Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.
The following is an excerpt from The New York Times’ bestseller, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation, by Sim Kern. Check out Sim’s recent interview on CounterPunch Radio, and head over to Interlink Press to pick up a signed, deluxe copy of this important book. Proceeds support the Middle East Children’s Alliance.
+++
When you say “Genocide bad,” Zionists will counter, “But Hamas [did something terrible].”
“But Hamas” comments try to derail you from talking about Israeli violence by asking you to first address the violence of the Palestinian resistance.
Comments might sound like, “Do you condemn Hamas?” or “But Hamas started this!”
They may share facts, such as, “Hamas abducted children,” lies such as, “Hamas beheaded babies,” or—trickiest of all—partial truths, like, “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”
As I’m writing this chapter, Israel has just invaded Lebanon, and this familiar refrain on cable news networks has shifted to, “But Hezbollah!” If Israel continues expanding its regional war, Hasbarists will continue responding to any criticism of Israel by asking you to first condemn any local populations daring to take up arms and resist their own extermination.
It’s up to you whether you want to get derailed here. Because sometimes we do need to talk about Hamas. We need to talk about the important distinction between violence that comes from imperial colonizers versus violence that comes from Indigenous people defending their homes. Though if you start down that road, you’re going to have to define what you mean by “colonizers” and “Indigenous,” and you’ll get drawn into debating the meaning of Indigeneity.
But notice—you were trying to say “Genocide bad,” and now they’ve got you arguing semantics!
We also need to contradict blatant lies about the Palestinian resistance, like the “Hamas beheaded babies” story. It’s important to clarify that, no, they did not. That story proved to be false. Israelis are the only military force that have actually beheaded babies over the past year, babies like Ahmad Al-Najr, eighteen months old, whose head was severed from his body in the bombing of a Rafah tent encampment on May 26, 2024. The video of Ahmad’s father, shaking his headless child’s body, wailing in agony as people burned alive in the holocaust of tents behind him, was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, even after a year of this digitally broadcasted genocide.
So Israel beheads babies, not Hamas.
Remember: every accusation, a confession.
What’s trickier and more time-consuming than contradicting outright lies is picking apart the strands of partial truths—but this is especially important work, as these half-truths, or truths-stripped-of-all-context can cause a lot of confusion. Take the example above, that “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”
The kernel of truth here is that Hamas’s original 1988 charter defined its struggle as a “struggle against Jews,” included a quote from the Quran about a prophecy of Muslims killing Jews, and decreed in Article 15: “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” However, in its 2017 revised charter, Hamas clarified, “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Hamas also explicitly condemns anti-Jewish hate in its revised charter: “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”
You might also take the time to unpack the anti-Muslim hate and panic that informs Westerners’ understanding of the word “jihad.” Many USians think “jihad” is a synonym for suicide bombings or genocide. When they hear “jihadist” they picture ISIS fighters storming their suburb to enact Sharia law. In reality, the word just means “struggle” or “fight,” and is often used in Arabic in nonviolent contexts, such as a struggle for self-improvement or what a Christian might term “wrestling with your faith.” 
But if you get into all of that, not only are you now miles away from whatever point you started off making (genocide bad), now a hundred Zionists in your comments are still going to insist, “BUT HAMAS BEHEADED BABIES!” And you’re back where you started.
If you give a Zionist a cookie, they’re going to ask you to condemn Hamas.
And maybe, in fact, you do want to condemn an action of Hamas. Maybe Hamas has done something that violates your moral code, and it’s important for you to make sure your audience knows that, because otherwise you fear you’ll lose credibility with them.
For example, I am staunchly against abducting children. I don’t think children should be taken from their parents at gunpoint, under any circumstances. So yes, I condemn Hamas’s abduction of thirty children from their families on October 7th. I’ll also condemn the abduction, rape, torture, and killing of any civilians.
But consider—why am I asked to condemn Hamas for abducting children first, when every year, Israel abducts an estimated 500–700 Palestinian children at gunpoint? Since October 7th, at least 640 children in the West Bank have been arrested by the IOF, many facing medical neglect, abuse, and even torture in Israeli prisons. Furthermore, before October 7th, Israel had killed forty-one Palestinian children in the West Bank, taking them from their families forever. Between October 2023 and July 2024, the Lancet, a leading international medical journal, estimated that 186,000 deaths “could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” And because 47 percent of the population of Gaza are children, 87,420 of those killed by Israel may be children. Though even that’s likely a conservative estimate, as children are more vulnerable to violence, famine, disease, and medical neglect, so the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s genocide may be even higher.
For whatever action you’re being asked to condemn Hamas, the IOF has done something similar, more extremely and more frequently, to more people, for a longer period of time—and they fucking started it.
So sure, sometimes we need to talk about Hamas, but most of the time, we should avoid this derailment tactic that sets us on a defensive footing, apologizing for the actions of an impoverished, besieged Indigenous resistance rather than attacking one of the most powerful and violent colonial militaries in the history of the world.
That’s why, 99 percent of the time, I shut down people asking me to condemn Hamas with, “Forget Hamas! My tax dollars don’t fund Hamas.”
^^That’s where I ended this chapter when I first drafted it. With a tidy soundbite that let me avoid going too deep into my thoughts and feelings on armed resistance—which are unsettled at best. I’m way out of my depth on this topic. And armed resistance is a very loaded topic to discuss, because if I misstep, I risk, on the one hand, being exiled from the Free Palestine movement for the crime of normalization, or, on the other hand, landing on a government no-fly list for being a radical terrorist sympathizer.
Or … worse. There are worse things that have happened to authors who are proponents of armed anti-colonial struggle.
So you can see why I hesitated to get too deep into my thoughts. But since completing that first draft, I watched on my phone—on my little handheld magic window into war crimes—the last moments of Yahya Sinwar, chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, before he was killed by a gunshot to the head. I suspect he was killed by the Israeli drone that filmed his last moments, although that detail has not been confirmed.
Now I have more to say about Hamas, although it’s all kind of a mess in my head. Forgive me that what follows is fragmentary and won’t come to a tidy resolution.
You should watch the video if you haven’t seen it.
The clip begins as a disembodied viewpoint swooping over an apocalyptic landscape. From the abrupt, robotic adjustments of the flight path, you can tell this is drone footage—and a very expensive drone at that, delivering crystal-clear HD images. I had to remind myself, in those first moments, that I wasn’t watching the intro to some Hollywood movie. The demolished city was no multi-million dollar set or CGI creation, but the very real ruins of thousands of homes in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah, a refugee camp—and now a graveyard for countless people who died beneath the rubble.
In 2017, the sci-fi series Black Mirror aired a chilling episode called “Metalhead,” which follows a woman as she flees through an abandoned landscape from a pack of dog-like, four-legged armed drones. Throughout the tense, forty-one-minute episode, she is mostly silent, because the drones are attracted by noise. After surviving several near-death encounters with the metalheads, she is wounded and takes shelter in an abandoned home. In the final shot, an aerial drone pans away from the house, showing a dozen of the killer robot-dogs closing in on her location, and we presume she is done for.
“Metalhead” was a cultural phenomenon in the US—the kind of TV that got everyone in the teacher’s lounge at my school insisting, “You have to watch it.” “Metalhead” left such an impression on me that I included police drone-dogs in my 2023 sci-fi novel, The Free People’s Village, the cover of which features a masked punk smashing a Metalhead-like drone with a baseball bat.
But in Gaza in 2024, there’s nothing futuristic about armed robots hunting down human beings—that nightmare has become a part of everyday life. One evening last June, that reality came crashing into my own cushy life in the imperial core. I was in Berkeley, California, attending the Bay Area Book Festival to promote The Free People’s Village. I was walking towards an author meet-and-greet event, wearing my keffiyeh, because I had vowed to bring Palestine with me onto every stage I was afforded. Still, I was trying to compartmentalize the genocide, for the moment. I was having fun. My kids were back at the hotel with my spouse, and I was looking forward to a free drink ticket, cheese plate, and schmoozing with other authors, feeling swept up in the glamour of the rare chance to travel for my author career.
