The Wisdom of Yahya Sinwar
The leader of Hamas bet that the West’s oldest hatred would obscure Hamas’s atrocities. He was right.
Growing up as the only Jewish kid in an Irish and Italian neighborhood, and then later as an Israeli soldier and diplomat, I experienced many different forms of antisemitism. I’ve gone from being labeled a Christ-killer to a money grubber to a child murderer. But I’ve never in my many years encountered anything like today’s wholesale Jew-hatred, which accuses us of committing humanity’s most heinous crimes.
Now, in addition to baseless accusations of orchestrating global pedophile rings, promoting wars, and fabricating terrorist attacks to garner international sympathy, we’re charged with committing genocide in Gaza.
The accusation, like those before it, is false. Israel’s policy has never been to exterminate the Palestinians, nor is it today in Gaza. And the charge is easily refuted. “Genocide requires clear, provable intent to destroy a people through sustained, deliberate actions,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) John Spencer, combat veteran and the world’s leading authority on urban warfare. “That burden of proof has not been met.” The laws of war, Spencer stresses, do not prohibit war itself. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens tautologically asked: Why hasn’t Israel, with its vast military capacity, killed millions of Palestinians? “Furious comments in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities hardly amount to a Wannsee conference,” he concluded. “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.”
Still, those charging Israel with genocide point to Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and, at various stages in the war, denying them food and water. Much of Gaza has been reduced to a moonscape. Israeli politicians, meanwhile, have been quoted calling the Gazans “animals” and likening them to Amalek, a Biblical enemy deserving of annihilation. Israeli ministers from the radical right have recommended erasing Gaza entirely. Among the most outspoken of those branding the Jewish State genocidal are numerous Jews, American and Israeli alike.
Why, then, does the libelous charge of genocide resonate so widely in the West? What makes accusing Israel of striving to wipe out the Palestinians in any way antisemitic?
In fact, the charge of genocide itself has deep antisemitic roots. Since antiquity, the West has been predisposed to associate Jews with evil. It assigned them what each society regarded as the worst possible crimes. Today, that is occupation, racism, and genocide. Once demonized for killing individuals, we’re now defamed for massacring an entire people.
The charge’s origins go back many centuries, to the blood libels first leveled in the Roman Empire and then widely disseminated in medieval Europe. But the provenance of the “Gaza genocide” calumny is much more recent, traceable to October 7, 2023, and Hamas’s massive assault on Israel.
The mastermind of that invasion, Yahya Sinwar, was a betting man. Hamas documents retrieved by Israel in Gaza clearly show how the terrorist planner of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, as Sinwar called it, made two fateful wagers.
The first was that once Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border fence and began slaughtering Israeli civilians en masse, much of the Muslim world—Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Shi’ite militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Palestinians living in Judea, Samaria, and in Israel itself—would join in the onslaught. Israel, overwhelmed, would be destroyed.
Sinwar’s second bet was that Israeli society, already torn between those favoring and opposing the government’s judicial reform, would remain unbridgeably divided. Israel would be, in the words of Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, “a spiderweb”—easily swept away.
Both of these bets were busts.
Apart from sporadically firing rockets, no major Muslim force came to Hamas’s assistance on October 7. The West Bank Palestinians didn’t revolt and Israeli Arab towns remained silent. Israelis, contrary to Sinwar’s prediction, swiftly put aside their political differences and united in a spirited defense of their country.
But Sinwar also made a third wager, one that does not appear in the Hamas documents but that nevertheless informs them all. He banked on the West’s obsession with Israel, on the anti-Zionism that had permeated the media and the educated liberal elites, and that linked right-wing extremists with the radical left. More fundamentally, Sinwar placed his money on the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy, and lustful for the blood of innocents and children.
In betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot.
Sinwar gained this insight from the border wars Hamas fought with Israel before October 7—in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021—and from the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. All began with unprovoked terrorist attacks on Israel. The IDF responded, first from the air and then with ground incursions of various depths.
