Extracted from the opinion article in Ha’aretz 20/9/2025: “In Its Vengeful War in Gaza, Israel Played the Tragic Role Hamas Had Scripted” by Carolina Landsmann.
Summary: How Hamas’ slain chief Sinwar, well-versed in Zionism and Jewish history, pulled every trigger of Jewish trauma
The goal of Hamas’ October 7 attack wasn’t a military victory; Hamas lacks the tools to achieve that. The goal was to provoke an Israeli response. Hamas’ murderous attack, with enough documentation to fill three Yad Vashems, was planned to drive Israel out of its mind.
It’s not just the righteous man who knows the soul of his animal, as the biblical book of Proverbs says. A Palestinian who has been jailed in Israel also knows the souls of his jailors.
Sinwar knew that Jews had prepared all their lives for the next Holocaust. That’s why Israel stages flyovers of Auschwitz – to promise that in the event of another Holocaust, we will fight back rather than going like sheep to the slaughter.
This conditioning worked, even if it was only against “terrorists in flip-flops,” as Netanyahu once called them, rather than the Nazi war machine. Following Hamas’ attack, there was nobody to stop the gates of hell from opening. Tragically, Israel played the role Sinwar wrote for the country. It embarked on a campaign of vengeance that even the devil couldn’t have imagined.
And that’s what Sinwar was waiting for. He didn’t create a false facade of genocide; he planned a calculated move that involved exposing his entire people to a genocide that Israel would carry out. The Palestinian genocide was the bloody platter on which their state would be served up.
Sinwar, an expert on Zionism and Jews, pressed all the triggers of Jewish trauma. The note he left about taking “a calculated risk” can now be understood not just a risk, but a calculated genocide.
As far back as January 2024, I wrote about the genocide trap and was promptly compared to former Prime Minister Golda Meir, as if I were absolving Israel of moral responsibility. But that article was a cold-blooded analysis of a historic move and its diplomatic fruits. And judging by what happened at the United Nations, the move seems to have worked. The world saw a genocide, identified Israel as the party responsible and is finally waking up and taking action (and Sinwar understood both the world and the amount of blood required to awaken it).
This time, the Holocaust isn’t the only historic injustice on the world’s mind as it seeks to advance a solution to the conflict. And just as the Holocaust gave birth to the state of Israel, this genocide will give birth to the Palestinian state. The violence Israel is employing in Gaza has rebounded on it like a diplomatic boomerang.
With Britain now joining in, one can almost imagine history reconverging around the 1947 Partition Plan. The question is whether this time, the Arabs will decide to accept partition and thereby correct their historic mistake, or whether they will once again reject it. And a no less interesting question is whether Israelis will maintain their acceptance of the idea of dividing the land, or whether there will be a role reversal, and they will be the ones to reject it.
Bibi thought he had besieged the Gaza Strip, but it turns out that Sinwar was the architect of a diplomatic siege on Israel.