Who died and made you boss?

The Promising Land #6: Yahya Sinwar gets a promotion.

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Yahya Sinwar has been appointed the new head of Hamas following the fortunate death of Ismail Haniyeh.

You’ve got to wonder what the recruitment ad was like.

WANTED: A boutique terror agency is seeking a self-starter to head up its global jihad division. Due to some unforeseen organisational and anatomical restructuring, our previous chairman has moved on from this life and we are looking for a special candidate to fill his charred shoes. You must be a corporate killer: the sort of person who sees problems as challenges and festival-goers as legitimate targets. Prior experience of homicidal anti-Zionism is a must. You will be required to manage relationships with some of the leading UN agencies and NGOs. Job will involve regular travel to Doha.

Salary dependant on experience.

Length of appointment dependant on Mossad.

Sinwar was the architect of the October 7 massacre of Israelis in the border communities near Gaza. His promotion was predictable given events of the past week. October 7 was Hamas’s biggest ever victory and the group is eager to show a defiant face after the death of Haniyeh. Still, one Sky News analyst was caught off-guard:

‘The appointment, a surprise to many, will further complicate the war in Gaza as it nears its eleventh month. The decision is being seen as a victory for hardliners in the organisation. Rather than electing a figure such as Khaled Meshaal, who is seen to be more pragmatic and closer to some Arab states, Sinwar was the mastermind behind the 7 October terror attacks.’

It’s almost as if Hamas isn’t interested in ending the war in Gaza. It must be frustrating being a Palestinian terrorist. You keep shouting ‘itbah al yahud’ and the world keeps hearing ‘two states for two peoples’.

Haniyeh hasn’t faired much better with the international media. You’ll recall that the chairman of the Hamas political bureau was staying in a guesthouse in Tehran last week when the Mossad reportedly detonated a bomb hidden at the foot of his bed. (Worst. Airbnb. Ever.) Bringing the news of Haniyeh’s death to Radio Four listeners, the BBC remarked that he was seen as ‘moderate and pragmatic’. Following the October 7 massacre, Haniyeh told Al-Jazeera:

‘The blood in the Gaza Strip, alongside the resistance and the Al-Qassam, will defeat this occupier, will defeat this enemy… [T]he blood of the children, women, and elderly… we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution, so that it will arouse within us persistence, so that it will arouse within us defiance.’

Just your regular, middle-of-the-road moderate.

Before long, you’ll start to hear about how Sinwar is really a pragmatist, trying to juggle his own hardliners and those intransigent Israelis who stand in the way of peace in Gaza, if not throughout the world. International elites — the UN agencies, the NGOs, the foreign ministries, the correspondents and the academics — maintain this pretence because they know the truth and understand the ramifications of the truth. Generation after generation of Palestinian leaders have shown themselves unwilling to make peace with Israel, rejecting one offer of statehood after another. But if the conflict is presented in these terms in the West, public sympathy for the Palestinian cause will be limited. Which is why so much effort is put into fashioning a Bizarro World in which Hamas are the peace-seeking moderates and Israelis the genocidal extremists. That alternative reality, hitherto the preserve of university campuses and foreign news desks, has gone mainstream in the West, and particularly in the United States, in the past ten months.

If Haniyeh is retconned as a moderate, then Israel can be blamed for the appointment of Sinwar. Hamas was just moseying along with a chill leader when BLAM! Israel killed him and they were forced to appoint a hardliner in his place. It’s not Hamas’s fault that it chose as its new leader the mastermind of a pogrom of unspeakable obscenity; it’s the fault of the target of that pogrom. Thus is Palestinian agency shaded out to make Israel the villain once again.

It is a testament to how thoroughly this intellectual and moral rot has spread that when Israel took out Haniyeh, President Biden complained that it ‘doesn’t help’ chances of a ceasefire, but when Hamas announced Sinwar as his successor, the White House declined to comment. Killing a terrorist earns a rebuke, promoting a terrorist does not. Then again, considering how the progressive wing of the Democrat Party has responded to October 7, the White House’s displeasure at the death of Haniyeh makes sense. They’ll have to make time for an In Memoriam segment at the Democrat national convention.

As the removal of Haniyeh demonstrates, Israel can take care of itself. What should worry us is the violent inversion of the West’s moral compass, so that slaughtering men, women and children is ‘resistance’, self-defence is ‘genocide’, Hamas are moderates and pragmatists and Israel is the impediment to a ceasefire. The Jewish writer Hilde Walter is recorded as saying: ‘The Germans will never forgive us for Auschwitz.’ The world will never forgive Israel for October 7.