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Israel’s Response to Its 9/11 Risks Missing the Lessons of America’s 9/11 [1]

['Jeet Heer', 'Sarah Lazare', 'Adam H. Johnson', 'Musa Al-Gharbi', 'Dave Zirin', 'Nima Shirazi', 'The Nation', 'Mychal Denzel Smith']

Date: 2023-10-09 13:54:05+00:00

World / Israel’s Response to Its 9/11 Risks Missing the Lessons of America’s 9/11 Ignoring intelligence failures and doubling down on bad policy is the worst response to terrorism.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses world leaders during the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023, in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

For once, a big news event is producing historical analogies that are not hyperbolic but, if anything, understated. Hamas’s brazen incursion into Israeli territory on Saturday, which to date has led to the killing of more than 700 Israelis and 400 Palestinians, was almost immediately compared to Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. Among American politicians, Representatives Adam Schiff and Ritchie Torres, both Democrats, invoked the memory of 9/11.

By any reasonable measure, the Hamas attack is a much greater trauma for Israel than the 9/11 attack was for the United States. Israel’s population is just over 9 million. The United States had 285 million people in 2001. The United States lost 2,996. In proportional terms, Israel lost more than 20,000 of its citizens. Even so, the Israeli death toll is smaller proportionally than Palestinian causalities in the conflict, which in recent years runs to more than 200 killings per year. The 2014 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) operation in Gaza took the lives of at least 1,400 Palestinian civilians.

Beyond the horrendous civilian death toll, Hamas has committed further war crimes by kidnapping civilians. There is also the psychological factor of a surprise attack. As the United States did on 9/11, Israel experienced the assault as a bolt out of the blue—a sudden, unexpected disruption of an orderly society. For the Israeli military, as for the American national security state, the terrorist attack is a humiliation that shatters a once-vaunted reputation for invincibility. It calls to mind the Yom Kippur war of 1973, which took place exactly 50 years earlier and destroyed the reputation of Prime Minister Golda Meir, caught off guard by the invasion by Egypt and Syria. Meir resigned the year after the war.

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is thinking in historical terms at all, he must be contemplating how to avoid Meir’s fate and achieve what George W. Bush pulled off after 9/11. After all, just as Netanyahu has recently been a prime minister under siege for his widely resisted attempt to overhaul the courts—not to mention his long-simmering trial on charges of bribery and corruption—Bush was also a floundering president. The 9/11 attack was a godsend for Bush’s presidency, even as it was a curse for the United States. His presidency went from feckless to consequential—in fact, even world historical.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispers to President George W. Bush news that two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. (Doug Mills / AP Photo)

Practically overnight, Bush was recast as an heroic leader, given a blank check by Congress to run roughshod over civil liberties with the Patriot Act, to pioneer new forms of incarceration and torture at Guantánamo Bay, to launch invasions of two countries and make the United States the spearhead of a Global War on Terror. We’re still living in the shadow of Bush’s decisions, which led to mass torture, a global refugee crisis, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

There’s already an impulse in Israeli politics (echoed in the United States and elsewhere) to give Netanyahu the same blank check Bush had. Former Republican representative Joe Walsh, a Never Trump Republican, tweeted, “Yesterday was Israel’s 9/11. And remember, after 9/11, nobody told the United States not to retaliate, nobody called for a ‘ceasefire’ or a ‘de-escalation,’ nobody ‘both-sided’ what had happened that horrible day.”

Surely, the lesson of 9/11 is not that you should give unconditional support to a government that has an escalatory military response to terrorism. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis had a wiser response. He tweeted,

The shock and fury in Israel are reminiscent of the emotions in the US after 9/11. That provoked a display of American unity and power. It also led to a misconceived and self-destructive war on terror. Israel may be heading down the same dangerous path.

Sentiments like Walsh’s, in Israel and among its allies, will help Netanyahu shore up his power. He’s already on that path, forming an emergency government and declaring war. The IDF has already launched attacks on Gaza, laying the groundwork for what could be a scorched-earth destruction of Hamas.

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-us-911-lessons/

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