In the aftermath of 9-11 and our response to that horror, I remember near-shouting arguments in our Common Room about what we should have done. Some folks thought that the attack on Afghanistan and on Iraq was not only justified, but positively insufficient. One person thought that we should have used neutron bombs on the whole area, on the mistaken assumption that such bombs would leave the infrastructures of the area more or less intact while at the same time annihilating the population. I won’t do more than point out the incredibly xenophobic, not to say racist basis of that point of view.
My take on the events in and around 9-11 were different. I thought that the US should take the opportunity to bring charges in the international court of justice against the terrorists. The counterargument was inevitable: what would such an action do? There is no enforcement branch to international courts, after all. There’d be no retribution to satisfy our sense of outrage. There’d be no satisfactory response to the horror, in short, nor any real movement towards justice against the perpetrators.
All of that was probably true, and I conceded as much. I had no idea what the outcome of a legal rather than a military response would be. But that was part of what I saw as a good thing. If we took such an approach and pursued it seriously and with diplomatic force, we would at least begin to make international law something with real reach and power. In the long run, the result, uncertain and unfathomable as it seemed to me and the others, might be to establish justice and ensure international tranquility. We might begin to build a real international community with real international laws and real international police forces. A nightmare for those of us who fear the “deep state” and, even more, UN black helicopters dipping down on us, but for the rest of us a welcome turn to a legally stable planet.
What I feared would happen from the military response did, unfortunately, come to pass. The disaster of Iraq and the disaster of Afghanistan became inevitable. We are still suffering from that result.
I say all this as a preface to what’s happening in the Middle East right now. There’s no doubt that the events of October 7th, 2023, were for Israel the equivalent of the events of 9-11 for the US. There’s no doubt that a military response such as indeed came to pass was as understandable as was our military response to 9-11. It’s also true, I think, that for Israel the attacks of October 7th were more immediate, more existential, more threatening by far than was the terrorism of 9-11. Washington DC is some seven thousand miles from Afghanistan. Tel Aviv is two hundred sixty miles from Beirut, next door to the West Bank, and fifty miles from the Gaza Strip. The danger for Israel is immediate, palpable, omnipresent.
Again, a military response is not only understandable, but almost inevitable.
I won’t address what I see as the excesses of that military response. Suffice it to say that I sometimes think that Tel Aviv, or rather Netanyahu, sees the war as an opportunity to enact the final solution, a phrase I use with deliberation. It strikes me as a move to eradicate the Palestinian people root and branch. A version of my colleague’s neutron bombs.
Unlike the US after 9-11 wrongly blaming Iraq for the attacks on the homeland, Israel correctly points to the influence of Iran on the terrorist groups that take repeated aim at destroying the country. Responsible as Iran may be, however, making Iran the focus of suspicion and hatred works to make it impossible to grapple with the foundational cause of the conflict that pits Palestinians against Israel. It’s a straightforward issue: Palestinians want a homeland; Israel, or at least the right-wing governments headed by Netanyahu, do not want a two-state solution. On the contrary, directly or not, Netanyahu’s governments foster a sense or Eretz Israel that makes it easy for Israelis to take land from Arabs on the West Bank and so increase the tensions between the two peoples. The effect is the same as the arrival of American settlers in Hawai’i during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ultimately Americans outnumbered the natives, who lost their monarch and their independence as Hawai’i became a state. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank head in the same direction.
From that perspective, the Palestinian resistance to Israeli hegemony is absolutely justified. Israeli intransigence under the Netanyahu governments makes it difficult to see how the hopes of the Palestinians can ever be accomplished. The result is not just frustration, but anger, resentment, and ultimately a restive move towards violence as the only way to achieve any movement towards what the Palestinians see as their justified demands. Iran takes advantage of that anger, of course, fosters it, arms it, encourages more and more violent responses. The result is war and a further destabilization of a very unstable region. Willy nilly, Netanyahu’s intransigence plays into Iranian hopes.
In the long run the US response to 9-11 created enemies by the score. To be sure, under the authority of American armed forces, Iraqi governments bowed to the will of Washington while large-scale insurrection festered outside of the Green Zone and the army bases scattered across the country. Once American military personnel left Iraq, any suggestion that the country was our ally became increasingly absurd. We are barely friends.
The same is happening in Palestinian lands and will undoubtedly continue to happen into the future. If Israel is justified in seeking to avenge the attacks of October 7th, then by the same token Palestinians are justified in seeking to damage the nation that has all but destroyed the very shadow of civilization in Gaza. Given such a response from the Palestinians, from the Israeli perspective, the extermination of Palestinians is the only, the final solution. From the Palestinian perspective, then, resisting extermination, and fighting back against Israeli power while doing so is the only logical response.
Given the intransigence of Netanyahu’s coalition, it’s useless to say that the only real, viable solution is the establishment of Palestine as its own nation. But the only solution is the two-state solution, with guarantees from however many countries in the world it might take to reassure both sides that the solution will remain peaceful. It’s a terrible mistake to allow Iranian interference to obscure that truth.
I realize that Hamas and Hezbollah are equally intransigent. But underlying that intransigence are the just hopes and demands of the Palestinian people. Address those hopes and demands, and the authority and power of the terrorists will diminish and, one hopes, ultimately disappear.
