The Year After October 7th Was Shaped by the 23 Years After September 11th
Israel strikes Gaza on Dec. 8, 2023. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images
9/11 gave Israel and the US a template to follow – one that turned grief into rage into dehumanization into mass death. What have we learned from the so-called 'war on terror'?
Almost immediately after Hamas and other Palestinian militants overran the open-air prison Israel has made of Gaza for a killing and kidnapping spree, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longtime prime minister, knew how to explain the events of the bloodiest post-Holocaust day in Jewish history.
Netanyahu, anticipating the onslaught he was about to launch, needed to cleave Oct. 7 from more than a century of Zionist conquest of Palestine. He had to present the massacre only in the context of its abundant Jewish suffering. And so Netanyahu went with a template proven in recent memory to work spectacularly well for the bloodthirsty and ambitious. Adjusting for population, Netanyahu said Oct. 7 "was like twenty 9/11s." Among the many things Netanyahu left unsaid was that his pre-Oct. 7 strategy had been to entrench Hamas' hold on Gaza and thereby preempt a disengagement from the West Bank occupation predicated on negotiations with a united Palestinian leadership.
Netanyahu was not the only one grasping for the template. Speaking in Israel barely a week after the attacks, President Joe Biden calculated October 7 only slightly differently, at "fifteen 9/11s."
There was only one purpose behind declaring a Mega-9/11: to create a permission structure for war, widespread state violence, persistent security-related repression, and vigilantism. In Tel Aviv, Biden said he recognized the “all-consuming rage" that tapped into "some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States." As Mehdi recently put it during his debate with Eylon Levy, Israel portrayed Oct. 7 as being an unjustified event that justifies everything. That, of course, has been how 9/11 operated in the United States. And there has been a mobius-strip aspect to Israel's Mega-9/11 Era. As the academic Darryl Li has shown, the so-called ‘war on terror’ itself drew upon legal and political legacies for criminalizing Palestinian resistance to Israel.
This revival of the spirit of 9/11 has shaped both the Israeli and the American social, political, and military responses to 10/7. And it has led exactly to the same agony, futility, and reactionary politics that it did the first time around, only at an accelerated pace and on a gruesome scale.
The ‘War on Terror’ Template
On 10/7, as on 9/11, disconnecting the attacks from their ugly historical contexts encouraged bloodlust as an acceptable patriotic response, the due of the righteous victim. The world has seen that bloodlust displayed through a year's worth of unapologetic social media posts from Israeli soldiers raiding the lingerie drawers, smashing the schools, and defiling the mosques of Gaza, to say nothing of the clustered bullet holes through the windows of vehicles driven by aid workers. It animated Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to call the people of Gaza "human animals." Gallant's words were reminiscent of Senator Zell Miller declaring on the Senate floor the day after 9/11, "Bomb the hell out of them. If there is collateral damage, so be it."
Biden, who had withdrawn the US from the agony of Afghanistan, felt compelled to mumble that being "consumed" by that rage could tempt Israel to repeat the US' post-9/11 "mistakes." But it was he and his administration who repeated them, by giving Israel everything it materially and diplomatically needed to turn rage into policy.
Army Maj. Harrison Mann, a Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who resigned in May, told me that from the earliest days after Oct. 7, the national security bureaucracy was "fully aware of not only everything that was happening in terms of destruction and civilian deaths in Gaza, but also the expected consequences and expected trajectory of the Israeli campaign in Gaza." That's a liberal like Biden for you: unwilling to accept the symbiotic relationship between a politics of bloodthirst and a policy of bloodthirst; and forever hoping to accommodate one without strengthening the other.