Image and myth in the face of death

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After the martyrdom of Yahya Sinwar, comparisons related to the making of a myth spread based on the image of the fighter’s end. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind for writers of leftist origins is the comparison between two images: the image of Sinwar’s last act of resistance, and the image of Che Guevara after his execution when he was displayed before the press lying down surrounded by army and intelligence officers.

The executioners cannot resist the temptation to display the photos to the public to brag about their achievement after they have worked hard to create the myth of the targeted opponent (wanted dead or alive), which establishes evil in an individual and attributes to him characteristics that are a product of their imagination and based on the fears of their audience. After they have personalized the evil/issue, they fall into the trap set by their propaganda. As long as it is related to a person, his end at their hands must be displayed, and their embodiment of the inevitable fate of their enemies must be displayed.

This temptation blinds them to what experience has shown about the risk of publishing the image, which could create a counter-myth. So Israel, not content with what the soldiers leaked and spoiled the drama that Benjamin Netanyahu longed to be the hero of, officially released the tape recorded by the drone, thereby igniting the enthusiasm of the victims of the oppressed throughout the region.

Myths are created by politicians, biographers, news writers, writers and media professionals, and popular culture is no exception, and historians dismantle them. As for the historian who contributes to their creation, he has become in our time considered a traitor to his profession. However, the source of myths, the subject of this article, is not the falsification of facts, nor is their purpose to explain phenomena with a story so that the historian can come and expose the falsehood and correct the fallacies, but rather it returns to the interpretation of the image. This is how the British literary critic John Berger interpreted the last photograph of Che Guevara by likening it to two paintings; one by Rembrandt entitled "A Lesson in Anatomy by Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", and the other by Andrea Mantegna entitled "Weeping Around the Body of Christ".

As is known, Guevara was executed by firing nine bullets into different parts of his body to camouflage his execution without a trial, and to make it appear as if he had been killed in battle. But the lie did not last for days, and the fact of the execution spread by order of the Bolivian president on October 9, 1967.

The image of Sinwar throwing the drone with a stick appeared, after he used the bullets and hand grenades he had in his arsenal in a clash with soldiers who never imagined they were facing someone who frightens their children in his name. This was the image of the exhausted and wounded masked man who, along with his two comrades, faced his fate, already known in advance, fighting in a house whose inhabitants had been displaced by the occupation, like their neighbors and the people of their city. What the image conveyed blew up everything the occupation had been promoting about the leader who spends the war hiding in tunnels, betting his life on the lives of hostages. The final confrontation and the reception of death with composure unleashed people’s imagination, and perhaps they will build legends on the legend.

It is true that during a whole year they witnessed hundreds of resistance fighters bravely confronting death, but this time they witnessed what the entire world is witnessing with them. They found a symbol that counters the narratives of the occupation and their own fears, standing tall at a time when the Israeli war machine is trampling on everything that rises above the ground, and in light of Israel’s attempts, along with its international and regional allies, to subjugate morale as well. Israel has doubled Sinwar’s symbolism by focusing its hatred on him.

Except for the mythical interpretation of the image of the resistance fighter at the end of his path, the paths of the two men do not intersect or resemble each other. Guevara, who was originally from Argentina, belonged to a well-off family of Spanish and Irish origins. He studied medicine and adopted Marxist thought.

When you read his epic biography, you are surprised by the number of sports hobbies he practiced as a young man, and the variety of interests of a medical student in art, literature, philosophy, and others. A son of a bourgeois class, he chose the side of the morally oppressed, but he was certainly not one of them. He concluded from his motorcycle tour across South America that the source of injustice there is one, that the revolution must be one, and that it faces one enemy, which is American imperialism (and its major corporations such as United Fruits), which he considered the basis of injustice and backwardness on this continent.

Guevara joined the Cuban revolution and, after the overthrow of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in 1959, became a minister, governor of the central bank, and Cuba's envoy to several countries. But his quest to create revolutionary outposts in South America and Africa ended with him isolated with a few dozen fighters in the remote mountains of Bolivia, among peasants who did not accept his ideas or his rhetoric. He was unable to reach an understanding even with other armed groups.

