UPDATE:  The verification is almost complete. From the Times of Israel:

This is amazing, and, given reports that the head of Hamas was scuttling around Gaza’s tunnels surrounded by hostages (and a bunch of explosives to blow them all up if the IDF tried to get Sinwar), it’s doubly striking—as well as heartening.  Click to read from the Times of Israel: (it’s also reported in the NYT):

From the ToI:

The Israel Defense Forces said Thursday it was working to confirm that one of three terrorists its forces had killed in Gaza was Hamas terror chief Yahya Sinwar, as a senior Israeli official said it was very likely that a body found at the scene was that of the October 7 mastermind.

The official said that the security establishment assesses that there was a “high likelihood” that the terrorist killed by the IDF was Sinwar.

“At this time, the identity of the terrorists cannot be confirmed,” the IDF said in a statement.

However, since the IDF is very cautious about these things, the “high likelihood” statement carries some weight.  There’s a bit more:

Hebrew media reports said the IDF troops were not targeting Sinwar and did not know he might be in the building where they were operating.

The army noted that there were no hostages present in the area where the three terrorists were killed. There have been reports that Sinwar has been hiding among hostages throughout the war, using them as human shields.

“The IDF and Shin Bet forces operating in the area continue to operate under the necessary caution,” the army said.

The terrorists were killed when troops opened fire on a group of combatants on the ground floor of a Gaza building in an incident that began on Wednesday.

A strike was ordered against the building, which partially collapsed the structure. When the soldiers subsequently entered the building, they realized that one of the dead terrorists “looked very much like” Sinwar.

If it was Sinwar, it is serendipity, and the fact that no hostages were present in the area is fantastic.  The NYT adds this:

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it was assessing whether Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and a mastermind of last year’s Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel, had been killed. Eliminating Mr. Sinwar has been a major goal of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, and his death would be a watershed in almost 13 months of fighting that have reshaped the Middle East.

The military released no further details. But four Israeli officials said the military was taking the body of a slain militant to a laboratory in Israel in order to assess whether its DNA matches that of Mr. Sinwar, who is in his early 60s. Three of the officials said the militant had been killed on Wednesday in a firefight with Israeli soldiers.

For months, Mr. Sinwar has escaped Israeli efforts to find and kill him, even as many of his top allies — including much of the leadership of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s former political leader — have been assassinated.

Mr. Sinwar’s death, if confirmed, could raise hopes for an end to the conflict in Gaza, by encouraging Hamas to agree to Israeli demands or by providing Israel with a victory that could push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ease its negotiating stance. Hamas and the Israeli government have remained far apart on key issues during months of negotiations over a truce.

Here is a photo from the Polish website balconik.com showing the match of Sinwar’s teeth when he was alive (left) with the teeth of the body (other gruesome bits omitted). It’s a pretty good match. (You can see more photos, some you might find disturbing, here.)

This is the best chance yet for an end to the war–assuming that Hamas will fold given that both its political and military leaders have been killed by the IDF.  I would hope that Hamas would surrender unconditionally and release all the hostages, as they have no credible leadership.

As an addendum, remember that Sinwar (now 61) was an Israeli prisoner, doing a life sentence for multiple murder of both Israelis and Palestinians suspected of collaboration.  He got a brain tumor, and an Israeli doctor saved his life by removing it. He was then released in a prisoner swap when over a thousand Palestinian terrorists were exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Gilat Shalit. No matter that an Israeli doctor saved his life, for Sinwar vowed to kill him and his countrymen after release.

This is still a developing story, but I am optimistic that, if true, this portends an end to the war in Gaza and the release of the hostages. Fingers crossed!

Steve Pinker has an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe (title below). It reflects his own ambivalent feelings—which many of us share—on the first anniversary of the October 7th massacre. As I argue below, the article’s title is a bit misleading (granted, he didn’t choose it), but he does defend Israel’s right to defend itself—though to an unknown extent.  This is the first piece by Steve that I think could have been tweaked a bit to improve it.

If you subscribe to the Globe, you can click on the headline to read it, but you can also find it archived here. And I think I’ve reproduced the whole thing below.

Excerpts are indented, and my own comments are flush left:

My own biography has equipped me with this mindset. I grew up in a Zionist community, had a Jewish education which emphasized that Jews gave morality to the world, and taught Sunday school in the Reform Temple where I had been a student. Yet while I remain proudly Jewish, my adult convictions have pulled me in directions away from this background.

I’m an atheist and feel no need to praise God. I’m a humanist who argues that morality comes not from scripture but from treating people impartially and maximizing their well-being.

And I am not a Zionist in the sense of seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews. I believe a state should be based on a social contract that secures its citizens the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not the embodiment of religious or ethnic yearnings. And I believe that if Jews are distinctive, it’s because we are a diaspora people, relying on norms and knowledge rather than ties to the soil, and drawing from the many civilizations in which we have lived.

In the past year, the universalism of my adulthood, layered atop the ethnocentrism of my upbringing, has left me in a state of agonized ambivalence. Like most American Jews, I oppose many of the actions taken by the current Israeli government and am heartsick over the death and destruction in Gaza. Yet as I struggle to apply objective yardsticks to Israel and its policies, I have been stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at it, not least by students at my own institution, Harvard University.

JAC: This is generally good, especially the ambivalence. I would, however, argue that Pinker’s definition of Zionism as “seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews” is misleading. First, for most Jews living today, “Zionism” means “the idea that Israel is a sovereign nation created as a sanctuary for displaced Jews” (of course there are plenty of Arab Israelis as well).  Israel is in fact IN EXISTENCE, so saying that seeing “a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews” is like saying that “seeing Saudi Arabia as a Muslim state is the natural aspiration of Muslims.”  It can’t be an aspiration if it’s already accomplished.  At one time, before the Balfour Declaration or even 1948, Zionism was an “aspiration to see a Jewish state.” But now the Jewish state is born, and Zionism is simply the desire to ensure that the baby isn’t killed (h/t Natasha Hausdorff, who has a better take on Zionism).

More from Steve:

. . . . In a statement issued three days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre on Israel, 34 student groups held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible’’ for the slaughter and rape of 1,200 of its citizens. Entirely! Our students exonerated the men who pulled the triggers, raped women, and set houses on fire with families in them. They took no note of the murderously antisemitic ideology of Hamas, nor of their strategy of killing noncombatants, a war crime. They seemed unaware that Egypt blockades Gaza, too, and that Hamas is armed and encouraged by a malevolent theocracy in Iran.

This is the species of facts that Harvard students really need to be taught. Not that it would budge the Hamas-lovers one whit, but it at least weakens their arguments, especially about genocide. (But there are other Big Lies that need to be dispelled, including the “Israel is an apartheid state” trope.)

Then, this spring, the students camping in Harvard Yard went far beyond protesting Israel’s attack of Gaza, an understandable impulse. They declared “From the river to the sea,’’ and displayed signs that wiped Israel off the map.

Calling for the annihilation of a state is extraordinary. None of the other 192 members of the United Nations has had its existence seriously questioned, and in 79 years none has gone out of existence through conquest. Many historians note that the grandfathering of states since 1945 is a major cause of the historical decline of war.

In the paragraph above, Pinker really does get at the heart of anti-Zionism: opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. If he believes that Israel is a legitimate state that has the right to defend it’s existence, then yes, Pinker is a Zionist. But I think he holds back on that under the impression that “Zionism” is the sentiment held by Jews in the early 20th century.

Below he shows that the Nakba was not simply the driving of Arabs out of Israel during the 1948 war—a gross distortion that could be corrected with a little education. The majority of Arabs who left Israel around the time of Independence (when five Arab states invaded Israel) did so either before the announcement of independence, because they wanted to flee the war and reside in countries ruled by Arabs, or because Arab armies, like those in Iraq, told the Arabs to leave Israel to avoid extermination during the coming war. The smaller number of Arabs who stayed to fight were expelled by the Israeli army, while Arabs who stayed in place peacefully became Israeli citizens.

This is not to deny the tragic displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding. Yet the turbulent post-World War II period was a time of population transfers all over the world, as new countries coalesced and people fled out of fear or duress. Refugees included massive numbers of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and Hindus and Muslims in partitioned India, long since resettled. Crimes against humanity took place in those years, and the victims deserve sympathy and compensation. Yet it would be grotesque to try to reverse this history three generations later, or to abolish countries like Poland or Pakistan that emerged from the chaos.

