On The Assassination of Yahya Sinwar

Who gets to be a freedom fighter and who gets deemed a terrorist?

A few weeks ago I found out about Yahya Sinwar’s murder in a WAWOG group chat that I’m in. Immediately, my heart sunk. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. It had already been a bloody month with the bombings in the South of Lebanon, the destruction of Beirut (one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, I’ve been told) obliterated. Just a few days ago, the Zionists were said to have murdered nineteen people in Lebanon’s ancient city of Baalbek. The BBC reported:

“It came hours after tens of thousands of residents fled in response to evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military that covered the entire city and two neighbouring towns.

Mayor Mustafa al-Shell told the BBC more than 20 strikes were reported on Wednesday afternoon in the Baalbek area, with five inside the city itself, where there is a Unesco-listed ancient Roman temple complex.”

An ancient Roman temple, some of the oldest churches known to mankind, an ancient culture and people — all desecrated by Zionists. I find it interesting that when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Banyiman statues in Afghanistan two decades ago the international community UNDERSTANDABLY was up in arms, so where is the same outrage for the destruction of the birthplace of Jesus? For old Roman temples to be demolished without remorse or pity?

We’ve accepted that Zionists can and should expand their borders because that’s just the way it is. Hamas is not in Lebanon, but of course, it’s still being bombed and obliterated. Despite Netanyahu continually talking about a “greater Israel,” meaning Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia - we pretend as if this is normal. It acts like an insolent child that the international community refuses to restrain, as the occupation and its inherent greed and desire for destruction permeates everything.

Zionism is all pretense and if it must be this way, why must we lie about it? Why must we pretend that what is happening is not happening? Why must we code the outstanding violence of Zionism into denial and dismay at its critique?

And, then, a question I keep coming back to w/r/t Sinwar is why must resistance against colonial theft and savagery always be seen as thuggery?

I started re-reading “Self Defense” by French professor Elsa Dorlin recently. In the book, she writes about how slave masters / imperial overlords made it illegal for Black, Indigenous and brown people to revolt. Inversely, the colonizer could do whatever they wanted to the Black, Indigenous, Brown, or Colonized body. “Article 43 of the Black Code “absolved masters who kill slaves under their authority,” and although the murder of a slave belonging to a different master was punishable by death, in most cases the killer was acquitted.”

This particular law reminds me so much of the Patriot Act, a reminder that all law is colonial: “Any royal subject who saw an illegal gathering or meeting had the right to arrest the guilty parties “and take them to prison, though they be officers not yet subject to any decree.” Similarly, many of the policies that segregate Palestinians in Palestine were enforced by British colonizers even before the Zionists. Collective punishment and administrative detention (detention without trial) were both introduced by the British and have been extensively carried on by Zionists and become the norm. Meaning Zionists are continuing colonial standards of extraction and land theft because they are colonizers.

But as Dorlin writes: “Patriotism is the biggest obstacle to internationalizing the struggle, and the idea of a people’s army ready to defend its borders is just a myth in the service of capital.”

Beyoncé and all these celebrities wholeheartedly in defense of empire is what this last week of America revealed to me. Not that we didn’t already know this but this nation state is so far gone on duplicity that the only thing that feels impending is total collapse, a boiling pot that is reaching a boiling point.

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I knew publically mourning Sinwar could be misconstrued and I noticed that any public declaration of sadness or remembrance of his life was swiftly deleted on IG. A few days ago I wrote about him in a caption and immediately I was shadowbanned.

Just a note to add in that this is what they call repression.

If the Zionists are innocent, why not let the general public decide on their own without propaganda and silencing? No civil society should have to hide what it does or doesn’t do. And yet, the fact remains: there are no foreign journalists that have been let into Gaza since October. Why?

