From Sinwar to Sydney. So, now what?

HOW YAHYA SINWAR TURNED ISRAELI VALUES AGAINST ISRAEL

The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach ignites a question being asked far beyond Australia: how did we get here? Acts of violence that once seemed isolated now feel increasingly connected, part of a broader pattern of radicalization and normalized brutality. The danger is not only the frequency of these events, but the reality that they are no longer confined by geography, and that Jewish communities are confronting a growing existential threat worldwide.

October 7 was such a moment. It was a calculated operation shaped by years of observation and a clear understanding of how Israel and the wider world respond to mass civilian trauma. The strategy helps explain how the world has shifted over the past two years, and why events unfolding now are so deeply troubling.

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, did not need to defeat Israel militarily. He needed to entangle it morally, politically, and psychologically. Achieving that required a deep understanding of Israeli society and its core values.

Sinwar acquired that understanding during years in Israeli prison. He learned Hebrew fluently. He followed Israeli media closely. He observed political debates, social divisions, and the moral language Israelis use to speak about responsibility, solidarity, and obligation. He watched how Israeli society reacts to trauma and how quickly it mobilizes around shared principles.

One principle stood out above the rest. Israel does not abandon its people. Hostages are not abstract bargaining chips. They are individuals whose fate becomes a national concern, cutting across ideology and politics.

By the time he was released in a prisoner exchange, the 2011 deal in which Israel freed 1,027 prisoners in exchange for a single Israeli captive, Gilad Shalit, Sinwar had spent more than two decades in Israeli prison, serving four life sentences for terrorism-related crimes, including the abduction and killing of fellow Palestinians. When he returned to Gaza, he carried all that he had learned back with him. It became the basis of his strategy.

The mass abduction of civilians was the core of the October 7 operation. Sinwar understood that Israel would be compelled to act, and that any serious effort to recover hostages and dismantle Hamas would be prolonged, destructive, and visible to the world. Every available Israeli option carried severe costs.

This trap was years in the making. Gaza was engineered as more than a surface battlefield. Beneath it lay an extensive tunnel network, widely described as stretching hundreds of miles, designed to function as a protected military ecosystem. The tunnels allowed fighters to move, communicate, store weapons and ammunition, and stockpile months of supplies, enabling Hamas’s leadership to remain underground for extended periods.

Civilians were afforded no comparable protection. When war came, Hamas went underground, while the population above remained exposed. This arrangement was by design. Gaza received billions of dollars in international aid over many years, much of it intended for civilian needs and reconstruction. Substantial resources were diverted instead into tunnels, weapons stockpiles, and underground fortifications designed to sustain fighters during prolonged conflict. The result was a deliberate inversion of protection, military assets and leadership were secured below ground, while civilians were left without comparable safeguards.

The preparations extended beyond infrastructure. Hamas also benefited from intelligence gathered over time by Palestinians who worked inside Israel under permit programs. That access was built on trust, later unabashedly betrayed. It allowed routine exposure to Israeli communities, workplaces, and daily life. The trust was reportedly abused to collect operational intelligence, including the locations of homes, shelters, and safe rooms, as well as routes, response times, and security patterns. That information was carried back into Gaza and later exploited. The result was not only tactical advantage, but a profound breach of the social trust that underpinned civilian interaction across the border.

The same logic operated above ground. Throughout the fighting, Hamas fighters strategically and tactically operated in civilian clothing, embedding themselves within civilian life and making it impossible to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. This ensured that Israeli responses unfolded amid moral and operational ambiguity that Hamas itself had engineered. It also allowed Hamas, through its so-called “Ministry of Health,” to report casualty figures that served its narrative and were widely accepted as gospel by many, while others viewed them as unreliable or impossible to independently verify.

These realities complicate a claim that is widely repeated: that Hamas’s actions should be understood primarily as “resistance” to occupation.

But there was no occupation. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, dismantling all settlements and removing its permanent military presence from within the territory. Gaza’s border with Egypt remained largely closed, and Israel’s naval blockade functioned as a security measure aimed at restricting ongoing weapons smuggling, while not preventing legitimate shipments from entering.

Resistance also does not target civilians. The October 7 attack targeted civilians in their homes, at festivals, and in shelters. What took place functioned less as “resistance” than as a lure, designed to draw Israel into a response that would serve Hamas’s strategic aims far beyond the battlefield. The scale and brutality of the crimes all but guaranteed a powerful Israeli response, removing any possibility of restraint and ensuring that the war would unfold on terms Sinwar understood well.

