Both the U.S. and Israel were stunned to experience the ultraviolence they mete out to others.


On the night of September 11, 2001, I sat on the stoop of my apartment building in Greenwich Village and drank some abominable wine coolers with my neighbors. I’d bought them from a nearby store that had already started wild profiteering and was charging three times the normal price. We were two miles north of the site of the World Trade Center; the neighborhood smelled of acrid smoke, which turned out to be preferable to the stench of burnt, rotting bodies that would develop later that week.

Now, according to a plethora of voices, with the vicious recent attacks by Hamas, Israel has experienced its own 9/11. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli military’s spokesperson. “This is the equivalent for Israel of probably what happened in the United States in September 11th,” says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Israeli Faces Its 9/11,” says the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. If you’d like to see 37,000 more examples, have at it.

The point of all these comparisons is obvious. Former Rep. Joe Walsh expressed it here:

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.

In other words, Israel, like the U.S., had been innocently walking through the world when SUDDENLY, OUT OF NOWHERE, it was inexplicably attacked by inhuman barbarians. Therefore Israel, like the U.S. was, is entitled to do anything whatsoever in response. A recent estimate found that the U.S. war on terror has directly and indirectly caused over 4.5 million deaths.

I don’t agree with Walsh’s conclusion. But certainly everyone here is starting from the correct premise — that this is Israel’s 9/11 — even if they don’t understand why.

First of all, something like Hamas’s attack on Israel, as with something like 9/11, was going to happen eventually. Israel and the U.S. constantly deal out ultraviolence on a smaller scale (Israel) and a huge scale (the U.S.). Anyone in either country who believed this would never come home was living in a vain fantasy.

Likewise, the establishments of both Israel and the U.S. were well aware of this: that their policies would inevitably lead to the deaths of their own citizens. Richard Shultz, a longtime national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that “a very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’” Eran Etzion, onetime member of Israel’s national security council, just explained that from the government’s perspective, “the relatively small price that Israel paid every so often” for its policy toward Gaza was the deaths of dozens of Israelis.

What stunned both the U.S. and Israel was that anyone managed to briefly deal out damage on a scale they’re used to delivering. Israel killed over 10,000 Palestinians from 2000 through last month. God only knows how many hundreds of thousands the U.S. killed in the Middle East in the lead-up to 9/11.

Then, as now, anyone pointing out these obvious facts was smeared as “supporting” or “justifying” the vicious blowback. It’s frustrating and suggests that it’s impossible for human beings to be rational about this subject. If you tell someone that pouring gas on a pile of shredded newspaper and then throwing a match on it will probably make the newspaper catch on fire, you are not “supporting fire” or “justifying fire.” On the contrary, you’re trying to reduce the amount of fire in the world by describing reality.

Another similarity is that both Israel and the U.S. generated their own enemies. The U.S. famously nurtured fundamentalist Islamic opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said in a 1998 interview that this had been “an excellent idea” and he had no regrets about these “stirred-up Muslims.” Israel did essentially the same thing in miniature in the occupied territories, encouraging the growth of Hamas to damage the secular Fatah. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” according to one of the Israelis who worked on this clever project.

As with 9/11, the attacks on Israel could only have succeeded on the scale they did because of the monstrous incompetence of the relevant leaders. “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA told George W. Bush in August 2001. Bush ignored this. Dick Cheney actually pushed back at the intelligence world’s many warnings because he believed Al Qaeda was merely feinting and trying to get the U.S. to expend resources preventing something that would never happen. Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently warned by Egypt that something bad was coming but ignored it. We’ll inevitably learn shocking details soon about Netanyahu’s general indifference to what was on the horizon.

This is all of a piece with the irrelevance of citizens’ lives to leaders like Netanyahu and Bush. They gnash their teeth and rend their garments about how enraged they are by attacks by foreigners, yet in their hearts they don’t care about us at all. Immediately after 9/11, the Bush administration falsely told New Yorkers that the city air was perfectly safe to breathe.

Finally, the revenge that Israel will now exact will be hideous, as was that taken by the U.S. There is nothing on earth like the fury of the powerful when they believe they have been defied by their inferiors.

This is something my neighbors and I agreed on as we drank those awful wine coolers on 9/11. We were frightened deep in our guts by what had happened that morning. For anyone who wasn’t in New York then, let me tell you — Al Qaeda truly put the terror back in terrorism. But what we were most scared of was what our own government was about to do next. Ever since that moment, my dream has been that someday the regular people of the world — all of us, on every “side” — will form an alliance against our grotesque leaders.

link: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/09/israel-hamas-september-11/

archive: https://archive.ph/Fbwmn

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The states didn’t wipe Saudi Arabia off the map when 9/11 happened. And we hadn’t really talked about wiping Saudi Arabia off the map for decades, sent in colonists to steal land or regularly executed Saudi citizens.

