Our American Israel 7 HOMELAND INSECURITIES

===
CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
===

7 HOMELAND INSECURITIES 

 

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, is known to millions of Americans as the day that changed everything. “Ground Zero” represented 

not only a site of carnage in Lower Manhattan, but also a rupture in time, the moment Americans lost their innocence and no longer felt 

invulnerable. On that day, al-Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, killing al- 

most three thousand. At day’s end, “night fell on another world,” observed President George W. Bush, when he announced before a 

joint session of Congress a week later that he was declaring a “war on terror” and establishing a new Office of Homeland Security.¹ 

Unique and unprecedented, al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the United States appeared to defy both comparison and historical analysis. 

Any attempt to put the event in context—likening American losses to the suffering of others, or explaining acts of terrorism as reactions 

to political policies—raised the specter of moral relativism and blurred the clear line between “our way of life” and “evildoers.” 

Israel stood out as an exception to the unwritten rule about the incomparability of American suffering. “Now we are all Israelis” was a 

common refrain, but it did not undermine the exceptional quality of America’s calamity or becloud its moral clarity.² On the contrary, 

identification with Israel sharpened the sense that the two countries shared a unique position in the world. The familiar image of Israelis 

as long-suffering victims of terrorism offered an emotional touchstone for comprehending incomprehensible losses, and Israel’s vaunt- 

ed military vigilance provided a guide to action. In the rhetoric of President Bush and his advisors, the United States took on Israel’s 

paradoxical role as an invincible victim. In this view, America was confronting, on a global scale, murderous enemies who threatened 

nothing less than total annihilation. Terrorism would force the United States to fight a never-ending battle for national survival, even as 

the country was providentially destined to vanquish all evil. 

For Americans to place themselves in Israeli shoes was to imagine the nation in a new way, as a homeland—a nation one needed to 

fight for against the threat of total loss. In the decade following 2001, Israel increasingly appealed as a model to emulate in defending 

America at home and abroad from existential threats, both real and imagined. The military and the media, think tanks and popular cul- 

ture, all enjoined Americans to study Israel as the gold standard for fighting terrorism in foreign lands, at the borders, in cyberspace, in 

urban centers, in the homeland, and in private homes. Israel’s permanently imperiled state exemplified the new concept of homeland 

security. This concept entailed, on the one hand, erecting impregnable barriers between inside and outside, the citizen and the alien, the 

self and the other. On the other hand, it meant effacing boundaries between home and abroad, domestic and foreign affairs, civilian and 

military control. 

The history and language of America’s close identification with Israel offered a ready-made narrative of innocence and danger that 

helped some Americans understand what at first seemed incomprehensible. Americans could believe that, like Israeli Jews, they were 

hated for who they were, not for what they did. This hatred, even by a small cadre of nonstate actors, seemed so dangerous that it 

threatened to “destroy our way of life.” The rhetoric of the existential threat, associated primarily with Israel since the 1980s, entered the 

lexicon of the war on terror, which Vice President Dick Cheney would refer to as an “existential conflict.”³ Since retaliation alone could 

not guarantee security against such an all-encompassing menace, the only option was to preemptively eradicate this shadowy but om- 

nipresent enemy. 

In the post-9/11 model of homeland security, perceptions of vulnerability and invincibility fed on each other. With imminent extermi- 

nation on the horizon, any available means can be used to destroy impending threats before they strike. Military advantage alone, how- 

ever, never suffices in the face of existential peril. Fears of omnipresent danger continually stoke the call for vigilance in the name of 

total security. These views perpetuate and rely on the continuous production of radical insecurity. In this apocalyptic way of thinking, 

the only imaginable outcomes are absolute supremacy or utter annihilation; negotiation or compromise can lead only to appeasement 

and capitulation. David Frum and Richard Perle, neoconservative advisors to President Bush, expressed this idea succinctly in their 

book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror: “There is no middle way for Americans: it is either victory or holocaust.”⁴ 

 

“Now We Are All Israelis” 

 

In the days following 9/11, journalists likened the devastation in New York to the tragic routine of terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv and 

Jerusalem. “The acrid and unexpungeable odor of terrorism, which has hung over Israel for many years,” wrote George Will in the Wash- 

ington Post on September 12, “is now a fact of American life. Yesterday morning Americans were drawn into the world that Israelis live in 

every day.” On the same day, the New York Times published no less than three pieces on Israel, all solemnly acknowledging that “we” 

now understand what “they” have bravely endured for so long, that our overwhelming catastrophe is their everyday norm. Clyde Haber- 

man noted that the most recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv had taken place at an American pizza chain, linking Americans and Israelis 

in a shared fragile landscape, where everyday life becomes vulnerable to destruction. In the following years, journalists would return to 

this theme. “With every new threat, … our everyday life becomes more like Israel’s,” wrote Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic.⁵ 

Some journalists acknowledged that people in many other countries—Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Sri Lanka—also lived with the hor- 

rific effects of terrorism. But most were quick to assert a more intimate identification with Israelis. In his editorial in the New York Times 

the day after the attacks, Bill Keller repeated the phrases “like Israelis” and “like Israel” as a sober but reassuring refrain, remarking that 

the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania felt “too far way,” and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City 

by a domestic terrorist too “freakish.” When Dexter Filkins rushed to the smoldering scene of the collapsed Twin Towers, it occurred to 

him that many of the street vendors from Third World countries would have encountered comparable disasters—whether natural or 

manmade—that destroyed thousands of innocent lives in their own homelands. But then he noticed a surreal object lying on the street, 

a human intestine, and he flashed back to a scene in Tel Aviv, where Orthodox Jews had been collecting fragments of body parts in the 

aftermath of a suicide bombing. Comparisons to Israel offered psychic ballast and a cognitive chart to navigate by in the chaotic wake of 

the attacks, which had made home seem frighteningly foreign. Some Americans easily saw themselves, like the Israelis, as virtuous vic- 

tims of inexplicably evil forces, and they could then rally to emulate Israeli resilience. The language of that day resonated in newspapers 

from around the country. In the words of a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, “We’ve lost our old invulnerability, and must learn the art of 

survival in the presence of peril.”⁶ 

Americans turned to Israel for education in the art of survival. Israeli leaders were eager to edify, though not without a note of 

schadenfreude. When Benjamin Netanyahu, former (and future) prime minister, was asked how the attacks would affect relations be- 

tween Israel and the United States, he answered, “It’s very good,” before correcting himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate 

immediate sympathy.” The attacks, Netanyahu explained, would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experi- 

enced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” Prime Minister Ariel 

Sharon decried the assault on “our common values” and declared that “together we can defeat these forces of evil.” Israel’s minister for 

public security accused Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, of having laid “the foundation for modern terrorism,” and 

officials repeatedly equated Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attack, with Arafat, and al-Qaeda with the Palestinian Authority.⁷ 

In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Likud government of Israel and its conservative supporters in the United States had laid the 

conceptual foundation for American and Israeli partnership in a global war on terror. Throughout the 1990s, experts and politicians at 

think tanks and conferences had worked to define Islamic-inspired terrorism as the primary threat to Western democracies after the fall 

of Soviet communism.⁸ In 1996, Netanyahu published a well-received book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic 

and International Terrorists, in which he articulated ideas that would later be taken up by President Bush. Terrorists have no political 

goals, no grievances or aspirations, but are driven by irrational hatred, he claimed. Although they belong to a hydra-headed network of 

disparate groups, they are united in their aim of destroying the West. Netanyahu did not refer to the clash of civilizations that Samuel 

Huntington had made famous in his 1993 essay and book, but rather to a battle of civilization against barbarism. Published on the heels 

of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, Netanyahu’s book distinguished domestic terrorism, represented by the Irish 

Republican Army (IRA) and the white supremacist militias in the United States, as destined to wither away in democratic societies, 

which by nature would not tolerate them. Islamic terrorism, on the other hand, would remain dangerous because of its death-driven the- 

ology and its political support from authoritarian states. Netanyahu made no distinctions among the myriad groups that employed ter- 

ror as a tactic, whether al-Qaeda, Chechen rebels, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the mujahideen. He labeled Yasser Arafat as the progenitor of 

contemporary terrorism, and he placed Israel at the vanguard of the global struggle.⁹ 

Netanyahu’s narrative helped frame American perceptions of the second intifada, which received more media coverage in the United 

States than any other foreign event in the year before 9/11. The uprising was triggered by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in 

Jerusalem, site of the al-Aqsa Mosque, in September 2000. Its roots lay in Palestinian disappointment with the failure to achieve state- 

hood in the U.S.-led peace process, and mounting frustration with growing Israeli settlements and with the Israeli occupation, which 

had become even more draconian since the Oslo Accords of 1993. In the fall of 2000, most of the world looked on with horror at the 

overwhelming firepower that Israeli forces unleashed on Palestinian protesters, followed by the military reoccupation of cities and 

refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some Palestinian militias responded with deadly suicide bombings that killed and 

maimed Israeli civilians in buses and cafes, at street corners and weddings. The bombings wreaked havoc on the daily life of most 

Israelis.¹⁰ 

The U.S. media focused almost entirely on the suffering of Israelis. News reports told of Israel defending innocent civilians against 

death-loving Arabs, who were willing to sacrifice their youth just to foment violence aimed at eradicating Israel from the face of the 

earth. The American media rarely mentioned the context of the occupation or acknowledged what many observers and international 

human rights groups saw as Israel’s disproportionate assaults on civilians. At most, the media bemoaned the terrible cycle of violence 

on both sides.¹¹ 

After 9/11, America’s war on terror merged with Israel’s war against the Palestinians in both rhetoric and practice, with each legiti- 

mating the other. Israeli officials were concerned that the U.S. government would be distracted by its own war, but they also believed it 

would look sympathetically at the assault by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the occupied territories, as an attack on terrorists. On 

September 13, 2001, the Washington Post reported that Israeli tanks had entered Jericho, a city controlled by the Palestinian Authority, 

with little international notice. A few days later, the paper noted that Sharon believed the “shell-shocked West” had become receptive to 

his argument that Yasser Arafat was not a national leader, but a terrorist like Osama bin Laden.¹² Sharon visited ground zero in Novem- 

ber in order to highlight the bond between the two countries, united in fighting against terrorists and mourning the losses they inflicted. 

