Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind who had the bad luck of crossing paths with a team of 19-year-old Israeli grunts in Rafah on Wednesday morning, was an intractable religious ideologue who saw his life’s purpose in extravagant historical terms. He was someone whose actions corresponded perfectly to his beliefs, and who treated reality as a thin and temporary illusion concealing the God-given triumph to come. Sinwar was, in short, exactly the type of leader that citizens in democratic societies can’t easily comprehend.
Speculating about Sinwar’s motives became an analytical cottage industry after October 7. Observers of the resulting conflagration have been told that Sinwar ordered his invasion and kidnapping spree because he wanted to derail Israeli-Saudi normalisation; put “the Palestinian question” back on the table; bait Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war; bleed his enemy through an insurgency; fracture Israeli society; or undermine Fatah’s rival claims to leadership of the Palestinian struggle. There’s a category error behind every one of these claims. If Sinwar had been a normal warlord in pursuit of mundane objectives, he could have pursued a less spectacular course that would have greatly improved his chances of remaining the uncontested theocratic dictator of a Mediterranean coastal enclave with two million subjects. More than that, he could have retained a local military-industrial complex, extensive foreign relations, and subsidies from friendly regional governments and the UN. But Sinwar operated beyond the limiting realm of normative politics. He is arguably the first Palestinian leader who ever thought to test the proposition that his people could decisively settle their conflict with the Jews of the Middle East solely through violent means.