How 9/11 helped Israel sell its war on Palestinians to America
The 'war on terror' made Israeli repression easier to present as part of a shared struggle against a common enemy.
Yousef Munayyer is senior non-resident fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and former executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
For me, the New York City skyline was close to home. Quite literally. I grew up just across the Hudson River, with the famed skyline of America’s biggest city visible from my bedroom window. Being a Palestinian American living just outside of the world’s most famous city meant that I spent part of my summers as a tour guide for family visiting us from the Middle East, who, like so many people around the world, wanted to see the Big Apple that the movies and live broadcasts from Times Square on New Year’s Eve had made so famous.
I took visitors to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park and the World Trade Center. My last tour was in the final days of August 2001. We went to the observation deck of the World Trade Center known as “Top of the World”. Little did I know that two weeks later that deck, where we had stood looking out at the amazing metropolis below, would come crashing down along with the entire World Trade Center, killing thousands and instantly changing the world as we had known it.
Netanyahu and his allies understood this very well, just as he made clear to The New York Times 25 years ago this week. A wounded America was primed for Islamophobic narratives, and pro-Israel voices were often happy to provide them, as they understood that an America obsessed with “counterterrorism” would have to stay close to Israel.