The next month, Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City and mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg went to Jerusalem, where they visited the 

site of a suicide bombing. Giuliani proclaimed that “the people of Jerusalem and the people of New York City are shoulder-to-shoulder, 

and the people of America and the people of Israel are shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight against terrorism,” and that the experience of 

terrorism had made the kinship between the two nations closer than ever.¹³ 

On March 27, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a Passover Seder at a hotel in Netanya, murdering 28 Israelis and injuring 

140. Israel launched a massive military offensive in retaliation, an operation that had been planned well in advance. In Operation Defen- 

sive Shield, the IDF invaded cities and refugee camps on the West Bank and besieged Ramallah, where it pummeled Arafat’s presi- 

dential headquarters, targeting not only security installations but also civilian ministries and municipal buildings. In justifying the as- 

saults, Sharon drew analogies between the Taliban’s infrastructural support for al-Qaeda and the Palestinian Authority’s enabling of sui- 

cide bombers in Israel. Columnist Charles Krauthammer compared the Passover massacre to both the Holocaust and the World Trade 

Center attack, referring to it as “Kristallnacht transposed to Israel,” and “Israel’s Sept. 11, a time when sporadic terrorism reaches a crit- 

ical mass of malevolence such that war is the only possible response.” Krauthammer argued that Israel’s military raids and America’s 

attacks on Afghanistan were essential, not merely to kill individual terrorists, but to destroy the regimes that sponsored them and the 

groundwork that facilitated them. America’s war in Afghanistan may have distracted attention from Israel’s attacks on the West Bank 

and Gaza. But it also provided support for Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian social institutions in an attempt to destroy the rudi- 

ments of any future state.¹⁴ 

 

 

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon (left) and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (right) inspect the site of the destroyed World Trade Center, 

November 30, 2001. 

 

The United States benefited, in turn, from Israel’s military campaigns in Operation Defensive Shield. In preparation for the invasion 

of Iraq, U.S. military observers visited the West Bank in 2002 to watch the Israeli army bulldoze a 40,000-square-meter area in the 

center of the Jenin refugee camp, an operation that killed an estimated fifty-two Palestinians. Marines showed a special interest in learn- 

ing about urban warfare and about how to undertake search-and-destroy missions against insurgents. Israeli advisors visited Fort Bragg 

to train Special Forces. After the initial invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. military faced numerous uprisings throughout the country, espe- 

cially in densely packed cities, American forces adopted counterinsurgency tactics that the Israeli military used in the occupied terri- 

tories. These techniques included searching house to house, razing buildings, erecting walls to seal off areas within and between neigh- 

borhoods, making mass arrests, setting up checkpoints, and monitoring people’s movements using biometric identity cards and 

surveillance systems. Americans also adopted the Israeli practice of extra-judicial executions by helicopters or drones as part of the 

broader doctrine of what Israelis called “urban area domination.” American troops trained in mock “Arab” towns built on Israeli bases 

and paid for in part with U.S. funds. Interrogators in Iraq used a torture technique called the Palestinian chair, in which the prisoner is 

secured in a painful crouching position. These convergences were not lost on Iraqis, who named an opening between barriers in Bagh- 

dad “Rafah,” after the crossing point between Gaza and Egypt. One Iraqi protester complained, “This wall makes us feel as if we were in 

Palestine.”¹⁵ 

The American military was certainly not learning for the first time about methods of counterinsurgency, assassination, torture, or at- 

tacks on civilians; it had its own long history of interventions, from Southeast Asia to Latin America. But the Bush administration repre- 

sented the war on terror as an exceptional response to an unprecedented threat rather than as a continuation of this history. With the 

country at risk from what Bush called a “new and changing threat unlike any we have faced before,” Israel appeared to be far ahead of 

the game. Think tanks and military research centers churned out papers about lessons the United States could learn from Israel about 

“fighting terrorists,” “irregular warfare,” “homeland security,” and “urban military operations.” Most addressed preemptive strikes and 

targeted assassinations. Although these studies focused on Israel’s most advanced strategies and technologies, they started from the 

premise of its uniquely vulnerable position. “No political entity since medieval times,” began one influential report by Thomas Hen- 

riksen, a senior fellow with the Joint Special Operations University, “has been more constant [sic] under military siege—whether conven- 

tional, terrorist, or even existential—than Israel.”¹⁶ 

Israel offered a moral framework, not only a strategic one, for the belief that was fundamental to the American war on terror: in the 

face of extraordinary peril, the old rules do not apply. “The civilized world faces unprecedented dangers,” said Bush in his State of the 

Union address in January 2002. Viewed as a nation born out of the cauldron of absolute evil, whose survival was continuously endan- 

gered, Israel was understood to have developed the will and expertise to avert a second Holocaust by any means necessary. The United 

States now shared a similar moral imperative to defend itself by extraordinary means. 

The war on terror was oriented to the future, with the goal of defeating a known enemy as well as preventing any potential impending 

catastrophes. With this orientation, important security doctrines of the Bush administration drew on Israel’s practice and theory, partic- 

ularly the commitment to preemption. The Six-Day War had long been viewed as a model for preemptive war, the sole exception to the 

injunction against preemptive strikes according to the just war theory, as articulated most influentially by Michael Walzer in 1977. The 

U.S. deployment of targeted assassinations, or extra-judicial killings, also followed Israel’s practices, using the same logic of antici- 

patory security based on eradicating perceived threats in advance. The United States had banned targeted assassinations in 1976 but 

reintroduced them in November 2002. Based on his research on the new militarization of modern cities, urban geographer Stephen 

Graham claims that “the Bush administration’s justification of its reliance on extra-judicial and pre-emptive assassination in its global 

war on terror clearly was heavily influenced by Israel’s practices.” As the decade progressed, notes military historian Andrew Bacevich, 

“Targeted assassination has eclipsed conventional military methods as the hallmark of the Israeli way of war.”¹⁷ 

Key to the justification of preemption in attacking nations and targeting individuals is the idea that the war on terror is exceptional, 

and that it lacks any legal precedents. This notion informed the U.S. government’s reformulation of rules about torture, detainment, 

prisoners of war, and the applicability of the Geneva Convention. Legal scholar Lisa Hajjar contends that the claim that the war on terror 

constituted a legal no-man’s-land had a recent Israeli precedent: “the Israeli military at the start of the second intifada had already 

characterized its war on terror in the West Bank and Gaza as a legal terra nulla.” Although the two governments were operating in very 

different political, historical, and legal contexts, the United States claimed that the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was a space out- 

side of national sovereignty, and Israel redefined the occupied territories as “disputed” territories, based on the contention that no na- 

tion has sovereignty over them. Both nations constructed gray zones of productive ambiguity for the exercise of power: between occu- 

pied and disputed territory, between detainees and prisoners of war; between torture and enhanced interrogations; between military and 

civil jurisdiction; between soldiers, terrorists, and unlawful combatants; between legitimate and illegitimate violence.¹⁸ 

In addition to military and legal precedents, Israel offered Americans a powerful myth of origins for the war on terror, in the terrorist 

attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics that killed eleven Israeli athletes. In retaliation, Israel launched a clandestine campaign called Oper- 

ation Wrath of God to assassinate those who had perpetrated the massacre. Thirty years later, Americans showed an acute interest in 

this historical incident, demonstrated in journalism and popular culture. One month after 9/11, the CBS news show 60 Minutes broad- 

cast “An Eye for an Eye,” a documentary about this operation, which was offered as an object lesson that the CIA was studying now that 

Bush had directed the agency to “take its gloves off.” The former head of Mossad, who directed the operation, explained that it went be- 

yond targeting the gunmen who had carried out the attack; the objective was to “wipe out the entire terror network” in Europe and 

Lebanon, including anyone who had been even indirectly involved. CBS presented the Israeli mission as an exemplar, and an adven- 

turous one at that. To imitate the Israelis, it was suggested, Americans must prepare to get their hands just as dirty—to use illegal meth- 

ods, violate the laws of other nations, and accept the death of innocent bystanders as a necessary cost. As Ehud Barak, one of the Israeli 

participants and a future prime minister, exclaimed, “What the hell is wrong about hitting someone who did not hesitate to use hijacked 

planes with 150 tons of fuel, as a living cruise missile to kill 5,000 people?” A CIA agent agreed that this is “no tea party,” and the head 

of Mossad had the last word, expressing his belief that the world will come around to the Israeli way, because “we have no alternative. 