    The states responded with a largely humiliating show of force in the wrong countries, took ten years to achieve their stated goals and shamefully admitted at various times to an awful amount of civilian casualties that were supposed to be avoided as much as possible while dismantling al Qaeda and capturing bin Laden.

    The Israeli defense minister is currently explaining publicly how Palestinians are animals and Israel is acting accordingly by withholding electricity, food, water, fuel from civilians while they indiscriminately attack civilian and military targets.

    So the outrage following an attack is comparable though unequal, but the history, context and intention is not at all comparable and making the parallel to 9/11 is a mistake, or(more likely) a jingoistic attempt to trick Americans into supporting a rapidly concluding genocide.

    • darq@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      parallel to 9/11 is a mistake, or(more likely) a jingoistic attempt to trick Americans into supporting a rapidly concluding genocide.

      I took the exact opposite conclusion from the article. It seems to be a condemnation of the US’s actions in the wake of 9/11, and thus also a condemnation of the actions the author believes Israel are about to take in the wake of the Hamas attack.

        • sudneo@lemmy.world
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          To be honest, I think they might be thinking about two different things. The article itself criticized the parroting of “this is 9/11” and explicitly decides to explain why it is Israel’s 9/11 but reaching obviously different conclusions that many that repeat the same thing.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You were supposed to take that conclusion.

        Shaking your head and saying “hey look violence is violence, and it’s all terrible”, is a false equivalence of devastating military action versus deliberate, persistent genocide.

        The conclusion pushed by this article makes genocide easier to swallow. Israel is not “about to take” any actions it has not already pursued against the Palestinians for fifty years, they just have more support now, and Israel is committing these military actions against Palestinians civilian and military targets alike because, as the defense minister says, Palestinians are “animals”.

        • darq@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          The conclusion pushed by this article makes genocide easier to swallow.

          I really don’t see how? Everything about the article condemns these actions?

          The whole idea of twisting the media’s line of “this is Israel’s 9/11” makes it more impactful, rather than making it easier to swallow.

          Israel is not “about to take” any actions it has not already pursued against the Palestinians for fifty years

          Yes, agreed. And the article is supportive of that conclusion too. It takes a mocking tone at the idea that the attacks “came out of nowhere” and specifically states that the US, and Israel, played a key role in creating the conditions that give rise to the attacks that they then use as a justification for further escalation.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Everything about this article sounds like it condemns certain actions but reductively concludes that overreactive violence is the same as overreactive violence regardless of the rest of the story, equating internationally condemned military action(Iraq) with internationally supported persistent genocide(Israel).

            It’s the same argument pundits and idiots use to trick you into believing that the far left and the far right are the same people, even though the far left argues for affordable education and healthcare and the far right argues for bounty hunting rape victims and unlimited corporate election funding.

            Equating this genocide with 9/11 does make this genocide more impactful by lending credibility to ongoing genocide.

            • darq@kbin.social
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              But the article isn’t the one originating the line that “this is Israel 9/11”. It is taking that line from other sources, sources who are directly making that comparison, and showing that while there are indeed similarities, they aren’t what those sources might want people to believe.

              Everything about this article sounds like it condemns certain actions but reductively concludes that overreactive violence is the same as overreactive violence regardless of the rest of the story, equating internationally condemned military action(Iraq) with internationally supported persistent genocide(Israel).

              And it goes on to suggest that we should be condemning Israel’s actions in the same way that the US’s actions have been condemned. That there should not be that popular support for this genocide. That we know how wrong the US’s actions were, and that we should not be fooled into believing that what is happening now is as simple as a reaction to the Hamas attacks.

              At worst, I see the article as not addressing the full story, because it’s only addressing the specific media line comparing this to 9/11. And I can see your reasoning about comparing a military action to a genocide and how that’s inadequate. But to say it’s “lending credibility” to genocide… I don’t really get where you are getting that from. Is the complaint mostly just that, while it is condemning Israel’s actions, it isn’t going far enough in the condemnation?

              • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                The problems begin and end with the broad false equivalence this article posits that you(and I expect most people) are agreeing with.

                Look at these concluding sentiments:

                “This is all of a piece with the irrelevance of citizens’ lives to leaders like Netanyahu and Bush.”

                Pretty sentence, right? Sounds like a reasonable comparison if you ignore what actually happened:

                Bush said that the US military would dismantle al Qaeda and capture bin Laden.

