Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that "since this terrorist attack" took place, we have seen it described as Israel's 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I'm sure those horrors have tapped into" some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States."
It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas's attacks, Israel's discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.
"Surprise" Attacks
The power of that "primal feeling" was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned "surprise" about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President's Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.
Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel's longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that "we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens."
By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted o n October 30th that, "since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war."
All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate "an extremely narrow set of 'political truths'" (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such "truths" were meant to dictate just who the "terrorists" were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention -- full-scale war, in fact -- was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a "natural interpretation" of reality, not a constructed one.
Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as "driven by fanaticism," as Scott Poynting andDavid Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is "presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable -- and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice."
The Threat of Terrorism and Moral Equivalencies
Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as "catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life," and "a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism."
As with Bush's argument that the 9/11 attackers were the "heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century" and that "they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism," Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that "just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas."
American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country's inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: "If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic" I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective."
By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other "counterterrorism" operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and "Islamic extremists" based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing "collateral damage").
No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas's attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel's. For example, he described Hamas as "an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday." But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel's war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).
Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together
In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, "These guys -- they make al-Qaeda look pure. They're pure -- they're pure evil." Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in "a battle" with "the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions." More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an "axis of evil," who were "arming to threaten the peace of the world."
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