Each time, the media, long inimically fixated on Israel, swiftly downplayed the terrorists’ aggression and focused exclusively on the suffering Israel inflicted on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Consequently, international pressure to curtail Israel’s military operations intensified, followed by UN condemnations and allegations of Israeli war crimes. In each case, Israel, battered and delegitimized, was forced to agree to a ceasefire. The terrorists, emerging from the civilian homes they hid behind, proclaimed victory.
On the basis of these conflicts, Sinwar could only have concluded that there was no terrorist attack so murderous that it wouldn’t be obscured—if not retroactively justified—by Israel’s response. He must have seen that, while the West upheld Israel’s right to defend itself, the Jewish State was only allowed to do so passively and was damned the minute it didn’t.
Each round of fighting, moreover, left Israel more isolated internationally, more toxic in the eyes of American and European youth, the educated, and the elites. The head of Hamas, whose charter blamed the Jews for starting global conflicts, igniting revolutions, and manipulating financial markets, Sinwar must have noticed how criticism of Israel increasingly became permeated with classic antisemitic tropes.
Chief among these was the Jews’ supposed longing for children’s blood. Not incidentally did the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry specify and inflate the number of children killed in every IDF operation. And not without relish did the media repeat those unverifiable claims and bolster Hamas’s blood libel. In 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, Hamas accused Israel of shelling an UNRWA school, killing 40 children. The report was false—nine Hamas terrorists had been killed; no children—but the entire Western press ran the story anyway.
Four years later, during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, the front page of The Washington Post featured a photograph of a Palestinian man, surrounded by mourners, grieving over a shrouded bundle. The caption read, “Jihad Masharawi weeps while he holds the body of his eleven-year-old son Ahmad following an Israeli air strike.” I was Israel’s ambassador to Washington at the time and asked the Post’s editor if the photograph was real. He assured me that the image was 100 percent genuine, but it wasn’t. An independent study conducted three weeks later found that the child had indeed been killed, but by a Palestinian rocket.
An insidious line connects these examples to the front-page, over-the-fold, New York Times posting of the pictures, together with brief bios, of 64 Palestinian children purportedly killed by Israel in its May 2021 clash with Hamas. That luridness led directly to the Times’ October 9, 2024 publication of the X-rays of Gazan children with Israeli bullets lodged in their skulls. Ballistic experts and doctors who examined the photos concluded the bullets were too perfectly preserved, and the skulls too intact, for the images to be trusted. Their skepticism didn’t matter. The message was once again illustrated: Jews kill children.
Such examples no doubt made an impression on Sinwar. So, too, he must have noticed how a half-million people killed in the Syrian civil war, more than a million in the Ethiopia-Eritrean war, and roughly 220,000 in Yemen’s civil war, sparked little or no interest in the West. A chart of CNN’s foreign reports during three months of 2023 showed that almost 45 percent of them dealt with Israel. That was before October 7.
If the Palestinians had the misfortune of facing a different enemy—Turkey, for example, or Chinese—the West might care as much about them as it does about the Kurds or the Uyghurs or worse, the Syrian Druze. But Sinwar and other Palestinian leaders understood antisemitism. They understood the Jew-hatred long hardwired into the West as well as its desire to purge the original genocidal sin of the Holocaust by accusing the Jews of a similar crime.
This does not remotely mean that Israel is blameless or hasn’t enhanced the Palestinians’ ability to tap into Western prejudice. Undoubtedly, there are many hungry people in Gaza and numbers of them may have starved during this war. Israel’s erratic policy of supplying, then denying, then again supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza, often in woefully insufficient amounts and by inefficient means, surely exacerbated the food shortage. And Israel’s failure to explain and defend its policies has been nothing short of monumental. All that, combined with settler violence, the racist remarks of prominent government ministers, and the selfie videos of soldiers rejoicing over Gaza’s demolition, heighten the odds that Sinwar’s bet paid off.
Still, nobody knows exactly how many Palestinians have actually died of starvation or can prove Israel’s culpability. The accusations persist despite the achievements of the American-run and Israeli-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Since May, the GHF has distributed more than 100 million meals in Gaza, a record that America’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called “a great feat.” Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) says hundreds of food trucks are waiting to enter the Strip daily. The delays, Israel maintains, are caused by the refusal of the UN and other aid agencies to distribute the food and the relentless attacks on GHF workers and civilian aid recipients by Hamas.
Not surprisingly, the media has rejected these facts virtually out-of-hand while uncritically accepting Hamas’s. Little credence is given to Israel’s assertion that Hamas stole much of the UN aid and sold it back to the Palestinian population at exorbitant prices. Scant importance is given to the fact that, in the ceasefire talks, one of the terrorists’ top demands is for the return of the UN’s responsibility for aid—a return, that is, of the terror group’s major source of political control and income. Such details are irrelevant to a West insistent on finding Israel guilty of genocide by deliberate deprivation.
Any lingering doubts about the wisdom of Sinwar’s wager would be dispelled by the publication, again on the front page of the Times and other influential papers, of the photograph of a Palestinian woman holding her emaciated infant whom the captions claimed was starved by Israel. As is now well-known, the child, Muhammad Zakariya al-Matouq, suffered from a genetic condition, perhaps exacerbated by malnutrition, though his brother standing nearby did not appear visibly starved. Still, the Times did not apologize for the distortion, issuing only an editorial clarification, but other outlets—The Guardian, Sky News, the Daily Mail—did not even do that. The reason is obvious. What subtler way to defame the Jewish State than the image of a mother cradling the infant it killed, a modern-day Pietà?
By contrast, the video Hamas posted on Saturday of hostage Evyatar David, Auschwitz-emaciated and forced to dig his own grave, merited only minor Western headlines. The Times’ print edition buried the story on page 10. CNN similarly buried the story in a report on the anti-war movement in Israel, and concluded the piece with a long description of “the worst-case scenario of famine” in Gaza, and rising casualty reports from the Gaza Health Ministry.
The supposed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians is now widely accepted as truth. A June 2025 Leger poll found that more than half of Democratic voters and all Americans under the age of 35 believe Israel is guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, as do a shocking 78 percent of Democratic primary voters in New York.
Typically, the charge has united both radical left and right—Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene with academics like Brown University’s Omer Bartov and lunatics like Candace Owens. Added to the brands of antisemitism I’ve experienced in life, along with deicide, pedocide, and conspiring to destroy civilization, Jews now stand accused of annihilating an entire people. And each day, it seems, more people co-sign this lie.
Yahya Sinwar died last October 16, felled by an Israeli bullet, but indeed his gamble on Jew-hatred continues to pay off. The impending recognition of a Palestinian state by Britain, France, and Canada not only punishes Israel for imperfectly defending itself, but incentivizes terror and strengthens Hamas’s hand in the ceasefire talks. Sinwar’s successors can now walk away from the negotiating table, perpetuate the war with yet more civilian casualties, and further immiserate both Palestinians and Israelis.
What better bet could have assisted the terrorists to obscure their atrocities of October 7? What wager would enable the West to finally cleanse its own genocide guilt by imputing that sin to the Jews? In his grave, Sinwar is still counting his earnings.
This article originally appeared in The Free Press on August 4, 2025.
Extremely well put. It reminds what an evil force The New York Times has become in the world. There have always been serious problems from Walter Duranty and Ukraine through a strange reluctance to report the Holocaust, but now they are outdoing themselves. And yet people still believe them as a "newspaper of record," an absurd concept to begin with. Most of the media follows along behind them like obedient puppies. They now have blood on their hands, both Israeli and Palestinian.
Michael, your excellent piece sums the situation very well. Your subscribers will read it, and of course agree. If you could condense it perhaps the “main stream media” could be persuaded to run it. I believe that the MSM bares a large part of the problem we are experiencing today.