Yahya Sinwar has already achieved a mythic status. Alongside all the expected Islamist reflections there are some who compare him to Mandela or Guevara, leaders who whatever criticisms one can make of their ideas or actions, were not advocates of a conservative, sectarian ideology.
There is no doubting his personal courage and moral strength. He was unbroken by twenty-three years of brutal treatment in Israeli jails, and he died defying the colonising apartheid state with his last breath. Part of his appeal will be that no one can imagine, least of all Palestinian youth, the Palestinian Authority leaders around Abbas doing anything similar.
History will write the name of Yahya Sinwar with heroes. Your name will be written with Omar Mukhtar, Guevara, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and so on. The Resistance will remain and Palestine will remain forever.
— Bassem Youssef Commentary (@bassem_youssef9) October 17, 2024
I stand with Gaza, Palestine. pic.twitter.com/TdR0xVMmhk
However, while we can compare the events of October 7th which Sinwar organised to a slave revolt with all the accompanying violence and brutality, any assessment of Sinwar has to take into account what his ideas were and the utter failure of his militarist, religious world view. His strategic choices were not an answer to the barbarous colonial oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.
One way of thinking about the difference between a revolutionary Marxist like Guevara and an Islamist like Sinwar is to consider what the world would look like if their ideas prevailed. Guevara offered a humanist Marxism to create societies in which people could live with dignity free from poverty, racism and exploitation.
The Hamas Charter offers a distorted echo of this:
“Hamas believes that the message of Islam upholds the values of truth, justice, freedom and dignity and prohibits all forms of injustice and incriminates oppressors irrespective of their religion, race, gender or nationality. Islam is against all forms of religious, ethnic or sectarian extremism and bigotry.”
It also correctly points out that:
“The Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others; it is hostile to the Palestinian people and to their aspiration for freedom, liberation, return and self-determination.”
The document has two sentences on women, both of which read like a patronising afterthought.
It is a matter of historical record that the Islamist strand in Palestinian society was nurtured by the Israelis as a counterweight to the secular leftist forces. Its economic ideas are based on an understanding that Islam favours capitalism and the free market. Obliged by its militarist understanding of liberation to get weapons from Iran and Hezbollah, it is unable to develop a critique of the reactionary nature of both, even if it thought one was necessary. Where Guevara offered an idea of internationalism and liberation, Sinwar offered a confessional, capitalist state.
We may never know what Sinwar’s thinking was when he launched the attack on October 7th. The most charitable view is that it would be a catalyst to an uprising in the West Bank, offensives from Hezbollah and Iran and some sort of crisis in Israeli society. What he didn’t predict was that Netanyahu would respond with a genocidal war enabled by US bombs and Starmer’s political support. And this is a war which has given the most exterminationist elements in Israeli society the taste of victory as they plan to kill as much of the population of Gaza as they came before expelling the survivors and settling the land. The Democrats and Labour are their partners in this project.
The violence of October 7th has been responded to thousands of times over by the Israeli regime and its openly fascist components are now setting policy. Irrespective of Sinwar’s personal courage or organisational talents, his death reminds us that Islamism will not free Palestine or emancipate the peoples of the region.
Source >> Liam redux
Art (51) Book Review (108) Books (110) Capitalism (65) China (77) Climate Emergency (97) Conservative Government (90) Conservative Party (45) COVID-19 (44) Economics (37) EcoSocialism (50) Elections (82) Europe (44) Fascism (54) Film (49) Film Review (61) France (68) Gaza (58) Imperialism (97) Israel (116) Italy (44) Keir Starmer (51) Labour Party (110) Long Read (42) Marxism (48) Palestine (140) pandemic (78) Protest (145) Russia (323) Solidarity (126) Statement (46) Trade Unionism (133) Ukraine (326) United States of America (124) War (359)