News Analysis
Israel’s killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is the latest expression of Israel’s belief that regional acceptance will be achieved only through strength.
A quarter century before Israel was founded, the Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country. A Jewish state, he wrote in 1923, would succeed only by projecting enough strength to force its enemies to accept it as a permanent reality.
Israel’s killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is the newest manifestation of that century-old premise, Israeli analysts said on Friday. It reflects Israel’s decades-old policy of killing enemies in order to enact revenge, undermine its foes or establish deterrence — aims that became ever more urgent after Hamas’s devastating attack last October dented Israel’s image of strength.
“Events like the killing of Sinwar express something very deep in the Israeli psyche,” said Micha Goodman, an Israeli philosopher and writer on Israeli identity. “It highlights the longstanding Zionist view, which goes back to Jabotinsky and other early Zionist thinkers, that there will only be peace when our enemies lose hope that the Jewish state won’t exist.”
It is a view that helps to explain why, over the years, Israel has retaliated for attacks with overwhelming force, attempting to show that it is more costly to fight Israel than to accept its existence. After Hezbollah refused to end cross-border attacks this summer, Israel responded by killing most of its commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and then invaded Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Lebanon last month.
That view is also partly why Israel has shrugged off international condemnation of its campaign in Gaza, ignoring calls for a cease-fire. Since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023 that killed roughly 1,200 people, Israel has pursued the most devastating war in its history, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and displacing roughly 2 million others.
Though Israeli soldiers ultimately stumbled across Mr. Sinwar almost by chance, his killing was the climax of a yearlong effort to track, find and kill him for planning the Oct. 7 assault.
