for fear of being punished by Hamas for speaking out. A day of celebration, said countless Israelis.
They were reacting to the death of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and architect of the 7 October massacre of 1,200 Israelis that unleashed this last year of devastation, a war that has turned Gaza into rubble and taken the lives of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian civilians. As Mohammed put it: “[He] started the war, scattered us and made us displaced, without water, food or money … He is the one who made Israel do this.”
The hope that Mohammed, Biden and leaders around the world now cling to is that Sinwar’s death might allow this horror show to end. They are allowing themselves that rarest of sentiments in the Middle East: optimism. And there is a case for it. The trouble is, the same set of facts can also serve as ingredients for a much more familiar Middle Eastern commodity: pessimism.
Let’s start with the hopeful view. This rests on the simple truth that in the months-long attempts to broker a ceasefire, Sinwar was an obstacle, either saying no to terms negotiated by US or Qatari diplomats or suddenly becoming uncontactable when a decision was required. His demand that Israel agree to both a permanent end of hostilities, rather than a mere pause, and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, thereby allowing Hamas to regroup and reassert control, guaranteed no deal could ever be done. Now that he’s gone, that obstacle is removed.
What he leaves behind, say the optimists, is an organisation in disarray, with a power vacuum at the top. The deaths of Sinwar and, in July, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, leave few on the ground in Gaza with serious standing. Israel’s relentless military pressure has taken its toll on Hamas, vividly demonstrated by the fact that, in his final moments, Sinwar was not in a well-defended command post, directing his forces, but rather running house to house, alone, reduced to fending off an Israeli drone with a stick.
According to this reading, whoever takes his place will be too weak to persist with the hard line he maintained. They could be amenable to ceasefire terms that Israel could also agree to: say, a reduced number of Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails in return for the remaining hostages, and acceptance of a role for Palestinian technocrats, unaffiliated to Hamas, in running postwar Gaza. Such a deal might be sweetened for whoever signed it by a promise of safe passage out of the strip and relocation in Qatar.
Pressure to say yes to such an agreement would come not only from those Arab states that have acted as sometime patrons of Hamas, but from the streets, from the likes of Mohammed. He is hardly alone among Palestinians in despising Sinwar for the terrible and inevitable Israeli retribution he brought down on Gaza and, long before that, for the acts that made him notorious as the Butcher of Khan Younis: his infamously sadistic torture and murder of those Palestinians he accused of collaboration with Israel.
Of course, there are two sides to any negotiation and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been no less stubborn in his unwillingness to do a deal that might end the war, even as it has enraged the bulk of the Israeli public and, especially, the families of the remaining 101 hostages held in Gaza. The optimistic reading holds that, with Sinwar dead, Netanyahu could budge, because now he can claim the “total victory” that has long been his precondition for ending the war. With the photograph he craved – of the country’s arch-enemy slain – available on every Israeli’s phone, Netanyahu will have the space to compromise.
That, then, is the hopeful scenario. The counterview sees every one of those facts through an opposite and darker lens. First, it spots nothing encouraging in the void where Sinwar used to be. His absence means there is now no address for negotiators, no one with the authority to agree a plausible deal. On the contrary, those Hamas leaders who remain are likely to feel obliged to match Sinwar’s unbending stance, not least because of the manner of his death.
Many Palestinians and their Arab supporters see that drone footage of Sinwar’s final moments as heroic: the last man standing, fighting to the end, dying a martyr’s death. Rather than hiding away underground, or in exiled, Gulf-state luxury like so many of the Hamas top brass, he died on the frontline. On Arab social media, the legend has already been born – and whichever Israeli official thought it a good idea to release those pictures may live to regret their decision.
Within Hamas, there will surely be an appetite for revenge. The obvious way for Sinwar’s avengers to hit back would be to harm or kill the Israeli hostages Hamas holds, a prospect that has the hostages’ families newly terrified.
Which brings us to the other essential partner for any deal to end the war. Netanyahu’s announcement of Sinwar’s death included language designed to dampen any hope that the conflict would be over soon. It was the “beginning of the end”, he said, but no more. Short of not only a hostage release but also a Hamas surrender, “laying down their arms”, the war would go on.
You can see why he would say that. Netanyahu feels he is on a roll, his own position strengthened. He can now pose as the slayer of dragons – Sinwar in Rafah, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut – and as the man who defied the naysayers, only to prevail in the end. His cheerleaders are quick to note that world leaders, including Biden, had urged Netanyahu to stay out of Rafah: had he listened, they say, Sinwar would still be alive.
On this logic, why would he bow now to US pressure to seize the moment and agree a deal? After all, he has become very used to ignoring Washington and paying little price. The latest example came this week as the US secretary of state and the defence secretary issued a joint letter demanding that Israel increase the supply of humanitarian aid to Gaza, even as signs on the ground suggest that Netanyahu is pursuing, at least in part, the so-called generals’ plan, which calls for northern Gaza to be cleared of civilians and those who remain to be deemed part of Hamas before being offered a choice: surrender or starve.
For Netanyahu to change course, he would have to break from the far-right coalition partners who have allowed him to avoid the elections he fears by sustaining him in office – and who believe that now, when Hamas is down, is precisely the moment to kick it harder – and hand a Democratic administration the prize of a diplomatic breakthrough little more than a fortnight before an election he wants Kamala Harris to lose and Donald Trump to win. Does such a dramatic change on the prime minister’s part seem likely?
Of course, the smart money would say no. It’s usually those who bet on optimism who lose in the Middle East. But the many Israelis who oppose Netanyahu do now have an opening. They can grant that the prime minister has scored some tactical wins, but demand he leverage those into strategic gains – starting with a ceasefire deal and the return of the hostages, but then moving towards a diplomatic process that offers a different future for Israel and its neighbours. Channeling an earlier era, their message could be: with Sinwar’s death, you have your total victory – now win the peace.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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