Halfway to the event, my phone buzzed with a notification—it was my friend Mohammed in Gaza.
Throughout the spring, I had been using my TikTok platform to fundraise for pregnant and postpartum people in Gaza who were trying to evacuate to Cairo. I had used a random number generator to select Mohammed’s campaign from a list of hundreds of such fundraisers. By raffling off signed copies of my book, I had raised the nearly $100,000 in bribe money that Mohammed’s extended family needed to pay off Egyptian officials and evacuate. But in June, before any members of Mohammed’s family were able to evacuate, Israel had destroyed the Rafah border crossing—the last route for Gazans to escape from genocide.
Though their plans to evacuate had fallen through, Mohammed, his wife, Shahd, and I had stayed in touch. Their baby, Heba, had been born just a few days after my own baby. We started chatting regularly, sending each other baby pictures and updates on our kids’ milestones. I learned about how Mohammed had visited my state of Texas as a teenager, on a foreign-exchange student program, staying on a ranch where he’d fallen in love with the USA and horses and wide-open spaces. I learned that they were both doctoral students in biomedical engineering, still somehow taking exams and writing papers between bombardments and diaper changes. By June, I loved baby Heba like a niece, and I considered Mohammed and Shahd to be friends.
So that evening in Berkeley, my heart dropped into my stomach as soon as I saw the notification. It was the middle of the night in Gaza, so something must be terribly wrong.
Mohammed texted me that an armed quadcopter was patrolling the street outside the building in Rafah where they were then staying. A dog right outside their window had just barked at the drone and been shot dead. Mohammed was terrified, because there was no glass in the window. Only a thin curtain separated his sleeping family from the quadcopter, which would attack anything that made a noise. What if baby Heba woke up and started screaming?
I slumped against the side of a building, the horror of Mohammed’s reality shattering that balmy northern California evening. Couples strolled past me on the sidewalk, chatting in soft tones or laughing with their heads thrown back. I was holding my breath, hoping a robot didn’t massacre this precious family on the other side of the world.
I could do nothing for Mohammed but be there with him, digitally at least. I could bear witness as he stayed awake through the long watches of the night, tensed to comfort Heba at the first sign of movement. I texted some pitiful banalities, like, “That’s so terrifying. I am praying for you.” And even though I’m not religious, it was true.
They got lucky. Heba slept soundly. The quadcopter moved on. My friends have survived, to the day I am writing this. And Heba’s mother, Shahd, has written a powerful letter to you, dear reader, which you’ll find on the final pages of this book.
So of course I was thinking about that quadcopter when I watched the video of Sinwar’s last moments. I wondered if the drone stalking him was the same make and model of machine that had killed a dog outside the window where baby Heba slept. I wondered about all the people who built these machines, and what they got paid for their labor. I wondered what it cost the Israeli military to buy a drone like that. And I wondered who profited the most from their sales.
In the video of Sinwar’s last moments, the quadcopter zooms into the bombed-out side of a building, where everything is thickly dusted with rubble. It takes the viewer—and the drone—a few moments to recognize that a man is sitting there on an overstuffed sofa. He’s camouflaged by the asbestos-filled dust that coats his skin as thickly as everything else in the room. But if your eyes can’t pick him out, don’t worry—the drone’s AI software soon identifies the human form, tracing a helpful red line around his head and torso.
Like Predator. Like Terminator. Except wait—you must remember! You’re watching real life, not a movie.
At that moment, you might notice that the man is missing a hand, and the blood leaking from the stump of his arm has darkened the armrest of the sofa. He holds very still, like he is hoping the drone will not spot him. But we viewers have already seen the red identifying line, foreshadowing the man’s death. We have seen the caption of the video—“Sinwar’s last moments!” Time flattens; in the video, the man is alive and hoping to survive, but we in the future know he is doomed.
Growing up, my older brother was obsessed with Star Wars. He had Star Wars bedsheets, a collection of the original 1970s action figures, and dozens of tiny plastic ships that he would arrange in elaborate formations on the carpet before acting out space battles, making the laser beam sounds with his mouth. Pew-pew! Because I idolized my big brother, I absorbed an encyclopedic amount of Star Wars trivia. To this day, tons of information on the military hardware of a fictional space empire is still stored in my brain—I can tell a Tie Bomber from a Tie Fighter, and an AT-AT from an AT-ST. Among our small collection of VHS tapes, we had all three Star Wars movies, which meant—in those days before streaming services—that we watched them over and over.
I must have watched The Empire Strikes Back—my brother’s favorite—about a hundred times. Burned into my memory forever is the image of Luke Skywalker as he clutches a catwalk above a windswept abyss, filthy and bleeding from his forehead and the stump where Darth Vader has just cut off his hand with a light saber. Luke screams in defiance, “I’ll never join you!” and lets go, plummeting into a seemingly bottomless void.
Luke Skywalker is one example of a classic sci-fi archetype—the plucky resistance fighter taking on an evil empire. Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Paul Atreides in Dune, and Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta are other examples. All are stories that mirror anticolonial resistance movements throughout history, with one crucial change: in the Hollywood versions, the rebels engaged in violent struggle are all white.
Hollywood raised my generation on stories of young people who take up arms against an imperial army full of robots despite overwhelming odds. These heroes are violent. They carry light sabers and blasters and fly bomber spaceships. They mow down soldiers by the dozen. They blow up space stations, presumably staffed with at least some civilians. And they destroy capital cities full of wealthy-but-otherwise-innocent bystanders.
Hollywood taught me that their violence was justified.
What was Hollywood thinking?
According to Western journalism, only white people representing colonial empires are allowed to do violence in “self-defense.” Black and Brown people who fight back are engaged in “terrorism.”
So when these film franchises were in production, did the multimillionaire elites who owned the studios think that we’d pay more attention to Luke Skywalker’s white skin than his material conditions? Did they think, when presented with the stark difference between the wealthy revelries of the Capitol and the starving laborers of District 12, that we would not see parallels to income inequality between the imperial core and the Global South? Were they counting on us to dehumanize Black and Brown people that much?
When you watch the final moments of Yahya Sinwar, you are not seeing Luke Skywalker. But you are seeing a man with a bleeding stump where his hand should be, facing down a killer robot. You will recognize familiar tropes. You will have been trained, by countless sci-fi shows and movies and video games, to identify which character is the plucky resistance fighter and which character is the imperial droid. And even if you have never watched Star Wars or read The Hunger Games, even if you know absolutely nothing about the man in the overstuffed chair, you will recognize that he is human. He is a member of your species, and the thing that is hunting him is decidedly not. On a primeval, ancient, lizard-brain level, you are going to root for the human being over the killer robot that hunts him.
Unless, of course, you don’t see the man in the chair as human. Maybe you’ve been indoctrinated since birth to see men like him as monsters. Well, then you’re going to cheer on his demise, the way movie theaters full of parents will laugh and applaud, even beside their very young children, when the villains of Disney movies meet with a violent death.
In the footage—which, remember, is not a Disney film—Sinwar realizes he’s been spotted, and we see a blur of movement. The red outline appears again, tracing the shape of something in his hand. Is it a gun? A sword? No, just a piece of wood—a splintered bit of framing blown off the wall at some point in a year of relentless bombardment. Sinwar tests the stick’s weight, readying it to throw. With what must be the last of his strength, his lifeblood gushing out the stump of his arm with every heartbeat, Sinwar lobs the stick over his head.
You already know how this ends. You’ve read the caption. And from the moment the stick leaves his hand, you can plainly see the trajectory is off and that it will fall short. And yet you can’t help hoping that somehow, miraculously, his aim will prove true. That a simple piece of wood will take down a sophisticated robot. That human will defeat machine.
