For left-wing Palestine friends in Switzerland, Yahya Sinwar is an “icon of resistance”. This is not only stupid, but also dangerous.
Always at the forefront of pro-Palestine protests: Geri Müller, former National Councilor of the Greens, at the demonstration in Bern on October 28, 2023.
Anthony Anex / Keystone
Anyone who still believed in the common sense of certain Palestine supporters in Switzerland was proven wrong by Monday at the latest. The Switzerland – Palestine Society published an article on its website entitled “Who was Yahya Sinwar?” It is a grotesque tribute to the Hamas leader who was recently killed by Israeli forces. Sinwar is portrayed as a “historical hero,” an “icon of resistance” – not a mastermind of terror and mass murderer.
The Hamas terrorist act of October 7, 2023 – the worst pogrom since the Second World War – is not mentioned at all. Neither is the fact that Sinwar brutally took his own people hostage and willingly sacrificed them so that he could later accuse Israel of genocide. And about the alleged development of Hamas into a “part of the global anti-colonialist struggle” it says: “All anti-Semitic clichés, initially adopted by Western anti-Semitic discourse, have been dropped.” As if Hamas’ founding charter from 1987, in which it states the extermination of Jews as its goal, no longer applies.
The justifications that Geri Müller, the President of the Switzerland-Palestine Society, felt compelled to make in the media are at least as absurd: “There is a different image of Hamas and Yahya Sinwar than the one that Israeli propaganda spreads.” In addition, it was not Hamas’ intention in the “liberation attack” to “kill civilians. Rather, the hostages were intended to free thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.” Such statements are not just stupid and forgetful of history – they are also dangerous.
Geri Müller, after all a former Green National Councilor and mayor of Baden, is a repeat offender. In 2008, he took part in a demonstration in Zurich against Israel’s military deployment in Gaza, particularly when he was President of the Foreign Policy Commission of the National Council. During his speech, someone behind him held up a banner that read in French: “Gaza worse than Holocaust.” Müller didn’t want to hear anything about it.
Four years later, he invited three representatives of Hamas to the Federal Palace, including their spokesman Mushir al-Masri, a hardliner even by the standards of the Islamists. He was certainly not a supporter of terror, but spoke to all those involved, Müller piped up at the time. Just a few months ago he spoke out against Switzerland classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization. His worldview was also revealed by his seventeen parliamentary initiatives in which he dedicated himself to Israel. The former SP National Councilor Boris Banga once rightly called him an “anti-Semitic political clown” – although that was probably an understatement.
And Geri Müller is not alone. Hamas supporters are still present in Federal Bern. Above all, Geneva SP Councilor of States Carlo Sommaruga, who chairs the Switzerland-Palestine parliamentary group. He does not see Israel as a threatened small democratic state, but as a colonial and occupying power that oppresses the Palestinians in an apartheid state. Like Geri Müller, he also supports the BDS movement, which calls for a boycott of Israeli products. Experts classify this as anti-Semitic. Despite this, the Young Socialists recently passed a resolution in support of the BDS movement.
The Middle East conflict is historically complex, the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population is immense and the conduct of the war by the Netanyahu government is debatable. But those who, like Geri Müller and Co., reverse the perpetrator and victim are not just acting cynically. But he also makes himself a useful idiot for the Hamas terrorists.
