ISRAEL, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE RHETORIC OF THE WAR ON TERROR FROM
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, TO OCTOBER 7, 2023 (AND BEYOND)  
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Maha Hilal
January 25, 2024
TomDispatch
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_ Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,”
neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel. In remarks at a bilateral
meeting with President Biden, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu
strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones. _

Earlier this week, following the withdrawal of Israeli troops from
the Gaza Strip, residents returned to some of the areas which had
become no-go zones during the attacks, such as Jabalia just outside
Gaza City. On Tuesday 20th January, ISM Gaza Strip , volunteers joined
a university professor as he visited his house in the east of Jabalia.
(Jabalia 20 by RafahKid Kid is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr)

 

In a _New Yorker_ piece published five days after the attacks of
September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan
Sontag wrote
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“Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid
together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us
understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.”
Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant
challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon
deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most
importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical
strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global
War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly
embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that
country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been
waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023.

On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress
in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would
justify endless war. The United States, he said
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was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our
freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and
assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to
the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the
first time, stating
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too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with
al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and
defeated.”

“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And
then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the
“terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions
prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other
words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without
warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this
was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different
world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar
Richard Jackson later noted [[link removed]],
the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very
carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse…
specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible,
and inherently ‘good.’”

YOUR FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT

The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave
a televised address to Israelis, saying that
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fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world
against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way
of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in
other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the
American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a
way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed
almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded
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an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying
that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at
our disposal.”
 

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On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then
working in the private sector after holding various positions within
the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by
asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a
statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee,
emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism,
Netanyahu stated
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certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I
say _today_, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”

ISRAEL’S “9/11”

Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves
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neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks
at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however,
Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to
the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed
Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years
earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated,
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October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a
country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to
over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s.
That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”

But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage
of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because
it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but
because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the
perpetrators
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and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as
uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it
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“was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American
suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while
transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as
a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an
omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize
future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October
7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential
threat, Israel could do the same.

Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the
guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President
Biden stated that
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this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as
Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15
9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have
tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did
and felt in the United States.”

It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the
War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of
terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in
1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of
essays called _Terrorism: How the West Can Win_ that spoke to themes
similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However,
in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was
both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had
popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.

“SURPRISE” ATTACKS

The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both
the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their
countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both
were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that
Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in US
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the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document
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the potential attack a year in advance.

Just as Bush referred to
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9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with
al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden
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stated
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U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the
attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring
Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the
West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack,
Netanyahu asserted that
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are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This
morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State
of Israel and its citizens.”

By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable
danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and
over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both
tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing
themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched.
Netanyahu typically asserted o
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October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war.
Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But
Israel will win this war.”

All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an
extremely narrow set of ‘political truths
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(or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public
consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were
meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of
course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why
intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An
additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative,
whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation
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of reality, not a constructed one.

Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a
depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed
in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and
inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding
regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians.
Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as
“driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting
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[[link removed]]David Whyte
note [[link removed]], while
state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive,
responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a
particular ideological bias or political choice.”

THE THREAT OF TERRORISM AND MORAL EQUIVALENCIES

Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the
service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost
unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have
represented terrorism
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“catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American
[or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism
and Communism.”

As with Bush’s argument
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the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies
of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of
fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a
mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a
similar basis. To this end, he asserted that
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as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat
ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”

American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the
country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in
September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the
War on Terror, Bush said
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“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of
the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s
flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to
think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of
the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who
kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism”
operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given
the staggering number
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civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the
United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of
innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though
when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was
the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).

No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies,
Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks
in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he
described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in
their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids,
youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids,
who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United
States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater
scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to.
In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to
have killed more than 10,000 children
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those figures will only rise if you include children who are now
likely to die from
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disease in a devastated Gaza).

BIRDS OF VIOLENT RHETORICAL FEATHERS FLOCK TOGETHER

In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said,
“These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure —
they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October
7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel
Macron, Netanyahu
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that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by
Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two
decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words
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referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who
were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to
communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and
destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or
Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.

As scholar Joanne Esch has noted
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are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our
own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United
States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking
on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that,
positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on
terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction
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which Israel has used as a blueprint.

In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint
submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant
Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted
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country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also
mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your
war.”

If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed
anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror
narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both
states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and
deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to
justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an
eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”

In his book _Narrative and the Making of US National Security_
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Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language
“neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power
politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such
destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United
States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule
domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon
historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe
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“the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must
die.”

_[DR. MAHA HILAL is the founding Executive Director of the Muslim
Counterpublics Lab [[link removed]] and author
of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and
the Muslim Experience Since 9/11
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Her writings have appeared in Vox
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Jazeera
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East Eye [[link removed]], the Daily
Beast [[link removed]], Newsweek
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Insider,
[[link removed]] and Truthout
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_Copyright 2024 Maha Hilal. Cross-posted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission from TomDispatch._

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Hamas
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* Oct. 7
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* War on Terror
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* 9/11
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* Bush administration
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* Biden Administration
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* Iraq War
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* Afghanistan War
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* Iraq
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* Afghanistan
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Ceasefire
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* Genocide
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* Palestinians
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* Occupied Territories
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* IDF
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