The 9/11 Comparison
There have been many comparisons made between Hamas’s attack against Israel that began on October 7th to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on September 11th. I first heard the comparison made by Israeli officials, and then parroted by US and British media outlets. It is a very inaccurate comparison, at least in the ways that those who’ve made it intended it.
The reason that the comparison was initially made is obvious. It is meant to elicit sympathy and promote support from the west. It is meant to make a connection between different Islamic militant groups and through that connection demonize Muslim people as a group by extension.
The nature of each attack, in terms of everything other than the relatively superficial similarities between those who committed them, was very different. One involved a small number of men hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. The other involved a military force launching rockets and executing an armed ground assault. Those are simply objectively very different, which highlights the weight being placed on the fact that the attackers in each case were Muslim and the intentionality behind that in the comparison. There was also a considerable difference in scale, the initial death toll in 9/11 being roughly three times that of the initial death toll in Israel last week. Though I don’t want to get into equivocations or say that one atrocity was more significant than another because of the number of people killed. Both incidents were horrific.
Perhaps the biggest difference between each attack is in their origins. 9/11 was executed by people who infiltrated the US from different countries and then used its own infrastructure against it. The attack in Israel came from people from within it, from people native to the land where the attack was launched from and upon which it was launched. If a comparison is going to be made between conflicts and attacks with mass casualties that have occurred in the US and Israel, it would be more accurate to compare it to attacks by Native American tribes against US settlers. The Sioux Wars would be more comparable to the conflicts between Israel and Hamas than any isolated terrorist attack could be. Each is a situation in which one group with more power and resources took land and violated the rights of another group, one with a longer and more recent historical presence on the land, leading members of the less powerful group to attack and for tensions between the two groups to escalate to war.
Something that the Hamas attack and 9/11 do have in common is that the majority of casualties in each case were civilians. The killing of civilians in any scenario is horrific and wrong, whatever the reasons. That said, we can’t ignore the reasons behind each attack.
The big myth about 9/11 and about attacks by Hamas is that they were unprovoked. The US and Israel in both cases feign complete innocence. This is simply untrue in both cases. Neither incident was unprovoked. The US spent decades waging wars and dropping bombs in Middle Eastern countries. Our military and government, and by the complicity of our silence or acquiescence, we, have inflicted roughly a century of violence upon the people of that region, and in many other places around the world. 9/11 was not unprovoked. Nor was it unpredictable. The same is true of Israel, which has for decades persecuted, tortured, and killed Palestinians in what is an apartheid state. They inflicted violence upon them for nearly a century, and so, similarly as with the US, retaliation was entirely predictable. It is horrible that in both cases it was civilians, on both sides of the conflicts, that have suffered most. The 9/11 hijackers and Hamas killed many innocent people, and innocent people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine have suffered and will continue to suffer the most as a result. The US government and Israeli government, in each event, in addition to provoking attacks, both failed utterly to prevent them. With all the intelligence and security assets they had at their disposal, they could have prevented them, but didn’t. In this way, Bush and Netanyahu are both not only war criminals, but complete failures in the duty of protecting their people.
Perhaps the strongest connection between the two events, other than them being provoked and entirely predictable, is the parties responsible. In both cases, it is government officials and military leaders that are most to blame, and it is they who have paid and will pay the least for the violence they’ve wrought.