Smoke billows over the northern Gaza following an Israeli strike. US President Joe Biden likened Operation Al Aqsa Flood with the 9/11 attacks. [Picture: Jack Guez/AFP]
The repeated parallels between Hamas’s resistance attack on Israel on 7 October and the 9/11 attacks in the United States are nonsensical, says an analyst. If anyone, the people of Gaza, Palestine, have experienced a series of attacks under Israeli occupation.
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden cautioned apartheid Israel against making similar “mistakes” to what his country did in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.
“Justice must be done … But I caution that, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes,” he told reporters while on a one-day visit to Israel.
Speaking in an interview on Salaamedia, Na’eem Jeenah, senior researcher at Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), said US president Joe Biden’s parallels between the two deadly events was “quite ridiculous”.
“These parallels are quite ridiculous. When you compare the number of Palestinians killed in every Israeli onslaught on Gaza, with a smaller population in Gaza than Israel, then you’re looking at Palestinians in Gaza every year or two suffering multiple 9/11’s.”
“It’s a stupid kind of comparison,” he added.
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ISIS and 9/11 remarks a distraction
Jeenah noted that while Biden compared Hamas to the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS), this was merely a distraction from the reality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.
“Either he has no idea what ISIS means [and is] just reading something off his paper, but all of these parallels are made in order to detract from the fact that Israel is engaged in a 75-year-old illegal occupation, in the colonisation of Palestinian lands, and in apartheid practices throughout the lands that it controls which are all illegal under international law.”
Israel has consistently demonstrated disregard for Palestinian lives, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. Its latest attack on Gaza has already claimed 3 785 lives. Of those, at least 1 524 were children and 1 444 women. No less than 12 500 have been injured during the same period.
The latest figures from the Palestinian ministry of housing indicate that at least 30% of all housing in the Gaza Strip has been either destroyed (12,845 units), rendered uninhabitable (9,055 units) or lightly damaged (121,000 units) by Israeli bombardment.
In comparison, if such was ever warranted, three buildings were attacked and 2 977 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Operation Al Aqsa Flood, meanwhile, resulted in approximately 1 400 Israeli casualties.
