O pinion
After 9/11, I Wrote a Headline Comparing US, Israel. I Regret It
BY GARY ROSENBLATT
ONE OF THE MOST contro-
versial — and tone-deaf
— front-page headlines to
appear in The New York Jewish
Week during the 26 years I
served as editor was published
the morning after 9/11 — 20
years ago.

Across the top of the page,
in moon landing-size bold
type, it read: “America: The
New Israel.”
And underneath, in italics:
“As fear and vulnerability
grip U.S., will empathy with
Jerusalem increase?”
How did Israel somehow
take center stage in this
American tragedy?
I can criticize the headline
and those words because I
wrote them.

Looking back now, I realize
just how misplaced my anger,
sadness and fear were in my
immediate response to the
deadliest terror attack in U.S.

history — one that claimed
3,000 innocent lives at the
World Trade Center, the
Pentagon and in a lonely field
in rural Pennsylvania.

Not in my defense but in
the interest of establishing the
context of my initial reaction
— and of many supporters of
Israel — allow me to recall the
mood of much of the Jewish
world, here and in Israel, in
early September 2001. It was, to
be blunt, one of deep despair.

In Durban, South Africa,
international anti-Semitism
reached a new high — or low
— when the United Nations
World Conference Against
14 SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
Racism adopted a resolution
labeling Israel an “apartheid,
racist” state and accused its
government of “genocide and
ethnic cleansing.”
The U.S. and Israel withdrew
their delegations on deter-
mining that they could not
remove anti-Israel language
from the final declaration of
the conference.

But Durban is hardly
remembered now, its miserable
outcome overtaken by the leap
from rhetorical terror to the
real thing.

In early September, Israel
was one year into the Second
Intifada, a uniquely brutal and
frightening period when it
seemed that Palestinian terror-
ists were killing Israelis on an
almost daily basis.

It’s difficult to convey the
sense of fear and outrage that
hung over the country like a
bombings, drive-by shoot-
ings, stabbings and stonings
across the country. Sixteen
teenagers and five other
young people were blown up
at the Dolphinarium disco in
Tel Aviv; 13-year-old Koby
Mandell and his 14-year-old
friend Yosef Ishran were stoned
to death in a cave in Tekoa on
Lag B’Omer; a five-month-old
baby was stoned in an attack in
Shiloh; a 40-year-old woman,
five months pregnant, was shot
in her car near Karne Shomron;
and 15 people were blown away
by a suicide bomber one August
afternoon in a Sbarro restau-
rant in downtown Jerusalem.

According to
the International Institute for
Counter-Terrorism, 1,137
Israelis were killed during the
Second Intifada, which lasted
five years. Its most common
weapon: suicide bombers
tragedy, I already mourned
for my fellow Americans. But
as we learned more details, I
was overly focused on what
I saw as the striking paral-
lels between two democracies
whose citizens were viciously
and unfairly attacked by Arab
terrorists. To the perpetrators,
the U.S. and Israel were Big
Satan and Little Satan.

Particularly galling to me,
American officials for months
had been calling on Israel to
show restraint in its response
to the many Palestinian terror
attacks, and the media too often
made moral equivalence of the
attackers and the attacked.

As my colleagues and I tore
up the articles planned for
that week’s edition and threw
ourselves into reporting on
the attacks and their profound
impact, I wrote an editorial
titled “Terror Hits Home,”
Looking back now, I realize just how misplaced my anger, sadness and
fear were in my immediate response to the deadliest terror attack in
U.S. history — one that claimed 3,000 innocent lives at the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon and in a lonely field in rural Pennsylvania.

dark cloud. I returned from
a five-day trip to Israel on
Sunday, Sept. 9, relieved to
have avoided terrorism first-
hand. That same day, three
Israeli men (one was 19 years
old) were killed by a Hamas
suicide bomber on a train in
Naharia. Every day, parents feared
that when they sent their
children off to school in the
morning, they might never
see them again. The battle was
waged not on distant fields but
on the streets of Israeli cities,
in cafes, hotels, on buses and
trains. During that first year,
110 Israeli men, women and
children were killed — almost
all of them civilians — in 51
separate incidents of suicide
targeting innocents. Its most
lasting impact: convincing a
majority of Israelis that making
peace with the Palestinians was
a dream-turned-nightmare.

The intifada’s impact on
Israeli politics is evident two
decades later in a country
whose citizens have moved
increasingly right on the
Palestinian issue.

I was back at work on that
beautiful Tuesday morning,
Sept. 11. After seeing on TV
the non-stop clips of a plane
smashing into one of the
Twin Towers, I looked out the
window of my Times Square
office and saw and smelled the
black clouds in the distance.

And then the second plane hit.

I felt sickened and stunned.

Not knowing the extent of the
JEWISH EXPONENT
which stated: “Friends and
supporters of Israel could not
help but think that this week
the United States became
Israel,” with American citizens
suddenly “learning what it is
like to experience fear and
vulnerability, to bear the
brunt of blind hatred, to have
innocent civilians targeted as
victims of suicide bombers.

“Will the U.S. government,
which pledged to strike back
against those who committed
these dastardly deeds, now see
the folly in its calls on Israel
to use restraint in the face of
murderous terrorist acts?
“Surely we don’t expect
Washington to seek peace
talks with the perpetrators, or
offer up several states to pacify
them, or condemn the cycle
of violence” as if there is no
difference between the arsonist
and the victim of fire.

In a letter to the editor
responding to the headline,
published a week later, a reader
wrote she was appalled that
rather than focus on the plight
of the victims, “you harangue
and berate the United Sates for
its sins of omission. How cruel.

How arrogant.”
The letter noted that “there is
nothing wrong with your front-
page articles except for their
placement. Horror and outrage
should have been your lead.”
Her point was well taken,
and still is.

My timing was woefully
premature in calling out what
I saw as Washington’s hypoc-
risy — pressuring Israel to
ease up in its defense against
deadly attacks on civilians as
the U.S. was about to launch a
“war on terror.” I should have
been mourning the victims,
damning the perpetrators
and praising the heroes — the
firefighters who rushed into
the chaos rather than escape
it, and those brave souls on
American Airlines Flight 77,
whose struggle with the plane’s
hijackers likely saved the U.S.

Capitol from a direct hit.

The fact is that the 9/11
attacks did change U.S. policy
toward Israel in its own, and
ongoing, war on terrorists.

It started at the top. “The
personal relationship between
[President George W.] Bush
and [Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel] Sharon grew much
tighter,” Gideon Sa’ar, then
Cabinet Secretary in Sharon’s
government, later recalled.

“Following the September 11
attacks, Bush finally under-
stood Sharon’s situation as
leader of a nation fighting mass
terror attacks. He began to
identify with him.”
Israel is still condemned by
many for using “dispropor-
tionate force” in its insistence
See Rosenblatt, Page 26
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM