"Israel's 9/11" is a dangerous, bloody trap — just like America's 9/11

When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations spoke outside the Security Council on Sunday, he said: “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a "PBS NewsHour" interview, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. said: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

While the phrase might seem logical enough, “Israel’s 9/11” is already being used as a huge propaganda weapon by Israel’s government — which is now engaged in massive war crimes against civilians in Gaza, in response to the mass murder of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants last weekend.

On the surface, an analogy between the atrocities just suffered by Israelis and what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, might seem to justify calls for unequivocal solidarity with Israel. But horrific actions are already in progress — with much worse to be expected — from an Israeli government that has long maintained an apartheid-style system while crushing the basic human rights of Palestinian people.

What is perhaps most sinister about trumpeting “Israel’s 9/11” is the willful blindness to history. By now we should all understand what happened after America’s 9/11. Wrapping itself in the shroud of victimhood, the U.S. exploited the trauma and tragedy of those events as a license to kill vast numbers of people — nearly all of whom had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — in the name of retaliation, righteousness and, of course, the “war on terror.”

It’s a playbook that Benjamin Netanyahu's government is currently adapting and implementing with a vengeance. Israel’s collective punishment of 2.3 million people in Gaza, which is now underway and certain to accelerate, is an intensification of what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades. But Israeli extremism, which more than ever justifies itself as a matter of self-defense, has reached new depths of racist rhetoric, and now displays a willingness to treat human beings as suitable for extermination.

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “beastly people” and said: “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.”

Indiscriminate bombing is now happening in Gaza, along with a cutoff of food, water, electricity and fuel. Noting that “even before the latest restrictions, residents of Gaza already faced widespread food insecurity, restrictions on movement and water shortages,” the BBC reported that a U.N. official said people in Gaza “were ‘terrified’ by the current situation and worried for their safety — as well as that of their children and families.”

This is a terrible echo of the U.S. government's approach in the aftermath of 9/11, which from the outset conferred advance absolution on itself for any and all future crimes against humanity.

In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. inflicted collective punishment on huge numbers of people who had no connection to al-Qaida and literally nothing to do with 9/11. The Costs of War project at Brown University calculates there were more than 400,000 direct civilian deaths “in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.”

Early in the “war on terror,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fashioned a template to provide approval for virtually any killing by the U.S. military. “We did not start this war,” he said at a news briefing in December 2001, two months into the Afghanistan war. “So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of al-Qaida and the Taliban.”

Rumsfeld was showered with acclaim from the U.S. media establishment, while insisting not just that the U.S. bore no responsibility for the deaths caused by its armed forces but that the American military’s decency was especially noteworthy. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld said. He lauded “the care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it.”

Even before its current high-tech attack on Gaza, Israel had amassed a long track record of killing civilians there, while denying it every step of the way. For instance, the U.N. found that during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” 1,462 Palestinian civilians died, including 495 children.

It seems inevitable that the civilian death toll from current Israeli military actions in Gaza will soon climb far above the number of people killed by the Hamas assault in southern Israel days ago. As in the aftermath of 9/11, official claims to be only fighting terrorism will serve as PR smokescreens for a government that terrorizes and inflicts mass carnage on Palestinians. Hamas’ killing and abduction of civilians, which deserve only unequivocal condemnation regardless of one's political perspective, have set the stage for Israel’s slaughter of civilians now underway in Gaza.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

A grisly news story that was not visible on the New York Times home page Monday night, and was relegated to page 9 of the print edition on Tuesday, began this way: “Israeli airstrikes pounded Gaza on Monday, flattening mosques over the heads of worshipers, wiping away a busy marketplace full of shoppers and killing entire families, witnesses and authorities in Gaza said. Five Israeli airstrikes ripped through the marketplace in the Jabaliya refugee camp, reducing it to rubble and killing dozens, the authorities said. Other strikes hit four mosques in the Shati refugee camp and killed people worshiping inside, they said. Witnesses said boys had been playing soccer outside one of the mosques when it was struck.”

Evasion is central to public statements from U.S. officials as more and more civilians die in Gaza. When National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the interview included some pointed questioning from host Mary Louise Kelly, who asked: “What is the U.S. assessment so far of how Israel has carried out retaliatory strikes in Gaza?”

“They have certainly been going at these targets aggressively,” Kirby replied. “We expected that they would. They have made it clear that they would, and they have.”

Kelly cited the rising death toll in Gaza, and this exchange followed:

Kirby: Look, we don't want to see any innocent civilian life taken — none. And all too sadly now, the death toll in Israel is now over a thousand, and it's just brutal. We don't want to see any civilian life lost or any civilians harmed. And that is why the president made it clear also when he gave his speech that, look, we share a lot of the same values and interests with Israel. And one of those is a respect for law, a respect for the law of war specifically. And we know that that's an important thing for the Israeli people as well.

Kelly: Yeah. Well, and to stay with that a second — respect for the law of war. Israel has cut off food, water, electricity to Gaza. The International Criminal Court defines a war crime as intentionally using starvation of civilians, willfully impeding relief supplies, as provided for under the Geneva Convention. So my question again — what's the U.S. assessment of whether the response is appropriate?

Kirby: Right. Right. And right now we know that — Mary Louise, that they were going to be aggressive in these early — the early days, and they have been. And we are doing everything we can to help them defeat this terrorist threat and to defend themselves, and that's what our focus is right now.

My translation of that exchange would be this: The U.S. government is fine with Israel continuing to commit war crimes on a large scale in Gaza.

This horrific cycle of violence in the Middle East, which has grown dramatically worse in recent days but has not changed its fundamental character, is not likely to end until the Israeli occupation ends — and one of the biggest obstacles to ending the occupation is the U.S. government.