As we come to the end of the Bush failure, I've been fascinated with his first, full-on catastrophe: 9/11. September 11 was a horrible day of death and destruction, as we all know. It was also a day of reckoning: any semblance that there would be peace, simply by virtue of the end--probably--of conventional warfare was clearly proven false.
Another string of thought going through my mind right now is, of course, the situation in Gaza. I have to say: I'm conflicted. I think that what Israel is doing is wrong on many levels, mainly collective punishment and the murdering of civilians. I don't think that Gaza has the manpower to achieve its stated goal of destroying Israel. But I still feel that, however wrongly Israel is acting, they still have a basis for this action, that they clearly believe. It may be incomprehensible--for perfectly legitimate reasons--to us. But I think that it's important that we at least try to understand the mindset.
So how are the two connected?
On September 12, 2001 the New York Times published this article.
Do you get it now?
It is a question that many Israelis wanted to ask yesterday of America and the rest of the finger-pointing world. Not in a smart-alecky manner. Not to say, ''We told you so.'' It was simply a question for those who, at a safe remove from the terrorism that Israelis face every day, have damned Israel for taking admittedly harsh measures to keep its citizens alive.
''Suppose I had intelligence reports telling me that someone was going to hijack a Boeing 757 and crash it into the World Trade Center,'' an Israeli official said yesterday. ''And suppose I used an M-16 to kill him. According to the arguments being used against us, I'd be an assassin, illegally using American weapons.''
This official was referring to the international condemnation Israel has endured for killing certain Palestinians, people accused of not only masterminding anti-Israel terrorist acts in the past but planning more in the near future. And in this Black September, after the worst act of terrorism in history, the question arises from Israelis like this official:
Do you get it now?
It's an interesting read, and something to consider. I suppose that I hope that the United States, as a nation, would agree that, despite the terror we had undergone, the death and destruction, that we would bury our dead, mourn them and determine to kill the perpetrators--and only the perpetrators.
Of course, we know how that turned out. Now, I don't mean to create a false equivalence whereby I somehow say that by the US following Israeli mistakes (and/or vice versa) that it somehow makes the situation right. I don't think that in the slightest, and I don't think it has any validity.
But consider: 9/11, fundamentally, led to a serious alternation in our thinking that hadn't been affirmed since Pearl Harbor: that our oceans would not protect us. Imagine if the US was surrounded by a host of countries/entities whose public goal was to extinguish us:
You can't avoid the question when, again, as on many occasions while working in Israel in the first half of the 1990's, you have seen the human wreckage caused by the suicide bombs that go off with sickening frequency. You ask it because Jerusalem offers a glimpse of what New York may become.
What would your reaction be? Think about who, at least as a country, we would elect to make us safe? How many of us would want compromise? Certainly, I think that we'd want peace--we'd also, I would wager, want to severely deter those bent on attacking us--but not at the expense of inaction. Who among us would idly sit by? How many would don the uniform of our Army with the goal of keeping America safe from such an immediate, daily, threat?
I freely admit that this is a hypothetical thought experiment--for us. But it's worth considering in the broader context of Israel's situation in the Middle East.