His legend, the legend of challenging injustice anywhere and in the worst circumstances, and his statement that the task of the revolutionary is to make a revolution, spread among young leftists who carried his iconic images during the youth and student movements in Western Europe and the United States in 1968 and until the first half of the 1970s. Guevara became a symbol of the cultural revolution and the counter-culture to the ruling establishment; the culture of his people, in fact. His influence on the strategies of struggle against imperialism and dictatorships and on real change remained limited.

Some young people imitated his appearance without following his choice in the international struggle against American imperialism and its multinational corporations. Western democracies soon embraced his image as part of pop culture in art, literature and cinema. From there it took the familiar path to shopping malls; his image was printed on coffee mugs and T-shirts.

Sinwar was martyred while fighting the occupation in his homeland, not in another country. He is a descendant of a family of Palestinian refugees, the son of the poor oppressed classes who shared life and injustice in the Gaza Strip. He did not have the opportunity to practice hobbies, nor to travel the Arab world; all the injustice that a moral rebel searching for a personal identity wants to explore, surrounded him from every side where he lived.

He entered prison at an early age. Prison was his school, and the prison inmates’ fraternity became his family. He left after twenty years to the besieged Gaza Strip, where his movement exercised power. He did not tire of power and leave it to make a revolution somewhere else; the occupation of Palestine is chronic and long. It is true that he became part of the authority that runs the Gaza Strip, but he did not abandon the mood and discourse of resisting the occupation. He only left Palestine once, to Egypt.

Sinwar did not adopt an internationalist or leftist ideology or a discourse of global revolution. The furthest his thought reached was the reconciliation between his Islamism and his nationalism; he was a nationalist Islamist who sought national unity. This localism, this broad life in a narrow place, became his path to globalism. He lived a short life long enough for his fame to spread far and wide.

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After October 7, 2023, a global chorus was formed under Israeli leadership, and it unleashed propaganda that held Hamas, and Sinwar personally, responsible not only for what was committed that day against Israeli civilians, but also for what Israel is committing in its extended war on Gaza, under the pretext that the genocide it is committing is due to Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa, which has been linked to it.

It is a blood libel in the pastures of lies. An original sin is invented other than occupation, so the victim is blamed and the criminal is acquitted while committing the crime in flagrante delicto. Some Arabs have followed its example and imitated it; as we know them, they are suspected of lying and a vehicle for idle talk, and their speech is not considered, in the words of Ibn Khaldun. We say this despite the position of many displaced people without shelter in Gaza itself since that day when the gates of hell were opened upon them.

In this case, too, it is not right to blame the victims of the war of extermination who lost everything, wandering among the rubble and devastation, carrying what remains of their world in plastic bags, and who do not believe in the legend of Sinwar or the legend of anyone else. The problem does not lie here, but in those who have paid no price, who ally themselves with those who commit atrocities, who gloat over their victims, and who hold the resistance responsible for the atrocities of the occupation.

We are surprised to see his name repeated by the leaders of major Western countries who appeared in the media after his martyrdom. They ignore him and repeat the Israeli myth about him; they consider him the obstacle to the ceasefire, and they receive the real obstacle (Netanyahu) as if he were one of the leaders of the civilized world, even after the prosecution in the International Criminal Court treated him as a war criminal.

The so-called "obstacle" is gone, the war continues, and the lies continue after they have been exposed. The Israeli Prime Minister - who commits the most horrific atrocities, bombing schools and hospitals, and is not deterred by the remains of children, and who embodies the lowest combination of human qualities, namely the combination of cowardice and sadistic cruelty, baseness and arrogance, baseness and showmanship, and a passion for appearances - is greeted by leaders in the West, and the parliament of the greatest country in the world stands to greet him. They breathe a sigh of relief at the killing of the poor man, the son of the poor, who never set foot in their country or anyone else's, and who never occupied anyone's land.

The image of the masked mujahid cannot be contained by Western consumer capitalism within the margins of cultural pluralism and diversity of scenes, unlike the image of Guevara; it is an image of a performance that is difficult to contain, unlike its easy and smooth absorption by the oppressed in general in our countries. You can meet the model of Sinwar in any refugee camp, village or Palestinian neighborhood: he has no special uniform, nor even an attempt to stand out.