This is the coming war. It’s here.” Operation Wrath of God came across as a mix of biblical retribution and frontier justice that was of 

urgent relevance.¹⁹ 

A model for heroic violence can easily be recast as a cautionary tale. That was the point of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, a controversial 

film about the band of Israeli assassins who took “God’s wrath” into their own hands. The film, released in 2006, turns the genre of in- 

ternational thriller into a moral drama about the psychic damage afflicting those who kill for righteous ends. The main Israeli characters 

come to doubt the justice and efficacy of a mission that threatens to dehumanize them, with no guarantee that the terrorists they kill 

won’t be replaced by new ones. Like some of the liberal criticism of the Lebanon War, the movie focuses, in Michelle Goldberg’s words, 

on “the effect of retaliatory Jewish violence on the Jewish soul and not the Palestinian flesh.” As one character exclaims after a partic- 

ularly bloody scene, “This isn’t how Jews are supposed to act.” Spielberg portrays civilized Israeli Jews as victims of the barbarism that 

forces them, against their better nature, to become murders. His cinematic portrayal of their anguished soul-searching ultimately re- 

deems the humanity they are afraid of losing.²⁰ 

Munich is an allegory for the American war on terror. The film ends with the Israeli protagonist wandering along the postindustrial 

Brooklyn waterfront. The recently opened Twin Towers loom on the horizon. His traumatic experience has made it impossible for him 

to return to his home in Israel, which his mission was meant to protect. He ends up in exile. From this vantage, it looks as though the 

homelessness and self-doubt that resulted from Operation Wrath of God may be the legacy for the United States, as well. Spielberg’s 

film raises ethical and psychological questions about the impact that the war on terror may have on the warriors of both nations. Spiel- 

berg presents Israelis as models, too, but unlike the bellicose heroes shown in “An Eye for an Eye,” here they are guilt-ridden moral 

guides for Americans who are navigating their own self-doubts.²¹ 

By superimposing questions about the U.S. war on terror onto an iconic episode of Israeli history, Spielberg breached a double 

taboo for neoconservatives, for whom Israel and America both exemplified the righteous use of military power against absolute evil. Vi- 

ciously attacking the film, they accused Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner of committing the sin of positing moral equivalence 

between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli agents, and between their respective causes. David Brooks criticized Spielberg for distorting 

reality because “he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists.” In portraying ambivalence about Operation Wrath of God, 

Spielberg undercut Israel’s lessons for the present: that in the face of real evil, “the only way to achieve peace is through military victory 

over the fanatics.” For Brooks, the film undermined the binary logic of the war on terror, where the apprehension of moral ambiguity 

can only abet evil—and violence cannot corrupt those who wield it against fanatics. To his neoconservative critics, Spielberg muddied 

the moral clarity that Israel had always embodied, and that Americans finally rediscovered after the 9/11 attacks.²² 

Another fictional response to terrorism displayed no such ambiguity. Moral qualms about killing terrorists do not disturb Gabriel 

Allon, the formidable spymaster of Daniel Silva’s bestselling espionage thrillers. The most popular fictional Israeli hero since Ari Ben 

Canaan in Exodus, Allon gets his start as the leader of Operation Wrath of God. The first novel of the series, The Kill Artist (2000), de- 

scribes Allon’s backstory. The head of Mossad—who had himself captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina—had plucked Allon out of his 

promising art studies to lead the squad of assassins at the age of eighteen. In three years of hunting down the members of the Black 

September Organization that had carried out the Munich attack, Allon personally shot six of the targeted terrorists, pumping eleven bul- 

lets into each victim in memory of the eleven murdered Israelis. Allon’s background story is recounted in every one of the sixteen novels 

in the series, which all take place when Allon is well into his fifties. His 1972 pedigree compensates for his aging body, and his history 

reminds readers that only an Israeli forged by these mythic origins has the resolve, know-how, and moral authority to fight a global war 

against the hydra-headed terrorist enemy in Europe, America, and the Middle East. Only two of the novels focus on Israel and Palestine. 

The rest are international and depict Allon making use of his connections to the highest echelons of power, including the pope, the 

British prime minister, and the American president. As an Israeli, born to Holocaust survivors, with his multigenerational experience of 

fighting for survival, he is called on to accomplish what the intelligence agencies of other nations cannot because they are hampered by 

legalities, bureaucracy, international diplomacy, reliance on Arab oil, or their own lack of willpower. As a model warrior in a shifting 

global conflict, Allon adapts his skills to each new terrorist group that rears its head, including, in the most recent books, ISIS, which 

threatens the existence not only of Israel and America but of civilization itself.²³ 

Despite this lifelong calling, which eventually leads him to the directorship of Mossad, Allon has no passion for violence. In the 

tradition of the reluctant warrior, he retires whenever possible to his studio in Italy, where he works as a renowned restorer of classical 

European paintings. Only an Israeli could play this double role as both spy / assassin and expert restorer of Old Masters—defending 

the civilized world from catastrophic assaults while refurbishing the most highly valued objects of Western culture. 

Silva’s novels dramatize in fiction a belief, widespread since 2001, that Americans and Israelis were battling the same enemy, Islamic 

radicalism, despite the fact that the PLO was a secular organization that included Christians, that Hamas did not target the United 

States, and that neither group had ties to al-Qaeda. The rhetorical power of the war on terror as a battle against evil writ large, rather 

than against any particular organization or state, reinforced this generalized sense of a common foe. So, too, did the long-term identi- 

fication of Palestinians with terrorists in the popular and political imagination, as the revived interest in Munich 1972 shows. Further- 

more, as we have seen, both Israelis and Americans had long portrayed Arabs as Nazis with a genocidal desire to exterminate Jews by 

destroying their state. The 9/11 attacks proved to some that Nazified Muslims had expanded their murderous aims from Israel to the 

United States. 

In President Bush’s address to Congress on September 20, 2001, he answered the question “Who attacked us?” by identifying the 

then unfamiliar group al-Qaeda as “the heirs of all the “murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” that is, “fascism, and Nazism, and 

totalitarianism.” The focus on radical Islam as the source of terrorism never strayed far from its association with the Holocaust as the 

primary and universal symbol of evil.²⁴ 

After 9/11, three linked stereotypes supported the ideology that construed Islam as the common enemy of Israel and the United 

States: Islam’s cultural resistance to modernity, its inherent violence as a religion, and its political connection to fascism. In an article 

published in Newsweek a month after the attacks, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” the journalist Fareed Zakaria asserts 

that although Islam is not inherently opposed to modernity, Arab nations (as well as Iran) have dismally botched the project of modern- 

ization. The attacks, he avers, erupted from simmering resentment and humiliation at their own failure. Although he mentions anger at 

U.S. support of Israel’s “iron-fisted rule,” ultimately he deems that Israel’s proximity as a success story has exacerbated Arab jealousy 

and rage. Zakaria’s implicit answer: they hate us for their own failure to become like us.²⁵ 

Some conservative evangelical leaders saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks as part of Islam’s diabolical scheme for global dominion. They 

viewed Islam as an inherently violent religion that fostered murderous hatred toward both Christians and Jews. Jerry Falwell immediately 

declared that Mohammed was a terrorist, though public pressure later forced him to apologize. The leader of Christians United for Is- 

rael, John Hagee, wrote that “the first step in fulfilling Mohammed’s dream is the destruction of Israel.” With apocalyptic urgency, he 

warned that “America is at the crossroads!” It can obey God’s word and “bless” Israel with absolute support, or face even greater disas- 

ters than 9/11. Another evangelical preacher wrote that the “legacy of hate that focuses on the Jews—and includes the Christians—has 

always been the obsession of Islam, and this clearly identifies it as satanic.” Christian Zionism’s most vociferous preachers attributed 

genocidal motivations to Islam as a religion, and they merged America together with Israel as potential Judeo-Christian victims of a new 

Holocaust perpetrated by Muslims.²⁶ 

Another supposed common danger to the United States and Israel was “Islamofascism,” a controversial concept propounded largely 

by secular intellectuals. Christopher Hitchens, one of the popularizers of the term, contended that although no form of Islam actually 

“preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race,” in practice, “Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the ‘pure’ and the 

‘exclusive’ over the unclean and the … profane.” This attitude, he claimed, views Jews as “an inferior or unclean race,” and he gener- 

alized from an 1948 canard about Amin al-Husseini that this fanaticism explains “why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of 

Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler’s side.” According to those who defended the validity of this term, the political fusion of Islam and totali- 

tarianism imperiled both Israel and America, as Western democracies. In 2006, President Bush announced that “this nation is at war 

with Islamic fascists.” Without naming Israel, the word “fascist” conjures images of the Holocaust. “Islamic fascists,” in popular under- 

standing, look like Nazis reincarnated in Middle Eastern garb, this time bent on exterminating freedom-loving Americans alongside Jews 

in Israel. All three narratives of the Islamic threat—as antimodern resentment, religious domination, and fascism—united America and 

Israel as potential victims of horrendous violence, but also as inevitable victors over the forces of evil.²⁷ 

The United States and Israel faced another common foe according to some neoconservative intellectuals, this one in Europe rather 

than the Middle East. The anti-American sentiment being expressed by some Europeans—in anti-globalization protests and marches 

against the invasion of Iraq—was coming to sound an awful lot like anti-Semitism, and was, they claimed, indistinguishable in these 

discussions from anti-Israel attitudes. The common answer to the post-9/11 question about terrorists, “Why do they hate us?” already 

had that ring of eternal bigotry: they hate us for who we are. “They” would now include those Europeans who opposed the United 

States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq at the United Nations and in the streets. International criticism of the United States mounted when the 

invasion yielded neither weapons of mass destruction nor regime change, but instead scenes of mass destruction and photographs of 

abuse of Iraqis by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. 

