By Abe Greenwald
Thursday, October 17. 2024
The IDF has killed Yahya Sinwar. One year and 10 days
after Hamas’s massacre of Israeli innocents, the mastermind of the attack was
pronounced dead. On social media, one can see pictures that appear to show his
corpse—lying in rubble, covered in dust, head cratered. And that just about
describes the current condition of Hamas.
Some critics of Israeli strategy claim that Israel can’t
destroy Hamas. You can’t kill an ideology, they say. And it’s too hard to
defeat a non-state terrorist organization. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Well,
when you whack all the moles, you win the game. And Israel has pulverized
Hamas’s underground rat-maze, dismantled or hobbled its battalions, killed
thousands of its fighters, choked off its smuggling routes, and taken out its
leaders—the most important of these being Sinwar. Does this constitute Israeli
victory? No, not yet. There’s more fighting ahead. But it’s what winning looks
like. And it’s how you destroy the enemy.
All of this also means that Hamas’s remnants might find
themselves without the Iranian funds they’d have used to try to reconstitute
the organization in the future. The regime in Iran has spent billions of
dollars on its terrorist proxies. This was a good investment for decades,
enabling Tehran to project power abroad and attack Israel without Iran sticking
its neck out. But the mullahs can’t be happy looking at the present state of
Hamas (and increasingly of Hezbollah). Iran’s return on its investment in proxy
armies is vanishing fast. And with Israel about to take the fight straight to
the regime, Iran needs to reallocate its resources.
So who wants to fill Sinwar’s shoes now? Israel took out
Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in July. The crown then fell to Sinwar, and now
he’s dead. The list of senior Hamas members killed by Israel is long and
growing longer by the day. The same, rather suddenly, applies to the senior
ranks of Hezbollah. There aren’t many takers for the job of next mole to be
whacked. Especially if it means getting whacked for a crumbling cause with a
spare and ruined fighting force. It’s not going to be easy recruiting new members
to what’s left of Hamas.
But what about Hamas’s supporters over here in the U.S.?
Are they still “exhilarated”
by the October 7 attack? Do they still think
that it was a “gift to Allah from the world”? That “Palestine has never been as
within reach”? Are they satisfied with what Hamas has wrought for the people of
Gaza? And do they still think they’re on the winning side against Israel? Even
if they now recognize Hamas’s strategic failure, they undoubtedly still support
its aims. And they’re the kind of enemy that’s truly hard to defeat because you
can’t destroy moral imbecility. On October 7, 2023, Sinwar ensured his own
demise and that of his monstrous organization. But the woke jihadists of the
West will live to tweet another day.
And here’s a thought for the Biden administration. The
U.S. has recently threatened to withhold arms shipments to Israel over concerns
about humanitarian aid getting into Gaza. The greatest gift of humanitarian aid
ever received by the people of Gaza was Israel’s killing of Yahya Sinwar. His
death, and the destruction of Hamas, don’t by any means guarantee that the
Palestinians will one day be able to thrive in freedom. But so long as he was
in charge, that would have remained a certain impossibility. And if Israel had
heeded the Biden administration’s calls for a ceasefire, this massive aid
package would never have been delivered. Take the win, Mr. President.
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