If it’s not a genocide let foreign journalists onto the ground and let them decide! And then how about not murdering the Palestinian journalists on the ground as well? Last week, the Zionists put six Palestinian Al Jazeera journalists’ lives on the line when the IOF designated them as members of resistance factions. “Suggesting their imminent targeting for assassination,” This is after IOF forces raided Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah and forced them to shut down at gunpoint. CNN reported this a few weeks ago, “Al Jazeera’s office in Ramallah has been operational for decades. It became even more essential for the network after Israel shut down its Jerusalem office and seized some of its communication equipment in May, prompting condemnation from the United Nations and rights groups over what they said were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s moves to restrict press freedoms.”

Remember their names, they are begging for you to care about their lives.

Hossam Shabat,

Anas Al Sharif,

Ashraf Saraj,

Alaa Salama,

Ismail Abu Omar

and Talal Aruki

fariha_roisin

A post shared by @fariha_roisin

The Western consensus is that all men who fight back against the state (especially Muslims) are terrorists and savages who deserve their slaughter. Especially leaders of Hamas, we must find them despicable, inordinate, cruel.

But when you distill anybody into good or bad you lose the meaning of humanity, you lose the complexity of life itself.

This is what I have been most confused about this time… you’re telling me, that the most important actors and artists of our time… that all these people in the world have nothing to say about a genocide? Or, they might be silently cheering it on? This reality has given me a lot of clarity about what these people might think of me, what they do think of me truly, what they really think of my Muslimness. The other day I was lucky enough to interview Aisha Gawad about a piece that will come out soon. If you don’t know who she is, look up “Albany Book Festival.” The vitriol she is getting simply because she privately said no to being on a panel with someone she didn’t agree with politically is an action any writer could or should take. I know I would have done the same thing. But that decision was unprofessionally taken out of context to mean something it didn’t, so it could become a scandal, a story. But these moments become a stunning reflection of the fallacy of Zionism and Zionist sympathizers — they can only abstract the truth, they can’t ever face it. So everything they do is a game to trap you in projected anti-Semitism, rather than to have a true and honest good-faith conversation about the full reality that encompasses Palestine and the genocidal machinery that has been invested in collapsing it for the last 100 years. This isn’t an opinion, this is a historical fact.

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What we fail to remember when we talk about October 7th, or rather Al Aqsa Flood, is that it was an attempt at a prisoner exchange, and that is the sole reason why hostages were taken. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, are in prison under “administrative detention,” which means without trial, without charge. Thousands of Palestinians. Without charge or trial. Including children.

Ghina Abi-Ghannam writes about the oldest serving Palestinian political prisoner, Walid Daqqa (who died in Zionist prison this year, after 38 years), and his work, “Searing Consciousness (Or on Redefining Torture), she explains: “Taking the prison as the unit of analysis to study the climate of violence that Palestinians endure… Walid recounts Israel’s own words that identify Palestinian prisoners as the solid nucleus of the Intifada, and so, the searing of Palestinian consciousness intentionally begins with the body of prisoners and then ripples outwards to cover the totality of Palestine.”

In a recent conversation on the podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism comrades Kaleem Hawa and Jeanine Hourani speak about Daqqa and the specific function of the prison as a disorganization of Palestinian resistance “to fight and dismember the Palestinian struggle.”

“The more Palestinians resist the stronger the policing and incarceration they experience. Incarceration is a Zionist strategy to isolate Palestinian freedom fighters and dissidents from the rest of Palestinian society. There’s a lot of fragmentation in the (Zionist) prison system and imprisonment tries to enforce onto the Palestinian people whether it’s the separation between the mind and body or the separation from the resistance fighter and the masses /the street. This is why the Zionist carceral system targets our leaders,” says Hourani.

Because of this, the notorious brutality of Zionist prisons themselves become sites of psychological, physical (and as we recently saw again in Sde Teiman) sexual torture. And because of their brutality, they also become sites of resistance. Prisons have always produced resistance. Lest we forget that Sinwar himself was a political prisoner.

Haneen Odetallah in an essay entitled, “The philosophy of Hamas in the writings of Yahya Sinwar” for Mondoweiss writes: “Sinwar spent 23 years of his life in prison, including four years in solitary confinement, but he did not waste any of those years. He learned Hebrew and everything he could about his enemy, even formulating and executing a long-term intelligence plan from behind bars, which at the time was far-reaching. Sinwar studied and thought extensively, and he also wrote.”