The drone pivots to track the arc of wood through the air—a moment of distraction—and if this were a Hollywood movie, that’s when Sinwar would get up, sprint across the rubble as bullets graze past his ankles, launch himself out the blasted-out wall of the apartment building, and plummet toward the streets below, only to be rescued at the last second by an allied hovercraft.
Or maybe a team of his comrades would burst through a back door, blasting the drone out of the air in its moment of distraction. A Steadicam from another angle would capture Sinwar turning to his battle-buddies with a grin, saying, “Took you long enough.”
But this is not a Hollywood movie, I can’t stress that enough. It’s a snuff film of a man’s death, released purposefully by the Israeli military, in what has to be one of the worst Hasbara blunders in history.
The video abruptly ends. Sinwar died from a gunshot to the head, but we don’t see that part.
On Israeli television, the on-air personalities—in their brightly lit studios, in thousand-dollar suits, with their perfect hair and teeth—played this clip and then passed around sweets, one journalist chewing with relish and licking his fingers. Their food-based celebration may strike you as in particularly bad taste if you know, or care, that Israel is intentionally starving two million Palestinian people as a tool of genocide.
You will recognize the tropes. If you have seen The Hunger Games, the twentieth-highest-grossing film franchise of all time, you will correctly identify which of these characters lives in the Capitol, and which character lives—well, lived—in District 12.
Unless—unless you were raised in the Capitol, and you’ve been taught since birth that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Jews are Indigenous to Palestine—then you might be so blinded by hate for the man with the stick that you fail to see how enormously sympathetic he appears in that video, regardless of how one feels about Hamas.
The global film industry is worth upwards of $136 billion, and people pay all that money to watch actors, with no firsthand experience of war, pretend to have the kind of courage in the face of certain death that Yahya Sinwar displayed in the last moments of his life.
And Israel released that footage to the world of its own volition.
Whoops! Big ol’ PR blunder.
A representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran described Sinwar’s death to the UN as follows: “When Muslims look up to Martyr Sinwar standing on the battlefield—in combat attire and out in the open, not in a hideout, facing the enemy—the spirit of resistance will be strengthened. He will become a model for the youth and children who will carry forward his path toward the liberation of Palestine.”
Yeah. I don’t doubt it. If there were any teenagers out there, waffling about whether or not to join the armed resistance, I don’t doubt that watching the footage of Sinwar’s last stand might have swayed their decision.
Israeli and Western media scrambled to regain control of the narrative in the twenty-four hours after the snuff video’s release. Every major USian news outlet ran a profile on Yahya Sinwar, reminding their audiences that Sinwar was the architect of October 7th, the top terrorist we’re all supposed to fear and loathe these days, now that Saddam and Bin Laden are gone.
Even riddled with Zionist distortions, these articles all painted a pretty sympathetic picture of Sinwar. I had known vanishingly little about the man before his death. I had heard his name mentioned as the “head of Hamas.” I’d heard that he’d taken over ceasefire negotiations after Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination, but that was about it.
From the flurry of media after his death, I learned that Sinwar had been labeled a “psychopath” by Israeli officials. Then I learned this diagnosis was made by Shin Bet agent Michael Koubi, a man who had interrogated Sinwar for 180 hours over the course of Sinwar’s twenty-two years in Israeli prisons. Forgive me if I don’t take professional torturers at their word when it comes to diagnosing the mental health of their victims.
The idea that Sinwar was primarily motivated by a hatred of Jews—as Koubi attests—also doesn’t square with the fact that the year Sinwar assumed command of Hamas was the year that Hamas revised its charter as discussed above—specifically to clarify that Hamas’s beef was with the Zionist occupation of Palestine, not the Jewish people.
Sinwar had reasons for his grievances against the occupation. He was born into a refugee camp in Khan Younis, the child of parents whose home had been stolen by Zionists during the Nakba. In 1967, when Sinwar was four years old, Israel took command of the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War. Thereafter, Sinwar and his family were subjected to the daily humiliations of life under Israeli occupation.
In his young adulthood, he was detained by Israeli forces multiple times for involvement with student political groups, and by his early twenties, Sinwar was involved in armed resistance. According to Israeli courts and Western reporting, in this period of his life, he tortured and killed people—including two Israeli soldiers and twelve Palestinians whom he suspected of collaborating with Israel. Now once again, I’ll condemn torture. Genocide bad; torture bad. Bear in mind, however, that the information that led to Sinwar’s conviction was also extracted by Israeli “interrogation.” Meaning torture. Israeli forces torture Palestinian prisoners.
Sinwar spent the following twenty-two years in Israeli prisons, where he taught himself Hebrew, studied Jewish history, wrote a novel, and once led a hunger strike of 1,600 prisoners. In 2011, his brother had him freed through a hostage swap in which Israel traded one Israeli soldier for over 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. A hostage swap. That’s as deep as I’m going to dive into Yahya Sinwar’s biography, because I have absolutely no qualifications or additional information with which to dig deeper. But even from these surface-level facts, reported by every mainstream Western outlet, you can understand Sinwar’s logic when it comes to October 7th. He got free through a hostage deal, so maybe another one could free his 5,000 Palestinian comrades who were still being held in Israeli detention on October 7th, 2023. He was trying to pay it forward. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Sinwar was more motivated by a desire to free his people than to kill a bunch of Jews.
But Hamas did do that. We don’t know exactly how much of the slaughter of October 7th was carried out by mob violence, and how much was planned and intentionally executed by Hamas fighters. But those Hamas fighters certainly killed people on October 7th, and they abducted over 250 people, most of them civilians, including those thirty children—acts I’ve already condemned.
So do I condemn Hamas? Do I condemn Yahya Sinwar?
I mean truly, who the fuck needs my opinion here? Let me tell you something else I understood watching the footage of Sinwar’s end: I understood the depths, the profound depths of my own cowardice.
Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian author of short fiction and an advocate of armed resistance, writing in the 1960s and ’70s. I read Kanafani’s Palestine’s Children last spring, when I was trying to sort out my feelings on armed resistance.
In the climactic scene of his short story, “Return to Haifa,” Kanafani’s protagonist proclaims, “A man is a cause.” And I didn’t really get what that meant when I read it last spring. Because most people I know—most of us in the West? We are not a cause. Most of us are a bundle of anxieties and materialistic aspirations wrapped in flesh.
But Yahya Sinwar was a cause. He was willing to die for his people, and for liberation.
And that’s the kind of shit I’ve only ever seen in movies. All my life, I’ve watched these little fantasy stories, just for the rush—just for that sweet ache in my heart when Katniss makes the sign of the Mockingjay, when Luke lets go of the catwalk, when Aragorn, at the gates of Mordor, cries, “There may come a day when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day!”
Something inside us needs these stories of people who are a cause—something that is starved by Western civilization.
So I’ve watched these fictions about white characters, written by white authors, acted out by white actors on soundstages in Propaganda City in the heart of a white supremacist empire. And meanwhile, I have led a charmed, white, middle-class life in the wealthiest nation on earth. I wasn’t born in a refugee camp. I’ve never gone hungry. I’ve never stared down the barrel of a gun that’s pointed at me. I’ve never heard a bomb explode. I’ve never spent so much as a night in jail, because I always dip out of the protest when the cops pull out their zip ties. I have zero firsthand experience of war—only those images I’ve seen through my phone screen.
And all the peace and comfort I’ve enjoyed throughout my life has been purchased in blood—blood that I’ve never had to get on my hands. The US sits at the pinnacle of a global economy founded on the enslavement of the entire Global South. Western empire exports endless violence around the world to ensure obedience to its core project: funneling ever more wealth and resources and human blood and entire ecosystems into the foundries of capitalism—all so we can make rich people richer and richer and richer until there’s nothing left of life on earth.