                Netanyahu has consistently stated that he’ll never allow a Palestinian state, literally redrew a map without Palestine, has actively invaded, attacked and colonized Palestine, and is now leading the israeli military in deliberately attacking civilians as a means of retaliation.

                These are not equivalent motivations or actions.

                “Finally, the revenge that Israel will now exact will be hideous, as was that taken by the U.S.”

                The US military dismantled Al-Qaeda and captured bin Laden, apologizing more than once for the horrific amount of civilian casualties, and left Iraq.

                Netanyahu has redrawn a map of the Middle East without Palestine in it after 50 years of stealing Palestinian territory and executing civilians, and now the Israeli military is punitively withholding food, water, gas, and electricity to Palestinian civilians because according to the Israeli defense minister, Palestinians are animals.

                These are not equivalent motivations or actions.

    • ours@lemmy.film
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      And many people and organizations rightfully protested the Iraq invasion. The French refusing to get into that part of the mess is how some idiots come up with the “freedom fries”.

      I remember vividly thinking the US going all out into Afghanistan in retaliation was probably exactly what the terrorists wanted. I’m certain this applies to the current situation as well. Hamas is hoping to provoke Israel into going full throttle against and into Gaza with the intention of triggering a wider Jihad.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        Good point, this brings up another glaring contract:

        Following 9/11, there were many countries urging caution and prudent judgment, advising against thee invasion of Iraq, as well as mass public protests.

        Here, most international peers, media outlets and public voices are supporting the genocide and even lending aid to Israel.

    • TheMauveAvenger@lemmy.world
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      The states didn’t wipe Saudi Arabia off the map when 9/11 happened.

      It’s wild, every time I try to play this alternate scenario out in my mind, the world always ends up being this insanely blissful utopia with flying cars and unlimited pizza rolls for everyone.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        If the states completely destroyed Saudi Arabia?

        What’s up with the flying car fanboys these days? They’re such a bad idea.

        • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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          Ironically a lot of the times I see this comparison the outcome of whatever supposedly leads to flying cars would be just as dystopic and horrible.

          If the US had wiped Saudi Arabia off the map what would that have changed? Not much I’d argue except even more civilian blood spilled and further justification for muslim extremists across the world to partake in a jihad. Reducing a country to rubble would have solved nothing but likely made things worse, just like flying cars.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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          Flying cars comes from the question “Why do I have to be stuck in traffic for hours on end?” instead of answering with “you’re right, I don’t, fuck this shit” you instead fantasize about being able to fly over the traffic even though that’s not even remotely going to fix the problem.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            Sounds about right.

            I’d suggest as a corollary that flying cars are conceived and advocated by those who have never had to fix a car.

            Hose leak, faulty alternator, overheat? Your flying car is a meteorite.

              • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                Ugh yes, the ill-conceived notion that addiitional cumulative wrongs will eventually produce a right.

                Great point

    • library_napper@monyet.cc
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      I think it’s an important comparison to make.

      We’re at a crossroads. The world can prevent Israel from doing what the US did after 9/11. We must stand up to Israel to prevent this.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        It’s an inaccurate, irresponsible comparison that conflates military action with persistent civilian genocide.

        You don’t have to “prevent Israel from doing what the US did after 9/11” because they are entirely different situations undertaken with entirely different motivations and behaviors.

        The US did not seek to punish civilians.

        Israel is seeking to punish civilians.

        The US pursued military targets with the directive to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible.

        Israel is purposefully punishing Palestinian “human animals” by blockading food, water, and energy to civilians after 50 years of imperialism and attacking civilians.

    • Bye@lemmy.world
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      But aren’t you agreeing with the article? The USA attacked Afghanistan, which housed Usama bin Laden, who was a Saudi and was funded and supported by saudis

      The Israelis are attacking Palestine, which houses hamas, which is Iranian (suspected to have Iranian members and soldiers), and is funded and supplied and intellectually descended from Iran

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        Reductively, yes, there were attacks and governments are using them to achieve their ulterior aims.

        If you are zooming that far out, then almost every major terrorist attack is a 9/11.

        Every historical factor, detail and circumstance pushes the two events further apart, and you can only equate what is now happening with 9/11 from an American-centric perspective.

        My main issue is that the conclusion of that article, for all its apparent aversion to violence and decrying of hawkish militaries, concludes with the imprecise judgment that just like the US, Israel will do terrible things for revenge, equating US military policies expressly stated to avoid civilian casualties with the ramping up of a 50 year genocide by Israel expressly indiscriminate in its military attacks and explicitly punishing Palestinian civilians and withholding food and water because the israelis see Palestinians as animals.

