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In 1948, Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi took the dramatic step of banning the Muslim Brotherhood, believing that if the group were dissolved, stability would return to his country. In the three years prior to that move, the Brotherhood had taken a leading role in fomenting riots, strikes, and violence, including the assassinations of a prime minister and a former finance minister.
Yet the ban on the Brotherhood produced more violence. Unmoored from their leader—Hassan al-Banna—armed cadres of Muslim Brothers took matters into their own hands in a vengeful spasm of violence, culminating in the assassination of Nuqrashi. The government responded by locking up thousands of Muslim Brothers, and in February 1949, Banna was assassinated in what was widely believed to be a government-sanctioned killing. Almost 76 years later, the Egyptian government is still trying to repress the group.
In 1948, Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi took the dramatic step of banning the Muslim Brotherhood, believing that if the group were dissolved, stability would return to his country. In the three years prior to that move, the Brotherhood had taken a leading role in fomenting riots, strikes, and violence, including the assassinations of a prime minister and a former finance minister.
Yet the ban on the Brotherhood produced more violence. Unmoored from their leader—Hassan al-Banna—armed cadres of Muslim Brothers took matters into their own hands in a vengeful spasm of violence, culminating in the assassination of Nuqrashi. The government responded by locking up thousands of Muslim Brothers, and in February 1949, Banna was assassinated in what was widely believed to be a government-sanctioned killing. Almost 76 years later, the Egyptian government is still trying to repress the group.
It has become cliche to say, “You cannot kill an idea.” Fair enough, but there is a finer point to this story: It is hard to kill your way out of the problem posed by a resistance movement. The committed do not get the message; they just redouble their efforts.
No doubt, killing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a righteous act. He was the mastermind of what he hoped would be the beginning of a genocidal war to wipe out Israel. And in planning the destructive conflict he began with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, he knew that the Israelis would visit unimaginable pain on the Palestinians in his midst. His demise is a moment to reflect on the damage Sinwar has done to so many people as well as the cause—Palestinian statehood and justice—he claimed to represent. Israelis will celebrate with sweets and ditties in Tel Aviv bars at the death of their monster. Reality will soon set back in, however.
Does anyone remember Khalil al-Wazir? Abbas al-Musawi? What about Fathi Shiqaqi? Ahmed Yassin? They were the monsters of Israel’s past. Wazir’s nom de guerre was Abu Jihad, and he, along with Yasser Arafat, led the armed wing of Fatah, whose forces were eventually absorbed into the PLO. Shiqaqi, a physician, directed Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Musawi predated Hassan Nasrallah as the leader of Hezbollah; and Ahmed Yassin led Hamas after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch created the group in the late 1980s. They are all dead, assassinated in one spectacular intelligence or military operation after another, helping to build the towering mythology of Israel’s security services. Yet as proficient in avenging blood as the Israelis have become in their decades-long struggle with terrorism, they have never managed to bring an appreciable end to violent resistance.
There remains an armed wing of the PLO, which played a bloody role in the Second Intifada. After the Israelis killed Musawi in 1992, Nasrallah built the group into the most well-armed nonstate actor in the world—Iran’s regional expeditionary force and second-strike capability. In the weeks since the Israelis killed Nasrallah and wiped out most of Hezbollah’s leadership, its militants have fired a seemingly endless stream of rockets at Israel. In 1995, Shiqaqi was shot five times in front of a hotel in Malta, but decades later, Islamic Jihad continued to target Israelis with suicide bombers and rockets from Gaza. Yassin—like Nasrallah—was killed in an airstrike. His violent death never compelled his successors to rethink their strategy. Why would Sinwar’s killing be different?
One could make the argument that Sinwar’s demise will finally break the back of Hamas, whose fighters the Israeli military has battered and beaten for months. They have lost. There is a belief among some analysts and elected officials in the United States that only when Israel metes out a total defeat can peace be possible. With Sinwar’s killing, might that moment be upon us?
That is the hope. That was abundantly clear in U.S. President Joe Biden’s statement on Sinwar’s death, but when it comes to faith, those desperately holding onto it tend to leave important and inconvenient details out. It is more likely that Hamas’s leaderless cadres will behave more like their distant (in time) analogues from the Brotherhood’s secret apparatus. Atomized and angry, they will continue to fight, taking revenge on their enemies.
Resistance, after all, is not futile. It is a critical component of identity. This is why Sinwar wanted to die at the end of an Israeli tank shell and not by a stroke. He believed, with considerable evidence, that his violent death would be an inspiration for yet more resistance.
For those paying attention to the last two decades, the Israelis are not unique in their ability to avenge the deaths of innocents with little to show for it strategically. In the years after 9/11, the U.S. military killed a veritable All-Star team of transnational terrorists—Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (though he blew himself up as U.S. forces closed in), and a bevy of their underlings. This wrecked al Qaeda and the Islamic State, but both groups have survived. Perhaps they’ve not yet reconstituted in equally dangerous form, but they live to fight another day.
For another example, take Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose Quds Force is the central player in the so-called Axis of Resistance. It never missed a beat and perhaps even became more lethal after a U.S. drone slammed into the car in which Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani was riding near Baghdad’s airport in early 2020.
This is not to suggest that the world is not a better place for the deaths of Sinwar and the catalogue of terrorists with copious blood on their hands. But while momentarily satisfying, their deaths do little to bring the region’s suffering to an end. After Sinwar’s death was confirmed, I messaged with dear friends who live between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They have a child currently serving in the Israeli military. In the almost immediate response I received, I could feel the deep sense of anxiety and sorrow: “Now we need the hostages back and then some kind of peace. I want my son home.”
I hope he comes home soon. When he does, it will not be because the war is over. That Israel killed Sinwar seems like a major achievement today, but in time, others will rise—as they always have—to continue to resist.