To those who championed America and Israel as allies in the war on terror, criticism of America sounded more like irrational hatred 

than reasoned critique, more like bigotry than political analysis. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach wrote from London in 2004, “For 2,000 

years, Jews have asked themselves the question an increasing number of Americans are now asking: Why do they hate us? Is it possible 

that the underlying causes are similar to the underlying causes of anti-Americanism?” Yes, wrote Nathan Sharansky in Commentary: 

“Anti-Americanism was a continuation of anti-Semitism by other means.” Like anti-Semitism, according to this equation, anti- 

Americanism relies on standard conspiracy theories: hyperbolic fantasies of financial power and world domination. When European 

protesters yoked George Bush with Ariel Sharon as oppressors and warmongers, criticism of Israel, anti-Semitism, and anti- 

Americanism appeared to converge. “Rambo Jew has largely supplanted Shylock in the anti-Semitic imagination,” wrote Daniel 

Goldhagen.²⁸ 

Those who sought to explain this fusion of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism as “twin brothers” identified resentment and envy at 

its heart. They argued that, in contrast to the Arab resentment of modernity, Europeans resented America and Israel for not being mod- 

ern enough, for embracing a retrograde nationalism that relied on a belief in divine providence and was buttressed by their eagerness to 

use force. In a 2004 article in Commentary, Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, wrote that to “postnational” Europeans, 

who saw themselves in the moral avant-garde, America and Israel were “outriggers of the Occident”; they were “different from the rest 

of the West—different in the same way.” From a cosmopolitan European outlook, both America and Israel appeared too nationalistic— 

they lustily revived those barbaric traits that Europeans had abandoned after the devastating lessons they had learned about nationalism 

from two world wars.²⁹ 

Nonetheless, Europeans, Joffe contended, unconsciously envied the loss of those fierce warrior qualities they had come to reject— 

hence their irrational antagonism toward the power and exceptionalism expressed by Israel and America. This contorted mix of envy and 

hatred was widespread and could have destructive consequences. It motivated al-Qaeda members to kill Jews and Americans, and, in 

Europe, it led to “elimination lite,” that is, pushing back against “the hyperpower-turned-empire” by “containing and defanging the 

American behemoth.” In this article Joffe applies the idea articulated by neoconservative defenders of Israel in the late 1970s, and de- 

ployed forcefully after 1982, that verbal attacks can be as dangerous as military assaults. 

In overreacting to the power of America and Israel, claims Joffe, Europeans refused to acknowledge the actual vulnerability of both 

nations. They ignored the fact that Israel’s existence is still uniquely threatened, and that America is the only Western nation to have 

been attacked since 1945, leaving it precariously clinging to its perch as the “last remaining superpower.” Given the irrational hatred 

directed toward them, both countries have no choice but to exercise more power against the threat of elimination—whether physical or 

verbal. In response to the twin threats of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, wrote Joffe, “America and Israel will remain both targets 

and warriors,” ever victimized and fighting to retain their invincibility. 

Although fear of Islamic terrorism was clearly more widespread among Americans than concern about European anti-Americanism, 

the latter, when equated with anti-Semitism, expressed anxiety that the whole world had turned against the United States. This in turn 

enhanced the belief in the moral innocence of Americans as victims of irrational hatred, and created an implicit connection between the 

attacks of 9/11 and the Holocaust. Americans could imagine themselves as persecuted by overcivilized Europeans, who, while claiming 

superiority to Bush’s cowboy mentality, were reaching into their own dark past to vilify Americans, now as vulnerable as Jews and as 

primed as Israelis to battle a hostile world. 

 

“The Harvard of Antiterrorism” 

 

Americans turned to Israelis for guidance in defending their nation from threats at home as well as identifying common enemies 

abroad. As a 2006 U.S. Air Force study put it, “The United States is decades behind Israel in coming to terms with terrorism, and ac- 

cepting the need for enhanced security measures on a day to day basis.” Because the Israeli people “have faced daily attacks from Pales- 

tinian terrorists for decades,” the study claimed, “Israel is, sadly, much more experienced, much more practical, and more willing to 

sacrifice some individual liberty for the sake of security in the face of a known and immediate threat.” Lessons in sacrificing civil liber- 

ties were only part of what Israel had to offer when American police, soon after 9/11, started training with Israeli counterterrorism ex- 

perts. Merging foreign and domestic spheres into a single battlespace epitomized the new concept of homeland security, and Israel of- 

fered the experience, technology, and language to tutor Americans in this new way of conceiving the nation as the homeland.³⁰ 

When President Bush first used the word “homeland” on September 20, 2001, in his announcement launching the war on terror, the 

locution struck many as jarring and even un-American. Although “homeland” has the ring of ancient loyalties, no American president 

had used it before to rally the nation for war, and it had never been part of the political lexicon. “Homeland” had Old World associ- 

ations, like the place immigrants left behind with sentimental attachments. But it also evoked darker meanings, like “fatherland” and the 

German Heimat, as appropriated by Nazi ideologies of racial purity.³¹ 

“Homeland” implies an ethnocentric foundation of national identity, a connection to a land embedded in the past, a sense of native 

origins, birthplace, and birthright. It appeals to common bloodlines, ancient ancestry, and ethnic or racial homogeneity. Although Amer- 

ican national identity has always been linked to geography, “homeland” has connotations that depart from the image of a boundless 

American identity, a nation in motion, that has long characterized its exceptional nature, as in “Manifest Destiny,” or a “nation of immi- 

grants.” These visions of nationhood also rely on racial exclusions and the appropriation of native land. “Homeland,” though, makes 

mobility look suspicious, and the term appeals to the xenophobic fears raised after 9/11, when “aliens,” immigrants, and foreigners, 

even naturalized citizens, began to be regarded as threatening outsiders and potential terrorists. 

“Homeland” refers to the aspirations of a people to realize their sense of nationhood in a sovereign state, but also to the opposite: 

exile or foreign domination. In 2001, the Zionist idea of the Jewish homeland was arguably the best known usage of this term to Amer- 

icans, who were also becoming aware of the contesting Palestinian claim to a homeland in same territory. Bush’s reference to the 

“American homeland” did not borrow directly from this context, but given the strong American identification with Israel, the Jewish 

homeland had a striking resonance after 9/11. “Homeland” tied a people to a territory and birthright, and it also evoked the threat of 

catastrophic loss. 

When Bush first used the word in 2002, no one could tell whether it would catch on in vernacular usage, outside the bureaucracy of 

the new Department of Homeland Security. Its use remains limited and has not supplanted “our country” or “America” as a common 

rallying cry for patriotic pride. “Homeland” rarely appeared in the nationalist slogans popularized by Donald Trump as candidate and 

president—“America First,” “Make America Great Again,” “American Carnage”—but these expressions incorporate many of the conno- 

tations of the word. 

“Homeland,” rather than becoming just another word for the American nation, came to signify American insecurity: the nation as vic- 

tim, as existentially endangered, vulnerable to protean threats that include terrorists, “illegal aliens,” drug smugglers, refugees, and 

immigrants, all merged together in a racialized sense of foreignness. The concept of homeland makes little sense apart from security, 

and homeland security relates to making all aspects of domestic life secure, both in the narrow sense of a domicile and in the broader 

sense of the nation. This all-encompassing approach to security is what Americans have sought to learn from Israelis since 2001. 

Commentators after 9/11 claimed that the attack on the World Trade Center exposed the permeability of national borders, which had 

been eroded by the very forces of globalization that the trade center represented. The word “homeland” performed the cultural work of 

shoring up those borders, while at the same time keeping alive a sense of pervasive insecurity. Although homeland security may strive 

to wall off the nation from foreign threats, it has worked both bureaucratically and conceptually to break down boundaries between in- 

side and outside, between civil and military jurisdictions, and between policing and war-making, while strengthening divisions between 

citizens and aliens. Building walls and high-tech security systems to monitor foreigners at the borders, homeland security also redraws 

those boundaries throughout the nation, between Americans who can claim the United States as their native land and their birthright, 

and immigrants and those who look to homelands elsewhere, who can be rendered as inexorably foreign. 