And because I was born as the right race, in the right place, at the right time, I’m supposed to sit back and enjoy my little comforts near the tippy-top of this system. Being white in the US affords me air conditioning, and my own car, and a dozen streaming services to distract me from the horrific cruelty that makes my society possible. And I can choose from a zillion flavors of booze to numb the pain of watching the rapidly approaching collapse of the planetary systems that sustain carbon-based life on Earth.
Oh, I make my little TikToks, and I write my little books, calling for a more just and sustainable world, but I have never come close to putting my life on the line for a cause. Not really.
What kind of credibility do I have to sit in judgment of a man like Yahya Sinwar? A man born beneath the crushing weight of that same empire, whose life experiences were so radically different from mine? And the same question goes for all these Western journalists who open every interview with a Palestinian or Palestinian-sympathetic guest with the question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”
What a farce. What clown shit—for those of us in the Capitol to pass judgment on the resistance fighters in District 12.
Honestly, it’s clown shit that our most enduring myths of principled resistance, within the US, are children’s stories written by other privileged white people like George Lucas and Suzanne Collins, people who have never experienced war, occupation, or colonization firsthand. And though these creators became exorbitantly wealthy off their whitewashed stories of anti-imperial struggle, they have not reinvested that wealth into supporting anti-imperial struggles in the real world.
As a Jewish USian, the only real-life stories of armed resistance that I grew up with were stories of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the spring of 1943, Nazis began the final phase of liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto—shipping 265,000 Jews in crowded cattle cars to the extermination camp of Treblinka, where they were immediately herded at gunpoint into gas chambers and killed with a rat poison called Zyklon B. On April 19th of that spring, around 750 young Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto took up arms and fought back. Vastly outgunned and outmanned, the resistance held out for twenty-seven days, taking out Nazi troops using guerilla tactics, until finally the Nazis burned the entire ghetto to the ground and hunted down the resistance fighters still hiding among the ruins.
These days, I feel like the whole world is in pretty unanimous agreement that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was justified, and Jews celebrate its fighters as heroes. No one cries, these days, over dead Nazis. Now I’m not saying October 7th provides a parallel to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—that would not be an apt comparison, in part because the Jews of the uprising did not target civilians. But when Hamas fighters are trading fire with the IOF among the rubble of Gaza City and Rafah—as they have throughout this past year—the parallels are striking, especially considering that the IOF have admitted to learning from Nazi tactics during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 2002, a senior Israeli military officer told Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahranot, “the Nazi campaign to subdue the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 required careful study as an example of successful urban combat.”
On the much-celebrated twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a former combatant named Yitzhak Zuckerman said, “I don’t think there’s any real need to analyze the uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn’t a subject for study in military school …
If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or uprising.”
At the time he gave this speech, Zuckerman was living on the Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, which translates to “the Ghetto Fighters,” a settlement he and his wife founded north of Haifa, on stolen Palestinian land. If Zuckerman ever spoke publicly about Palestinians, I haven’t found it. Did he foresee that someday Palestinian youth, “after years of degradation” at the hands of settlers like himself, would “rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose:” Israeli drone, JDAM missile, or Hamas?
Over the past year, I have witnessed glimpses of the Israeli degradation of Palestinians. I have not smelled the blood. I have not felt my bones rattled by the explosions. But through my magic window into war crimes, I have seen countless precious children with their skulls smashed open, their mouths ajar, their blue skin and lifeless limbs. I have seen babies, with their sweet milk-breath, choked with the poison dust of rubble. I have seen toddlers, whose hands should be so chubby, shriveled to skeletons from weaponized starvation. I have seen kids no larger than my own seven-year-old carrying the corpses of their younger siblings on their backs, or in pieces in a backpack, or in plastic bags full of loose meat. I have heard the wails of parents clutching their children and grandchildren in a last embrace, and I have heard the wails of children realizing they have just been orphaned—left without any grown-ups to love them in an unfathomably cruel and heartless world. I have heard the shouts of those trapped beneath the rubble, and the anguished cries of those above, of the men who shred their palms digging through concrete with their bare hands, trying to free the people below. I have fundraised for pregnant moms, trying to get them out of harm’s way before they had to give birth, only for Israel to blow up all the crossings, trapping two million people between concrete walls and Israeli tanks and the sea. I have cried as one of those babies was born alive—miraculously—only to die that very night, because there was heavy bombardment nearby, and her little heart couldn’t take the fear. Her name was Manal Mattar, and she died of terror. Of Israeli terrorism. She lived to be not one day old.
I have watched extermination. I have watched a holocaust.
The more real-world violence I’ve seen in this life, the less I can tolerate fantasy violence. I used to love a good first-person-shooter video game as much as the next millennial, but after decades of mass shootings in the US, I can’t bear to play any game that involves guns. A guy I dated once convinced me to buy a gun for “home defense.” But after living with it for a while, and deeply contemplating what it would be like to shoot another person, I decided I’d rather be murdered than kill anyone, and I got rid of it.
But that feeling changed after I had kids. If anyone was about to do to my children the things I have seen done to the children of Gaza, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull a trigger, not for a second. And come to think of it, I don’t think I would hesitate to pull a trigger to save my spouse or my parents or my friends either. In fact, alone in an alley, if anyone was about to do to anyone else the kinds of things I have seen done to the children of Gaza, I’d pull that trigger.
So I’m not sure I believe in self-defense, but child-defense? Other-people-defense? Genocide-defense? That’s easy math for me.
And that’s why anyone pretending to be baffled by the existence of violent Palestinian resistance is full of shit.
But it’s also why Israel’s reaction—in collectively punishing millions of people for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, including children—was totally predictable. Not justified, of course not—GENOCIDE BAD. But it was predictable, because Zionist Israelis truly believe that Palestinians want their mass extermination, that Palestinians hate them just because they’re Jews, not because they are being violently oppressed under racial apartheid. Israel’s genocidal reaction was predictable even to me, on the other side the world, because throughout Israel’s brief seventy-six years of existence, it has never passed up a good excuse to further the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Sinwar knew Israel would retaliate disproportionately, and yet he was involved in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. I don’t know what exactly Hamas’s marching orders were that morning. And again, given the Hannibal Directive, I don’t know how many of the 1,200 Israeli victims were killed by Hamas and how many were killed by the IOF to prevent more hostages being taken captive. As for the abduction and killing of Israeli children—I don’t know if Hamas leadership intended to target children, or were apathetic about targeting children, or if they’d actually given orders to avoid targeting children, but individual fighters broke protocol or made mistakes in all the chaos.
Gun to my head, if I had to guess, I’d bet it wasn’t the first one. In the last interview he ever gave, Sinwar spoke with Vice News about why Hamas fires rockets at civilian areas.
“Israel,” he says, “which possesses a complete arsenal of weaponry, state-of-the-art equipment and aircrafts, intentionally bombs and kills our children and women. And they do that on purpose. You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capability to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did. We are forced to defend our people with what we have. And this is what we have. What are we supposed to do? Should we raise the white flag? That’s not going to happen. Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible. We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we have.”
I can’t begin to understand what it’s like to be Yahya Sinwar, but I can understand that logic. According to his own words, it sounds like Sinwar would’ve preferred to only strike military targets. Perhaps, similarly, he would’ve preferred to only take Israeli soldiers hostage on October 7th, if Hamas had had the firepower to do so. But Sinwar and the rest of Hamas leadership made the decision to carry out an attack that would include civilians among their targets, thus provoking one of the most powerful militaries in the world from a nation founded on the erasure of Palestinians. Not only that, on October 7th, Hamas killed and kidnapped Israeli kids.
