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.
By the time of the September 11 attacks, I was back in my dormitory at university in New England and huddled around a 10-inch television screen with floormates watching ABC’s Peter Jennings cover the horrific news as it was unfolding that Tuesday morning. Among the early reactions was one from Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister of Israel. Asked by The New York Times what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Netanyahu replied, “It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy,” adding that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”.
This was his response while ground zero was still smouldering after an attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people. It immediately hit me that not only was the world about to change, but my life in the US as a Palestinian American was about to become far, far more complicated. The US was about to embark on military engagement in the Middle East, and Netanyahu was excited by the opportunity this presented Israel.
To better understand the impact this moment had on US-Israel relations, it is crucial to consider the preceding context. I have argued elsewhere that the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 was a complicated one for US-Israel relations. For most of the history of the US-Israel relationship, the Cold War was the defining paradigm in international relations.
For Israel, this was an easy paradigm to navigate. It billed itself to Americans as a like-minded, US-aligned democracy confronting Soviet-backed satellite states in the Arab world. But as the Cold War ended, the political landscape shifted.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
