Leaders of the Jewish enemies have always died as weak cowards - opinion

After his plan to exterminate the Jewish people, including the Jewish queen, was exposed, the highest-ranking royal court official, Haman, was led to his execution by hanging. Once considered a hero by his people, Haman was exposed as an antisemite and no longer held in esteem by the Persian people.

After his suicide, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, once revered by the Germans, was revealed as a hateful man and is seen as an embarrassment by the German people today. The list of Jewish enemies once respected by their followers, only to be unveiled for their hate and whose names are ignominious, is long; Haman and Hitler are just two of the many names of Jewish enemies now disgraced.

Yahya Sinwar’s name will soon join that long list. Killed by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier last month, Sinwar died a weak coward and will forever be remembered that way by the Palestinian people. For all his bravado over the years, he turned out to be just another rat in a tunnel hiding from Israeli forces.

The truth of who Sinwar was all along hasn’t stopped some (although not many) Palestinians and many of their apologists from trying to turn him into some sort of hero. Irish writer Keith Woods responded to Sinwar’s death by extolling him as a hero:

“Almost everyone acknowledged there was the stuff of legend in Sinwar’s last stand: at age 61, he continued fighting after being shelled by a tank, managed to lob grenades at incoming IDF soldiers, and created a makeshift tourniquet using iron wire from the rubble for his injured arm.

“For a year, Sinwar has been portrayed by Israel as a rat scurrying through tunnels surrounded by human shields. But in the first and final image of him, he is above ground, entirely covered in dust as if being swallowed into the rubble of Gaza, fighting to his last breath.”

Sinwar’s last moments

Watching the videos of Sinwar’s last moments and of his greater concern for his personal circumstances than the Palestinian people on the night before the October 7 massacre makes it difficult to see Woods’s take on Sinwar as a hero as nothing more than fantasy and wishful thinking of a former accolade whose image of a hero has been shattered by the disappointment of the reality of Sinwar’s cowardice.

The Times of Israel reported that the IDF believes that Sinwar was forced to flee from Khan Yunis to Rafah due to Israeli military pressure. Sinwar felt forced to move locations, staying underground as much as possible, potentially up to 90% of the time. He then tried to leave Rafah, where he was ultimately spotted and killed by an IDF force operating in the area.

Instead of the image Palestinians are trying to paint of Sinwar as a courageous fighter, he spent the night before the Simchat Torah attack in a luxurious bunker with plasma TVs, UNRWA-sponsored and Hamas-stolen aid, and thousands of shekels of cash while providing his immediate family with security (and, for his wife, a Hermes handbag reportedly worth upward of $30,000) that no other Gaza family could acquire for themselves.

During the war, he hid in Hamas’s network of tunnels while ordering Hamas terrorists to expose themselves and fight Israel’s soldiers without cover. According to one Hamas official’s estimates, the Israel Defense Forces slaughtered over 30,000 Hamas fighters. Sinwar surrounded himself with six Israeli hostages, starving them until they were too weak to move from tunnel to tunnel along with Sinwar as the Hamas leader slithered like a snake underground, trying to avoid detection.

After years of stealing international aid from the Palestinian people of Gaza, brutally oppressing them with his radical fundamentalist Islamic tyranny, and executing anyone who resisted his dictatorship, he died like many other Arab dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi – in shame. 

When he died, Sinwar wasn’t fighting; he was fleeing from Israeli soldiers, instead of facing them like a brave resistance fighter alongside his fellow fighters. His bodyguards abandoned him, leaving him alone. He snuck up to the top floor and tried hiding from the soldiers. 

Well-trained, these soldiers didn’t give up and used Israel’s famed technology to track him down and eliminate him. His last “act of resistance” was to lob a piece of wood at the tiny drone capturing and broadcasting his final moments of shame to the Israeli tank stationed outside the house where he was using to hide. 

His hiding place couldn’t provide him cover because it was already battle-pocketed from a war Sinwar brought pointlessly to Gaza.

GEORGE DEEK, Israel’s ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan, explained the Palestinian refusal to admit Sinwar’s cowardice as “a fear not of Israel itself, but of what Israel represents: a painful reflection of the Muslim world’s decline since the fall of the Caliphate. 

Israel, in all its existence – not just its actions – serves as a glaring reminder of stagnation and weakness compared to the West’s progress. For many, Israel is a humiliating affront, described as nothing more than a “spider-web,” flimsy yet infuriatingly persistent.

“Its mere presence is an insult, a challenge to the very idea of Islamic greatness,” Deek maintains. “And so, the path to restoring that greatness is seen not in progress or reform, but in tearing down the Israeli spider web through renewed Islamic fervor, heroism, and relentless determination. 

“Admitting that Sinwar’s actions were flawed would mean more than just critiquing one leader; it would require questioning the entire narrative of the conflict,” he continues. “That’s why no alternative paradigm exists – because acknowledging one would mean embracing a reality that challenges deeply ingrained beliefs.”

The Jewish people’s enemies rarely come to understand the folly of their ways before it is too late for them to reverse their ways. Zionism is an ideology that stands for the right of the Jewish people to their homeland. It is a just and righteous movement that has not only survived but thrived because, with all of its opponents, good people know its values will stand the test of time. 

God has orchestrated Jewish history to have the Jewish people threatened by forces looking to annihilate them in every generation, but every year God thwarts their plans.

Whether it was Pharaoh, Haman, Hitler, or Sinwar, the leaders of the Jewish enemies have always died as weak cowards, known forever as an embarrassment to their people. The world can only hope that one day the cycle ends.

The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published his book, Zionism Today.