Why do we refuse to humanize Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims? Why is it so hard for us to understand that anybody in this situation would resist? Nobody would cower. But we’ve made it illegal for the “savage” (their words not mine) to fight back. So we deem them terrorists instead and create another mythology around their barbarism. Meanwhile, the truth remains: US bombs shred Palestinian children into pulp and Zionist soldiers shoot children in the head and heart with snipers.

It reminds me of this Franz Fanon quote from The Wretched of the Earth, “This threatening atmosphere of violence and missiles in no way frightens or disorients the colonized. We have seen that their entire recent history has prepared them to ‘understand’ the situation. Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped, there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homo- geneity. The colonized have adapted to this atmosphere. For once they are in tune with their time.”

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In a conversation with Sinwar, journalist Francesca Borri writes about him and Hamas. I would encourage you to read it because it’s so revelatory about who he was, despite who we think we know him to be.

“If you are honest, if you observe rules—you don't get in trouble. And actually, at that point, you are their guest, before being a journalist: they would protect you against everyone and everything. They are men of faith. And like all men of faith, they keep their word.”

This is something that struck me since reading the interview and has struck me about the work of Hamas and Sinwar. I grew up believing that all men who were deemed “Islamists” were inherently bad men. They scared me. Their furrowed brows and guttural Arabic—even as someone who was raised speaking Arabic (I went to Arabic school until I was 8) I felt uncomfortable around it. It wasn’t until years later that I realized this was internalized Islamophobia that was normalized as I was taught to suspect and fear men who looked like my father, and to mistrust them.

Men like Sinwar are only ever damned in the Western imagination, there’s no space for him to be complex, to be a person. What’s most dangerous about Sinwar is that he is just a man. That means, like all men, he deserves to be humanized. He deserves to be unraveled from flattened interpretation and the posturing of Western propaganda that has framed him into being one tone, a terrorist (not a freedom fighter), is an image that’s collapsing in front of our very eyes because there’s access to who he was and what he believed in.

There are so many parts of the interview with Borri that astound me but these two screenshots really summarize the love and resilience that Sinwar felt for his people.

This is from an interview with Borri in 2018.

We’ve been continuously told that Hamas leaders are millionaires living luxury lives as the average Palestinian suffered but Sinwar was accidentally murdered - they didn’t even know it was him until later (which goes to show you the totality of Zionist intelligence) - but he was on the front lines, fighting. Like a warrior.

Perhaps it shocks you that I would try to understand a man whose violence has only been misunderstood as contempt—not a plea of desperation. Nobody wants to be a resistance fighter, nobody wants to sacrifice their one life to become a martyr so the sooner we collectively realize we have not given Palestinians a choice, that we as a society have not protected them and that is the very reason they have chosen violence as a weapon. You have to remember that Hezbollah was created in 1985 and Hamas was created 1987. Palestinians have tried peace. They tried peace every year before 1987. They tried peace in the Great March of the Return in 2018… thousands of unarmed Palestinians were injured because the IOF fired at UNARMED people asking for peace. This interview with Borri about a ceasefire was from 2018. They tell us Hamas doesn’t want peace when they keep assassinating the same leaders calling for peace. Peace is not more settlements. Peace is not more settlers raping and murdering and taking Palestinian life and land. It seems the Zionists want unrest because that’s how one dehumanizes and destroys, continued unrest creates tension and a sick population. They murder Palestinians however they can - slowly and quickly too.

Zionists have no historical truth and they sure as hell have no historical references - except the Holocaust. But a victim who does not understand how easily it can and does become the oppressor is one of the most lethal and dangerous combinations in a person imaginable.