Again, in the first paragraph below, Pinker really does characterize how most Jews see “Zionism”—as “the claim that Israel’s has a right to exist as a sovereign nation”. And then he goes after the Big Lie that Israel is committing “genocide”, a really dumb criticism that has caught on among the ideologues who don’t even know what “genocide” is. If they did, they’d know that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are the genuinely genocidal groups or states. But have you ever heard that claim from pro-Palestinian groups? I didn’t think so, even though this aspiration is in Hamas’s initial charter and remains the goal of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their masters in Iran.

Even those who are skeptical of ethnic or religious states have no grounds for opposing the very existence of Israel. Many liberal democracies have state religions (including the United Kingdom with its antidisestablishmentarianism), and many more have a responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of their ethnic majority. Israel can be a Jewish state in the same sense that Denmark is a Danish state, each granting full rights to its minority citizens.

Just as egregious as calls for the destruction of Israel is the blood libel that it is committing “genocide,’’ the worst of human evils. War and genocide are not the same. An armed force waging war targets enemy fighters for a military goal, harming noncombatants only as an unwanted side effect. An armed force committing genocide targets noncombatants with the goal of destroying a people.

Israel may deserve criticism for launching the Gaza war or for sacrificing too many civilians in fighting it (despite its stated efforts to spare them). Yet its military objective — eliminating a militia dedicated to Israel’s destruction — is crystal clear, as is the reason so many civilians have been harmed, namely that Hamas entrenched itself in tunnels beneath homes, schools, and hospitals.

“May” deserve criticism? Do they or don’t they? If they do, then I’d like to know how Pinker would suggest Israel go about eliminating Hamas given, as he admits, that the huge death toll is an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas deliberately embedding itself among civilians. One can, and should, mourn the death of civilians while at the same time recognizing the ultimate cause of those deaths.

And the ending:

I would desperately like to see a cease-fire in Gaza and a Palestinian state. Yet I know enough Israelis and American Zionists [JAC: note that Pinker doesn’t say “American Jews”, so here he is conflating “Jews” with “Zionists,” which is my point] to understand the counterarguments. No other country would tolerate a fortress on its border that regularly bombarded it with tens of thousands of rockets and sent out terrorists to kill and kidnap its citizens. A state in the West Bank, always vulnerable to Hamas takeover, would multiply the menace. I like to think that human ingenuity can find a way for Israel to attain the security of other democracies, with no force or repression. Yet its venomous critics have advanced no such plan.

When I was a Sunday school teacher, the curriculum was ethics, and I led pupils in deliberating moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. During the past year I have found myself grappling with new ones and wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.

The last paragraph shows why the title is misleading. When I read “I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel” (note, he doesn’t mention “Palestine,” so perhaps “the Gaza war” would have been more appropriate), I took it to mean that Harvard students need to be educated on Middle Eastern history so they could argue about the war knowing the facts. But, it seems, he means that Harvard students need to learn to discuss “moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer”.  That means only that students need to learn how to debate. But to do that, they surely need to  know the facts of history, not simply philosophical styles of argument.

Still, it takes some courage for a famous Harvard professor to risk his reputation by coming out in support of Israel, and defending its existence and right to defend itself.

Starting tomorrow is the “Week of Rage”, marking five days of pro-Hamas faculty, students, and staff acting out their hatred of Israel and Jews on our campus—and campuses across America. Odd, isn’t it, that the week begins on October 7, the first anniversary of the day the evil butchers of Hamas (and their allies) slaughtered 1200 people and kidnapped 250? One might even say that celebrating on that day violates common decency.

To many activists and their supporters shown below at the University of Chicago, that was a glorious day, marking the revival of the “resistance.” No matter that the dead and kidnapped were almost all civilians, and that about 70 are still languishing in horrible conditions in the dank tunnels beneath Gaza. No matter that Hamas and its ally Hezbollah (and their masters in Iran) continue to fire rockets at civilian targets in Israel. After all, it was ‘justified resistance” from the very beginning in 1917.

Here is a video, taken last Friday and put on the Instagram page of “fsjpuchicago,” which stands for Faculty and Staff for Palestine at the University of Chicago. The video calls for a continuation of protests along with a promise that they will continue protesting until Chicago “discloses and divests”.

This is all free speech, of course, but it doesn’t mean that these people are not odious apologists for terrorism and, as the term goes, “anti-Zionists” (we all know what that means).