The concept of homeland security did not emerge suddenly from the wreckage of the Twin Towers; it draws on a long history of 

affective emotional associations between the home and the nation, and its landscape includes institutions in place before 2001, such as 

prisons and gated communities. Homeland security focuses on securing every area of social life by means of home security systems, 

border security, cyber security, urban surveillance, and systems that monitor communication and intrude into the private lives of citi- 

zens and noncitizens alike. Every public and private space is seen as susceptible to foreign intrusion. In the 2004 election, “security 

moms” replaced “soccer moms” as the key voters to court, both referring to a similar population of white suburban women. A colum- 

nist for USA Today, who identified herself as a security mom, said that the two figures she feared most were “Islamic terrorists” and 

“criminal illegal aliens.” In 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended his embattled Justice Department by contending that dur- 

ing the previous two years, the department had made “great strides in securing our country from terrorism, protecting our neigh- 

borhoods from gangs and drugs, shielding our children from predators and pedophiles and protecting the public trust by prosecuting 

public corruption.” He yoked terrorism and crime to the intimate violation of children, portraying the nation as both vulnerable and 

innocent.³² 

Paradoxically, homeland security is inseparable from an expansionist agenda, with the acceptance of a never-ending war against ter- 

rorism and the embrace of empire as a way of life. If every crevice of the home requires constant vigilance from intruders, the borders of 

the homeland are not strong enough when thought of as conterminous with the geographic boundaries of the nation-state. The 2001 at- 

tack revealed that threats to the homeland from small stateless groups are omnipresent, and so, according the 2004 9/11 Commission 

Report, “9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against 

America ‘over here.’ In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.”³³ 

This idea is not connected with a sense of feeling at home in the world. On the contrary, with no distinction between “over there” and 

“over here,” the planet permeates the homeland with the threat of foreign infiltration. For Americans, to understand their nation as a 

homeland beset by existential threats is to see themselves like Israelis, who inhabit a land they regard as their inalienable birthright, but 

one vulnerable to annihilation, and secured only by proactive and mobile intelligence and military capacities beyond the borders of the 

nation. 

A popular Israeli television drama helped Americans imagine their country as “homeland.” While the word rarely stands alone with- 

out its partner “security,” an exception is the title of the acclaimed Showtime series Homeland, which premiered in 2011. Alex Gansa, 

who developed the show with Howard Gordon, explained that he came up with the title when he was seeking a word that would convey 

“creepy subversion,” or, as James Traub describes it, “something sinister, xenophobic, un-American.”³⁴ 

It is possible to binge-watch every season of Homeland without ever realizing that it was an adaptation of a popular Israeli television 

show, Prisoners of War. Though different in style and substance, Homeland adopted the premise of the Israeli original, in which an Israeli 

soldier held as a prison of war in Lebanon converts to Islam and turns against his country. He becomes a double traitor, against both 

his religion and his nation. Homeland dramatizes the deep fear at the heart of the concept of homeland security—that there are no sta- 

ble boundaries between us and them. Neither bombing terrorist bases abroad nor infiltrating sleeper cells at home can totally block the 

porous borders between the domestic and the foreign. Homeland explores terrors more frightening than the machinations of a terrorist 

mastermind whose minions masquerade as worldly reporters, or tailor-spies sewing Confederate costumes for Gettysburg reenact- 

ments—both plot points in the show. The horror driving the plot is that the most American of Americans—a white marine, Sergeant 

Nicholas Brody, a war hero running for office with a photogenic suburban family—can be transformed into the enemy: a Muslim and a 

suicide bomber. Uncertainty about his real allegiance—and the catastrophic potential of this uncertainty—created the frantic suspense 

that characterizes the first season. The uncertainty about the white marine’s patriotism stands out against the situation of a black ma- 

rine captured with him, who has clearly gone over to the other side. What’s more, the advanced surveillance technology meant to secure 

the homeland only makes things worse. The protagonist of Homeland, CIA agent Carrie Mathison, illegally installs sophisticated equip- 

ment to monitor the inner domestic recesses of Brody’s life. Her round-the-clock surveillance does yield the truth; it makes her the only 

official who knows that he is a terrorist. Yet the intimacy of surveillance also leads her to fall in love with him, which further blurs the 

boundaries between us and them. Homeland reveals that the terror at the heart of homeland security is not about the foreigner next 

door or the imam at the local mosque, but about the American war hero you elect for public office, the lover in your bed, or the sub- 

urban dad in his garage workshop—the idea that everything truly American could turn into its opposite and implode. 

Homeland, with its Israeli roots, remapped America as the homeland. When the first season came out, critics praised it as a more 

subtle alternative to the first popular television series of the war on terror, the spy thriller 24, also created by Gansa and Gordon. Com- 

mentators had criticized 24 for its overt xenophobia, and public officials accused it of normalizing torture. Though Homeland was also 

castigated for its stereotypes of bloodthirsty Arabs and Muslims, critics applauded it for displaying a moral conscience lacking in 24. In 

Homeland, Brody becomes a turncoat only after witnessing the murder of Iraqi children in an American bombing attack. The ethical bal- 

last of the series is the character Saul Berenson, a high-ranking CIA operative who is Carrie’s mentor and protector. He is a secular 

American Jew with a sense of Jewish traditions, and he combines steely resolve with moral contemplativeness. He occasionally strug- 

gles with his ambivalent relationship to Israel, which ranges from illegally supplying intelligence to his Mossad counterpart to fending 

off a Mossad plot against him, and he has a tense visit with his sister, a settler on the West Bank, whose militant views repel him. 

Though Israel is not featured in any of the main plots, scenes that take place in Arab countries were often filmed there. The Israeli 

underpinnings are never far from the American Homeland. 

Before Homeland Americanized its Israeli precursor, one of the longest-running and most popular network television series, NCIS, 

featured the collaboration between American and Israeli intelligence agents. Ziva David, a female Mossad agent, moves fluidly between 

Israeli and American intelligence agencies as though no national borders separated them. This tough and gorgeous assassin, played by 

the Chilean American actress Cote de Pablo, was rated one of the most popular characters on television for a decade, from 2003 to 

2013. The show’s huge viewing audience had critics comparing it to staples of the 1980s like Dallas and ER, and it spawned several pop- 

ular spin-offs. NCIS, which stands for Navy Criminal Investigation Service, epitomizes the general understanding of homeland security 

as a combination of thwarting terrorist plots and solving crimes. The series shows the nation in terrible jeopardy on a regular basis, and 

its expert but playful agents fight terrorists and other criminals with high-tech gadgets—but without warrants—from their base in a 

Washington, D.C., office. In this serious milieu, a lovable, family-like team with a gruff father-figure act as though they were in an office 

comedy, in which scenes of Ziva’s integration into American ways of espionage and life are often part of the joke.³⁵ 

The Israeli characters in NCIS are introduced in the third season. At first it is difficult to distinguish between good guys and bad 

guys, but, unlike in Homeland, the ambiguity is quickly and clearly resolved. A Palestinian terrorist, Ari Ashwari, who is working for both 

al-Qaeda and Hamas, kills a beloved female American member of the intelligence team, and antiterrorism becomes a family affair for 

both the Americans and the Israelis. When Ziva shows up to represent Mossad in the investigation, we learn that Ari is her half brother. 

Their father is the head of Mossad, and his mother was a Palestinian doctor. The father raised his bicultural and bilingual son to be- 

come a double agent for Israel, and Ziva at first thinks he still works for Mossad. Ari, however, rebelled against his father, adopted his 

mother’s side, and became a terrorist at large. When Ziva realizes what Ari has done, she shoots him in order to save her new boss, a 

rite of passage that integrates her into the American team. Ziva is like a female Ari Ben Canaan: she’s a sharpshooter, a hardened assas- 

sin, a martial-arts expert, and a bit emotionally gruff. Over time, Ziva shifts her affections from her father and her Israeli lover to Amer- 

ican counterparts, becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen, and has a child with her American colleague / lover. Although Ziva becomes 

Americanized and appears somewhat less aggressive than her male Israeli colleagues, she never loses the essential Israeli qualities she 

contributes to the team. What’s key about her popular role in NCIS is that she makes her Israeli identity—whether in a dangerous 

undercover operation in Morocco or in the Jewish mourning ritual for her father—both natural and fundamental to the work of securing 

the American homeland. 