It’s not in any way fair that imperial powers like Israel can mass-abduct and mass-murder Indigenous Palestinian children, as they’ve done throughout their 76-year history, and still be considered a respectable nation in the eyes of the world. Meanwhile, impoverished resistance fighters using homemade bullets and mortars are held to much higher standards of military decorum. Israel can mass-murder hundreds of thousands of civilians and still participate in Eurovision and the Olympics; and calls for Israel to be banned from those events are labeled “antisemitic” by Western media. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance fighters are vilified as terrorists for killing even a single Israeli. And anyone who publicly advocates for Palestinians’ right to armed resistance will be dismissed as a terrorist sympathizer and face severe material consequences—up to and including assassination.
This double standard is not fair, but that’s how Western empire maintains its dominion. International law and order have historically operated as a PR campaign for genocidal empires. The Geneva Conventions aren’t to be applied to United States and its allies, but they provide a convenient pretext for the US to invade or bomb or orchestrate a coup in any nation in the Global South that doesn’t bow down to US interests. And those interests require these nations to enslave their own people in the businesses of extracting oil or lithium, or cleaning rich peoples’ houses, or providing them with beautiful beachfront resorts, so that all the wealth of these nations can be transferred to the Global North as cheaply as possible—maximizing profits for the West and maximizing poverty for the Global South. Any country that even just tries to protect its wealth and nationalize those resources will be accused of violating international law for some reason or other, and sanctions, assassinations, and drone strikes are sure to follow.
And for those who dare to violently attack a Western imperial power? Well, for them, the sky’s the limit in terms of punishment. And that punishment will not be constrained by the Geneva Conventions or any UN resolution.
I wonder if Sinwar ever regretted October 7th, this past year. As the death toll mounted into the tens of thousands—as the estimated dead surpassed the violence of the Nakba several times over. Was he surprised when Netanyahu proved to give absolutely zero fucks about getting the hostages back, or even avoiding killing them in the bombardment? Of course, Sinwar had known Israel would retaliate for October 7th, but I wonder if he had any idea that it would hold nothing back. That it would pursue, in full view of the entire world, the extermination of the Palestinian people, dropping more tonnage on the Gaza Strip than the entire amount of explosives used in World War II in the bombardment of London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined.
I wonder if Sinwar ever had moments where he wished he could take it back, as Israel obliterated the hospitals and schools and refugee camps. As Israel found newly cruel and despicable ways to mass-murder and torture Sinwar’s people with each passing day. Had he banked on more help from a callous world that has failed and failed and failed to put a stop to the genocide? Some of us common people have marched, and we’ve carried banners and dropped banners and chanted and held press conferences and written letters to the editor and gone to meetings and vigils, and those of us on social media have made our rabble-rousing little tweets and reels. College kids camped out. And some people vandalized private property about it. Some people went to jail about it. Not me—well, I had the convenient excuse that I was breastfeeding. But some of my more courageous comrades in JVP got arrested about it.
Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice and set himself on fire about it.
But still, day after day after every day until this one, we have failed to end the genocide.
But at least we’ve been trying.
Most people haven’t. Most people in the world haven’t lifted a single finger or spoken a single public word in solidarity with Palestine. Either they were too scared, or they couldn’t be bothered.
Stern speeches have been made in the UN, the General Assembly has passed resolutions, and the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant’s arrest. But that body, which is supposed to represent the sum total of global political leadership, has also failed to end the bloodshed.
And so I can’t tell you how it affected me—to witness a man who actually fought for the people of Palestine, right up until the bitter end. Starving, hand blown off, riddled with shrapnel, he hurled a stick at a killing machine, defying empire to his last breath.
Do I condemn Hamas?
Do I condemn Yahya Sinwar?
Do I wish he had consented to be “slaughtered without making a noise?” After all, in 2021, the year he gave that last interview, Israel only killed 319 Palestinians—not hundreds of thousands. That year, Israel only stole 895 Palestinians’ homes—whereas this year, the number of homes destroyed rose above two million. If the members of Hamas had been “well-behaved victims,” then maybe Israel would still be grudgingly allowing some Palestinian children to grow up with all their limbs intact. Maybe baby Manal’s heart would still be beating, along with tens of thousands of other slaughtered kids. And sure, they would live out their lives trapped in the concentration camp of Gaza, drinking polluted water, malnourished, denied civil rights and any employment besides performing manual labor for the racist occupiers who stole their ancestral lands, under the constant threat of being randomly arrested, disappeared, tortured, killed in a bombardment, or shot for no particular reason by a bored Israeli teenager.
Without Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the people of Gaza could’ve still had that status quo, instead of this full throttle genocide. And if every life is precious, is a universe unto itself—wouldn’t that have been worth it? Parents who are now bereaved—who loved their children every bit as much as I love mine—they could’ve watched those kids grow up, and fall in love, and have babies of their own—to be subjected to lifelong Israeli occupation in their turn. At time of writing, Israel has exterminated all members of at least 902 families in Gaza—erasing those lineages from existence, and from participating in whatever the future may hold.
If every life is precious, is a universe unto itself, and if October 7th triggered this mass death, then why won’t I condemn Hamas?
In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi relates how, in the 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization asked an anticolonial resistance expert, Eqbal Ahmad, to evaluate its military strategy. Ahmad was no softhearted lib normalizer, okay? He “had worked with the Front de libération nationale in Algeria in the early 1960s, had known Frantz Fanon, and was a renowned Third World anticolonial thinker.”
After studying the PLO’s situation, even though he was, “in principle a committed supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes … Ahmad questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel. He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis … it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.” Perhaps in part as a result of Ahmad’s advice, in 1988, the PLO renounced armed resistance as a strategy for Palestinian liberation … until the Second Intifada.
Khalidi characterizes the First Intifada of the late ’80s and early ’90s—a mostly nonviolent uprising consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and civil disobedience—as “the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917.” Precisely because Palestinians remained nonviolent, whereas Israeli forces responded with their typical brutality, “[international] television viewers were riveted by repeated tableaus of wrenching violence, which inverted the image of Israel as a perpetual victim, casting it as Goliath against the Palestinian David.” Khalidi argues that the nonviolent uprising unified Palestinian factions, spread the Palestinian narrative to a worldwide audience, and led to a “profound and lasting positive impact on both Israeli and world opinion” of Palestinians.
The 2000 Second Intifada would be very different from the first.
Between the two uprisings, the Oslo Accords would be signed. US President Bill Clinton brokered this agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Optimistic Palestinians hoped that the result of the process would be the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, but they would hope in vain. Khalidi details how the US and Israel rigged the talks and frustrated the aims of the PLO, ensuring that the Palestinian delegation failed to secure any substantial material improvements for the Palestinian people.
In the final agreement, the PLO “recognized” the state of Israel, and Israel “recognized” the PLO—not as a state, but as a “representative of the Palestinian people.” That’s some tepid bullshit, but it was a big change from Israeli policy in the past. So why did Rabin break with tradition and give the PLO a shred of legitimacy? Khalidi argues it’s because of “the lesson Rabin learned from the First Intifada: that Israel could no longer control the Occupied Territories solely by the use of force.” Through the Oslo Accords, Rabin essentially hired Arafat and the PLO to control the territories on Israel’s behalf, as the rebranded Palestinian National Authority—now shortened to the Palestinian Authority, or PA.
What did Arafat get in return for agreeing to “recognize” Israel, even though Israel had not “recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one?” Well, he got to live in Palestine, after years of exile in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Now, he and the other members of the PLO could return to Palestine, and Israel had promised them they would live comfortably compared with other Palestinians, and they’d enjoy positions of authority. As Israel built an elaborate system of checkpoints and walls throughout the West Bank, “Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO leadership … sailed through the checkpoints with their VIP passes” and “did not seem to know, or care, about the increasing confinement of ordinary Palestinians.”
The PLO had fallen prey to elite capture. At the time Khalidi wrote The Hundred Years’ War, he characterized the PA as having “no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel … its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians.”