Calling the attack “resistance” blurs responsibility by shifting it away from Hamas and framing Palestinian oppression as wholly orchestrated by Israel, recasting Hamas as the “superheroes” who arrived to save the day. This framing obscures reality. Gaza has long been portrayed as impoverished, powerless, and defenseless, yet Hamas and allied groups amassed large stockpiles of weapons, including rockets, RPGs, firearms, and grenades. That arsenal did not materialize organically. It was built through sustained smuggling and the misappropriation of financial resources, in defiance of agreements and controls explicitly designed to prevent large-scale militarization.

The attack began with that arsenal. Thousands of rockets were launched in a short period, driving civilians across Israel into shelters and providing cover as the ground assault began.

Terrorists infiltrated communities, attacked civilians in their homes, murdered families, and took hostages. In multiple locations, people hiding in safe rooms and shelters were targeted with gunfire and explosives. Shelters intended to protect life became sites of mass killing. The sequence reflected coordination and planning.

The violence of October 7 carried a psychological and symbolic dimension. Sexual violence, mutilation, and the burning of people and homes were deliberate acts chosen for their impact. They struck at Israel’s deepest moral sensibilities and historical memory, evoking multiple existential traumas associated with attempts to erase Jewish humanity and continuity.

Sinwar understood that such brutality would compel unity and action inside Israel. He also understood how that action would be received internationally.

While conflicts may start on the battlefield, they quickly unfold across global media and information networks. Sinwar understood how attention shifts over time, how images come to matter more than sequence or causation, and how prolonged conflict redirects outrage from the initial acts to their consequences. This dynamic is further amplified by artificial intelligence and the growing prevalence of manipulated pictures and videos, which accelerate narrative distortion and make verification increasingly difficult in real time.

The international reaction that followed Israel’s war in Gaza was anticipated and incorporated into the strategy from the outset. Israel’s obligation to recover hostages and dismantle Hamas ensured sustained urban warfare. Civilian casualties would dominate coverage long after the initiating atrocity faded from view. The stage for this reaction had been set over decades by foreign activist networks, many backed by nefarious Middle Eastern regimes, that spent years shaping narratives and conditioning audiences to interpret events with a normalized bias. Sinwar likely had nothing to do with these activists. He only needed to know that they were in place, ready and waiting.

Indeed, the consequences extended far beyond Israel and Gaza. Globally, Jewish businesses were boycotted solely on the basis of identity. Synagogues were defaced, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, and communal institutions placed under sustained security pressure. Jewish communities worldwide experienced a sharp rise in harassment, assaults, and vandalism. On university campuses, protests spilled into intimidation tactics targeting Jewish students, including harassment, exclusion, and silencing, regardless of their views on Israeli policy, their general positions on the left-right spectrum, or even whether Judaism played any meaningful role in their lives at all. It has also been repeatedly shown that many participants struggle to answer even basic questions about the Middle East, Palestinians, or Israel itself. In many cases, the desire to belong, or more precisely, the need to not be left out, has overridden context and critical thinking.

Across Europe, the United States, and Australia, this climate spilled into wider public life. Protests related to the Gaza war frequently turned confrontational. Holiday festivities, including Christmas markets and seasonal events, faced disruptions, restricted access, and heightened security. Artist and academic boycotts followed, reinforcing social and professional exclusion alongside public pressure.

Sinwar pursued a strategy aimed at forcing Israel into a series of unavoidable choices, each carrying severe cost, while ensuring that the consequences of Israel’s response would be judged in isolation from the crime that precipitated it.

We are now living with the consequences. Jews are singled out, isolated, threatened, boycotted, and pressed to account collectively for a war they did not choose, amid the political fracturing now common across most democracies.

But the current surge in antisemitism and anti-Western agitation is unlikely to remain confined to Jews or to Israel-related politics. History suggests that when hostility toward Jews becomes socially acceptable, it rarely stops there. It spreads outward, attaching itself to other institutions, values, and communities associated with liberal democracy, pluralism, and the West itself. What begins as anti-Israel rhetoric often evolves into broader rejection of Western norms, authority, and social order.

If this is the world October 7 was designed to produce, the burden of response no longer rests only with the Jewish State and the Jewish people. Jews represent just 0.2 percent of humanity. What follows will be decided by the choices of the other 99.8 percent.

So, now what?