The Israeli September 11, 2001, Crisis, and 9/11: Reflections on Israel’s Failure to Do What Israel Did and Don’t (Dis)Operate

His voice grew angry when he recalled how disbelief led him to believe that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked Israel. Lavi was confused about the difference between people being killed or their heads falling off, and hostages in Gaza.

There has been much discussion about whether Hamas did or did not kill babies, after President Biden made a false claim before the White House walked it back.

The Iraq war was an example of a war using horrible but false or exaggerated claims as a rationale.

Recently, a former permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations told Britain’s Sky News that he was “very puzzled by the constant concern which the world,” he said, “is showing for the Palestinian people.” The U.S. actions following Sept. 11 have been referred to as Israel’s Sept. 11.

The United States received a lot of sympathy after the attacks. Many Muslims were angry about the attacks, even if they objected to U.S. policies. The idea that Muslims celebrated the attacks has been shown to be false at least a few times.

The United States chose to wage reckless and destructive war in Iraq instead of trying to isolated the extremists, because of the fact that they lied about weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration’s lies in the lead-up to the war, the fiasco of its occupation, and the chaos, violence and death that the invasion set off have deeply and indelibly damaged the standing and credibility of the United States and its allies.

People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation of ISIS a decade later.

To make matters worse, the Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing.

Four young boys killed in Israeli strikes while playing by themselves at a beach, three of them hit by a second blast while trying to flee the first bomb, are an example of what happens when you let your guard down.

There was an airstrike. The Israeli military said that it had killed a leader of Hamas who helped plan an attack that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel.

Some of the journalists who had seen the bombing said there had been no attempt to interview them, as reported by The Telegraph.

One can see how this history plays out in the global upheaval over the Hamas claim two weeks ago that an Israeli missile struck a hospital courtyard in Gaza. The officials from Israel and the US denied that the missile came from Gaza. Initial claims that 500 people died in the hospital blast led to global condemnations. Next, the number was challenged, and there was another uproar and back-and-forth.

It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The truth is unknown either way because of the lack of conclusive evidence.

A dispute over exact numbers of deaths in the hospital explosion might seem cruel to a family that lost members, but it’s not as cruel to a family that was in an attack by Hamas.

But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.

After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, there was strong opposition to the idea of a new war in the United States because of Vietnam Syndrome and because it’s best for the US to avoid large military engagements.

It was in this context that a teenager testified before Congress in 1990 that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of incubators and left them to die on the cold floor, a shocking assertion repeated by many high-level officials. The claim was repeated by many people, including officials and the media.

The daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the U.S. used to be a witness, but was kept quiet because she was working for a public relations firm.

The shocking fabrication played a key role in the effort to sell the war to the reluctant American public. It was not necessary to make sure oil fields stayed in the hands of rulers of the tiny country that began in the 20th century. It’s more convincing to oppose an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes.

The terrible outcome of all this history is widespread distrust and dehumanization, as ordinary people’s loss and pain are viewed suspiciously as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and pain for others.

There are plenty of echoes of this on social media. One person posted onX that they were the last one to have WMD, and that 40 babies beheaded by Hamas was equivalent to the WMD lie.

I was happy to see that the videos of the horror have been verified by Human Rights Watch. The attacks were condemned by the group as cruel and brutal crimes, including mass summary killings and hostage-taking. Both organizations would like the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.

Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so, especially by the government of Israel and some NGOs and lawmakers.

Yet these are the kind of independent voices that need to be heard. In a world where many see the United States as reflexively supporting Israel, President Biden might consider elevating such independent human rights voices instead of embracing Netanyahu.

From Hamas to the Gazans: How Israelis Have Tolerantly Defended Their Families, and How Israel Isn’t

As Amnesty International states, kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.

But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

One reason I’m afraid that the worst is yet to come in the Middle East is that the mutual dehumanization is the most savage I’ve ever seen it in decades of on-the-ground reporting in the region.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is destroying tunnels, ammunition dumps and Hamas fighters, yes. But I’m afraid it’s also helping to pulverize the recognition of shared humanity that in the long run allows people to live beside one another in peace. The hatred is spreading to other countries such as the United States.

I was wondering as I drove the other day to meet the Gazans who were temporarily allowed to visit Israel and became stuck in East Jerusalem. My Israeli taxi driver decided not to enter the Palestinians and left me on the side of the road, where he would have picked me up. And then when I got to my destination, I interviewed a sweet 57-year-old Gazan woman who was talking to me about the war and told me that she approved of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians.

That conversation pretty much broke my heart. Such bigotry is nurtured by Hamas propaganda but also by Israeli bombing of Gaza: The woman said she had lost two cousins to Israeli fire, including a young woman married only a year ago, and she weeps daily at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

The Prime Minister cited biblical references to the target of a divine genocide when he announced the ground operation on Saturday. In the story, God’s order was: “put to death men and women, children and infants.” Netanyahu didn’t advocate that policy, but the code word for it is “Amalek“, which means “kill without mercy”.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” And this too breaks my heart.

I highlighted many other voices that are similar to sensible and merciful before. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

Eyad al-Saraj, a Gaza Psychiatrist who died in 2013, once said that extremists need each other. He complained that Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 had turned Hamas fanatics into popular heroes.

Israeli air strikes, massacres and a diaspora of extremists: The case of the Falluja neighborhood of Jabaliya

Videos verified by The New York Times captured the aftermath of an airstrike on Wednesday in the Falluja neighborhood of Jabaliya approximately half a mile from the site of Tuesday’s strike. The destruction shown is of similar magnitude, with several large buildings completely flattened. Rescue workers and residents can be seen digging through the rubble and carrying the bodies of people who are dead or injured.

The area that local officials say has dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded is hit again on Wednesday. The Gazan Interior Ministry reported that a new Israeli strike had killed and wounded “a number of people.”

After her cousin told her that he was hosting several people in a four-bedroom apartment, Ms. Hammad sent her last message to him on the messaging app.

She said she had been trying to reach family members in the area. Her father had grown up in Gaza, and in recent days she had been able to stay in contact with his side of the family, relaying their messages to relatives in the United States.

Mr. Hammash said that while he was in southern Gaza, he realized how much of a pain living with deprivation and death was.

A Norwegian Refugee Council employee who was born in the neighborhoods hit by the airstrike, said Wednesday that the situation was getting even more insane.

After an Israeli air strike on the densely populated Gaza Strip, Palestinians trying to reach relatives in the area were met with silence.

Progressivism is being radicalized. Nobody who has lived through the last decade’s Great Awokening should be surprised that Western progressivism now has a more radical line on Israel than it did 10 or 15 years ago, especially given Israel’s own rightward shift in that same time. But the extent to which the rhetoric of “decolonization” turns out to naturally extend — or, maybe, naturally circle back — from cultural and psychological projects to literal support for armed struggle and tacit apologia for antisemitic terror still feels like an important unveiling, a revelation of radicalization’s implications, a doorway into a future much more violently divided than our own.

The current protests in European capitals are more about ethnic and religious solidarity with Palestinians than about furthering a radicalized progressivism. And the tacit alliance between this diaspora and a secular, feminist, gay-affirming Western progressivism — “Islamo-gauchisme” in the French phrase — raises big questions for both progressives and conservative Muslims about who is using whom, and how the Western left and Western Islam might ultimately co-evolve.