“Colonial violence, in turn, always has to be entirely excessive. All the wrangling about proportionality by people still invested in international law misses the point entirely. When challenged, colonial power has no choice but to be totally disproportionate. It has to carpet-bomb neighborhoods. Not for any military reason, but because it has to constantly strive to re-establish non-reciprocity. This is why the Israeli state understands the restoring of deterrence as an exercise in destruction. It measures its political achievements in scales of rubble. It expresses its political aesthetic in the dissemination of almost sublime images of ruination,” writes Nasser Abourahme, in his essay In tune with their time.

I’ve been asking myself this these last few months, but why does one become a resistance fighter?

Abi-Ghannam explains something pertinent: “Walid reveals to us that the incomprehensibly asymmetric military violence deployed by Israeli forces is neither an indicator of episodes of pathological madness nor a security mission to materially threaten “terrorist infrastructure.” Instead, he postulates that the purpose of continuously inflicting unimaginable scales of death and destruction is primarily to change public sentiment towards Palestinian resistance, where the consequential blame of Zionist violence becomes displaced onto Palestinian resistance.”

This is exactly what happened on October 7th - it became a story about Hamas apparently raping women who have still not been identified, with zero documentation and a lot of questions. We know the number keeps changing of how many Israelis were killed on October 7th, we know the Zionist forces used the “Hannibal Directive” which ABC News Australia recently reported, in a headline “Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the 'Hannibal Directive' during October 7 chaos.” And no forty beheaded Israeli babies were ever found — but plenty of Palestinian ones were.

Why are we so offended by the New York Times? It’s because their misinformation and desire to protect imperial interests over truth for decades has directly aided and abetted the war crimes of the US government against particularly the Muslim and Arab worlds—but Vietnam, Korea and the Phillipines before that — basically anyone that the US wanted to conquer. The NYT have been manufacturing consent to choke Iraq, bomb Syria for decades. All we ask of you is to pay attention. Connect the dots. Don’t look away.

These are actual headlines.

So the story becomes about Hamas’ “deadly attack” and nothing about Al Aqsa Flood, and the real reason for the attack being to free political prisoners. Sinwar was liberated in a prisoner swap himself called the “Loyalty of the Free” deal, and that’s what they were doing, they were attempting to free their people. Israelis in exchange for Palestinian ones. Until the IOF unleashed the Hannibal Directive.

“This process rewires discursive associations to identify resistance to Zionism as the breeder of violence, as opposed to the very structure of the Zionist project in Palestine as an aggressive establishment that requires existentially eliminating Palestinian presence to ensure its survival,” writes Abi-Ghannam.

Rather then understanding why someone becomes a resistance fighter maybe it’s important to note that Palestinian resistance is flattened again and again because there are no dimensions of reality in the make-believe world where Zionists are the sole victims. Where they are also the chosen ones who aren’t perpetuating violence as they announce again and again that they are. A lethal combo that only churns delusion as opposed to real clarified accountable living. The entire world watches as the Zionist occupation obliterates the Middle East for a land grab, for what they believe is rightfully theirs (and theirs alone) and we can’t even morally object without getting silenced or suppressed.

“On the other, an incapacity stemming from the capture of our grammars in liberal politics of respectability and recognition that are fundamentally incapable of processing anticolonial political violence in anything other than flat moral frames that invariably privilege state power and reify the legal categories of colonial history,” writes Abourahme. “Here armed struggle is read only at the point of its transgression of a moral limit, and we end up with a kind of performative moral disavowal that folds entire anticolonial struggles into the pathologies of sadism and vengeance (only a short step away from the language of ‘barbarism’ and ‘savagery’). This incapacity dogs large sections of a global left seemingly unable to do its own revolutionary histories any justice in the present.”

We know Nelson Mandela was famously on the US terrorist list, until 2008. Like Sinwar, Mandela was in prison for 27 years for “conspiring to overthrow the state.” Not only was Mandela also very pro-Palestine, who understood the interconnectedness of the struggle against imperial violence, but he also became a revered depiction of anti-colonial resistance and transitioned into a beloved statement that was internationally respected. I mourn, too, what Sinwar could have been in a liberated Palestine. Had he not been forced to fight.

