Tareq Baconi on Death of Hamas Chief Sinwar & Why Killing Palestinian Leaders Won’t Pacify Resistance

AMY GOODMAN: The head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Khalil al-Hayya, has confirmed in a televised address that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces earlier this week. Al-Hayya could succeed Sinwar. This comes after Israel announced Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, marking what could be a turning point in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Sinwar was apparently not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military released a video they say shows Sinwar moments before his death after they attacked the building he was in, in Rafah. In Sinwar’s final moments, he appears to throw a stick or debris at the Israeli military drone filming him.

Hostage families called for Israel to now focus on negotiating a deal to free the hostages. Many of them protested in Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a video statement after the killing.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today we clarified again what happens to those who hurt us. Today we once again showed the world the victory of good over evil. But the war, my dears, is not over yet.

AMY GOODMAN: After Israel’s announcement, Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, told the AFP, quote, “Hamas is a liberation movement led by people looking for freedom and dignity … It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement … these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey towards a free Palestine,” unquote.

This is a displaced Palestinian in Gaza City responding to news of Sinwar’s death.

KAMAL ABOU AJWA: [translated] We are urging for the war to stop. We are not asking for them to assassinate this person or that. They have assassinated most of our leaders, and the war has not stopped. We are calling for the war to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in the United States, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined other world leaders in calling for Sinwar’s killing to propel a ceasefire. This is presidential candidate Vice President Harris.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Hamas is decimated, and its leadership is eliminated. This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza. And it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination. And it is time for the day after to begin.

AMY GOODMAN: Yahya Sinwar was appointed head of Hamas in July after the previous leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran on the day that the Iranian president was inaugurated.

For more, we go to Cape Town, South Africa, where we’re joined by Tareq Baconi, a Palestinian analyst and writer. The Palestinian Policy Network, he’s president of its board, Al-Shabaka. He is the author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. His recent piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Accounts of the Struggle.”

Tareq, welcome back to Democracy Now! First, if you can respond to Israel’s announcement that they’ve killed Yahya Sinwar, how you understand he was killed, apparently in Rafah, and Hamas stopping short but looking like they are confirming, in fact, the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead?

TAREQ BACONI: Hi, Amy. It’s good to be back.

Yes, so, we’ve seen the footage now that was released by the Israelis yesterday. And just as I was coming onto the show today, the confirmation came in from Hamas that the leader, Yahya Sinwar, had been executed. Now, the footage that came out shows how unusual this situation had been. This was, as you said on the show, not an operation that was planned. It appears to have been an accidental stumbling of this unit that was training in the Gaza Strip on the group that included Yahya Sinwar.

Now, the footage that’s been circulating is one that I believe that the Israeli military will come to regret one day, because it’s showing a man in military fatigues who is fighting until his last breath. This is a leader who they had long claimed was in hiding, surrounded by hostages and preventing — or, cowering in fear from the Israeli military. And, in fact, here is a leader who’s aboveground, not surrounded by any of the captives, fighting. Now, this is going to be something that will certainly shape the way that Yahya Sinwar is remembered and the legacy that he will be thought as having made before his execution.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about who Yahya Sinwar is? And talk about his rise to power and what you think the significance of this moment is.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, Yahya Sinwar really is a strategist. He’s someone who has gone up through the ranks of Hamas from its earliest days of the establishment around the founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He was part of that early group of leaders. And so he has been a part of Hamas and Hamas’s organizational structure in the Gaza Strip for decades.

He’s, as is well known now, someone who also served time in Israeli prisons, which meant that he was also exposed to Israeli military officials and prison wardens and had used that time to learn Hebrew, to educate himself about Israeli politics, before returning to the Gaza Strip with the prisoner exchange deal that freed Gilad Shalit in return for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

He came back into the Gaza Strip and slowly made his way up through the ranks in the military wing. And certainly, then, after Ismail Haniyeh was moved to Doha, he became Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, as well. Now, this is someone who is very calculated and has always maintained a very clear and decisive position that Hamas is engaged in a war of liberation, is engaged in resistance, and not just armed resistance, but also popular resistance, against Israeli apartheid.

