RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?

As I argue in my book, After the Pogrom, Hamas is ‘as far from an anti-colonial movement as it is possible to get’. Where past national liberation movements aspired, at least, to represent ‘the people’, Hamas conceives of itself as a narrow instrument of God. Where those old movements dreamed of creating a nation, Hamas dreams of subjecting a nation to God’s will – we will ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, it promises (my italics). It wants to impose on Palestine the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ – the sovereignty of the edicts of Sharia with their blind intolerance of manmade law, women’s rights and democracy itself.

The current war is a direct consequence of the Islamist delusions of the hysterics of Hamas. In their eyes, Gaza is not a terrestrial plane that ought to enjoy self-governance – it’s another front in the cosmic showdown between the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ and the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’. And the people of Gaza are not individuals deserving of life and respect – they’re mere martyrs-in-the-making, fleshy fodder for Hamas’s fanatical war on the Jews. In the words of Article 8 of the Hamas Covenant, ‘death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes’. Sinwar himself updated this deathly creed following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel when he said dead Gazans are ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get ‘the Israelis right where we want them’.

Hamas is not a liberation movement – it’s a death cult. This is the central difference between the old armies of national liberation and Hamas’s army of God: where the former believed their people had a right to live freely, the latter thinks their people should embrace death happily. Statehood is no longer the ‘loftiest’ of goals – death is. Gazans are promised not democracy, but martyrdom; not independence, but oblivion. In declaring a religious war on Israel, in slaughtering 1,200 Jews on 7 October, Hamas brought war to Gaza and reduced an aspiring nation to a theatre of holy warfare, and its people to bit-part players in the Hamas psychosis, underlings of fundamentalism, whose highest duty is to die.

Hamas is not alone in subjugating Palestine to its own lethal narcissism. Its Islamist hijacking of the Palestine issue is more than matched by the woke hijacking of it by the lost elites of the West. They, too, bend Palestine to their vain agendas. Palestine has become the omnicause of our cultural establishments. It’s the issue through which they express their self-absorbed angst with the West itself, with modernity, with this thing we call ‘civilisation’. On our campuses, in our streets, in the media world and art world, ‘Palestine’ has become a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged. Like Hamas, these ostentatious pitiers of the Palestinians turn Palestine from a real place with real people into an abstract moral landscape in which what really matters is my hang-ups, not their aspirations.

This is the fate of the Palestinians, then: physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas and moral fodder for the virtue-signalling of the West’s elites. Playthings of both the Islamist theocracy and the cultural aristocracy. And thus do those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians dehumanise them far more than Israel does, turning them into a stage army for fundamentalism, whether of the Islamist variety or the woke variety. It is hard to see where the Palestinians go from here. The dream of a Palestinian state – or even a two-state solution – has been broken on the wheel of nihilism.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy