On October 17, US President Joe Biden compared the combat death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar the previous day in Rafah in the Gaza Strip to the US killing of Osama Bin Laden.

“To my Israeli friends,” said Biden, “this is no doubt a day of relief and reminiscence, similar to the scenes witnessed throughout the United States after President [Barack] Obama ordered the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011.”

This appears to be the first time a senior U.S. official has publicly admitted that Obama did in fact “order the raid to kill” Bin Laden. Official accounts previously maintained the fiction of a kill-or-capture mission, in which US troops were to capture Bin Laden alive if possible, but were forced to kill him. 

Biden also implied that people all over the United States had publicly celebrated the death of bin Laden, but that was not true. A few thousand people gathered at the site of the World Trade Center in New York and in front of the White House, but, unless they were watching those gatherings on cable news, most Americans did not witness the mythical nationwide “scenes” Biden described.

At the time, US media reflected the public’s mixed feelings about bin Laden’s assassination more truthfully than Biden did. An NPR article titled, “Is it Wrong to Celebrate Bin Laden’s Death?” quoted a beer-drinking “reveler” at the World Trade Center site who questioned what they were all doing there. “It’s weird to celebrate someone’s death,” she said. “It’s not exactly what we’re here to celebrate, but it’s wonderful that people are happy.”

An article in The Atlantic described the gathering at the White House as “surreal,” saying it was “jubilant and fiercely American, but, other than that, it did not know what it was.” The author, Alexis Madrigal, wrote that the only focal points for the gathering were a few roving TV cameras. Many in the crowd were Georgetown students, who led chants of “USA, USA”, and “Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye,” interspersed with renditions of the Georgetown fight song. When the students flagged, Washington Capitals hockey fans stepped up, chanting “Caps, Caps, Caps.”

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“There were no transcendent moments,” Madrigal observed, “Perhaps people did their own private accounting, but as a public, we were loud and boorish and silly. We treated the killing of a man who promoted the killing of thousands of Americans like a game with no consideration of the past or future costs.”

Biden’s linking of Yahya Sinwar’s killing to Bin Laden’s relied on the mythical, potted version of American history peddled by cable news and corporate politicians like himself, his Vice President Kamala Harris and his predecessor Donald Trump.

 Whatever they say becomes the news, and what really happened in the real world is swept down the memory hole as in George Orwell’s 1984. Their version of reality is a dumbed-down, politicized view of the world tailored for political TV ads and teleprompters, leaving Americans hopelessly misinformed about the world we live in, and dangerously so in times of real crisis.

It is no wonder that young people who want to understand the crisis in Gaza turn directly to firsthand accounts and images of the genocide to find out what our “leaders” and the “news” refuse to tell or show us.

So how should we see Yahya Sinwar?

The context in which Americans hear “Hamas” from politicians and the media defines it as a “terrorist” group, setting the stage for Biden to claim that killing its leader “proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes.”

The whole premise of America’s war on “terror” was that terrorism is the product of religious indoctrination and an irrational view of the world that leads people to “hate our freedom.” The warmongers used this framing to deprive the public of the natural ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and apply the “golden rule”: to treat others the way we would want them to treat us.

After 76 years of gradual genocide in Palestine, there are Palestinian exiles all over the world, including in the United States. Many Americans know Palestinians and know that they are remarkably patient and tolerant people. They have lived under successive occupations, by the Ottoman Turks, the British and now the Israelis. They have never been quick to resort to armed resistance, and many still reject it and continue to work peacefully toward their liberation.

But to deny that they have a legitimate right to resist the militarized theft of their homeland by Israel, after 76 years of seeing it invaded, seized, occupied and annexed, piece by piece, is not “justice.” It is a historic injustice.

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To say that Israel “has a right to defend itself” cannot possibly justify the genocidal mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, every day for the past year, now escalating yet again in northern Gaza. Israel does have a right to defend itself — that is a truism — but only within the limits of necessity and proportionality, and not in Gaza, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July, international law requires Israel to withdraw its forces from all the territories it occupied in 1967, including Gaza.

So, if the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal military occupation by Israel, who is to lead that resistance? Hamas emerged as the leading resistance group after the previous Fatah government let Israel use the 1990s Oslo Accords as cover to keep building Israeli settlements all over the land it was supposed to withdraw from and return to the Palestinians. 

