https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/21/the-tragedy-of-palestine/
That footage of Yahya Sinwar’s last, gasping breaths before he was justly shuffled off this mortal coil was extraordinary. Here we had the death agony of a fascist broadcast to the world. Crooked and hunched in a chair coated in dust, in a building bombed almost to nothing, he stared forlornly at his final foe: an Israeli drone. He used his one working arm – the other withered by injury – to toss a stick in the drone’s direction. It was a suitably primitive gesture from the leader of a gang of medieval militants who made the grave error of starting a war with the Jewish State. The stick did nothing, of course. Moments later, their drone having confirmed the presence of a terrorist, the IDF fired a tank shell into the ruins and the architect of the bloodiest pogrom since the Nazis was dead.
Not since the execution of Benito Mussolini by the Italian Resistance had the world been granted such a battle-side view of the death of a fascist. We have all seen the photograph of Mussolini hanging by his feet in Milan in 1945 following his summary execution by partisans and the pelting of his body with rotten vegetables by crowds of righteous, free Italians. Now we have seen the execution of the man who organised the largest slaughter of Jews in 80 years. It was less chaotic – the IDF troops who happened upon Sinwar’s hideout observed his body but did not desecrate it – but no less momentous. A little over a year since Hamas’s pogrom, justice had been served against the plotter of that racist outrage. The young Jews of the IDF had toppled the most notorious Jew-killer of our age.
Yet there was a tint of tragedy to the events of last week. Not in the death of Sinwar – no one should mourn a pogromist. But in that drone footage we also glimpsed the consequences of Sinwar’s murderous vanity. All around him we saw the wages of his futile war against the Jews. We saw the devastation of a patch of land, and of a people, that Sinwar clearly viewed as expendable entities, as mere chess pieces in his game of hate against the Jewish nation. It was brutally confirmed: courtesy of the hijacking of the Palestinian issue by the Islamist demagogues of Hamas, the very idea of Palestine is now as pulverised as that building Sinwar perished in.
The response of the woke West to the death of Sinwar has been mad, even by their standards. In the grimmest nooks of online Israelophobia, there is actual mourning. Even mainstream voices are saying Israel lied and Sinwar wasn’t in fact scurried in a tunnel underground but was on the frontline, fighting with his men. Shorter version: hero. Others say it is a grave folly on Israel’s part to think it can crush a ‘national liberation movement’ by bumping off its leaders. Honestly, the speed with which Western leftists went from saying ‘The only good fascist is a dead fascist’ to saying ‘We can’t just kill everyone in Hamas’ has been mindblowing. From puffed-up anti-fascists who fancied themselves the heirs to the International Brigades to snivelling weepers at the coffins of the fallen fascists of Hamas – it would be funny if it were not so tragic.
