“It’s September 11th in Israel. This is Israel’s 9/11, and Israel will do everything to bring our sons and daughters home.” The statement by Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan, which came three days after the offensive by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against Israel is a good lesson in rhetoric.
First, the “slap in the face” formula: “11. September” evokes the material and psychological collapse of Western trust, the painful memory of violence, the scandal of foreign intrusion into the national home. And then, to respond to this pain, the simultaneously paternalistic and warlike tone of a state that is sure of its strength and is able to protect its children from a foreign body that no longer even needs to be called by its name – but Was that ever necessary? Do we really need to identify the enemy to defeat? Since 2001, we have relied on the vague and unclear term “terrorism,” which is used so frequently that the Ambassador no longer even mentions it. A word that says nothing about the actor and refers solely to the feeling evoked in the person who uses it.
Condemn violence…to legitimize your own
Beyond the wording, here is the first key information that emerges from the statement of the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations: In 2023, there will no longer be a need to speak of terrorism in order to mobilize the semantic apparatus of the “global war on terror.” George W. Bush advocated this in 2001. To talk about Israel’s 9/11 is to both condemn the other’s violence and legitimize one’s own, it is to justify declaring war because the terror is from from the opposing camp. After 2001, many authors advocated the thesis of a “clash of civilizations,” a war – against the Afghans, then against the Iraqis – that was the inevitable consequence of the victory of Western values over Islam in the struggle for world hegemony.
This statement is based on the anti-security, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam speeches of our leaders and ignores the common origins of Christian and Muslim traditions and the many features that unite rather than oppose them. The anthropologist Talal Assad, who specializes in Islam, shows this in his book Suicide Attacks. An anthropological question1 that analyzes the terrorist discourse as a reaction to aporic stories about the clash of civilizations.
In this habitual dichotomy between Islamism and the West, terror and war, Assad underlines a new discursive mechanism of imperialism that emerged in 2001 and in which war (then, now armed resistance in the case of Ukraine) becomes the prerogative of Western states, unyielding in the justice they grant and legitimate in their anger. These moral paraphernalia, in the author’s opinion, can be traced back to psychology: the point is to show that the Western state has a conscience and its decisions are based on reason, while “terrorism” is a wave of destructive provocations. Whatever the terrorist’s political motives, he perpetrates irrational violence and condemns himself to death, especially by suicide.
Almost unknown in France, where it is rarely and only recently translated, Talal Assad is nevertheless considered an essential reference in 21st century anthropology, and the small 2007 work remains popular even after the Hamas offensive Israel of outstanding relevance. Israel identifies the operation of October 7, 2023 with the suicide attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and maneuvers deftly, aligning itself with a Western power and reducing its attacker – who is no longer even named here – to a position of terrorist parasite. Israel is surprised by the violence on its soil, even though it is the origin of the systemic and total violence of colonization and apartheid that underlies its institutions. By drawing on the psychological sources of terror discourse, Tel Aviv miraculously erases its violent and colonizing antecedents.
In addition, the idea of an Israeli 9/11 ignores a fundamental parameter of the October 7 attack: the Hamas fighters were not intended to die there and behaved like the soldiers of an armed, organized group, strategic and with primary military objectives. The operation does not end with the demonstration of force on October 7th: it is part of a rational project for territorial reconquest, which should also be about justice and morality. It really doesn’t matter whether you think this land belongs to the Palestinians or not, the fact is that Israel’s enemy – Hamas, the various other factions of the Palestinian resistance that took part in the operation and, more generally, Arab otherness these are The terrorism that plagues its territory goes far beyond the narrow, moralizing and imperialistic label of “terrorism”.