In Yiddish, we have a word for what Arafat and the PLO became. Yiddish is a language rife with deliciously biting and fun-to-say insults like schlemiel, schlimazel, alter cocker, and vilde chaya, but the worst thing one Jew can call another—the most humiliating, degrading, and loathsome of all insults—is kapo. Kapos were the Jews who worked for Nazis in the ghettos and camps. Kapos were cops and snitches and prison guards who subjugated their own people in exchange for slightly less meager rations and a modicum of power, and the promise that they wouldn’t be killed by the Nazis—for as long as they remained useful. Kapos didn’t have to perform manual slave labor, because they became the overseers of their fellow enslaved Jews. Kapos made their cousins line up in the center of camp whenever the SS wanted to randomly execute someone. I get called a kapo all the time by Zionist Jews, not because it’s a particularly fitting insult for me, but because it’s the meanest thing they can think to say. A kapo is something so much worse than a rat or a pig or a motherfucker. A kapo incites rage.
Understandably, there was plenty of rage to go around as the consequences of the Oslo Accords set in. Palestinians had less control over their lands than ever, and now they were being harassed and brutalized, not just by Israelis, but by their own people in the Palestinian Authority. The backlash to the PA’s new role allowed more militant groups—like Hamas and Islamic Jihad—to challenge the PA’s authority amid the Second Intifada.
The Second Intifada was extremely violent compared to the strikes and boycotts of the first. Suicide bombers targeted crowded civilian areas within Israel, like buses, cafés, and shopping malls. The bombers traded their lives to inflict some of the pain and grief so familiar to Palestinians onto random Israeli people. Only a third of their Israeli victims would be members of the Israeli security forces. These attacks were planned by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and, eventually, even what remained of the PLO, as they tried to stay relevant with this new, more aggressive generation. But the largest portion of suicide attacks came from Hamas. And thus, the Western world was first introduced to Hamas as a group of suicide bombers who blew up buses full of Jewish people, including pregnant women and Holocaust survivors and children.
In Khalidi’s estimation, the Second Intifada “constituted a major setback for the Palestinian national movement. Its consequences for the Occupied Territories were severe and damaging.” In retaliation for the bombings, Israeli forces killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians and reoccupied what cities and towns it had evacuated after the Oslo Accords, “[shattering] any remaining pretense that the Palestinians had or would acquire something approaching sovereignty or real authority over any part of their land.” And on the international stage, “the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the peace negotiations.”
Throughout 2024, a common protest chant at pro-Palestine demonstrations has been “Viva, Viva, Intifada!” And I know the protest leaders mean, like, the concept of intifada, an Arabic word that just means “rebellion” or “uprising.” But given the stark difference and impacts between the capital-I First and Second Intifadas, when they chant “Viva, Viva, Intifada,” I always want to ask, “But, like … wait, which one?”
Perhaps Hamas leaders realized the bloody strategy of the Second Intifada was hurting their own cause, because they largely quit suicide bombings in the mid-2000s and abruptly pivoted towards electoral politics. Hamas ran candidates in the 2006 parliamentary elections, in a campaign that downplayed its historical violence, conservativism, and religiosity, instead promising “reform and change”—a slogan which would rhyme with Barack Obama’s electoral promise of “hope and change” in the US presidential election a year later. In Palestine, Hamas won by a landslide, taking control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah, the largest political party of the PLO.
After the election, Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian groups tried to set aside infighting and come together in pursuit of unity, but Israel and the US were not going to let that happen. Israel vetoed the inclusion of Hamas as part of the Palestinian Authority, and the US Congress passed a bill to ensure US funding would never go to a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas. Numerous nonprofits that sustained the Palestinian people would be forced to shutter. Fatah leaders responded by trying to regain power in the Gaza Strip by attacking Hamas fighters. A bloody battle ensued between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in June 2007, from which Hamas emerged victorious. From then until the present day, Hamas became the de facto authority in the Gaza Strip, operating independently from the Fatah-governed PA in the West Bank.
Israel responded to Hamas’s triumph by imposing the siege of Gaza—walling off the Strip, closing the borders, restricting aid and fuel, and imprisoning two million people in a 140-square-mile concentration camp for the past seventeen years.
Long enough for an entire generation to grow up without a future.
What did Israel think was going to happen?
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In an echo of the First Intifada, the youth of Gaza attempted their own massive nonviolent resistance movement in 2018—the Great March of Return. Every Friday for a year, Palestinians in Gaza marched to the border wall separating them from Israel, demanding an end to the blockade of Gaza and the right to return to their ancestors’ homes. Israeli forces responded to these nonviolent protests with mass murder, killing 266 people and wounding over 30,000. Like the First Intifada, the Great March of Return highlighted the cruelty of the Israeli occupation for an international audience. I had been drifting away from Zionist thinking for a few years already, but 2018 marked the first year I attended a Palestinian demonstration, the year I started reading Palestinian books and calling myself an anti-Zionist.
Dear reader, if you don’t already know, would you like to take a guess who orchestrated the March of Return? Well, orchestrated may not be the right word. Reporting is conflicting, but from what I can tell, the protests started as a spontaneous popular uprising, but were then absorbed and encouraged and sustained by Hamas.
And who do you think insisted that the march continue to be characterized by “peaceful resistance,” and insisted that participants continue “avoiding the militarization of the demonstrations”? Who showed up to march at the front of the crowds and gave speeches, even though he had been one of Israel’s most-wanted targets ever since being released from prison in a hostage exchange and had taken over leadership of Hamas?
That’s right, it was the man, the cause, the rebel fighter with a stick: Yahya Sinwar.
Everyone who participated in the Great March of Return has my deepest respect and admiration for that action. Week after week, for over a year, they walked into range of Israeli snipers on the border wall, risking their lives to highlight the Palestinian struggle to an uncaring world. And it worked—to an extent. The images of Palestinians linked arm and arm, mowed down by body-armored Israeli storm troopers, evoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The marchers’ message reached some of us here in the US, and activated us—it activated me! But not enough of us before Israel started gunning down the protesters. And people can only be reasonably expected to march peacefully into live gunfire for so long. I wouldn’t do it even one time. No way. I’ve already told you I’m a coward.
Yahya Sinwar was no coward. In another interview from 2021, he said about the prospect of his assassination, “The greatest gift the enemy and occupation can give me is to assassinate me, so I can go to Allah as a martyr by their hand. Today I’m 59 years old, and truthfully I prefer to be killed by an F-16 or missiles than die from Covid, or from a stroke, heart attack, car accident, or any other thing people die from.” Here, Sinwar sounds less like Luke Sykwalker and more like another beloved resistance fighter from Star Wars. At the end of A New Hope, Obi Wan Kenobi, the elderly Jedi, is dueling with Darth Vader and glimpses Luke running across the docking bay of the Death Star. Obi Wan taunts Vader, distracting him from his student, by saying, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” He puts up his lightsaber, and Vader slashes—but Obi Wan’s body vanishes into thin air. Vader prods the empty cloak where the Jedi just stood, as Luke and the gang make it onto the Millenium Falcon and escape. For the rest of the trilogy, during moments of great fear and crisis, Luke will see Obi Wan’s ghost or hear his teacher’s steadying voice in his mind, still guiding him from the afterlife … or wherever Jedis go when they vanish from the mortal plane.
Yahya Sinwar did not vanish into mist at the moment of his death. Israel released a picture of his dead body—recovered one day after his final encounter with the drone. In the picture, five IOF soldiers stand over Sinwar’s corpse, which is curled up and cradled by rubble, the blood of his gunshot wound dried and already coated with a layer of dust. The top-down angle distorts perspective, making the soldiers appear twice as large as Sinwar. Hasbarists clearly sought to humiliate Sinwar and demoralize the resistance by publishing the drone-clip and the photos of his corpse, but their publication had the opposite effect. The hashtag #Sinwar quickly racked up two million shares on Twitter, and pro-Palestine social media flooded with praise and mourning for Sinwar.And I’m sure that there are millions of people all over the world who, like me, hadn’t spared a thought for Yahya Sinwar before his death, but will be haunted by the footage of his last moments for the rest of our lives.