        No, as broadly pretty and evidently sympathetic as the article is until the end, equating the US 9/11 military response to the latest chapter of a historied, explicit genocide is irresponsible and promotes “justified” genocide to every reader.

    • centof@lemm.ee
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      making the parallel to 9/11 is a mistake, or(more likely) a jingoistic attempt to trick Americans into supporting a rapidly concluding genocide.

      Or its just a headline designed to attract attention. I think it is largely an accurate comparison but it is designed to pigeonhole readers into looking at it the same way they view 9/11. I think a lot of people would interpret a 9/11 like event as being a good enough reason to escalate, but I disagree with that because of the result of 9/11. A bunch of senseless suffering for everyone involved except the weapons manufacturers.

      • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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        Man, so few civillians died in there compared to all the civillians that die in the wars that US wage abroad, and it sure helped fund the US war machine for decades. As the article stated, this is like 9/11, a lucky event for the government that doesn’t give a shit about its people to justify more war against “the enemy”.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        Definitely clickbait(aka a jingoistic attempt blah blah blah). I don’t think the writer has to deliberately be misleading people, but whether the writer is or is not self-aware, revisionist history that encourages folks to empathize with genocide can fuck right off.

            • wagesj45@kbin.social
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              You keep describing it as jingoistic and the author didn’t claim or even appear to be heavily nationalistic and in fact appeared quite the opposite.

              • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                The article encourages you to accept that conclusion.

                Shaking your head and saying “hey look, disproportionate violence is disproportionate violence, and it’s all terrible”, is a false equivalence of devastating military action versus deliberate, persistent genocide.

                The conclusion pushed by this article makes genocide easier to swallow. Israel is not “about to take” any actions it has not already pursued against the Palestinians for fifty years, they just have more support now, and Israel is committing these military actions against Palestinians civilian and military targets alike because, as the defense minister says, Palestinians are “animals”.

                • wagesj45@kbin.social
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                  And the article is making the case explicitly that this is bad. He is saying that 9/11 brought about terrible actions from us and that we should learn lessons and not repeat our mistakes. He’s actually trying to convince the reader that we should not “swallow” another genocide.

                  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                    Reductively, yea, “they were bad”.

                    Realistically, practically and accurately, since the US reaction to 9/11 was in no way a genocide, and Israel is currently writing what is likely to be the concluding chapter in the Palestinian genocide, the article is irresponsibly and incorrectly conflating practical military action with civilian casualties with deliberate, long-term persistent civilian genocide.

    • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
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      If a walled off section of the United States that belonged to the free Mexican fighters had been behind 9/11 we would have done the exact same thing. The distance to get our troops mobilized delayed our reaction but we were frothing at the mouth and within hours of those attacks we were laying the ground work for the invasions.

      As you stated, we invaded 2 countries and killed over 150 thousand people to satisfy our blood lust. I’m not at all shocked or surprised by the Israelis here.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        Certainly if the situation was different and the history was different and the countries were different this may be similar to 9/11.

        Your misattribution to me of your own incorrectly paraphrased words and sentiments blatantly ignores the civilian target distinction: the US expressly labored to destroy al qaeda and capture bin Laden as a direct military response to a terrorist attack. Israel, in light of a terrorist attack, is continuing 50 years of persistent genocide against Palestinians, has labeled Palestinians animals and are denying food, water, electricity and fuel to the civilian population as explicitly stated retribution.

        After fifty years, I don’t think anyone is shocked or surprised.

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      I agree with most of your point, but the 9/11 attacks came from Afghanistan, even if Saudi nationals were involved.

      I still believe the USA was right in supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets and invading Afghanistan after 2001. Harboring terrorists is not how you repay those who aid you in your fight for freedom. The USA didn’t bomb Paris in 1801 for helping them in 1776.

      What happened in Afghanistan after the Soviets left is that Al-Qaeda came in to help the Taliban gain absolute control over the other factions of the Mujahideen and for helping them in that civil war, they offered refuge.

      The USA didn’t commit large scale war crimes against Afghanistan or oppress them prior to 9/11.

      The conduct of Israel is vastly different than that of the USA. That doesn’t justify America’s wrong doings, of which there are many, but the current day USA is simply not an apartheid state.

      And making that false equivalence also muddies the waters in the west, and ultimately leads to the oppression of Palestinians because it makes westerners indifferent towards holding Israel accountable.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        The west wrote off Palestinians as viable.

        Israel has blank check to kill them off the issue is that it is rather hard with out industrial scale to kill off millions of people.

        So Israel get these chances and they go for it.