Israel's 9/11

Beach in Gaza City, 1950s, via Quds News Network.

If I'd been a blogger around the time of the 9/11 catastrophe—I was already an opinion-haver, in any case—I'd have written something about the prospects of the Cheney administration launching a punitive expedition to Afghanistan, with or without the aim of capturing Osama bin Laden: that it wouldn't do any good, but was inevitable anyway, if only for political reasons, and it wasn't worth trying to stop it from happening.

It wouldn't do any good in the sense that it wouldn't change any hearts and minds one way or the other; it wouldn't persuade any of those Taliban to recognize the dread consequences of defying the United States, or convince any of their local enemies to resist them, or frighten anybody out of trying to do another 9/11, and I didn't think it would inspire them to violate the traditional law of hospitality by turning their Al-Qa'eda guests over to the Americans. And of course a bunch of civilians would die (in the event, in last three months of 2001, starting from the beginning of "Operation Enduring Freedom" on October 7, between 1,000 and 1,300, according to the Project on Defense Alternatives, killed in US airstrikes, plus maybe 3,200 more of "starvation, exposure, illness, or injury sustained" while they were running away from the bombing), but that couldn't be helped, because the American people, as the politicians understood them, were crying out for vengeance, for the lives lost in the Twin Towers and the other casualties of the day, and the politicians were probably right.

So I could see it would kill a lot of innocent people and accomplish nothing, but I still wouldn't have tried to stop it. What would be the use? Instead, I'd have recommended limiting it, as much as possible, to the status of a punitive expedition, like General Pershing's vain pursuit of Pancho Villa in northern Mexico in 1916-17. I'd have begged Bush not to reject out of hand the Taliban's offer to turn Osama over to a third country after the first week of bombing

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban "turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over." He added, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty". In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime - told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country".

and declare the possibility of negotiations as a kind of victory. And I'd have denounced the neoconservative project of turning the country into a demonstration project for the blessings of liberty (don't you know what these people did to the Soviet Union in 1979-89? to the British Empire? to Alexander the Great? "Easy to march into, hard to march out of," Alexander supposedly said, and in another legend, "Even the dirt is hostile") with everything I had. I didn't yet suspect it was just a dry run for the project the Cheney administration really cared about, in oil-rich Iraq.

Now I'm feeling some genuine sympathy for the idea of the weekend's incursions from Gaza into Israel as "Israel's 9/11", because the similarities are really there, starting with the awfulness of the thing the Hamas group did, which really can't be denied, whatever you may want to say about the conduct of Israel, and before Israel, the Zionist movement, from its inception, upon which I have a lot to say, and I don't hesitate to use the word "apartheid". The sheer number of the dead in Israel after this weekend seems so large, and the way the victims were chosen so arbitrary; I can't get over the picture of that rave festival outside Kibbutz Re'im, the twenty-somethings of the Tribe of Nova dancing to EDM on Simchat Torah, from which 260 murdered bodies have been recovered and an undetermined number of hostages taken to nearby Gaza—kids, you know, of whom a larger number probably had an understanding of the Palestinian cause than you'd find in the general Israeli population. (It keeps coming up in the mass media coverage, too, example after example of the dead or kidnapped turning out to be members of the peace movement.)

And of course that's not the only parallel. There's also the question of how the government let it happen, the intelligence failure, and the increasing sense that the main failure is at the top: George W. Bush dismissing the CIA warnings of "Usama bin Laden Threats Are Real" ("All right, you've covered your ass," said Bush) and "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" finds parallels in the history of Binyamin Netanyahu and his long-time relationship with Hamas, which extended to assisting the organization's funding, as recapitulated in today's Times of Israel:

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

which in turn harks back to the origins of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the other fundamentalist Palestinian parties as rightwing counters, backed by the Israeli governments of their time, to the leftist or "communist" components, Yasir Arafat's Al Fatah and others, of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Just as, and I know you already know this, the US backed the fundamentalist Islamic organizations in Afghanistan that later devolved into the Taliban as rightwing counters to the Communist Afghans supported by the USSR when the Soviets were bringing their own Enlightenment, science, tech, and education for girls and jobs for women, to the country.

The Israeli governing class, like the US governing class, and not just the conservative side, does not have clean hands in this story. In their Cold War fears, they played a huge role in creating the situation we're all faced with now, and they haven't shown any understanding of the harm they did.

So I'd like to give them the kind of advice I'd have given Bush in the fall of 2001: An invasion of Gaza may be inevitable, but it's not going to do any good. You may succeed in destroying Hamas as a formal organization—I doubt you will—but in any event you won't destroy the impetus to political fundamentalism Israeli governments have done so much to nurture over the decades (have you noticed how Hamas doesn't even refer its actions back to the social issue of the suffering of Gaza residents over the blockade but rather over the fundamentalist issue of access for the Faithful to the holy places in Jerusalem? they've got no leftwing impulses at all).

Your best bet, perhaps only bet, is to keep the expedition short and, if you can imagine it, less damaging to the infrastructure and population than other incursions in recent years. Hold your fire on the hospitals and UN schools and big apartment blocks in spite of your suspicions that militants may be sheltering there; focus it on the tunnel networks where you know the civilians aren't permitted to shelter and the militants are. Keep talking to the Saudis and Qataris if that's what you're doing, and especially the Palestinian Authority, if it's true you're doing that, and talk above all about the ways the population could be liberated from the tiny Bantustans of the West Bank and the prison camp of Gaza. After 75 years, it's really time to start trying something different.

Cross-posted at Substack.