In the realm of popular entertainment, NCIS, with its captivating Israeli agent, served to domesticate and normalize the actual coop- 

eration between the United States and Israel in the work of counterterrorism, policing, and homeland security. That cooperation runs 

very deep. Soon after 9/11, delegations of law enforcement officials from all over the United States started traveling to Israel for training 

in counterterrorism. Two major pro-Israel groups sponsored them: the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), and the Jewish 

Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a neoconservative think tank with strong ties to the Likud Party and the Bush admi- 

nistration. JINSA also held Israeli-led seminars and conferences throughout the United States and claimed to have trained over nine 

thousand American law enforcement officials at the federal, state, and municipal levels in its Law Enforcement Exchange Program 

(LEEP) between 2002, when it was established, and 2011.³⁶ 

The American police officers in these exchanges studied a variety of topics, such as “New Security Technology,” “Border Security,” 

and “Suicide Bombings: Methodology and Responses.” They were given the opportunity to identify with Israel and to see America in its 

image. A brochure on the LEEP program quotes an FBI official who participated in the program: “Understanding terrorism from an Is- 

raeli perspective gave me a renewed sense of urgency relative to the war we are waging against terrorism here in the United States.”³⁷ 

Promotional materials, newspaper articles, and testimonials tell a poignant tale of tiny Israel coming to the rescue of a sleeping giant 

who has just awoken to a perilous reality. As one Israeli sponsor told a reporter, “We are a little nation that has paid with blood for our 

experience. We don’t want the American people or the American police to pay as we have.” Israel’s perilous past foretold what was in 

store for America, and its experience in combating terrorism made it a trailblazer for Americans to follow. Participants saw Israel on the 

front line of a global war on terror; most would likely have agreed with the assessment of the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police that “Israel 

is the Harvard of antiterrorism.”³⁸ 

That the United States and Israel faced the same enemy was a key message of these programs. The LEEP brochure quotes a sheriff 

from Louisiana stating, “There are countries out there and religious leaders and political leaders that wake up every day trying to kill 

Americans and trying to kill Israelis and others to be sure, so from that standpoint you carry that passion and reality back home.” After a 

visit to Israel, the head of the New Jersey State Police claimed to have restructured his organization to defend his state against the 

“worldwide threats by Hamas and Al Qaeda,” even though Hamas did not operate globally. Delegates carried home the conviction that 

Israel was the vanguard for a battle America had yet to face. One of the initiators of the program, Louis Anemone, director of security for 

the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, contended that “today’s terrorists appear to be using Israel as a testing ground to prepare 

for a sustained attack against the U.S.”³⁹ 

LEEP emphasized the monolithic nature of this global enemy. One of its sessions examined “The Mindset of the Suicide Bomber,” 

as though an essential psychology could be divorced from any political context. That psychology fit the stereotype of an Islamic radical. 

Illustrating a description of that session in the LEEP brochure is a photograph of a young man encased in a suicide vest, his face veiled 

in black, holding a rocket launcher in one hand and a Koran in the other. LEEP’s thirty-eight-page glossy brochure has only one page of 

photographs without captions. At the top, Osama bin Laden stands with an outstretched arm as though blessing the terrorists in the 

other photos, identifiable as members of Hamas by their green flags and insignia. Anyone could recognize their evil intentions, repre- 

sented by marching male fighters, a mother defiantly holding a rifle with her baby on her hip, and a little boy wearing a belt of bombs 

around his waist. The message is an old one associated with Palestinians, not only about the danger these unnamed figures pose to- 

ward their potential victims, but also about their disregard for the sanctity of life, even of their own children.⁴⁰ 

The delegations to Israel included travel to sites of suicide bombings, border patrols, and checkpoints in the West Bank—as well as 

tourist sites. None of the accounts mention the occupied territories, and they make no distinction between the military control of an 

occupied population and civilian policing in the United States. American police express envy at the extraordinary cooperation among Is- 

raeli agencies: “You can’t tell the difference between the military, the border guards, and the police,” stated one participant. None ac- 

knowledge the merging of these agencies as the hallmark of the occupation and what has been called the “matrix of control” over every 

aspect of Palestinian lives.⁴¹ None note, either, how such cooperation would violate the traditional American law that separates the mili- 

tary from civil law enforcement, a separation that homeland security—both in theory and in practice—had a hand in eroding after 9/11. 

The pedagogy of homeland security united America and Israel as allies in the war on terror by blurring other boundaries—between 

military occupation and urban policing, between different Arab and Islamic organizations, and, most important, between terrorists and 

criminals. “Terrorism” became a capacious term for many different forms of criminality. In 2006, Israel’s minister of internal security, 

Avi Dichter, spoke at the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Boston. With FBI chief Robert Mueller 

and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by his side, Dichter told the audience of ten thousand that there was an intimate connection be- 

tween crime and terror—that they were “two sides of the same coin.” The war on drugs, he declared, should be fought in the same way 

as the interconnected war on terror, and he applauded U.S. plans to construct a security fence along the entire Mexican border. He 

claimed that because there is a limited pool of deeply committed religious fanatics, terrorists enlist new recruits from the ranks of crim- 

inals, who are easily seduced to “decorate their shallow criminal values with nationalism, religion and pseudo-fanaticism.” He coined a 

new term to describe this melding of the terrorist and the criminal: “crimiterrorist.”⁴² 

The basic assumption of these programs is that the conditions of Israeli counterterrorism can be transferred to policing the cities 

and borders of the United States. The question is never raised (in public accounts of these training sessions) of the propriety of polic- 

ing American cities as though they were occupied territory, and of treating citizens as though they were potential terrorists. If anything, 

these identifications are reinforced, especially in New York City, where, according to a New York Times article from 2005, “the New York 

City Police Department has worked with the Israelis since soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has permanently stationed a He- 

brew-speak-ing detective in Israel, who returns to the city often to train other officers.” In 2003, a secret Demographics Unit was estab- 

lished in New York to spy on and monitor Muslim communities in the city; it was not abandoned until 2014. A former police official 

told the Associated Press that the goal of the Demographics Unit was to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program that was 

partially modeled on Israeli operations in the West Bank.⁴³ 

Civil rights and civil liberties groups objected to American police being trained in using the Israeli antiterrorist tactic of profiling. One 

police chief denied that this was racial profiling because the Israelis taught them how to focus on the “behavior of potential bombers, 

not on race or religion.” Most of the police officials interviewed by the press praised their Israeli trainers for their “technical skills,” such 

as how to spot suicide bomber “handlers” in a crowd, or how to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that 

might be strapped to his torso.⁴⁴ 

The synergy between Israeli training and American policing influenced a wide array of connections. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times ran 

a feature about a JINSA alumnus from the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad whose extensive Israeli training helped him be- 

come an expert in dealing with suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). He then became a military advisor who taught 

Marines fighting in Iraq to protect themselves from both. He explained some of the parallels between the streets of LA, Israeli countert- 

errorist training, and Fallujah, Iraq: “You’ve got to go door to door to dig these guys out.… The more you stay in your vehicle, the more 

you’re going to pay—just like in police work. You’re not going to find the dope dealers or bank robbers by sitting in the police station.” 

His international itinerary connected the dots between Los Angeles and Fallujah via Gaza, to map a political landscape in which crim- 

inals, insurgents, and terrorists blend into a single threat.⁴⁵ 

The militarization of the police in the United States and around the globe started long before 9/11 and cannot be attributed solely to 

Israeli initiatives. But the reframing of criminals as potential terrorists and the use of tactics transferred from a military occupation to 

the streets of American cities had the effect of casting the American police as an occupying force, and it may have contributed to the in- 

creased tendency to treat people of color and people engaged in political protest as foreign threats. Israeli training also emphasized po- 

lice officers’ perception of their own vulnerability and the need to exert aggressive force to defend themselves. 

Reports of the encounters between American and Israeli police played up their strong emotional appeal, showing the Americans as 

identifying with the potent Israeli mix of vulnerability and invincibility. The first JINSA delegation, for instance, included “an emotionally 

charged meeting” in which the chief of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey presented the Israeli police commissioner with a 

“Star of David crafted from steel salvaged from the destroyed World Trade Center.” According to a JINSA account of the meeting, Amer- 

ican police came away with “respect for Israel’s efficiency and advanced tactics, coupled by its ability to enforce the law in a humane 

manner, despite dealing with countless depraved terrorists.” Newspaper accounts of American police training in Israel include tragic 

personal stories of Israeli police running to the site of a suicide bombing only to find a family member in the wreckage. The Americans 

in one story are described as “particularly moved by the candor and openness of the Israeli police,” and after a description of one har- 

rowing tale, “there was not a police chief in the room not in tears.”⁴⁶ 

The perception of the morality and vulnerability of the Israeli police was reinforced by the visit each delegation took to the Yad 

Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Within the United States, the ADL and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cre- 

ated a joint program to train law enforcement officials, including police cadets and FBI agents, in the lessons of the Holocaust. The les- 

son is a cautionary one: it teaches that German police enforced the racist policies of the Nazis and urges American police to respect the 

civil rights of the people they serve. Israeli police provide a countermodel, one based on their own heritage of Jewish persecution in the 

Holocaust and its legacy of an ever-present threat.⁴⁷ 

 

The Laboratory and the Start-Up 

 

After 9/11, Israel’s reputation as a leader in the methods and ethics of counterterrorism was enhanced by its booming new homeland 

security industry, which produced advanced surveillance systems, high-tech weapons and devices, and military drones, along with 

expertise in deploying these technologies. With funding from the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement agencies joined 

U.S. public and private institutions to purchase from Israel cutting-edge systems for airports, border control, urban surveillance, in- 

truder detection, cybersecurity, and data mining. In 2004, the United States signed an agreement with Israel to fund research for jointly 

developing new homeland security technologies. Two years later, Boeing formed a consortium with the Israeli firm Elbit Systems, which 

was largely responsible for construction of the separation barrier along the Gaza and West Bank borders. The consortium worked on a 

project to install a high-tech surveillance system along the U.S.–Mexico border. The Department of Homeland Security had already 

used drones manufactured by Elbit to test the first unmanned aerial patrols of the southern border. In 2014, Elbit alone was awarded the 

contract for the U.S. Customs Border Protection Integrated Fixed Towers project, which was renewed and expanded in 2018. Promo- 

tional material for the initial consortium explained that “the talent and expertise that Elbit Systems … has employed for years in pro- 

tecting Israel’s border will now be put to use on US borders to keep Americans safe.”⁴⁸ 

Observers have described Israel’s towering achievements in the homeland security industry in two radically different ways. Critics of 

the occupation have used the metaphor of the laboratory to explain how Israel has profited from its draconian and highly specialized 

control over the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Boosters of Israel’s economic accomplishments, in contrast, have 

emphasized the start-up, not only to refer to the large number of new high-tech companies in the country, but also as a metaphor for 

the nation as a whole. 

