This is on the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And this week amid the

deluge of coverage of the Israel Hamas conflict following Hamas's surprise attack on October

7th, a certain historical analogy keeps coming up.

What an Israel experience was the equivalent proportionately of 7, 9, 11.

This is our 9, 11. This is our 9, 11.

This is unimaginable. This is, as someone said, our 9, 11.

Yesterday it was the Israel's 9, 11. It's the worst of humanity.

In the immediate aftermath, the analogy seems apt. As journalist George Packer wrote in

the Atlantic, the facts are different, but the feelings are the same, profound shock,

unbearable grief, humiliation, rage, and solidarity.

And certainly October 7th will be remembered as a moment of national anguish, like 9, 11.

That in that case marked a turning point in how Americans saw their security and consequently

their place in the world. But the legacy of 9, 11 is every bit as important as the events

on that single day. The mistakes made in their wake, the lessons learned.

And so how much can we really invest in analogizing 9, 11 to October 7th?

Because we just don't know what'll happen over the long haul.

David Cleon is a contributing editor at Jewish Currents and writes for many publications including

the Nation and the New Republic. His latest article was about the 9, 11 analogy. He

wrote it for n plus 1 magazine and it was called, have we learned nothing? David, welcome

to the show. Thanks so much for having me.

Let's talk about the analogy. As George Packer and you yourself observed, the horror is

comparable, but the scale isn't. Packer went on to say the thousand or more civilians butchered

...