How a Country Reacts When It’s Attacked: 9/11 vs. October 7
Further reading — I’ve written the fuller case on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself elsewhere, and I’m not re-making it here, including:
Before You Ask for a Palestinian State, Define What You’re Asking For, and the three-part history behind it, along with other pieces referenced within those two.
The situation in Gaza is horrible. This piece isn’t about who’s right in the underlying conflict, and it isn’t really about casualty counts either, even though it’s built on them. It’s about something narrower: which side gets the benefit of the doubt before the facts are even weighed. A lot of people confidently call what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. Far fewer people ever applied that word, or anything close to it, to the one war their own country actually fought after suffering a comparable attack.
The numbers, briefly.
Hamas launched this war on October 7, 2023, killing roughly 1,200 people. The Gaza Health Ministry’s own count — which the IDF has said it now largely accepts — puts the war’s death toll at around 70,000 over roughly two years. The ministry’s tally doesn’t break out combatants from civilians, and the actual split is genuinely disputed, with no reliable independent accounting of how many of the dead were fighters versus civilians. Hamas has fought this war by embedding military infrastructure under and beside apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and mosques — documented by IDF tunnel evidence under Shifa and the Gaza European Hospital, and confirmed on the record by US officials including former Secretary of State Antony Blinken from an administration frequently at odds with Netanyahu. I’ve made the fuller case on that tactic and on the word “genocide” itself in the piece linked above, so I won’t repeat it here.
Now put that death toll next to the one war our own country actually fought after a comparable attack. September 11 killed just under 3,000 people. The wars the United States launched in response — Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “War on Terror” campaigns that followed in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya — killed, by Brown University’s Costs of War project, somewhere between 900,000 and 940,000 people directly (more than 430,000 of them civilians), contributing to a total death toll estimated at 4.5 to 4.7 million once the wars’ indirect effects on health systems, food, and infrastructure are counted, over twenty years.
By raw ratio, the American response to 9/11 was substantially larger than Israel’s response to October 7 has been, whether you use the direct-death figure or the full one — many times larger, not a close call. Duration cuts the same way: Gaza’s active combat phase has run about two years; the “War on Terror” ran two decades, and Afghanistan alone was America’s longest war in its history. Relatively few people call the Iraq War a genocide, even the ones sharply critical of it as a war crime or an act of imperial overreach. A meaningful number of the people who do use the word for Gaza defended or shrugged off Iraq’s toll at the time or since. Neither the ratio nor the duration proves either war did or didn’t meet a legal or moral threshold — together they make it hard to explain why the shorter, smaller campaign gets the harsher label.
Two things this argument is not.
It’s not a legal claim. International law’s actual proportionality standard weighs expected military advantage against expected civilian harm in a specific strike, not a running body-count ratio across an entire war — a single disproportionate strike is still a violation no matter how the war’s aggregate numbers compare to someone else’s. And “genocide” itself isn’t a body-count threshold at all; its legal definition turns on specific intent to destroy a group as such, not on how many people died. A war can produce a horrific civilian toll through urban combat against an enemy that embeds itself among civilians without meeting that bar, the same way a war can meet that bar with a comparatively small death toll if the intent is there. Nobody should read a casualty ratio as a legal verdict on either count.
It’s also not “two wrongs make a right.” I’m not arguing that Iraq’s toll makes Israel’s conduct in Gaza acceptable — a genuinely disproportionate strike isn’t excused by someone else’s worse war, and both deserve scrutiny on their own terms. The claim is about the presumption itself: when the same person calls one war a horrific mistake and the other a genocide, at a fraction of the scale, that’s not a verdict reached by weighing evidence — it’s one reached first, that then goes looking for support.
And the toll didn’t stop at the body count.
