The Exploitation of Crises, Death, and Bigotry: More Similarities Between 9/11 and 10/7
It is considered a radical conspiracy theory to suggest that the US government, specifically the Bush administration, allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen in order to exploit the tragedy for their personal interests. Regardless of whether the former is true, they absolutely exploited the deaths of thousands of people to wage imperial wars in the Middle East and kill many thousands more.
I don’t know if Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical right-wing associates had foreknowledge that the attacks by Hamas on October 7th were coming, but they absolutely exploited the deaths of more than 1,400 Jewish Israelis to justify the wholesale destruction of Gaza and the killing of more than 10,000 Palestinians.
People like Netanyahu and Bush and all those around them do not care about their people. For men like them, the citizens they are meant to serve are treated as pawns, only valuable for how they can be sacrificed to serve their cause. Even less valuable to them are the civilians they slaughter and whose homes they bomb.
Of course, saying any of this, saying anything critical of the state of Israel or Zionist ideology, even if many Israelis don’t even like Netanyahu and many would prefer peace over extermination, is liable to draw accusations of antisemitism. Much in the way that anti-war activists were called traitors and accused of siding with terrorists for protesting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, for speaking against the extreme carnage and death being inflicted upon civilians in our name, calling for an end to war on Gaza to spare an already suffering people further harm can get you labeled as an antisemite.
It is absurd that one cannot criticize the policies and actions of a state without being accused of being antisemitic. Zionism and antisemitism are linked, but not in the way that Israel’s government and its supporters frame it. The great irony, or wilful ignorance, of conflating antizionism, or any criticism of zionism as a colonial project, with antisemitism, is that the origin of zionism is rooted in antisemitism. The ideology can be traced to early 19th century England, where British elites viewed the relocation of Jews to Palestine, where they would be vassal subjects of the expanding British empire, as a win-win. The idea caught on in protestant Christian circles, where their reading of the Bible convinced them that the return of Jewish people to the region would help precipitate the second coming of Christ. That cynical desire to bring about the fairytale end of the world maintains popularity among many radical Christian groups and is the cause of their continued support for Israel today. To be clear, these Christians are not pro-Jewish, they are pro-armageddon, and see the existence of a Jewish state and its wars with its neighbors as necessary conditions to literally end the world, during which, they believe, the Israeli people, all Jewish people, will die and go to hell if they don’t promptly convert to Christianity.
It is ironic as well, or at least an overdue eventuality, that this latest example of violent settler colonialism, however advantageous men like Netanyahu view it to be, may have finally been a step too far. The goodwill and support that was justifiably shown to Israel in the wake of the attacks against their civilians has all but dried up in the face of their response. More people than ever, individuals and nations, are less inclined to give their support to a government committing war crimes and executing what is essentially an active genocide. They know that it is not antisemitic to criticize these actions. They know they are not antisemitic for protesting the mass-murder of civilians, seventy percent of whom are women and children.
The most painful irony is that by tying antizionism with antisemitism, tying Israel with Judaism, the government of Israel has made Jewish people around the world less safe. By purporting to represent all Jewish people, they have linked Jewish people the world over, without their consent, and against the morals and values of many of them, with war crimes, with mass-murder, with ethnic cleansing. This is despite the fact that many Jewish people around the world have bravely and nobly protested Israel’s actions. Similarly to how Muslims, Arabs, and anyone mistaken for being either, were put at greater risk of being targeted and harmed following 9/11, and how anyone who could be Muslim or Palestinian is currently at risk, so too are Jewish people. A state that claims to be the only safe place in the world for Jewish people, and a political movement that has for decades shielded itself with claims of antisemitism against their critics, failed to protect their own citizens, and has in fact promoted antisemitism.