Sinwar’s Death Embodies Israel’s Long Quest for Deterrence

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.

As an act of revenge, it summoned memories of efforts by pre-state Zionists in 1945 to assassinate hundreds of Nazis involved in the Holocaust. It also was a reminder of Israel’s decades-long effort to kill the perpetrators of a massacre in Munich in 1972, when terrorists killed 11 Israelis participating in the Olympic Games that year. One senior Palestinian official linked to the attack, Atef Bseiso, was shot outside a hotel in Paris nearly 20 years later, though Israel never claimed responsibility for his assassination.

As a disruption of Hamas’s hierarchy, the killing of Mr. Sinwar and other leaders echoed Israel’s effort to assassinate the scientists leading Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, a strategic attempt to undermine Iranian capabilities.

And as an act of deterrence, it evoked Israel’s recent assassinations of Hezbollah leaders.

But Mr. Sinwar’s killing was about more than sending a message to enemies opposed to Israel’s existence, Israeli thinkers said. It was also a way of proving to Israelis themselves that the central assumption of Zionism — that Jews would be safer in a Jewish state than in the diaspora — was still valid.

“The dare against Jewish history — that we could somehow take the weakest and most defenseless people with no military experience for 2,000 years and turn this people into an effective combat force — collapsed on Oct. 7,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research organization.

“This last year has been a slow and painful and essential attempt to reclaim the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defense,” Mr. Halevi added. “For me, the death of Sinwar is a culminating moment in that process.”

To critics, both at home and abroad, the idea is rooted in flawed tactical and strategic assumptions.

On a tactical level, the policy of assassinating Israel’s foes suggests that an enemy can be defeated through the loss of its leaders alone. But Israel’s slain foes have often been replaced by leaders who have eventually strengthened their organizations, according to Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency.

In 1992, Israel assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, the head of Hezbollah, only for his successor, Mr. Nasrallah, to turn the group into one of the world’s most powerful militias. Twelve years later, Israel killed both the founding leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi — only for the group to capture Gaza in 2007 and launch the Oct. 7 attack 16 years later.

“It’s totally ineffective,” Mr. Ayalon said. “We targeted Sheikh Yassin and we got Sinwar.”

Strategically, the practice also fails to provide any long-term solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, Mr. Ayalon said.

While Mr. Sinwar’s death was a military achievement that will undermine Hamas’s battlefield operations in the near future, Hamas will remain a lasting force in Palestinian society until Palestinians see an effective alternative to its violence, Mr. Ayalon said.

“As long as they do not see a political horizon, they will support Hamas, not because they believe Hamas’s radical concept of Islam, but because they see Hamas as the only organization fighting for freedom from occupation,” Mr. Ayalon said. “Winning on the battlefield does not bring us closer to winning the war — unless we defeat Hamas’s ideology by creating a better political horizon,” he added.

Still, for many Israelis, it is Israeli strength rather than Israeli concessions that will ultimately bring stability. In mainstream Israeli discourse, the peace process of the 1990s failed not because Israel offered too little to the Palestinians, but because Palestinians wanted too much.

Similarly, for Israelis, the Oct. 7 attack was rooted in the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in 2005, setting the stage for Hamas’s takeover of the territory, even if to Palestinians the attack was a response to Israel’s decision to blockade and impoverish Gaza for the next 16 years.

The same Israeli approach to using force has led it to invade Lebanon, strike the Houthi militia in Yemen who fired munitions at Israel, and attack Iranian interests across the region, even at the risk of edging the region toward an all-out war on multiple fronts.

For Israeli leaders, it is more important to project strength within the Middle East than to win praise in the West. And they believe that they can best achieve that aura of invincibility by increasing the cost of attacking Israel — as Hezbollah and the Houthis have done — instead of relying only on diplomacy.

In a similar vein, Israeli leaders say it was their decision to continue with the war in May — ignoring foreign pressure to agree to a cease-fire instead of invading Rafah, southern Gaza — that led to the death of Mr. Sinwar. Their thinking is that if Israel had agreed to a truce without entering Rafah, where Mr. Sinwar was hiding, he would likely have remained at large.

According to Tom Segev, a biographer of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, it is a mentality with roots in the ideas of both Mr. Ben-Gurion and Mr. Jabotinsky, whose 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” encapsulated the Zionist quest for deterrence. Mr. Jabotinsky and Mr. Ben-Gurion were rivals, but both agreed that the Arab world would only accept the Jewish state if it was too strong to be destroyed, Mr. Segev said.

“Everything is rooted in ‘The Iron Wall’ idea,” Mr. Segev said. “The Iron Wall is the security policy of Israel.”