Now, his killing, there’s been a lot of talk about what his killing will mean for Palestinians in Gaza and for what’s happening today. And one of the things that’s really important to note is that this is a war that’s happening against the Palestinian people. It’s not a war that’s happening against Hamas, despite the framing being of a war against Hamas in the West. This is an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. The removal of someone like Yahya Sinwar will not stop the Netanyahu government from carrying out its genocide in the Gaza Strip. As far as Hamas is concerned, this is not a movement that is dependent on a singular leader. It’s a movement that has a collective approach to decision-making. We’ll have to wait and see who they elect as a new leader, but I don’t necessarily foresee a significant change in the reality on the ground in the immediate future.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, after Israel assassinated Nasrallah in Lebanon, thousands of Lebanese Israel has killed. Do you see the same thing happening now in Gaza? I mean, you have President Biden. You have Vice President Kamala Harris You have the families of hostages in Tel Aviv. They are continuing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. And you have Harris saying now they should move forward in that direction.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, a ceasefire in Gaza has been possible for many months now. It’s been on the table for many months. And despite all of this false equalization that it was — that the obstacles to the ceasefire were both Sinwar and Netanyahu, the reality is that Sinwar has accepted, Hamas has officially accepted a ceasefire in which the hostages would be released in return for the Palestinian prisoners who are held in Israeli jails and a permanent cessation of violence. What the Netanyahu government has time and again said, that they will only accept a release or that exchange of captives for prisoners if the ceasefire is temporary, which means that after that exchange happens, they would plan to go back in and carry out the genocide. Now, it’s not clear how they think that that would be something that Hamas would be willing to accept, giving up the captives in return for only temporary reprieve. So, the obstacle to getting a permanent ceasefire in Gaza has always been the Netanyahu government.

The U.S. administration has time and again suggested that they’re putting pressure on the Netanyahu government to achieve a ceasefire. But that’s absolutely not in line with what the American administration has done in practice, which is to arm Israel and enable it to maintain a genocide against the Palestinian people. So I think all the rhetoric that comes out from either Harris or Biden at the moment has to be seen only as political theater. I think in the best-case scenario, we have an American administration that’s been entirely coopted by the Netanyahu government and is being led into becoming complicit in genocide against its best interests and the interests of the Palestinian people. And at worst, we have an American administration that has fully embraced Netanyahu’s ideological view of exterminating the Palestinian people, regime change in the region, and carrying out that ideological project through American arms and money. So I don’t think that the obstacle to a ceasefire has ever been Sinwar and that now the removal of Sinwar is suddenly going to lead us into a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Joe Biden — he just arrived in Berlin — speaking with Western leaders as he addressed the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The death of the leader of Hamas represents a moment of justice. He had the blood of Americans and Israelis, Palestinians and Germans and so many others on his hands. I told the prime minister of Israel yesterday, “Let’s also make this moment an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas.” And I look forward to discussing Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: “A path to peace,” he says. And he ends by saying, “I look forward to discussing Iran.” Your thoughts, Tareq?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, I think this is a continuation of the same, of the same positioning that the Biden administration has been in, which is really that they’re not making any of the decisions, or at least that they’re not making any of the decisions to end a ceasefire. They’re actively making the decisions to further support the Netanyahu government and to align American interests with Israeli interests in the way that it’s understood by Israel, which is to maintain a genocide in Gaza and to expand the war in the region.

I think it’s very clear that the Netanyahu government is thinking about completely destabilizing Lebanon, of possibly carrying out some kind of operation in Iran that could lead to a regime change. What we’re seeing today is an attempt by Israel to remake the Middle East in such a way that they can maintain their reality as an apartheid state unchallenged in the region. And the Biden administration is fully accepting of that reality and hasn’t made any moves to really counter or put pressure on the Netanyahu government to either end its genocide or rethink these policies.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of Yahya Sinwar himself. We recently had Hind Hassan on Democracy Now! talking about her new documentary, Starving Gaza. But two years ago, it’s believed she was the last person to interview on video Sinwar when she was working for Vice News. This was in Gaza in 2021.