The Iraq invasion’s aftermath — the dissolved army, the sectarian power vacuum, the failed state it left behind — is what ISIS grew out of, and it was ISIS’s metastasis into Syria’s civil war that turned a domestic uprising into the catastrophe that sent the largest wave of refugees toward Europe since the Second World War. Over a million people arrived on European shores in 2015 alone; more than 5 million had by the end of 2016. That single wave reshaped the continent’s politics for a decade — a straight line from that migration crisis to Schengen border closures and the rise of nationalist parties from Germany to Hungary to Sweden that commentators now discuss as a standalone European story, as if it fell from the sky. We set that in motion, and the throughline rarely gets drawn.
The dimension most commentary skips entirely: how often each country has had to answer this question, and how far it went the one time before 9/11.
The United States has been attacked on its own soil badly enough to trigger a war exactly twice since it became a global power — Pearl Harbor in 1941, and September 11, sixty years later — each followed by a war that ended, after which the country returned to a baseline of not being under existential threat. It’s worth remembering what “the war ended” meant the first time. Pearl Harbor killed about 2,400 Americans. The US response wasn’t proportional to that number by any measure — it was total war culminating in a demand for unconditional surrender, and when Japan didn’t surrender on schedule, the United States built and used a weapon specifically to end the argument. Historians still don’t agree on a precise death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — credible estimates for the combined toll by the end of 1945 range from roughly 110,000 up to 210,000, with the most commonly cited figure landing around 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki, the vast majority of them civilians, from two bombs dropped three days apart. Even at the low end of that range, that’s over 45 dead in Japan for every American killed at Pearl Harbor; at the commonly cited figure, it’s closer to 90. Either way, it’s remembered in American memory less as an atrocity than as the necessary ending to a just war. I’m not relitigating whether it was necessary — historians still argue that, and it’s a real argument. I’m pointing out that when the United States has faced an existential attack and decided the only acceptable outcome was the other side’s unconditional capitulation, it has, in its own history, gone further and faster than anything Israel has done in Gaza — and that response is a source of national pride, not a word anyone attaches “genocide” to in casual conversation. Israel’s experience since its founding in 1948 has not followed the “attacked once, respond decisively, return to peace” pattern at all: a war for its existence at birth, then again in 1967 and 1973, two intifadas, repeated rocket and terror campaigns out of Lebanon and Gaza, and now October 7 — one entry in a much longer, recurring history of armed threats to its existence than the US has ever had to reckon with, even counting 1941. That doesn’t make every Israeli military decision correct, but it means “why does Israel respond this forcefully” has an answer sitting in the historical record that “why did we respond this forcefully after Pearl Harbor, or after 9/11” doesn’t need, because we’ve had to answer that question far less often. And that’s before the fact that the modern Israeli state was founded three years after a third of the world’s Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust — a backdrop most people rendering snap verdicts on Israel’s conduct have simply never been taught.
The honest caveats.
The Iraq War is widely regarded, including by plenty of people who supported it at the time, as a catastrophic policy failure — a real disanalogy, not a defense of it. The two wars also aren’t fought against the same kind of enemy, or in the same kind of space: the US toppled and occupied entire state governments across vast open territory that civilians could at least attempt to flee, while Israel is fighting a non-state actor embedded in a sealed, roughly 140-square-mile strip that its population has nowhere to leave. That physical entrapment is a real part of why Gaza reads as more visceral and total to onlookers than a war fought across the length of Iraq or Afghanistan, independent of the raw casualty numbers, and it’s a legitimate reason the two situations don’t feel equivalent even when the ratios say something else. Gaza’s casualty figures are contested at the margins too, with independent analysts disputing the civilian/combatant breakdown in both directions. None of that changes the core point: two wars, both launched in direct response to a mass-casualty terrorist attack on the country fighting them, at meaningfully different ratios of consequence to provocation, fought by a country with far less practice at absorbing the question than the one doing most of the judging.
The situation in Gaza is still horrible. That was true in the first paragraph of this piece and it’s true in the last one. But horror isn’t evidence of intent.
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