What Sinwar’s death reveals about war- and peacemaking in Palestine

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on Wednesday sparked wildly different reactions across the world. While Israel and its allies celebrated the demise of the “mastermind” of the October 7, 2023, attacks, Palestinians, Arabs and others mourned him as a heroic figure.

Correctly assessing Sinwar’s role in the Palestinian struggle and what he and Hamas actually represent in political terms is critical as we seem to draw closer to a devastating regional conflagration.

Over the past year, Israel sought to establish a narrative about Hamas’s leaders as cowardly men hiding in tunnels underground, using Israeli captives as human shields and hoarding food, water and money.

The videos and details of Sinwar’s last moments that surfaced in the media, however, refuted this narrative. Instead, most people in the Middle East saw the Hamas leader as bravely fighting until the end despite suffering from injuries and being surrounded by Israeli forces.

This perception is reflected in the words of deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, Khalil al-Hayya: “[Sinwar] met his end standing brave with his head held high, holding his firearm, firing until the last breath, until the last moment of his life.”

The narrative of a heroic death is bound to solidify Sinwar’s legacy within the Palestinian struggle. As Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi noted: “His fate – beautifully pictured in his last image – is not a deterrent but a source of inspiration for resistance fighters across the region, Palestinian and non-Palestinian.”

By contrast, Israel’s Western allies saw Sinwar’s death as a victory over Hamas that could be exploited to reorder Palestine and the region to Israel’s advantage. United States President Joe Biden echoed the Israeli view that Sinwar was “an insurmountable obstacle” to achieving a ceasefire and that now, without Hamas in power, there is an opportunity for a “day after” in Gaza.

The leaders of Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and NATO all demanded a ceasefire that would allow the release of all Israeli captives still held in Gaza without mentioning the Palestinian demand to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel or end Israel’s presence in Gaza. This is a typically Israel-friendly orientation that defines most Western state policies and has prevented any serious negotiations from taking place.

That Sinwar or any other Hamas leader was an “obstacle” to a ceasefire or peace is simply false. Just four months before his death, he had accepted a deal presented by Biden and backed by the United Nations Security Council – which failed because Israel demanded more changes in its favour. In November, Sinwar also approved the only Israel-Hamas ceasefire and captive exchange that has taken place so far.

Hamas, as a whole, has also not been an “obstacle” to peace. Throughout its 37 years of existence, the movement has offered a long-term truce and peaceful coexistence with Israel more than a dozen times, which Israel has never responded to.

Sinwar’s political life illustrates well the consequences of Israel’s rejections of peace. He first became politically active in the early 1980s at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he pursued a degree in Arab studies. Israel arrested him multiple times, and while in detention, he met the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He then embarked on a lifetime of political action that focused on several parallel aims: cementing a unified Palestinian national consensus, maintaining Hamas’s internal unity and overseeing military resistance capabilities while managing political and diplomatic initiatives for peace based on Palestinian national rights.

His first responsibility after Hamas was formed in 1987 was to create a unit that eliminated intelligence leaks and Palestinian collaborators with Israel. For this work, Israeli forces arrested him in 1988 during the first Intifada and sentenced him to life in prison.

While he was in Israeli jail, the Intifada ended and was followed by the so-called peace process sponsored by Israel’s closest ally, the US. He pursued Palestinian national cohesion in jail and was involved in the historic 2006 Prisoners Document, which outlined a national programme approved by all the main Palestinian factions.

By the time Sinwar was released in 2011, the Oslo Accords had all but collapsed, and Israel was aggressively expanding its settler-colonial dominance over Palestinian land in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and laying a debilitating siege on Gaza.

The US-backed Israeli refusal to negotiate a permanent two-state resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict pushed Sinwar, Hamas and smaller fighting units to focus on armed resistance. This culminated in the October 7 attacks last year.

The rhetoric of Western leaders after Sinwar’s death reflects their refusal to admit this reality. They continue to deny that those who politically challenge or militarily engage Israel act as resistance groups waging a battle for justice for Palestinians and others in the region who suffer the consequences of Zionist settler-colonialism.

This biased deficiency has defined Western political elites for decades as they fail to acknowledge that Israeli concerns are not superior to Palestinian ones and the Israel-Palestine conflict has two parties whose mutual rights to sovereignty and security must be achieved for a meaningful peace to be established.

This deficiency now helps the West ignore Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own words that the war will not stop after Sinwar’s death – a clear indication of who really obstructs peace. Over the past few days, the Israeli army has only intensified its drive to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza, killing about 640 people in 17 days.

Israel wants to continue its colonial subjugation of Palestinian and neighbouring Arab lands and its US-aided imperial drive to end Iranian influence in the region. It also works to silence any voice that criticises its actions that are now widely recognised as apartheid and genocide.

Countering this, Palestinians and their allies across the Global South have steadily expanded their political and military resistance to Israeli actions.

In this context, it is clear – even to those of us critical of some of Hamas’s militancy against civilians – that Sinwar’s leadership and decision-making reflected the Palestinian refusal to relinquish their right to self-determination and statehood. The actions he took in the realm of military resistance and political peacemaking – whether we like them or not – were always the consequence of intense consultations and consensus among the organisation’s members rather than a single tyrant’s decision, as the West would like to present it.

Those powers who fail to understand this reality and continue to ignore the historical dimensions of such Indigenous resistance to US-backed Israeli settler-colonial aggression doom the region to perpetual warfare.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.