The attack on Israel has already been subtitled “Israel’s 9/11” for the sheer scale of its horror and the intelligence failures that allowed it. The U.S. responded to 9/11 with $6.4 trillion wasted on two ground invasions-cum-occupations, a pro-torture foreign policy, and millions of people killed or displaced by a misguided “war on terror” that made Americans their own worst enemies.
We have given ourselves a pass on the more than 300,000 Iraqi and 400,000 Afghan civilians who died in the name of the 2,977 Americans killed on 9/11. We used the killing of our civilians to justify the killing of their civilians in far greater numbers, (or in the case of Iraq, which wasn’t involved in 9/11, the nearest civilians available). We allowed horrific slaughter that caught us by surprise to justify systematic slaughter that we carefully planned on a much larger scale. And we got away with it.
So here we are again, angry and broken, helping an ally unleash hell on the world’s largest refugee camp, counting “our” innocents separately from “their” innocents, as if they weren’t the same thing. We must answer terrorist attacks, of course, but in a way where retribution does not cascade into endless generations of slaughter. How we choose to navigate our pain and anger today casts the die for the world that inherits our choices. If we want to stop terrorism, we need to stop creating terrorists.