In a 2007 article in The Nation, “Laboratory for a Fortressed World,” Naomi Klein wrote that Israel’s bestselling products, such as 

“high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interro- 

gation systems” were developed from “precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.” In the 

New York Times, in “Israel Discovers Oil,” Thomas Friedman explained the same economic boom as stemming from Israel’s advanced 

modern culture, which nurtured an “ecosystem of young innovators and venture capitalists.” In Friedman’s view, rather than a labo- 

ratory of domination, Israel is itself an experiment where the innovative imagination can roam free in pursuit of creative ventures.⁴⁹ 

In the idea of the occupied territories as a laboratory, Palestinians are understood as being treated like guinea pigs, over whose land 

and livelihood Israelis seek to exert maximum control while accepting minimal responsibility for human life. According to this view, Is- 

rael’s lucrative business in homeland security took off because sealed and controlled spaces were available close at hand for experi- 

menting with all forms of securitization. Based on his research in Gaza, human rights organizer Darryl Li contends that the Israeli disen- 

gagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 did not remove the territory from Israeli control as much as allow for more experimentation in 

the use of buffer zones, closure of certain areas, and air power. Cutting off Palestinian areas with barriers and checkpoints, mostly in 

Gaza but also in enclaves throughout the West Bank, created conditions for testing a wide variety of techniques that monitored and re- 

stricted the movement of people, including systems of incarceration and interrogation.⁵⁰ For some, this view of the occupied territories 

as a vast security laboratory provides an explanation for why the Israeli government has refused to relinquish land for a political agree- 

ment with the Palestinians. Rather than representing a security threat or a humanitarian disaster, they argue, the occupied territories— 

including their threats and disasters—have offered opportunities for researching, implementing, and marketing equipment, services, 

and systems that armies and police from the United States and other countries can purchase and deploy both at home and abroad. 

In 2013, the Israeli filmmaker Yotam Feldman made a documentary, The Lab, about the Israeli defense industry. He explains in an 

essay that “the product [Israeli salesmen and executives] are selling is unique. Rather than rifles, rockets or bombs, the Israeli compa- 

nies sell their experience. The long-running conflict with the Palestinians has created a unique and unrivalled laboratory for testing tech- 

nologies and ideas relating to ‘asymmetric warfare’—a conflict between a state and civil or irregular resistance. In this manner the Israeli 

conflict with the Palestinians may be seen as a national asset—rather than a burden.” The documentary dates this trend to 2002, when 

Israel re-invaded the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during Operation Defensive Shield, reversing the process of Israeli territorial with- 

drawals that had been initiated by the Oslo Accords. Many army officers went into private business after that, and Israel’s arms industry 

began bringing in record amounts of money.⁵¹ 

Feldman’s documentary shows that Israel’s weapons and security systems appeal to a broad international market. Jeff Halper, an Is- 

raeli anthropologist and activist, explains this widespread appeal based on the credibility of Israel’s experimentation, which turns the 

conduct of real life into a laboratory of control: 

 

The Occupied Palestinian Territory has been transformed into probably the most monitored, controlled and militarized place on 

earth. It epitomizes the dream of every general, security expert and police officer to be able to exercise total biopolitical control. In a 

situation where the local population enjoys no effective legal protections or privacy, they and their lands become a laboratory where 

the latest technologies of surveillance, control and suppression are perfected and showcased, giving Israel an edge in the highly 

competitive global market. Labels such as “Combat Proven,” “Tested in Gaza” and “Approved by the IDF” on Israeli or foreign prod- 

ucts greatly improves their marketability.⁵² 

 

Israelis have marketed their weapons and systems of homeland security to Americans not only based on testing in the occupied terri- 

tories, but also through a broader perception of Israel as an invincible victim. According to this image, Israel has confronted terror 

throughout a long, tragic history of Jewish persecution, Arab aggression, and Palestinian suicide bombing. It has applied itself to devel- 

oping weapons and security systems out of the urgent need to protect its population from extermination, all the while maintaining belief 

in its integrity as a Western-style democracy. 

In this narrative of the laboratory, Israelis have little incentive to negotiate a real peace with the Palestinians, because the lucrative 

security market has too much potential. What the Israelis are selling to the rest of the world is not weaponry to defeat an enemy once 

and for all, but systems for pacification and management, which match the approach that many governments have come to take toward 

their increasingly urbanized and heterogenous populations. Naftali Bennett, the far-right Israeli economy minister, was quoted as say- 

ing, after a trip to China in 2013, “No one on earth is interested in the Palestinian issue. What interests the world from Beijing to Wash- 

ington to Brussels is Israeli high-tech.”⁵³ As Naomi Klein writes, “The chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bot- 

tom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occu- 

pation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”⁵⁴ 

The occupation as laboratory is not the narrative of Israel’s economic achievements that is featured in publications like Forbes and 

the Wall Street Journal. The story found there is more often the one told by Dan Senor and Saul Singer in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Is- 

rael’s Economic Miracle (2009).⁵⁵ Dan Senor had served as spokesperson for the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 

2003–2004, where he became known for his positive media spin as Baghdad spun out of control, especially for his portrayal of Iraqi 

leaders as happy with the occupation.⁵⁶ He had more success with his work on Israel. Start-Up Nation was widely reviewed in both the 

business and the mainstream press, and the title has stuck as a kind of nickname for Israel. 

Senor and Singer try to explain the same phenomenon as do those who focus on the laboratory: how Israel wrested lucrative eco- 

nomic gains from terribly unstable political conditions of war and terrorism, during a decade of global economic downturn. The authors 

repudiate the narrative of Israel experimenting in a laboratory of occupation by revivifying a heroic narrative of triumph over adversity, 

one that repeats many of the major Zionist tropes through which Americans came to know Israel. 

Start-Up Nation reads like the business edition of Exodus, with brains substituting for brawn. The book reanimates earlier popular 

narratives about Israel’s modernity and revamps them for the neoliberal economy. Even the kibbutz, the symbol of Israel’s socialist ori- 

gins, becomes the prototype for modern entrepreneurship. The “barren wasteland” of Palestine spurred the agricultural ingenuity of the 

kibbutz, and twenty-first-century Israelis inherited this penchant for taking problems and turning them into assets. The proliferation of 

start-ups is the modern incarnation of “making the desert bloom.” Senor and Singer also use the metaphor of the laboratory, but in a 

different way from left-leaning critics. In their preface, they quote a young software executive saying that by isolating Israel, its “adver- 

saries had actually created the perfect laboratory to test ideas.” The authors later ask the rhetorical question, “What is the value of the at- 

tributes that Israelis have developed as a result of the constant efforts to crush their nation’s development?” Bringing curiosity and cre- 

ativity to the brutal fight for survival, claim Senor and Singer, was what turned Israel into a laboratory, not domination over others.⁵⁷ 

Senor and Singer claim that Israel’s history, society, and culture made it uniquely suited to the entrepreneurial spirit of the high-tech 

start-up economy, and they identify military service as the major factor. The incubator for innovation is Israel’s unique military structure, 

with its universal service and frequent reserve duty. The military, they claim, has an unusually egalitarian, anti-hierarchical culture, 

where, in contrast to traditional armies with top-down discipline, middle-level commanders have the leeway to improvise and are even 

expected to question their superiors. In addition, army service levels class differences, because recruits come from all walks of life and 

backgrounds and make lifelong connections. These descriptions resemble the romantic images of Israeli soldiers from 1967, when 

American reporters delighted in their ragtag appearance, and a militarized nation gave the appearance of being antimilitaristic. To 

emphasize the anti-elitist and communal nature of military service, the authors quote Michael Oren, an American-born historian who 

was formerly Israeli ambassador to the United States, saying that the Israeli army is more similar to “George Washington’s 1776 Conti- 

nental Army than it is to the American army of 2008,” thus rendering Israeli soldiers more American than the post-Vietnam members of 

the United States Armed Forces.⁵⁸ 

While praising the egalitarianism of the military, the authors make it clear that there is a hierarchy of elite intelligence units, which 

they liken to Ivy League universities. Promising students are selected and groomed from high school for special research units, and 

those coming from one particular elite army intelligence group launch the majority of high-tech start-ups. It is not just that these grad- 

uates are well connected, claim the authors. Their experience in the unit provides them with all the qualities of successful entrepreneur- 

ship: fluidity, creativity, assertiveness, anti-authoritarianism, self-reliance, and a competitive team spirit. 

