How 9/11 helped Israel sell its war on Palestinians to America

What the report says

Al Jazeera published an opinion essay by Yousef Munayyer arguing that the September 11 attacks reshaped how Israel’s conflict with Palestinians was presented to American audiences. The piece says the post-9/11 “war on terror” made it easier to frame Israeli repression as part of a wider fight against a shared enemy, rather than as a distinct political and human rights issue.

Munayyer describes how, in the aftermath of the attacks, then-former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw an opportunity to strengthen US-Israel ties by linking Israel’s security agenda to America’s new counterterrorism priorities. He argues that this shift helped bring Israel and the United States onto the same side of a new global divide, with Palestinians increasingly cast as a security threat rather than a people resisting occupation and oppression.

The article says this framing had practical consequences over time, including deeper intelligence cooperation, more US support for Israel, and the use of broader anti-terror powers in ways that affected Palestinians. It also contends that Israeli tactics such as surveillance, counterinsurgency and targeted killing gained greater legitimacy in American discourse after being used by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The essay further places this in a wider media and political context, saying Islamophobic narratives after 9/11 stigmatized Muslims and critics of Israel while helping present Israeli policy as defensive. As background, the article was published on the 25th anniversary of the attacks and is explicitly the author’s opinion, not a news report.