Eqbal Ahmad’s assessment, back in the 1980s that due to the unique history of the Jewish people, armed resistance—particularly any that resulted in civilian casualties—served only to strengthen Israel, while weakening the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world, seems to have been borne out by the events of the First and Second Intifadas.
But maybe not by October 7th. In the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, more people worldwide have rallied to Palestine’s cause than ever before. Israel’s retaliatory genocide, and the accompanying gleeful, sadistic content that countless Israelis have posted to social media over the past year, have laid bare the fundamentally racist nature of Zionism. Even among Israel’s formerly most stalwart allies—US Jews—a sea change is occurring. Incredibly, a recent survey found that fully a third of teenage US Jews now “sympathize with Hamas.”
Meanwhile, op-eds claim that “Israeli society is unraveling.” And while I don’t know the metrics for societal unraveling, recently a massive demonstration of over 750,000 people shut down Tel Aviv to protest Netanyahu’s government. The war has cost Israel around $66 billion, its global credit rating has been downgraded, and numerous northern settlements have been abandoned, along with the port of Eilat. New construction has ground to a halt because Israel relied on Palestinians for their hard, manual labor. The Jerusalem Post, in October 2024, exposed just how vulnerable the Israeli economy is—with less than 100,000 highly educated people in tech and medicine propping up the entire economy. These are the types of settlers who tend to possess dual citizenship with other countries, and, according to the head of the Shoresh Institute for Socioeconomic Research, many of those people “are giving up and leaving.” Their departure could cause Israel’s economy to collapse.
The Israeli military, meanwhile, is running out of bombs. At the time of writing, Israel is fighting ground wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, air-striking targets in Syria and Yemen to boot, and being targeted by embargoes from principled anti-genocidal countries around the world. As a result, the IOF has begun rationing armaments—a development Haaretz credits for an increase in Israeli casualties. It turns out that genocide, as the Nazis learned, is extremely costly and difficult to pull off.
I want to return to one statistic I mentioned earlier—that the Israeli forces have dropped more explosives on this tiny, densely packed area of the Gaza Strip in one year than the entire amount of explosives used throughout WWII on the cities of London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined. They’ve bombed Gaza as much as they possibly can. And yes, they’ve likely killed hundreds of thousands of people through this violence and the brutality of their siege. But there are still, surely, more than a million people in Gaza who’ve survived that unbelievable, historic bombardment. The IOF is trying its damndest to exterminate Palestinians, but it’s failing! Because Palestinians in Gaza are more resilient, resourceful, organized, and unified than they could imagine, and, at least in part, because for the past year, Hamas has continued fighting Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip through urban combat.
It’s hard to do a genocide! And if the leaders of Israel don’t quit trying, they seem likely to destroy themselves in the attempt, just as Nazi Germany did.
Even Israeli soldiers are figuring out this war is futile. Their military is facing a crisis of defections. More and more soldiers are refusing to return to their deployments. In October of 2024, just after the one-year anniversary of the war, Israeli Hebrew media outlet Ha-Makom described the collapse of Israeli morale, publishing interviews with soldiers who kept being deployed to the same neighborhoods in Gaza they had previously cleared. “We are like ducks at the (shooting) range,” one IOF soldier said, “we don’t understand what we’re doing here.”
Israel’s loss of stature in the eyes of the world has had major consequences beyond its borders. In the US, the Democratic Party’s association with the genocide likely depressed turnout and contributed to its historic losses in the 2024 election. A global movement of college students engaged in civil disobedience faced brutalization and arrest at the hands of police, finding themselves at odds with the administrators of their own universities. With striking uniformity across the Western world, the ruling class has responded to nonviolent, anti-genocide protests for Palestine with disproportionate police violence. Such brutality can be a radicalizing experience for young people. Just look what became of those kids who marched peacefully in Gaza in 2018.
In a zillion-jillion ways I couldn’t possibly enumerate, the impact of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has touched every corner of the world. It has likely forced everyone on earth with an internet connection to contemplate Palestine at some point over the past year, and its aftershocks have rattled an empire to its foundations. Because let’s be real—Israel is a proxy for the US military. The IOF are Jews who’ve consented to be cannon fodder in exchange for proximity to whiteness and the privilege of brutalizing an Indigenous population. And if US empire in Israel can be defeated, then empire anywhere can be defeated. If Palestine can get free, then anyone, anywhere can get free. And a certain class of people are willing to burn down the world rather than let that happen.
Sinwar must have died understanding, to some degree, the extent of these impacts. And so maybe, staring down the barrel of a flying gun, he died with no regrets at all.
I’ve probably focused on Sinwar too much here. He’s just one man—and the strength of an anticolonial resistance, like Hamas, relies on its decentralization. Israeli media described the killing of Sinwar as “cutting off the head of a snake.” But that’s a shit analogy for a guerilla fighting force like Hamas, and every Israeli and US military strategist should know that. Because an idea like “armed resistance to colonization” is not a snake that has a head to cut off. It’s not an idea that can be killed! Anyone who was involved or responsible for the US’s failed wars on Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan should know that.
And I suspect they actually do know that. All these generals and politicians and Hasbarists. They know Hamas and Hezbollah will never be defeated through force. They just don’t care, because the weapons manufacturers who own them will make trillions whether or not the US empire “loses” or “wins” its forever wars. All that matters is that the war against Indigenous people continues—somewhere, anywhere—forever. For war profiteers, 2023 was the most profitable year in history, with the global defense budget jumping to a record high of $2.4 trillion. And if 2024 doesn’t prove to be significantly higher, I’ll eat my keffiyeh.
In mansions and palaces, from Western Massachusetts to Moscow to Paris to Shanghai, the people who own the means of producing bombs are watching this spectacle of armed resistance and genocide and are, I assume, cackling with glee as they bathe in swimming pools full of money, Scrooge-McDuck-style. Because for every maimed and mutilated human body, their wealth and power becomes more unassailable. Israel is running out of bombs? Cool. That’s a guarantee they’ll sell even more next year.
So does armed resistance actually gain ground against empire, or does it just play into the schemes of the billionaires who sell bombs, and extract the oil that makes the bombs, and pull the puppet-strings of empire? Was any of the last year worth it? When I think about baby Manal, whose first and only hours in this world were shattered by screams and hellfire and exploding shells so loud and violent that her heart just couldn’t take it … When I think about baby Heba, sleeping a few feet away from a murderous drone, protected by nothing but her silence and a thin piece of fabric … .
Was October 7th worth it? The questions of whether a military action is moral, legal, and/or strategic are not necessarily connected. The war crimes committed that day were illegal, according to international law, and immoral, according to my own subjective, privileged, never-remotely-put-to-the-test moral code. But was the operation strategic? Was Hamas’s plan a foolish gambit that woefully underestimated what the scope of Israel’s retaliation would be and banked on assistance that failed to materialize from its allies in the Arab world? Or was October 7th a calculated, accelerationist, 4-D chess move, designed to trigger such incredible violence that Israel would self-destruct in the process of meting it out? Do their intentions matter to the many tens of thousands of lives that have been destroyed in its wake?
Someday, if and when Palestine is free, future Palestinian historians may debate whether that liberation was a direct result of, or in spite of, the attacks of October 7th. I don’t know the answer to that question. But my guess is, I doubt they’ll come to a clear consensus.