YAHYA SINWAR: [translated] Israel, which possesses a complete arsenal of weaponry, state-of-the-art equipment and aircraft, intentionally bombs and kills our children and women. And they do that on purpose. You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capabilities to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did. Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was Yahya Sinwar back in 2021 speaking to Hind Hassan. Tareq Baconi, speak more about what he’s saying and also about the decades he spent in an Israeli prison.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, what he’s saying, Amy, is something that many Palestinians would intrinsically and immediately agree with, which is that the expectation from the Israeli side is that Palestinians really just roll over and die, that any kind of resistance, armed or otherwise, is fundamentally unacceptable. The idea from the Israeli side is that Israeli Jews should be living in peace and security even as they maintain a brutal, violent regime of apartheid against Palestinians. Palestinians really are expected to be out of sight, out of mind.

I mean, this interview was in 2021. If you think three years before that, Palestinians engaged in one of the broadest forms of popular mobilization in Gaza, calling for return. This was the Great March of Return of 2018. And it was met by Israelis snipering off Palestinians, killing medics and journalists. More than 200 Palestinians were killed, and more than 36,000 were injured. And yet no one in the international community really engaged with this to question what this architecture of apartheid was, what it meant that 2 million Palestinians were held in Gaza behind a brutal regime blockade that was systematically a form of collective punishment against the Palestinians there.

So, the expectation is, as Sinwar is saying, that Palestinians should not resist that, that Palestinians should acquiesce to that reality. And then any resistance, whether armed or otherwise, is met with immediate condemnation from the West, a reassertion of Israel’s right to defend itself and, as we see today, a carte blanche to carry out horrific violence, the kind of sadistic violence that we’ve been watching happen in Gaza over the course of the past year.

So, I think what’s really important for us to go away with is that we have to delink the genocide that’s happening in Gaza from October 7th. October 7th might have been the trigger, and that might have been the framing for Israel to claim that it’s retaliating. But what we’re seeing in Gaza is the actualization of genocidal policies that have been in the making for years, that Israeli officials have been talking about a second Nakba for years. Palestinians like myself have been warning for years that Israel is planning ethnic cleansing to complete the Nakba, to carry out mass killing in order to end the issue of Palestine. They want to maintain a positionality of unchallenged apartheid in Palestine and across the region without any kind of resistance. And I think this is what we’re seeing today. Israel’s ability to do that with full impunity is at full display.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Tareq Baconi, if you could talk about, before October 7th, the Qatari government asking Netanyahu if they wanted Qatar to continue sending millions of dollars to Hamas — men would actually bring suitcases of money into Gaza — or if they should stop this? And according to the reports of a number of newspapers, they told them — he told them to continue. And also the role of the U.S. in asking Qatar to be the host of Hamas in order for it to negotiate?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, it’s precisely the point I was making. Now the Israeli media, Benjamin Netanyahu, certainly American media — obviously, with the exception of this platform — is on a rampage of trying to position Hamas as, and Yahya Sinwar specifically, as this image of evil, of this demon, the embodiment of evil that must be removed in order to maintain goodness in the world.

But as you say, go back just over a year, and the Israeli government was very happy to be actively engaged with maintaining Hamas as a government in the Gaza Strip, because their issue was never Hamas. Their issue was: How do they maintain Gaza as an enclave of more than 2 million Palestinians in a state of calm and in a state that does not challenge Israeli security? So the structure of apartheid, the architecture of apartheid, the blockade itself, was never in question. The question was: How do we stabilize the Gaza Strip so that it’s not a threat to Israel?

And so, that really — that goes to the heart of how Israel has been thinking about Palestinians, both in terms of the Netanyahu government and long before, which is that they have to be pacified, they have to be defanged, and they have to accept their lot that they’re living under apartheid indefinitely. Now, in order to achieve that, they worked with various Palestinian political leadership in this instance, including Hamas, to stabilize Palestinian enclaves under overarching Israeli rule. And the U.S. was not only happy with that, it was so convinced that this pacification of Palestinians was sustainable that they —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds, Tareq.

TAREQ BACONI: — that they allowed Israel to sort of pursue negotiation agreements and ingratiate itself with the region. It was never an issue of dealing with the political demands at the heart of Palestinian liberation.

AMY GOODMAN: Tareq Baconi, Palestinian analyst and writer, president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. We’ll link to your recent piece in The New York Review headlined “Accounts of the Struggle.”

When we come back, we go to Tel Aviv to speak with Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Back in 20 seconds.