Israel's 9/11

Commentator

The only true thing that I can possibly say about 10/7 — about Hamas’ massive attack on civilians across Southern Israel — is that words are inadequate. 

Like everybody else, I’ve spent the week watching the videos of the destruction — the pedestrians machine-gunned as they waited at a bus stop; the drone shots of cars now left forever in the parking spots where the owners left them to attend a trance music festival; the terrified hostages led off on motorcycles; the mothers of hostages begging for their return. 

Richard Hecht, the IDF’s International Spokesperson, calls it “Israel’s 9/11” and the comparison feels right. The only parallel I have in my life is of being a teenager in New York City when the Twin Towers were hit and knowing (in ways I couldn’t even begin to imagine) how drastically the world was about to change. 

At the moment, scenarios are proliferating—none of them good. Israel is clearly dedicated to the destruction of Hamas. A ground invasion of Gaza, with incalculable consequences, is in the offing. A Wall Street Journal article—relying entirely on anonymous sources—pins much of the blame on Iran, citing a series of meetings in which Iran “green-lit” the attack. 

We move with a momentum that no one can stop into a different era in the Middle East. Gone is the period of what former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk in Foreign Affairs calls “a long-term cease-fire [in Gaza] in which each side benefited from a live-and-let-live arrangement.” Gone too is the optimism of even a few weeks ago when the impending Israel-Saudi deal created the possibility of “normalizing” Israeli-Arab relations across the Middle East. 

Gone as well are the petty talking points surrounding any international discussion of Israel/Palestine. Commentators online are incensed about Free Palestine protests and Twitter posts—and I’m annoyed by them as well—but they seem like an utter sideshow. I was bothered, for instance, by Jeremy Corbyn’s inability in a widely-publicized interview to simply denounce the attacks, but, on the other hand, who cares what Jeremy Corbyn thinks?

In the wake of the catastrophe, what does seem important to reflect on, though, are the bitter lessons of other seismic events, 9/11 among them. 

There’s a worrying signal that I’ve been picking up on in a few articles this week that sees 10/7 as being not essentially about Israel/Palestine but as illustrative of more cosmic trends. In The New York Times, David Leonhardt, bringing together phenomena as disparate as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s bellicosity towards Taiwan, and India’s illiberalism, writes, “All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray….The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar.”

In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new….Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place.”

In an op-ed, also in The New York Times, Georgi Derlugian implicitly pairs Nagorno-Karabakh with the attack on Israel as “harbinger[s] of the coming world disorder.” 

It’s hard for me, seeing these, not to be reminded of the moment after 9/11 when a brief, astonishing period of national unity curdled, when the whole American mindset shifted to something harder and meaner and which I think of as supra-political. The rhetoric turned to “the axis of evil,” to “you’re either with us or against us.” This was Bush, but Bush was also channeling the national mood. 

What was lost — cataclysmically, as it turned out — was any sense of the normal dynamics of politics. In time, 9/11 no longer became about a small group of Al Qaeda terrorists nor even the Taliban regime that was hosting them. We came to believe —and, as a teenager, I took this in — that there was an existential battle of good vs. evil, of order vs. disorder, with the entire Middle East at stake. 

The dangerous conversation in the next weeks or months will be about Iran’s role in the attack. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack,” but a Haaretz op-ed, for instance, cites The Wall Street Journal’s story on the Iran/Hamas meetings as fact. 

The really dangerous conversations are yet to come and will have to do with how 10/7 alters the worldview of everyone affected. As the Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan said in The New Yorker, “This is the trauma that we haven’t even started to grasp.” 

What seems safe to say is that events like 9/11 or 10/7 change everybody’s sense of power dynamics. After 9/11, the U.S. — at the absolute height of its power — saw itself as a victim. Israel has now lost what Dayan calls the sense of “omnipotence,” which sustained it for, at this point, close to half a century. Israel is bound to undergo a period of trauma and a shift (one way or another) in its national identity. Nobody could expect anything different. 

As that shift occurs, a great deal will happen. The international community will need to go through its own adjustment, to get out of the lazy narrative that’s been in force for a long time of seeing Israel as always and only an oppressor, an agent of “imperialism.” There has to be an understanding that Israel’s technological prowess, Israel’s military might, don’t mean that Israelis can’t also be victims of unspeakable terror. 

What goes away most, I would say, are the structuralist conceptions of violence that pin agency and responsibility only to the stronger party — as encapsulated in Haruki Murakami’s celebrated, annoying speech that “if there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.” Well. October 7 reminds us — as we should long ago have remembered — that weaker parties have agency (and moral culpability) as well, that violence is not just the province of the strong.

But the really hard work will have to be done by Israelis—which is to avoid what happened to American society after 9/11. That’s to maintain some sense of proportion, to recognize that these acts were carried out by a limited number of people, that the normal course of politics continues, that we’re not suddenly in a fight to the death between “order” and “disorder,” that the world isn’t quite as simple as an axis (as Leonhardt vaguely proposes) of Russia, China, Hamas, and illiberal India (!) all bent on disarray. 

If I could go back in time to New York after 9/11, this is the point I would make. The images of the attacks were searing. The nation was in trauma from them for years afterwards — in ways that affected every aspect of American politics. But the important lesson, which was for a while hard even to gently make, was that the attacks didn’t actually divide the world into “with us and against us.” Politics in the normal sense should have continued. We should have been more aware of who exactly was harboring Al Qaeda and who wasn’t. 

I have no idea what will happen next—if Israel really does carry out its planned ground attack on Gaza, with an unending occupation. But I do know, from the experience of 9/11, that the responses to a catastrophe say more about a nation than does the catastrophe itself. And the American lesson is that an incredible mental toughness is required—not just toughness in the ordinary militaristic sense but a toughness in being able to see straight, retain a sense of proportion, exercise restraint where needed. 

Israel will go through its trauma and its fury — there’s no question about that. And the international community needs to mourn with Israel in a way that it is not accustomed to doing. But the real story of 10/7 (like 9/11) will play out a long way in the future and what it will depend on most is Israelis and their ability to act with a wisdom and perspicacity that I only wish could have existed in America in 2001.