Call me naïve, I still believe that words are more powerful than weapons. I think we do a great injustice to the memory of those who lost their lives in nonviolent struggles—in the First Intifada and the March of Return of 2018—if we don’t recognize how those movements primed the world to react in the way it has to October 7th. For me personally—I first started reading Palestinian books in 2018, because of the March of Return. I, and a few other anti-Zionist Jews formed Houston’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in 2021, because we’d been activated by Palestinian journalists reporting on the Sheikh Jarrah protests. We were ready to respond on October 7th, as anti-Zionist Jews standing in solidarity with Palestinian people, because of the education that had already been spread around the world by earlier nonviolent movements. It wasn’t killing and abductions that inspired me to say “Genocide bad” on October 8th. It was fucking poems! The poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Mohammed el-Kurd, and the prose of Hala Alyan and Raja Shehadeh, which I had only bought and read because nonviolent struggle had caught my attention from the other side of the world.
Khalidi, in a recent interview on the Bad Hasbara podcast, shared some historical evidence that this battleground of words—of public opinion—is at least equally important for an anticolonial struggle as the physical battlegrounds of armed resistance. He references several anticolonial struggles many point to as examples of the triumph of armed resistance, clarifying that, “[Algerian revolutionaries] won over huge segments of French public opinion, and that’s why they won. You think they were winning in … the mountains? They weren’t winning. The French army could’ve gone on indefinitely if French public opinion hadn’t turned against the war. The US Army could’ve gone on indefinitely in Vietnam or in Iraq if American public opinion hadn’t turned against the war.” Likewise, Israel may go on indefinitely killing people in Gaza, unless public opinion turns even more decisively against this genocide.
Here, Khalidi reveals the foolishness of comparing real-life violence with glorified, whitewashed, Hollywood movies. Unlike on the Death Star, there is no single, convenient self-destruct button that Hamas can hit to wipe out the Iron Dome. Unlike in the Hunger Games, assassinating one corrupt leader, such as Netanyahu, will do nothing to dismantle the Zionist project. There’s no simplistic, one-shot military solution. For as long as Palestinians are under assault, Hamas—or some group like them—will continue to resist, because as Khalidi also explains in that interview, “Occupation breeds resistance—inevitably, necessarily, historically, always, everywhere.” But Khalidi also cautions that due to the fact that Israel is now a settler-colony several generations old, where the people claim a profound, religious tie to the land, they will not give up Palestine as easily as French colonizers in Algeria or USian soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq did. Israelis will continue occupying Gaza “indefinitely,” unless that massive turn in public opinion can end the killing. And every day this genocide grinds on, Palestinian families and children are suffering and dying in some of the most violent ways imaginable.
After the year we’ve had, some may doubt the power of public opinion, and, granted, due to the influence of corporate money, Western political leaders are increasingly divorced from concern with public opinion. But they’re not completely divorced yet. If Israeli opinion continues to turn against this war, they may run out of soldiers to fight it. If it becomes so unpopular that all the tech bros leave Israel, their economy may collapse, and they’ll no longer be able to fund it. And, if US public opinion turns overwhelmingly and bipartisanly against Israeli aggression, far more decisively than it is right now, we may actually be able to stop the flow of armaments and aid to Israel, which would render their apartheid state nonviable in a matter of months.
So I think the reporting of Ghazawi journalists like Bisan Owda, Hind Khoudary, Belal Khaled, Wael Dahdouh, Motaz Azaiza, Ahmed Khouta, and nine-year-old Lama Abu Jamous, to name just a few, has been far more effective at forwarding the cause of Palestinian liberation than Hamas’s attack on October 7th was. But, then again, Bisan had spent years before October 7th trying to spread Palestinians’ story on social media. Calling herself the Hakawati, or storyteller, she made beautiful, well-produced videos educating the world in English and Arabic about life under occupation in Gaza. But she did not gain an audience of millions until after October 7th. If Hamas had never carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and Israel had never commenced this mask-off genocide, would any of us in the West be listening to Palestinian journalists on a daily basis? Would I even know Bisan Owda’s name?
Maybe, as Ghassan Kanafani insisted, it takes some combination of art and stories and education and bullets to overthrow a colonial occupation. Maybe the fact that he represented all those strategies in one man was why Israel assassinated him in 1972, when Mossad agents planted a bomb in his car in Beirut, Lebanon. They showed no concern that someone might be with him when the bomb went off—and there was. The explosion also killed his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamees. Similarly, in 2024, Mossad agents would plant bombs in the pagers used by thousands of people in Lebanon in order to target Hezbollah agents—without concern for how many children and doctors and nurses would be killed as collateral. I bring Israeli terrorism up, because in all this scrutiny on Hamas, we risk losing sight, once again, of who are far and away the most blood-soaked, genocidal, raping, torturing, massacring military force in occupied Palestine today. Let’s not forget that in just the first five months of this genocide, Israel killed more children than were killed over the past four years in all armed conflicts worldwide.
So while I’ll condemn a war crime, I won’t condemn armed resistance in the face of such brutal terrorism. And again, I think no one should give a shit what I think about Hamas, because I’ve never experienced anything like the suffering Israel has inflicted upon the people of Gaza.
But I fear I might someday. Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, two scholars who studied imperialism, describe an “imperial boomerang,” the idea that any repressive techniques an imperial power uses on its colonies will eventually be deployed domestically, on its own civilians.
We’re going off the rails in the US. In this last election, as both political parties embraced genocide, xenophobia, and populist nationalism in their campaigns, it became clear that whatever pathetic wisps of leftism have been holding back full-throated fascism in the US are now gone. Corporate capture of US politics seems total and unassailable. Trump is retaking power, emboldened and unfettered by Congress or the Supreme Court. Politically, shit seems on track to get real bad from here on out. And this collapse of neoliberalism will coincide with catastrophic effects from climate change, as our planet hurtles rapidly past 1.5 degrees of warming.
A decade or so from now, will I find myself crouched in an abandoned building, hiding out from the killer drones that hunt me, just as “Metalhead” predicted? Just as my friends in Gaza have already experienced? Will the imperial boomerang of the genocide of Gaza come smashing into the US’s heartland?
Maybe.
So what do I think of Hamas and Yahya Sinwar?
I think war crimes are bad. And, I think, if it comes down to it, I hope I have the courage to throw a fucking stick.
NOTES
1. See Chapter 9 for this very discussion. ↑
2. I happen to agree that antisemitism is a phenomenon fundamentally linked to European history, not Arab or Muslim history. See Chapter 8 for lots more on that topic. ↑
3. Some anti-Zionists object to the notion that any Israelis are civilians, because all Israelis participate in and benefit from settler colonialism, and because Israel has a policy of mandatory military service. However in 2020, the Jerusalem Post reported that fully a third of Israeli youth do not enlist, and neither do people who move to Israel from other countries. Civilians in many countries, including the US, benefit from and are complicit in violent colonial systems, and you can point out this complicity without conflating those people with active duty soldiers. I find the flattening of the distinction between Israeli people who may or may not have served a tour in the military at some point in the past with currently-employed military and security forces to be imprecise and dangerous. Eroding the distinction between civilians and active combatants benefits people who commit genocide, not their victims. And echoing this kind of rhetoric gives credence to Zionists who say things like, “there are no civilians in Gaza.” So I will be preserving that distinction, and when I say “Israeli civilian” in this text, I mean Israelis who are not currently employed by the IOF or security forces. ↑
4. Before the whataboutists come for me, let me be clear: Yes, I absolutely condemn the police abduction (arrest) of 250,000-plus children in the United States every year! ↑
5. The BDS movement (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) defines Normalization as: “dealing with or presenting something that is inherently abnormal, such as oppression and injustice, as if it were normal. Normalization with/of Israel is, then, the idea of making occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism seem normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime instead of supporting the struggle led by the Indigenous Palestinian people to end the abnormal conditions and structures of oppression.” ↑
6. That stunning cover was done by revolutionary Egyptian street artist, Ganzeer, who also designed and illustrated the cover of this book! ↑
7. he Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in which Zionist paramilitary forces (you might also call them terrorists) stole the homes and lands of 750,000 Palestinian people at gunpoint. Israelis call this their “War of Independence.” ↑
8. Mossad is the national intelligence agency for Israel. ↑
The post “But Hamas!” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
