If We Treated 9/11 Like the Israel-Hamas War

Could you have imagined they would rip down the missing persons posters?

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If We Treated 9/11 Like the Israel-Hamas War

One of the issues that I believe warrants some discussion re: the current protests of the Israel-Hamas War is that the Gen Z “activists” are either too young to remember 9/11, or did not exist at all when it happened. It is my view that their ahistorical rants (“resistance is justified/when people are occupied”) are largely the result of their privilege not to remember 9/11.

But for us millennials and all generations above us, the images of that day are forever seared into our collective memories. We remember exactly where we were when we heard. It was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday. Those of us who were school-aged at the time remember parents frantically flooding into the school building — during only the 2nd week of that school year — to collect their kids out of panic. Of course as kids, we were happy at first to be sent home early. But then we arrived home to watch on TV the images of the Twin Towers’ fall replayed again and again. For us millennials, 9/11 was a catastrophe that largely defined our formative years.

I also remember seeing clips of certain groups celebrating the attacks. But those people lived far far away and were generally accepted as enemies of our state. No American would dare try something like this, let alone on the day it happened:

If we treated the aftermath of 9/11 like Israel-Hamas War…

• Columbia students would have marched with al-Qaeda flags as soon as 48 hours after the Twin Towers hit the ground.

• The attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the airplane hijacks would have been called “acts of resistance” from freedom fighters justifiably confronting American colonialism in the Middle East.

• Protesters would have been apoplectic that our own troops who volunteered to go to Iraq and Afghanistan were killing civilians there. What did the Iraqis do to deserve that, since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 to start with? That’s a legitimate question that I almost never heard asked during my university days, which were at the height of that conflict.

• Major newspapers would publish a daily death count of all Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. military, with the Taliban as their source.

• We would have had dedicated journalist-activists disputing the total number of 9/11 fatalities. They might question if the terrorists really hijacked the planes or if the airlines were just trying to cover up the pilots’ incompetence at flying the planes. Also, how did the Twin Towers workers who were absent on 9/11 know to stay home that day?

• People would tear down the fliers of missing persons that loved ones posted in NYC in the hope that they might still be alive, just as emergency services frantically dug through the debris at Ground Zero.

Photo credit: Steve Pyke

I know what you’re thinking: but Jill, we didn’t have social media then, that’s the major difference! That is a cop-out analysis. Social media just makes the (mis)information get to more people faster. We are the same people we were during the days sans social media. We had the same college campuses, we had the same people ranting about how Israel shouldn’t exist, and we had the same political divisiveness (which back then culminated in the election of Barack Obama). Social media would not have changed any of that; it just changed how people communicate.

Some thought that no one would ever want to travel to NYC again after 9/11. Well, my family went in October 2001. NYC was always a favorite destination for us (I developed a taste for Broadway musicals at a very young age, my first being Les Miz at the age of 8). My parents’ rationale was simple: if we let 9/11 destroy our plans, the terrorists win.

I plan to travel to Israel in October 2024 for the High Holidays, during which the anniversary of the deadliest day for Jews since 1945 is sandwiched in between. Despite everything, I am convinced that we — Israel and the world’s Jews — will emerge from this catastrophe stronger, better.

Because if we don’t, the terrorists win.

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