Why Benjamin Netanyahu Said 9/11 Was ‘Very Good’ For Israel
25 years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by The New York Times on 9/11, he told the paper it was “very good” for Israel.
He claimed the terrorist attack would “generate immediate sympathy” and “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
What he meant was that the U.S. fighting a “war on terror” would be the perfect excuse to get America to fight Israel’s enemies for it in the Middle East and make way for Israeli dominance.
This was particularly well timed for Israel, given how close many top officials in the Bush administration were with Israel.
Top officials, including Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle, were advisors to Benjamin Netanyahu prior to entering the Bush administration.
In a letter sent to Benjamin Netanyahu written in 1996, these advisors called on him to reject the possibility of a two-state solution and instead overthrow surrounding governments seen as too sympathetic to Palestine, first and foremost “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”.
In coordination with the neoconservatives from the Project for a New American Century, who wanted to preserve American unipolar hegemony through waging “multiple simultaneous large-scale wars”, these Zionists and neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
To cook up the WMD deception used to launch the war, the Neo-cons created an “Office of Special Plans” within the Pentagon to push the deception.
At the time, journalist Bob Dreyfuss reported that, “also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit … prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon’s office … This secretive unit … may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.”
The Guardian reported at the time that the Office of Special Plans “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise,” adding that “The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.”
It also added that Israeli officials were welcomed to the Pentagon under “Mr Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms”, in reference to Douglas Feith, the lead Neo-conservative author of the clean break document.
The LA Times noted in 2005 that “A former senior Israeli military intelligence official asserted Thursday that the nation’s spy agencies were a ‘full partner’ to the United States and Britain in producing flawed prewar assessments of Iraq’s ability to mount attacks with weapons of mass destruction”.
The Israel lobby was also able to use 9/11 to make its clean break plan an official hit list of countries for the U.S. in its war on terror.
As the U.S. general Wesley Clark famously said, after 9/11 the Neo-cons planned to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”, a list he later said came from a study “paid for by the Israelis” in reference to the clean break.
It was this list that functioned as the driving force for U.S. foreign policy for the ensuing years.
As Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs documented :
The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11.
The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.
Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.
Similarly, Israel lobby groups used 9/11 to rebrand as “counter-terrorism” expert groups, most notably the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
As authors Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick documented in their recent book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” the FDD was “formed originally in 2001 as Emet (‘Truth’ in Hebrew) with a mission that included ‘provid[ing] education to enhance Israel’s image in North America.’ That name and mission, while submitted to the IRS in its founding documents, was nowhere to be found on its website”, before rebranding as a “counter-terrorism” organization after 9/11.
They added, “Al Jazeera hidden cameras captured Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, speaking in blunt terms about Israel’s relationship with the FDD. ‘We have FDD. We have others working on’ projects including ‘data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail,’ said Vaknin-Gil to an audience of American pro-Israel advocates in 2016. ‘This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best’”.
This Israel Lobby cutout was one of the most influential organizations in paving the way to war with Iran.
The authors wrote that during the negotiations of the JCPOA in 2015, the FDD “wasn’t just a producer of research papers and op-eds advocating against the JCPOA and for more sanctions and military threats against Iran. It also served as an important element of an echo chamber informing the public and Congress about Middle East policy,” adding that “In an eighteen-month period preceding and immediately following the signing of the JCPOA in 2015, FDD staff and fellows provided congressional testimony opposing the deal seventeen times”.
They also added that “a misfiled document revealed that Bernie Marcus contributed $10.7 million, Paul Singer contributed $3.6 million, and Sheldon Adelson contributed $1.5 million in a five-year period ending in 2011. The three men were the three largest donors to the FDD in that time frame, the only period in which the group’s top donors have been disclosed”.
9/11, and the “Global war on terror” that followed, was indeed “very good” for Israel, and it allowed it and its American lobby and neo-conservative allies to advance the regime change wars needed for Israeli dominance and continued subjugation of Palestine.
September 11, 2026 -
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | 9/11, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism
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