Sinwar, in a gesture of world-historical futility, last week lobbed a chunk of wood at an Israeli surveillance drone. Moments later, a tank crew outside the building where he was hiding brought the roof down on him like the proverbial house of cards.
May his soul rest in the very peace he denied Jews and Palestinians alike.
Yet since his ignominious end (chased from the Gaza tunnels where the bloodthirsty Hamas cohort ferreted themselves away from the violence they ignited on Oct. 7, 2023), word has emerged that his hands were covered in blood beyond even the reported 42,000 Palestinian lives he extinguished.
Following his release from an Israeli prison in 2011, as he clambered to power, Sinwar strangled with his bare hands a Palestinian he suspected of Israeli collaboration. On suspicion alone, published reports say, he took the man from his marriage bed and garroted him with — wait for this — the Palestinian victim’s own kaffiyeh.
The symbol of Palestinian liberation, worn by the sincere and also sported as ideological fashion by the usual band of rent-a-dunces, was, for Sinwar, just another handy-dandy means to murder his way to the top.
What could better illuminate the invidious inversion of morality, reason and common sense that has consumed the Holy Land, geopolitics and our daily life over the past year?
From first news of the hideous slaughter of Jews and Israelis, The Catholic Register has editorially argued for an inviolable distinction between Sinwar the self-evidently disturbed, the vile terror tactics of Hamas and the just cause of the Palestinian people. We rest our case.
Some will say “thank God”: It’s time for us to give the subject a rest. Still, at the heart of being a Catholic in the world at this historical moment, nothing can supersede our Catholic conviction to stand with Jews as they suffer and overcome their worst collective horror since the Holocaust.
Reasonable people might ask why. There are, minimally, two reasons. The first is straightforward. Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, was a Jew. He came not to abolish the Law, but to uphold it. We proceed from Judaism even though many Jews themselves would say it’s less process on our part than presumption. As John tells us: “Jesus said unto them, ‘before Abraham was, I am.’”
Yes, Muslims share Abrahamic lineage with us and with Jews. And the God-blessed ecumenical efforts of Holy Mother Church properly condemn unjust treatment of Muslims whether through bigotry or isolation. We are to live not only in peace, but in fraternity, with our Muslim brothers and sisters as with our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in faith.
And there lies the second answer to why we must now stand with Jews. We bear the blood stains of centuries of despicable persecution and attempts at extermination. To say so is not to mewl with guilt and shame but to be forthright in repentance, correction and reparation.
Does it mean that however the State of Israel conducts itself, we must concur? By no means. Like any State, the Jewish State can be contested. Obviously so, since within Israel itself some insist the whole idea of a State of Israel is antithetical to Judaism.
Yet even there, we as Catholics have on our consciences complicity for such a State needing to be created in the first place.
We were among those who fed the lies, the stereotypes, the hatreds, the pogroms, that precipitated a crime even greater than last year’s greatest crime since the Holocaust: the Holocaust itself. We must never again fail in our duty to stand with the Jewish people as we failed so abominably in the 20th century and, indeed, for centuries before.
In these pages, in his “Letter to the Christians of the Middle East,” Pope Francis speaks movingly of being “with the mothers who weep while looking at your dead or wounded children.” We should all follow the Holy Father’s profound spiritual example.
But when we sit by the rivers of Babylon, yea, yea, we should weep, too, for what we have done to subject the Jewish people to the hands of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas murderer.
Then we must stand with them.