War is a terrible thing, and it is sinful to laugh at carnage or loss of life, for we are, all of us, equal in the eyes of God. Let’s stipulate that to begin with.
Good, now that I’ve gotten all that pious nonsense out of the way, I want to party for a paragraph or two because the Israel Defense Forces just staged the greatest unplanned live hit in recent military history by — without even trying to at that moment — killing Yahya Sinwar, the powerful, feared, and highly elusive leader of Hamas and terrorist mastermind behind the October 7 massacre. (The next man in line for Hamas leadership is currently living in an expensive high-rise in Qatar; one assumes his life ends the second he leaves the country or the line of sight of his bodyguards, for that matter.)
We must be clear about things: A just world required this man to die, and ideally without dignity. I can put it in no blunter terms than that, nor even conceive of them. I am utterly relieved about his death, and more than a bit elated as well — not because I am bloodthirsty, but precisely because I despair over the implacable bloodthirstiness of Hamas, an organization that came to power in the Gaza Strip after it was literally handed to the Palestinians but that, instead of governing for the benefit of its people, harvested its resources and human capital to plot the slaughter, abduction, rape, and eventual genocide of its Jewish neighbors. Sinwar died with a shell through his skull and a roof collapsed upon his bomb-belted body, and I confess my grim satisfaction at the closure of it, if nothing else. He was given the opportunity to be an actual leader, and he invested all of it in hatred and terror. I celebrate, and couldn’t care less if you think differently.
Finally, though, the comedian in me has to celebrate the improbable randomness of it all. For the State of Israel, Sinwar was literally the single most wanted man in the entire world, more so than any Iranian official you could name. Sinwar was the monster who planned and executed the most traumatic terrorist attack in Israeli history, kicking off a regional war. When the Israelis brilliantly targeted the leadership of Hezbollah a few weeks ago, the attacks were a spectacular execution of tightly orchestrated spycraft involving high and low technology, the sort of work that will be professionally studied by other intelligence agencies for years to come.
But this? Sinwar was apparently found completely by chance. A young IDF tanker merely nine months into his first deployment, doing a random patrol, spotted a terrorist poking his head out a window. An online friend suggested that the American analogy to this would be like Osama bin Laden getting taken out by a random artillery regiment of the Iowa National Guard instead of SEAL Team Six, but I prefer to think of it as Sinwar getting iced by the Israeli equivalent of Harold Ramis and Bill Murray in Stripes. (ZISKEY RATES HAMAS: “They’re P***ies!”) Either way, the world became a better place for his absence in it.