Israel's 9/11

America Learned Nothing

For the first time in my life I am thankful that, when 9/11 happened, I was young enough and dumb enough to cheer when Bush said we would make no distinction between the terrorists and the countries that harbored them. I am thankful that I so thoroughly supported a war of vengeance and that I trusted my President to decide what people and countries deserved it. It was a horrible feeling, but it was a good feeling too: that hot hate, that rage given expression on television as the bombs dropped. I remember—is this real?—a reporter for Iraqi state TV at the Baghdad airport, who pretended everything was fine even as US troops took it over. I remember everybody laughing at him. Me too.

Ettingermentum, the best Substack on Substack, makes a very good case that the Tet Offensive, not 9/11, is the proper historical metaphor for the Hamas attack on Israel last week. I think he’s absolutely right when it comes to the purpose of the attack and the message it sends to the Israeli public about the feasibility of their Gaza strategy of containment. Like everything else he’s ever written, the article is well worth your time.

When it comes to America’s reaction, however, we can only see one thing: our apocalypse, our tragedy, our unhealed narcissistic wound. When my country says it stands with Israel, that’s not entirely true: we project ourselves into Israel. And, just as we were justified in starting a war that indirectly killed 3.8 million people, so too are the Israelis justified in destroying Gaza with bombs and a ground invasion.

Let’s be real clear. Just as 9/11 was an atrocity—just as it killed thousands of civilians with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and families and friends—so too are these attacks by Hamas. Children died in those attacks. People at a music festival. People living their lives. It is a war crime.

But one war crime can never justify another.

I vividly recall seeing the below diagram in the Denver Post in the days after the 9/11 attacks. It appeared in a lot of newspapers at the time. I remember pouring over it, reveling in terror and sick excitement:

Now I am being asked to believe that every city block Israel has leveled in the past week and a half was secretly infested with Hamas terrorists. I am being asked to believe that, when Israel ordered Gazans to evacuate and then bombed their only border crossing into Egypt, they were targeting a smuggling tunnel and not the “human animals” (their words) attempting to escape the death raining down from the sky. I am being asked to countenance Israel’s decision to enact a “complete seige” on those so-called human animals—all 2.2 million of them. No food. No water. No electricity.

Half of Gaza’s population is under 18, and current arguments justifying their wholesale slaughter are as sickening as they are familiar. Children can be terrorists. Women can be terrorists. Terrorists are everywhere, and they hide behind civilians to do their terrorism. They are not calling the women and children who die at their hands “collateral damage” this time around, but maybe they know we don’t require comforting euphamisms. We’re used to it by now.

Israel is an apartheid state. Gaza Strip is an “open air prison”: its residents are not permitted to leave without permits, and permits are difficult to come by, which limits everything from career opportunities to the ability to obtain healthcare. Before Israel totally cut power a few days ago, Gazans had electricity for only a few hours per day. Before Israel totallly cut water, 97% of it was contaminated. As of October 1st, Israel held over 1300 Gazans indefinitely, without trial. In the West Bank, settlers rob Palestinian families of land that they own and commit violent acts against them without consequence.

Brutalization does excactly what you’d expect it to, etymologically: it turns people into brutes. As Haaretz opinion writer Gideon Levy put it:

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we'll never pay the price and be punished for it. We'll carry on undisturbed.

One of the most insidious luxuries of being a powerful nation is that we get to decide which acts are atrocities and which are regrettable necessities. When the human animals break out of their enclosure to murder children and other noncombatants in cold blood, it is a war crime. When settlers drive those human animals off their land, attack them with impunity, imprison them indefinitely, disenfranchise them, deprive them of electricity and drinking water and sanitation and any hope of a better life—well. These things happen to uncivilized people sometimes.

America has learned nothing. People who loudly decry the mass hysteria that defined American politics post-9/11 snatch up the mantle of Israel and attack anyone who questions the morality of what news organizations have begun to call a “humanitarian crisis” and which is rapidly taking on the rhetoric and scope of genocide. If the Palestinians didn’t want to be killed, they should denounce Hamas. If the Palestinians didn’t want to be killed, they should have fought and overthrown their own govenrment (you know, like we did when Trump won in 2016). If the Palestinians didn’t want to be killed they should have meekly and quietly offered their throats to the Israeli knife, on command. Perhaps written a poem or two, to be read aloud at United Nations Human Rights Council members. In a hundred years or so, Israel can do land acknowledgements.

If the Palestinians didn’t want to be killed they also shouldn’t be so brown, or so Muslim. Let’s be real here. We’ve had a nice decade or so where islamophobia did not unrelentingly menace people who wear hijabs, or who worship Allah, or who wear turbans, or who have Middle Eastern names, but we never really renounced that attitude either. To this day, the 9/11 museum underneath the World Trade Center memorial greets its visitors in every major language on Earth except for Arabic and Farsi. I came out of the womb with pale skin and blue eyes but my father’s skin was dark and his nose large and his accent heavy. I have no cultural connection to the country he was born in because he did not want me to have one. I am white by the caprices of genetics and circumsances and it makes me sick—physically ill—to see how little my life would be worth to many of my fellow citizens if things had turned out even a little bit differently.

Some of you will call me antisemtic for opposing Israel’s unconscionable acts of oppression and violence, but the antisemitism is entirely on the opposite side of the table. Not all Jewish people are Zionists, though the Zionists would like you to forget this. And Jewish people are no more immune to violent prejudice than any other ethnicity. Not all Black people are good at basketball, not all Asian people are good at math, and not all Jewish people are anti-fascist. Jewish people are humans, and humans are sometimes trash, and the leaders of Israel certainly are, and they have enacted trash policies for many decades now. Jewish people are not a monolith: many agree with this statement. I am not an antisemite. I am anti war crime.

If you follow these arguments long enough, you reach their bedrock: a belief that Israel is a better society than Palestine ever could be. Israel, they say, is a relatively modern democracy. Palestinian people, on the other hand, are backwards and homophobic and sexist and authoritarian and generally unpleasant to be around.

The argument is not worth having: the premise itself is bad. Inalienable human rights do not hinge on personal perferences. People are no less deserving of life and liberty because you find them repugnant. I am not asking anyone to embrace the culture of Palestine, or to move there, or to approve of anything about them—I don’t care either way. I am asking only that you recognize that Palestinians are human and stand up against the chorus of voices calling for their extermination. It is a lonely and frightening place to stand, right now, with the blood of last week’s attack not yet dry. It is also the only moral ground there is to stand on.