My Take | Some who study too much history end up repeating it

Reading various accounts of Yahya Sinwar’s political thinking, it’s extraordinary how much the slain Hamas leader thought like Osama bin Laden. Likewise, there are the terrifying parallels between the response of the Israeli state and that of the United States after 9/11. The tit-for-tat – you kill one of mine, I kill 10 of yours – has rearranged political orders, globally in the US case, regionally in Israel’s. It has also resulted in the global discrediting of the moral standing of both countries outside the West.

And in both cases, China has been the unintended beneficiary of all the horrific upheaval. All Beijing has to do is sit back and watch – and occasionally make a few anodyne declarations about the need for peace.

You might think Sinwar had plenty of time to study and learn from bin Laden’s deeply flawed strategic thinking behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and their fatal consequences for his own organisation in the past two decades.

The fact that before Israel’s own September 11 on October 7 last year, Saudi Arabia was close to a historic Anwar Sadat-like diplomatic breakthrough with the Jewish state, one to be brokered by Washington and which Sinwar no doubt wanted to disrupt, may have reminded him of bin Laden’s singular failure. If 9/11 had worked out as bin Laden thought it would, the Americans would have been out of his home country a long time ago, if not the entire Middle East.

At least Sinwar’s followers, or what’s left of them, could take comfort that October 7 stopped the Saudi-US-Israel deal in its tracks. But it was at most a minor goal in his “grand” strategic plan.

Beijing, by the way, successfully brokered a rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh while the West was asleep.