The failure of the Oslo Accords persuaded most Palestinians that they needed new leadership, and so they elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian parliament in 2006, with Ismail Haniyeh, also now killed by Israel, as prime minister. 

The Hamas government rejected the previous government’s recognition of Israel, its renunciation of armed resistance and its commitments under the Oslo Accords. This was met with international opposition led by Israel and the United States, who imposed economic sanctions while continuing to support and fund President Mahmoud Abbas and an unelected Fatah government in the West Bank. 

Fighting between Fatah and Hamas killed 600 people and left the elected Hamas government in power in Gaza, with Abbas and Fatah in control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The fog of war on October 7, 2023

Israel tightened its economic blockade of Gaza and conducted regular bombing campaigns and invasions of Gaza that killed 1,965 people in 2008 and 2009, and 2,327 in 2014. By the time it launched its full-scale genocide in October 2023, Israel had already killed 7,087 Palestinians since 2008. 

Hamas’s breakout from Gaza on October 7, 2023, was initially a well-planned military operation that surprised Israel’s defense forces and the whole world. But it went badly wrong when the Israeli military crumbled and militiamen from different Palestinian groups found themselves confronting civilians in kibbutzes and thousands of young people at the Nova music festival.

It is still impossible to be sure how many civilians the Palestinians really killed that day, and how many more were killed by Israeli forces responding to the break-out with overwhelming force. Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun have documented how Israel activated its “Hannibal Directive,” under which Israeli forces were ordered to kill their own people rather than allow them to be taken to Gaza as prisoners. Israeli forces also destroyed homes in kibbutzes with both Palestinian militants and Israeli civilians still inside them.

Of the 780 unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7, Palestinians are presumed to have killed hundreds, while Israeli military forces killed hundreds more. The Israeli military deployed far more powerful weapons than the Palestinians, including 8 Apache attack helicopters, 2 F-16 and 2 F-35 warplanes, 2 Hermes drones and 23 Merkava tanks. 

If an accurate count were to be made, it is entirely possible that the Israeli forces killed more civilians than the Palestinians did, as well as some of the 374 Israeli troops, police and security forces who were also killed that day.

After a year of brutal, indiscriminate, criminal Israeli assaults, the fact that Hamas is still an effective military force defending Gaza reveals a high level of military organization and discipline, which stands in sharp contrast to the Israeli-propagated image of a bloodthirsty rabble on an undisciplined killing spree on October 7. 

It is also still unclear how many of the Palestinians who surged into Israel that day were fully trained Hamas special operations forces, how many were members of other armed groups, and how many were just stunned Palestinian civilians excitedly joining an unexpected jailbreak. So we also don’t know how many civilians were killed by each of these different groups of Palestinians.

Conclusion

What Yahya Sinwar and the Palestinians of Gaza have shown the world for the past year is that they will never surrender their rights to self-determination and the universal protections of international law. And, when all else fails, as it has for 67 years, some of them will continue to turn to armed resistance, a right that most Americans would passionately uphold if the United States was militarily invaded and occupied like Palestine.

On the US and Israeli side, our governments and armed forces have shown the world that they are prepared to commit genocide, arguably the most serious international crime of all, before they will give up their insatiable ambitions to impose their will on the world by military force.  

The last thing Yahya Sinwar did before he was killed by an Israeli tank shell was to pick up a stick and throw it at an Israeli drone. To the last, he understood the power and symbolism of resistance.His example will endure as an inspiration to oppressed people everywhere, but especially throughout the Global South.

In July, a UN panel of human rights experts hailed the ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation must end. “The Court has finally reaffirmed a principle that seemed unclear, even to the United Nations: Freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable,” the experts said.

Like Nelson Mandela, who led the movement against apartheid in South Africa, Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and other martyred Hamas leaders, though branded terrorists by Western leaders, will live on in the hearts of many.Biden and Netanyahu, on the other hand — like Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s “father of apartheid” — are more likely to be remembered as brutal colonialists who tried to hold back the tide of history. Verwoerd’s government sentenced Nelson Mandela to life in prison in 1964 for planning a revolution that Mandela and his people eventually won. Yahya Sinwar’s people will continue their struggle, until they too win their freedom, from the river to the sea.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.