Thoughts on 9/11

Many people were asked this past weekend what they were doing on September 11, 2001, and what they thought about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Even though no one has asked me, I wish to offer my answers to those questions.

But first, a little background: I had just finished writing a novel which included a lot about Israeli-Palestinian relations. My views had sharpened considerably from the typical pro-Israel stance most Americans take to one sharply critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and of the American government giving Israel carte blanche.

For instance, Israel persisted in maintaining its military occupation and building new settlements in Palestinian territories. They were taking over all water sources from Palestinians. They were building highways that split up the occupied land so that Palestine’s economy and social matrix were physically disrupted (farms were separated from the farmers’ residences, commerce between towns was disrupted by forcing Palestinians to drive many miles around the obstructing highways, schools were separated from their communities, etc.). All ports of entry into Palestinian territories were controlled by Israel. No matter what agreements were negotiated, Israel dragged its feet or completely refused to implement what they had officially agreed to.

By 2001, the Israelis had established, as former President Jimmy Carter observed, apartheid in the Palestinian territories.

It had not always been like that. Palestinians, Jews, and Christians had lived side by side in the Holy Land for more than a thousand years. Even with the early influx of Jews seeking to return to the land of their forefathers, even with those financed by the Zionist movement, there was relative peace.

But that all changed. Following WW II, Zionist squads began systematically forcing Palestinians out of their villages using bloody tactics. In response to the flood of refugees coming across their borders, neighboring Arab states sought to halt the flow and demand that the refugees to be returned. Israel ignored them and continued its campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinian territories so that new Jewish settlers coming from Europe, the Asian subcontinent, and Africa could have some of the better land on which to settle. Despite winning acceptance into the United Nations based on promises to repatriate the refugees, Israel never did.

America consistently supported Israel in the United Nations, vetoing nearly every challenge the UN mounted against Israel’s behavior and practices. We also provided billions of dollars each year to Israel’s military support. It is no wonder America joined Israel as targets of radical Islamic sects' and organizations' wrath-filled rhetoric.

In 1993, one of those radical organizations, Al Qaida, truck-bombed the World Trade Center in New York. A number of people were killed and injured by the blast. The damage was serious but could be repaired. The perpetrators were caught and tried in American courts and life went on.

On September 11, 2001, I was mowing my front lawn when a car from further into our sub-division stopped. The driver told me that the Twin Towers had been hit by airplanes. Since they had been targeted in 1993, I just knew that Al Qaida was looking for more payback.

The attack on the World Trade Center, even if the Twin Towers had been full to their normal complement of 33,000 workers, would not have come near comparing with the thousands of Arabs killed in the various Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza and the hundreds of thousands they had displaced through ruthless treatment of Palestinians, both Arab and Christian, over the previous 60 years.

Americans do not realize just how cruel the Israelis have been to the Palestinians. Bin Laden tried to tell us but his actual words rarely got through the American media. His writings were always described as crazy talk or pure hate speech. But he was trying to point out how America showed no inclination to deal fairly with the Palestinians and only continued disrespect for Arab culture. To Bin Ladin, the American presence in Saudi Arabia added insult to injury.

While a few extremist groups kept some violence going after Israel soundly defeated the handful of Arab nations that threatened them militarily in 1967 and 1973, the political use of fear in Israel overwhelmed the large number of peace-seeking Jews, Arabs, and Christians who were citizens of Israel. The assassination of the last Israeli Prime Minister who actually worked for peace, Yitzhak Rabin, by a right wing Zionist was the decisive moment when the conservatives took and maintained power undermining all peace efforts since.

So, this weekend as the TV, newspapers, and local groups all were remembering the ones who died, especially the first responders, mostly presuming the nineteen men who hijacked the four planes were terrible people who hated us because we love freedom, I prayed for the government to be more aggressive in holding Israel’s feet to the fire and working with other nations to bring about some decent resolution so that there is less reason for the extremists to hate us. . . and just maybe begin a new era of peace in the Middle East.

I wonder how long it will be before there is a national interest in the hijackers, an exploration of why those intelligent, educated young men were motivated to do the horrible deed they did and the impact on their families and friends.

Their unspeakable action should never be trivialized to be understood as the use of a 2-by-4 to get our attention. But neither should the Israeli occupation and suppression of Palestine be interpreted as Israel's "manifest destiny." Nor should our turning a blind eye to Israel's behavior be left unchallenged.

Unless America becomes realistic in viewing the Israeli-Palestinian problem and understanding our policies which fed into that conflict, there will be no chance for a peaceful solution to the Middle East Crisis.