9/11 Was the Warning. October 7 Was the Reminder

On October 7, 2023, I went to bed at 4:30 in the morning after a normal Friday night. A few hours later, I woke up to messages from a friend in Belgium.

“Until you wake up, there’s a war all over Israel.”

“Don’t leave the house. They’re all over the streets killing people.”

My friend in Belgium was telling me what was happening in my own country.

I lived in northern Israel, far from the communities being attacked in the south. At first, I could not understand what I was reading. A war all over Israel? People killing civilians in the streets? I opened the news and slowly realized that this was not another escalation, another round of rockets or another frightening morning Israelis had learned how to explain away.

By the time I went to sleep, October 7 was an ordinary date. By the time I woke up, it was a date people would remember by its number.

I was two months and 5 days old on September 11, 2001. I cannot tell you where I was when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I cannot offer one of those memories of a classroom television being switched on or a parent calling from work.

But I grew up in Israel learning about that day. Later, I researched it for myself and listened to people who remembered it. Someone very close to me is originally from New Jersey. She has told me about watching the news that morning, confused, not yet able to understand what had happened or how completely the world was about to change.

October 7 made those stories feel different to me.

There is a particular kind of confusion that arrives with terrorism. The human mind needs time to understand something the attackers planned for months or years. Ordinary people wake up, turn on the television and try to process images that were designed to overwhelm them.

Afterward, we promise to learn.

After 9/11, the world learned that terrorism does not begin when someone boards a plane. It begins much earlier. It requires money, training, weapons, propaganda, freedom of movement and people willing to protect those preparing the violence.

We were told to follow the money.

Twenty-five years later, why do we keep losing the trail as soon as it leads to Tehran?

To be clear, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did not carry out 9/11. Al-Qaeda did. These are different organizations with different ideologies, alliances and objectives. Blurring those distinctions would not strengthen the argument. It would only make it easier to dismiss.

But the ideology that turns civilians into acceptable targets did not disappear with Osama bin Laden. Neither did the infrastructure that allows radical violence to grow.

Today, the IRGC has made that infrastructure part of state policy.

For years, it has funded, armed and trained groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and militias operating across Iraq and Syria. These groups are not identical, but they share a method: build power through fear, place civilians in the line of fire and then call the bloodshed a victory.

The IRGC has found a convenient arrangement. Iran pays, proxies fight and civilians across the region bury their families.

And Iranians pay twice.

They pay first through the money taken from their country and sent abroad while they live with inflation, shortages, power cuts and a collapsing economy. They pay again through repression when they ask why their resources are financing rockets and militias instead of schools, hospitals and a functioning future.

I was born in Iran and grew up in Israel. I have watched this system from both ends. I know the people forced to finance it, and I know the people forced to run to shelters because of it.

That is why it is so frustrating to watch parts of the world discuss every attack as though it appeared from nowhere. A terrorist group fires rockets, kidnaps civilians or attacks a ship, and the conversation begins with the explosion. By then, we have already skipped most of the story.

Who paid for the weapons? Who trained the fighters? Who moved the money? Who offered political protection? Who spent years teaching young people that murdering civilians was heroic?

Apparently, asking these questions becomes impolite when the answers are politically inconvenient.

The West knows what the IRGC does. Its financial networks are documented. Its relationships with armed groups are not hidden secrets. Iranian officials and commanders have spent years speaking proudly about the reach of their so-called resistance.

Still, the world often treats the Islamic Republic as though it were only another difficult government that might become reasonable after the right meeting, the right agreement or one more carefully worded expression of concern.

Meanwhile, the machinery keeps running.

Remembering 9/11 should mean more than posting photographs of the Twin Towers once a year. Memory without action becomes ceremony. If we mourn the victims while tolerating the systems that prepare future victims, we have not learned very much.

I do not expect a world without disagreement, conflict or danger. I am not asking for some perfect fantasy in which everyone suddenly gets along. I am asking for a world capable of recognizing a mistake and becoming better because of it.

That is what I try to do as a person. When I make a mistake, I want to learn from it. I want to understand what went wrong and avoid repeating it. It should not be unreasonable to expect the same maturity from governments and international institutions.

One day, I want to raise children in a world that feels pleasant, healthy and safe. I do not want them to grow up memorizing new dates because another group discovered that mass murder attracts cameras. I do not want them receiving messages from another country warning them that killers are moving through the streets of their own.

Radical Islamism has already brought enormous pain to Muslims, Jews, Christians and people of every background. Naming that ideology is not an attack on ordinary Muslims. Many of its most numerous and courageous victims are Muslims, including the Iranian people living under a regime that claims to speak for them while silencing them.

The world should not need another morning of smoke, phone calls and confusion before it decides to take the infrastructure of terror seriously.

The next atrocity may surprise the people waking up to the news. It should not surprise the governments that chose to ignore every warning that came before it.