As an example of the ingenuity of Israeli middle-level commanders, Start-Up Nation offers a “typical” story of a young commander in 

the West Bank city of Nablus who is faced with rescuing an injured soldier being held by a terrorist. With only his troops, a bulldozer, 

and an attack dog, he must figure out how to save the soldier and kill the terrorist, while protecting Palestinian schoolchildren next door 

and staying cognizant of international journalists on the rooftop. With no time to get instructions from higher-ups, he improvises—and 

within four hours, he has smoke-bombed the school, bulldozed the house, shot a new terrorist on the scene, and used the dog to “neu- 

tralize the terrorist” who is holding the injured soldier. For the authors, this story exemplifies the innovativeness and multitasking re- 

quired of a commander who is “responsible for the lives of a lot of people: his soldiers, Palestinian schoolchildren, journalists.”⁵⁹ The 

context of the second intifada does not come into play, nor is any explanation offered for the situation the soldier faces in Nablus. 

The idea that Israel is an invincible victim constantly besting the challenges of a perpetual war contributes to its value in the eyes of 

international business. The authors explain that Google, Microsoft, and other companies initially hesitated to invest in Israel because of 

their fear that violence and terrorism would disrupt business. But Israelis, responding with characteristic grit, were not afraid to go to 

their offices as shells exploded during the 2006 Lebanon War, and they demonstrate on a daily basis that violence does not interrupt 

the flow of business. This determination, write Senor and Singer, “transformed the very dangers that may make Israel seem risky into 

evidence of inviolable assets.”⁶⁰ Vulnerability to constant risk turns Israel into a lucrative investment. 

The narrative of Start-Up Nation reproduces the paradox of exceptionalism, presenting Israel as both unique and exemplary. Its en- 

trepreneurial culture is superior to that of other countries, even advanced ones like Singapore, and certainly to Arab countries, whose 

business models are described as “bazaars.” Yet “the whole world has much to learn from Israel,” especially the United States. Amer- 

icans should imitate the Israelis, for instance, in making better use of their own experience in fighting the war on terror. The authors 

recommend that Silicon Valley recognize the value of U.S. veterans, who have become more like Israelis. After many tours in Iraq and 

Afghanistan, junior commanders have developed an “interdisciplinary” range, just like Israelis, in counterinsurgency multitasking: they 

have played the role of “small-town mayor, economic-reconstruction czar, diplomat, tribal negotiator, manager of millions of dollars’ 

worth of assets, and security chief, depending on the day.”⁶¹ Following the model of Israel could turn America’s long and costly wars 

into a more profitable venture, and its overstretched veterans into multitasking entrepreneurs. 

Ultimately the authors present the start-up nation as a unique combination of cutting-edge modernity and a return to Zionist origins 

in the land. As one entrepreneur puts it, “You’re doing something for humanity. You are inventing a new drug or a new chip. You feel 

like a falah [“farmer” in Arabic], a farmer of high tech. You dress down. You’re with your buddies from the army unit. You talk about a 

way of life—not necessarily about how much money you’re going to make, though it’s obviously also about that.”⁶² The authors trace 

the theme of Israel as the original start-up nation to its mythic founding: “a conscious effort to build from scratch a modern 

reincarnation of an ancient nation-state.” This unique past also makes it a model for the future, a light to other nations: “Israel is one of 

the world’s foremost idea factories, and provides clues for the meta-ideas of the future.”⁶³ 

Those who view the occupied Palestinian territories as a laboratory of state control also see Israel as an idea factory, manufacturing 

the “meta-ideas of the future.” But it will be a dystopian future: all around the world, people will inhabit cities that look like military 

zones, occupied by police indistinguishable from soldiers, and monitored by sophisticated systems of homeland security. 

7

HOMELAND INSECURITIES

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, is known to millions of Americans as the day that changed everything. Ground Zero represented not only a site of carnage in Lower Manhattan, but also a rupture in time, the moment Americans lost their innocence and no longer felt invulnerable. On that day, al-Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, killing almost three thousand. At day’s end, night fell on another world, observed President George W. Bush, when he announced before a joint session of Congress a week later that he was declaring a war on terror and establishing a new Office of Homeland Security.¹ Unique and unprecedented, al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the United States appeared to defy both comparison and historical analysis. Any attempt to put the event in context—likening American losses to the suffering of others, or explaining acts of terrorism as reactions to political policies—raised the specter of moral relativism and blurred the clear line between our way of life and evildoers.

Israel stood out as an exception to the unwritten rule about the incomparability of American suffering. Now we are all Israelis was a common refrain, but it did not undermine the exceptional quality of America’s calamity or becloud its moral clarity.² On the contrary, identification with Israel sharpened the sense that the two countries shared a unique position in the world. The familiar image of Israelis as long-suffering victims of terrorism offered an emotional touchstone for comprehending incomprehensible losses, and Israel’s vaunted military vigilance provided a guide to action. In the rhetoric of President Bush and his advisors, the United States took on Israel’s paradoxical role as an invincible victim. In this view, America was confronting, on a global scale, murderous enemies who threatened nothing less than total annihilation. Terrorism would force the United States to fight a never-ending battle for national survival, even as the country was providentially destined to vanquish all evil.

For Americans to place themselves in Israeli shoes was to imagine the nation in a new way, as a homeland—a nation one needed to fight for against the threat of total loss. In the decade following 2001, Israel increasingly appealed as a model to emulate in defending America at home and abroad from existential threats, both real and imagined. The military and the media, think tanks and popular culture, all enjoined Americans to study Israel as the gold standard for fighting terrorism in foreign lands, at the borders, in cyberspace, in urban centers, in the homeland, and in private homes. Israel’s permanently imperiled state exemplified the new concept of homeland security. This concept entailed, on the one hand, erecting impregnable barriers between inside and outside, the citizen and the alien, the self and the other. On the other hand, it meant effacing boundaries between home and abroad, domestic and foreign affairs, civilian and military control.

The history and language of America’s close identification with Israel offered a ready-made narrative of innocence and danger that helped some Americans understand what at first seemed incomprehensible. Americans could believe that, like Israeli Jews, they were hated for who they were, not for what they did. This hatred, even by a small cadre of nonstate actors, seemed so dangerous that it threatened to destroy our way of life. The rhetoric of the existential threat, associated primarily with Israel since the 1980s, entered the lexicon of the war on terror, which Vice President Dick Cheney would refer to as an existential conflict.³ Since retaliation alone could not guarantee security against such an all-encompassing menace, the only option was to preemptively eradicate this shadowy but omnipresent enemy.

In the post-9/11 model of homeland security, perceptions of vulnerability and invincibility fed on each other. With imminent extermination on the horizon, any available means can be used to destroy impending threats before they strike. Military advantage alone, however, never suffices in the face of existential peril. Fears of omnipresent danger continually stoke the call for vigilance in the name of total security. These views perpetuate and rely on the continuous production of radical insecurity. In this apocalyptic way of thinking, the only imaginable outcomes are absolute supremacy or utter annihilation; negotiation or compromise can lead only to appeasement and capitulation. David Frum and Richard Perle, neoconservative advisors to President Bush, expressed this idea succinctly in their book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror: There is no middle way for Americans: it is either victory or holocaust.⁴

Now We Are All Israelis

In the days following 9/11, journalists likened the devastation in New York to the tragic routine of terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The acrid and unexpungeable odor of terrorism, which has hung over Israel for many years, wrote George Will in the Washington Post on September 12, is now a fact of American life. Yesterday morning Americans were drawn into the world that Israelis live in every day. On the same day, the New York Times published no less than three pieces on Israel, all solemnly acknowledging that we now understand what they have bravely endured for so long, that our overwhelming catastrophe is their everyday norm. Clyde Haberman noted that the most recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv had taken place at an American pizza chain, linking Americans and Israelis in a shared fragile landscape, where everyday life becomes vulnerable to destruction. In the following years, journalists would return to this theme. With every new threat, … our everyday life becomes more like Israel’s, wrote Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic.⁵

Some journalists acknowledged that people in many other countries—Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Sri Lanka—also lived with the horrific effects of terrorism. But most were quick to assert a more intimate identification with Israelis. In his editorial in the New York Times the day after the attacks, Bill Keller repeated the phrases like Israelis and like Israel as a sober but reassuring refrain, remarking that the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania felt too far way, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by a domestic terrorist too freakish. When Dexter Filkins rushed to the smoldering scene of the collapsed Twin Towers, it occurred to him that many of the street vendors from Third World countries would have encountered comparable disasters—whether natural or manmade—that destroyed thousands of innocent lives in their own homelands. But then he noticed a surreal object lying on the street, a human intestine, and he flashed back to a scene in Tel Aviv, where Orthodox Jews had been collecting fragments of body parts in the aftermath of a suicide bombing. Comparisons to Israel offered psychic ballast and a cognitive chart to navigate by in the chaotic wake of

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter