The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the third anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel coincided with the ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran. The conflict raises questions about regional stability, diplomatic failures, and the role of Washington and Tel Aviv in prolonging hostilities.
Both 9/11 and 10/7 have Israel at the core
The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 marked its 25th anniversary and the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 marked its third anniversary on October 7, right in the middle of a war that started with an American and Israeli attack on Iran. While the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack and the Hamas attack on Israel will always be linked by their proximity, the US war with Iran could have been stopped, and is only continuing because of US and Israeli intransigence.
At the same time, it is possible to see the war on Iran as flowing out of the 9/11 attacks, and more immediately out of the 10/7 attacks. There is an element of blowback, for would the 9/11 attacks have been staged if the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Palestine had not happened? Palestine has been called ‘a dagger in the heart of the Arab world’ ever since the original UN partition plan created Israel. If the USA had not frequently tried to twist that dagger, would it have been at the receiving end of 9/11?
Indeed, 9/11 was a sort of revenge for all the evils that are supposed to have befallen the Muslims of the world, starting with the Indian occupation of Kashmir, which occurred a few months before Israel took over most of Palestine. However, 9/11 seems to have unleashed the USA against the Muslim world. With invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq coming virtually immediately after, its attack of Iran brings another Muslim country in its aegis. Before 9/11, there had been the vIranian Revolution, and then the Afghan Jihad. Indeed, the Afghan Jihad played a seminal role in the creation of Al-Qaeda, which carried out 9/11.
The focus seems to remain on the Crusader spirit. That spirit brought Israel into existence, but it has caused Muslims to react almost reflexively. So long as Israel remains, an anachronism, the last settler colony, there will be turmoil, not just in the region, not just the Arab world, but the whole Muslim world
9/11 unleashed Islamophobia throughout the West, while this may have been a thinly disguised racism in essence. The first victim of post-9/11 outrage in the USA was a Sikh attacked and killed in Arizona. Was he killed because od his beard, his turban or his colour? US President Donald Trump has banned citizens of certain Muslim countries, which indicates that his primary motivation is racist.
Meanwhile, 9/11 allowed both India and Israel to engage in anti-Muslim campaigns of their own. India’s did not grow, but Israel used 7/10 to engage in genocide in Gaza, which in turn is behind its attack on Iran, into which it inveigled the USA. Islamophobia seems to have percolated from a few extremists into the right generally, with resulting victories for them in Israel, India, the USA, Italy and Germany.
One result has been the violence of the Israeli response to 10/7. It was doubtless an extremely shocking event for Israel, indeed for Jews everywhere, but the sense of safety that Israel gave them yielded the ensuing genocide because the government in place was pro-settler, pro-extremists. (The so-called left was not anti-settler nor anti-extremist, as shown by opinion polls which have been broadly supportive of the massacre of Palestinians, but the Netanyahu government is more combative, more inclined to violence.)
One result of this violent reaction was that it backfired. Instead of intensifying the image of Jews as victims, the sight of Israeli soldiery slaughtering Palestinian children, which was spread by social media platforms, revulsed the rest of the world. The number of countries recognizing Palestine increased, and the image of Israel and Israelis took a beating.
The infrastructure which had created support for Israel in the first place was intact, and swung into action, but it did not work as well as before. Lord Acton’s famous saying, about absolute power corrupting absolutely, seems to be being proved by Israel. It has depended on the special relationship with the USA, and in that dependence, it seems to have assumed impunity.
There has been no lessening of that impunity. Funding continues as before. However, certain topics are now being discussed that were never spoken about before. The first is the existence and influence of the Zionist lobby.
The Gaza massacres particularly illustrated how closely the Israelis were beginning to repeat Nazi tropes, how their genuine victimhood before and during World War II was no longer considered sufficient for the carte blanche that it assumed. Perhaps most damaging to Israel was the sleaziness of Benjamin Netanyahu personally, as it became increasingly obvious that not only were Palestinians being slaughtered, but Israeli servicemen were being killed solely to protect Netanyahu from avoiding corruption charges.
The result has been showing up in US elections. The US midterms are still in the future, but some attempts by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to defeat unfavourable candidates in the primaries, have instead been defeated. The myth of the invincibility of AIPAC has been broken, thus breaking, or rather cracking, that very invincibility.
Because of the fallout from Gaza, it became essential for Israel to exploit its still strong position in the USA, as well as the presence in the White House of Danald Trump, about as pro-Israel a US President as it could hope for, by attacking Iran, not just once (in 2025) but twice. Thus the attack on Iran was a direct effect of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
Even Israel realizes that the Arab countries surrounding it will not just magically disappear. Therefore the Abraham Accords have been dreamt up after 9/11 to provide a framework under which Muslim countries can recognize Israel. The US campaign against Iran is not just directed against its nuclear programme, but its antagonism to Israel. Iran had broken through the covering of Arab nationalism that had been given to the Palestinian cause, and laid bare the truth that Palestine was a Muslim cause, and the desire for the liberation of Jerusalem was not merely a desire for the limited goal of Palestinian nationalism, but the universalist goal of Muslim fraternal feeling. FRom the ‘dagger in the heart of the Arab world’, Israel is now a dagger in the heart of the Muslim world. Iran’s investment in the Palestine issue should not be seen as part of some ani-Arab or even sectarian design. It is visceral for any state claiming an Islamic provenance.
9/11 and 10/7 were both world-changing events. It is possible to discern the trends that they gave a fillip to. There was Islamophobia before 9/11, resentment of Zionists (as opposed to Jews) before 10/7. But both events proved catalytic. While 10/7 was spawned by 9/11, its effects on the world have probably not played out yet.
One of the consequences of both events is to raise consciousness among Muslims. They were already feeling left out of the wave of global homogenization that was taking place in parallel, and the years since 9/11 brought what seemed a continuous stream of insults. The fierce Western campaigns against terrorism do not seem to have cowed Muslims into either abandoning their faith or loving their chains.
The focus seems to remain on the Crusader spirit. That spirit brought Israel into existence, but it has caused Muslims to react almost reflexively. So long as Israel remains, an anachronism, the last settler colony, there will be turmoil, not just in the region, not just the Arab world, but the whole Muslim world.