An amnesiac emotion
In the terror speech, the speaker ultimately blames everything he accuses his terrorist enemy of. Obsessed with his own pain, his “terror,” he invites the litigants to allow themselves to be carried away by an amnesiac feeling and to unite in a “counter-society” that Assad has created around the war on terror. Western subjectivities impose themselves, and we no longer find any subject in the enemy, a kind of monster without a name or face that has no other function than to provoke fear in the West. In this annihilation of alternative subjectivities, the terror discourse creates an analogous discourse about suffering, as the opponent’s sensitivity is limited by the “counter-society’s” own pain. War certainly causes suffering, but the counterterrorism response legitimizes the use of force through a discourse of humanitarian necessity – in 2001 we must save the American way of life, just as in 2023 we must save the Israelis’ right to Living as they want to be means, in reality, settling on land that doesn’t belong to them and partying a few kilometers from the cramped open-air prison of the Gaza Territory.
The hermeneutics of suffering that the anti-terrorist counter-society produces therefore leads to a paradoxical discourse that calls for violence as much as it condemns it, with the pathological proximity of a purely emotional discourse and a further genocidal discourse in the media. This double standard was also expressed on public radio (France Inter): in the same broadcast (October 9), Élie Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador to France, is treated with tearful compassion (“You understand what’s going on?” asks Léa Salamé by the historian and career diplomat), while Leïla Shahid, former Palestinian ambassador to the European Union, is summoned three times to “condemn” the violence on the Palestinian side. Thus, the violence suffered by Israelis is the subject of an almost sentimental consideration, while the Palestinians are discussed only from the perspective of the violence they caused.
It does not matter that Leïla Shahid tries to remember the context of 56 years of military occupation and violations of international law suffered by her people, given the immediate reaction to the attack on Israel after years of indifference to the Colonization of Palestine is not the suffering of the West or Israel seems to be the cause of violence. So much so that when the former Palestinian official calls for an equivalent condemnation of the murder of Palestinian women and children, the ex-diplomat rejects a “moral” difference by describing Gaza’s civilians as “victims.” “Securities.” Israel’s systematic use of the terror discourse ultimately leads to the disqualification of any form of resistance to oppression and the condemnation of both armed combatants and civilians. If necessary, let us note again that the rhetoric of terrorism is selective: through its conflating function, it applies to Muslim populations suspected of Islamism, while Ukrainians, assimilated to Westerners, have access to legitimate violence to defend themselves against the invader to defend.
Connection between Jewishness and Israel
After deconstructing the “clash of civilizations” thesis in his first chapter, then dealing with “terrorist” subjectivities and the reasons for committing a suicide attack, Talal Assad devotes a third and final chapter to the “horror” in the face of terrorism . He defines it as a loss of orientation that goes beyond understanding and discourse. It arises from breaking the boundaries set by society, for example through the intrusion of death outside the spaces and rituals that include it. What is particularly frightening, the anthropologist emphasizes, is the revelation of a contrast between civilization and barbarism in the crime, which offers the perpetrator no hope of reparation.
Take the example of the mass shooters in the United States who carry out massacres in schools. In their case, we are not talking about an attack, but rather a shooting, because given their assimilation to Western culture and its values, we reserve the right to rational violence. They also have the right to remorse and social rehabilitation, as in the case of this man who, at the end of his twenty-year prison sentence for the 2004 arson in a New York school, becomes a celebrity from around the world the next day on the social network TikTok… with Prevention videos against armed violence. “The Palestinian resistance fighters, sent back to the self-destructive violence of suicide terrorism, are grouping themselves into an irrational barbaric mass from which there is no question – it is no coincidence that the Israeli Defense Minister describes them as animals,” that is, brutal, irrational beings without language.
France did not wait for Israeli speeches to invoke the idea of terrorism. For them, 9/11 becomes an Israeli Bataclan in the media and political discourse, and Israel, long established as a security model, “ensures the protection of the entire planet” by indiscriminately defeating Palestinian fighters and civilians. In any case, these are the words of Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, president of the European Jewish Organization, who wonders to what extent she herself is doing the Jews of Europe a service by promoting supremacist and conservative identity politics that combines the Jewish with the colonial project of the State of Israel and actually feeds the anti-Semitism it claims to combat. On the microphone of BFMTV (October 9th) she offers a fine analysis: “Hamas is Daesh”. Brilliant illustration of the convoluted function of mobilizing the terrorist imagination and the vivid relevance of Talal Assad’s thesis.
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