We think these men enjoy the cruelty of war without seeing how their resistance is an act of faith in the future of a better world. They are fighting to bring us closer to justice and therefore peace—because there is no peace without justice.

I think the above interview with Sinwar shows his vulnerability despite the stoic and harsh depictions of what we want to believe of him in the West. “Do you like war? And so why should I?” he asks boldly, importantly. Why is it the assumption that the resistance likes violence when if there were no occupation tomorrow there would be no resistance to it. To talk about Hamas without regarding the total truth of their existence is to, again, lack historical reference and truth.

“I want them free.” A simple request from a man who was born in a refugee camp and spent decades in prison. People admire Sinwar because of this, because he was said to have integrity. Because he was fighting for the children, for his people, not using them as human shields as the West would like you to believe. He lived amongst his people and nobody offered him up for a year. They protected him and he died protecting them. Why else does one resist if not in hope for something better, knowing another way is possible?

I am haunted by these words from Daqqa:

“I must confess that I had not planned anything—not to become a fighter, nor to join any faction or party, nor even to engage in politics. Not because I deem all of this wrong, nor because politics is undesirable or reprehensible as some perceive it to be, but simply because these were vast & intricate subjects for me. I did not become an organizer or a politician because of a premeditated conviction. Instead, I could have simply carried on with my life as a painter or a gas station worker, as I had done until the moment of my arrest. I could have chosen to marry one of my relatives at an early age, as many do and perhaps have had seven or ten children. I could have bought a shipping container or become an expert on trading cars and hard currencies. All of this was within the realm of possibility until I bore witness to the atrocities of the Lebanon War and the subsequent massacres of Sabra and Shatila.”

The same massacres that broke June Jordan. Daqqa was just a human, a man, someone whose life was abstracted into violence because he refused to cower and die.

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Abourahme writes perfectly about the biggest global movement for Palestine that’s ever been mobilized: “They look at Gaza and see not just a hundred years of colonisation in Palestine, but the last five hundred years of Euro-American racial colonial domination. The campaign in Gaza is like a condensed restaging of every colonial war in history, bearing every hallmark: the pummeling of dispossessed and besieged peoples by an overwhelming military power in the name of self-defense and ‘western civilisation and values;’ the demonology and language of savagery, zoology…”

We see ourselves in Palestinians in our own colonial pasts. Whether we be Bangladeshi, Irish, Haitian - this global struggle for liberation is all of ours.

I think of the mass suicide taken by women in Sudan last week so they wouldn’t be raped by UAE-backed RSF soldiers and mourn how the West (and in this case UAE, too) profits off of war. If you don’t believe me - look up who is profiting from the barbarism being unleashed by Zionist occupation forces in Gaza. It sure as hell are not the Palestinians. You just want them - and the people of Sudan and Congo - to die silently, right? But they won’t.

“Palestine, in this sense, is the living archive of our future. But it is also the name of a renewed planetary consciousness,” writes Abourahme. “It has been the cause for the largest global student movement in generations, the biggest manifestations of left internationalism the west has seen in decades, and probably the largest mobilisations of Jewish anti-Zionist activism America has ever seen. These gains have not been won despite Palestine’s war of liberation but because of it; without the challenge of Palestine’s anticolonialism, without the ability to upend the colonial logic.”

Sinwar was just a man, at the end of the day, a man that loved his people enough to die in battle for them. Injured but still skillful, even until his final breath he fought. That’s courage. Liberation is not given - it’s fought for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to embody honesty against an opponent that has no moral compass and therefore lacks honesty, vulnerability, even earnestness. This time has forced me to stand behind my word that much more. I want to be a person who means what I say. When I say liberation, I want to say it with my chest. So I work on my ego, on my humility. I praise Allah for everything. Even the things that hurt. I think of what it means to be a martyr. To die for the belief in a better world. For liberation. In a world with such cruelty there’s something astonishing about that. Glory to our martyrs. I dream of a world where nobody has to resist oppression, where nobody is forced to fight for their lives. I believe in a world where we all matter. Where all death matters as much as all life.