September 11, 2001 changed America.
October 7, 2023 changed the Middle East—and eventually the rest of us.
History rarely announces these things beforehand. Nobody gets an Outlook invitation saying, “Tuesday, 8:46 a.m.: Old World Order Ends.” Instead, something horrific happens on an otherwise ordinary morning and everyone spends the next twenty years arguing about what it meant.
October 7 was Israel’s 9/11.
Hamas and other armed Palestinians burst across the Gaza border, killing about 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. It was not simply another round in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shattered the assumption that Hamas could be contained and that Israel’s technological and intelligence superiority could prevent catastrophe.
And then there was the calendar.
October 7, 2023 was Shabbat and, in Israel, Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah—“Rejoicing in the Torah,” one of Judaism’s most joyful celebrations. The attack immediately evoked another surprise attack almost exactly fifty years earlier: the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Was Hamas deliberately exploiting the holiday symbolism? The public evidence does not conclusively establish why that exact date was selected, so we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But terrorists understand theater. They understand anniversaries, religious imagery, television and psychological shock.
Al-Qaeda certainly understood theater on 9/11. The 9/11 Commission found that the attackers carefully selected targets and timing; one consideration was waiting until Congress was back in session. The date itself was communicated secretly weeks beforehand.
These people aren’t stupid.
Violence is the weapon. Fear is the payload.
October 7 delivered both.
Before that morning, everyone was pretending the Middle East was slowly becoming manageable. Israel was normalizing relations with Arab governments. Iran operated largely through proxies. Hamas ruled Gaza. Hezbollah threatened Israel from Lebanon. America desperately wanted to “pivot” somewhere else.
Apparently the Middle East didn’t get the memo.
October 7 blew up the arrangement.
Israel concluded that containment had failed. Gaza became a devastating war. Hezbollah entered the fight. Iran and Israel moved increasingly from shadow warfare toward direct confrontation. America’s military, diplomatic and economic power was once again dragged into the neighborhood.
Which brings us to Uncle Sam.
Being the global hegemon sounds wonderful until everybody sends you the bill.
If Israel is attacked, America must help.
If Israel responds too aggressively, America gets blamed.
If Iran expands, America failed to contain it.
If America confronts Iran, we’re imperialists.
If we leave, we abandoned our allies.
Congratulations. You’re indispensable.
You’re also the world’s favorite scapegoat.
That doesn’t mean America is innocent. When you spend eighty years constructing a global security system and stationing troops, ships and aircraft around the planet, you don’t get to act surprised when people hold you responsible for what happens inside it.
But October 7 exposed something bigger.
The old Middle East wasn’t peaceful.
It was merely temporarily not exploding.
That’s the real connection to September 11.
9/11 didn’t invent terrorism, jihadism or American intervention overseas. It destroyed the comforting illusion that Americans could remain safely separated from them.
October 7 did much the same thing.
It exposed Israel’s vulnerabilities. It exposed the limitations of deterrence. It exposed Iran’s proxy strategy. It dragged the Palestinian question back onto the world’s front page. And it exposed America’s strange predicament as a superpower desperately trying to leave the Middle East while remaining responsible for keeping the place from catching fire.
Three years later, we’re still living inside the consequences.
September 11 gave us a world before and after 9/11.
October 7 may eventually be remembered the same way.
Like it or not, we’re all on this wild and crazy ride together. Buckle up “butter cup,” it only get’s worse from here…
And once again, nobody seems to know where the emergency brake is.
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