Turn up the sound. The first speaker is Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development, and the second is Callie Maidhof, Associate Director and Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in our Global Studies group.

The speeches are the usual tedious repetition of propaganda, cant, and lies, blaming the war entirely on Israel–in fact, going all the way back to blaming the current conflict on the 1917 Balfour Declaration from the British government that called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Now, that state is, to these people, a “settler colonialist” state, a gross distortion of history.

The implication is that Israel shouldn’t be there at all. Pity that it’s here to stay!

Abdelhadi then decries America’s and Chicago’s emphasis on free expression, saying that the University’s dismantling of the encampment last summer (which violated University rules) was really a violation of free speech, thus “laying bare the contradictions of the Western World” and of the University of Chicago. The U of C is said to be “complicit in the murder of Palestinians”, “covered with Palestinian blood,” and dedicated to the erasure of Palestinian history.  As Abdelhadi promises at the end (after some chanting), the FSJP group is not going anywhere until it accomplishes its goals.  That will be. . . . well, never, and so we’re in for a long and rough yer as these protestors disrupt campus in their futile cause.

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A post shared by FSJP at UChicago (@fsjpuchicago)

“Uchicagounited” is composed mainly of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)( and some non-student allies. (SJP, a registered student group here, was sanctioned last year by the University for disruption). This appeared on the uchicagounited Instagram page.

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A post shared by UChicago United for Palestine (@uchicagounited)

Here’s a larger-type version of their mission:

Next week marks one year of “israel’s” genocide in Gaza — and one year of resistance.

“israel” has spent the past twelve months brutally bombing and displacing the people of Palestine and now Lebanon; cutting off their food, water, and education; and perpetrating every kind of atrocity against them, causing over 186,000 deaths. Despite this genocidal onslaught, the Palestinian and Lebanese people have remained steadfast in their resistance. ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

SHOW UP ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, AT 2:30 PM ON THE CENTER QUAD (by 1100 E 58th St) to express our grief and rage as the University continues to put their money behind this massacre. While our administration ramps up its repression, surveillance, and censorship against students and community members, WE WON’T TAKE IT FOR A SECOND. 🇵🇸🇱🇧

This is a masked event; keep yourselves and others safe! Masks will also be provided for those without them. 😷

The masks, of course, are not intended to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, but to hide the identity of the protestors from the authorities. When Jewish students congregate in solidarity, you see no masks.

Well, the administration has made its position clear; it is in favor of free speech but against disruption. And it will not entertain the idea of divesting according to the protestors’ demands. In a statement issued recently, President Paul Alivisatos, while calling for truth-seeking and the expression of diverse voices, added this:

While constructive dialogue is the gold standard to strive toward, speech should never be chilled. Actions that chill the speech or learning of others are out of bounds, and the University’s academic and administrative leadership is obliged to act to protect the community from such actions. Such chilling actions can include disrupting the speech or expression of others, disrupting the ability of classes and events to proceed, and other efforts intended to impose rather than propose a viewpoint for others. Acts of discrimination and harassment are inimical to our values and purposes, and we will defend our community against such actions.

It is clear, at least to me, what prompted this statement.

The student manual has also been updated in light of what happened last year. As the Chicago Maroon reports:

The changes include an explicit ban on “staying overnight in outdoor structures on campus or in non-residential campus buildings,” a clarification that “the erection or construction of any structure on campus” requires advance approval from the Director of Student Centers, and that amplified sounds are only permitted on campus at certain times and “not inside campus buildings.”

No encampments!  But, as the pro-Palestinian protestors promise, they’re not holding back: “WE WON’T TAKE IT FOR A SECOND”.  I’m afraid they’ll have to, unless they want to face sanctions from the University.

I absolutely defend the right of the miscreants above to say what they want so long as it adheres to our “time, place, and manner” guidelines for speech. But that doesn’t mean that counterspeech is not the proper response. Count this post as that kind of speech. But the lies mouthed by the protestors above are sufficient to discredit them and their “cause”. Israeli genocide, indeed! They willfully omit that it is Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s other proxies who are really dedicated to genocide: the extermination of Israel and its Jews. Israel has no intention to wipe out all the Palestinians, which is why their attacks are targeted.

The Jewish students and faculty here will celebrate October 7 with a show not of resistance, but of sorrow, hope, and solidarity. I won’t disclose the details because the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are prone to disrupting such events.