Doomsday?

“A day that will live in infamy.” That was how President Franklin Roosevelt described the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago. And that, and more, is how yesterday’s cataclysmic disaster will be remembered in the United States. From this morning, human history will never be the same.

Most residents of the global village looked on in shock at the horror movie that turned into a dreadful reality. The apocalypse suddenly seemed more tangible than ever, the war of Gog and Magog on our doorstep, doomsday, here and now.

It was indeed “conventional terror” according to the accepted definitions, but one with the effect of an atomic bomb, both because of the carnage it caused and the terror it aroused.

The hijacked planes hit the vital organs of the biggest, strongest empire in the world: the towers, like two giant missiles of the economic and judicial world of the United States, and the heart itself, the military nerve center in Washington. The wound is serious, and the shock is worldwide.

Now, history will test the newly elected rookie George Bush. With his abilities, which some claim to be fairly meager, he will have to bring the war to their doorstep, and with his leadership, which many hold in doubt, he will have to lift the American nation back up from the ground. The mission is great and broad, and it is feared that the shoulders which must bear it are narrow.

The Americans’ immediate suspect is the terrorist Osama Bin-Laden and, along with him, countries that support terror, the Palestinians among them. Along with this, and though the chances seem slim, we must not forget that this was also the consensual verdict given by experts after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, until it was found that the perpetrators were home-grown American madmen. As of last night, to complicate things even further, the Japanese were in the picture too.

History proves that the wrath of America, even delayed, can be fearsome and terrible. As long as it is not proved otherwise, America’s large Moslem community will need to go underground, and leaders of certain Middle Eastern countries will do well to go down into their bunkers.

The joyful dances of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank were, therefore, not only nauseating, but short-sighted as well. Israel, if it had such tendencies, now could do whatever it wished in the territories, and no one in America would bat an eyelash. “Just try and find us,” the Americans will tell the Palestinians as they celebrate, and that could go on for a very long time.

Most Israelis, on the other hand, empathized with their brothers and sisters in distress, because this is our own hell magnified thousands of times, and it happened in New York, their alternate homeland. And the loss, to our great grief, will only become stronger in the coming days, when it becomes clear how many Jews were among the victims.

This article ran in Maariv on September 12, 2001