Memories of September 11, 2001, are usually frozen in specific, horrific frames. The smoke. The steel. The silence of the grounded flights. But for many Americans, a specific piece of news footage remains burned into their brains: a group of Palestinians cheering in the streets of East Jerusalem.
It’s a visual that has defined a lot of Western perceptions for decades.
If you ask a person over forty, "Did Palestine celebrate 9/11?" they’ll likely say yes, citing those few seconds of grainy film. But history is messy. It’s rarely as simple as a ten-second clip on CNN. To understand what actually went down that day across the Palestinian territories, you have to look past the loop of that one video and look at the official responses, the public's immediate shock, and the allegations of media manipulation that followed.
People were scared. They were confused. And yes, in some small pockets, people were seen celebrating. But that’s only about five percent of the story.
The Footage That Went Viral Before Going Viral Was a Thing
Let's talk about that film. Shortly after the towers fell, news outlets—most notably the Associated Press and Reuters—captured footage of about 20 or 30 people in East Jerusalem. There were women in hijabs ululating. There were children jumping around. Someone was handing out sweets.
It looked like a party.
For an American audience currently watching thousands of their fellow citizens die in real-time, this was gasoline on a fire. The footage was broadcast globally within hours. It created an immediate, visceral connection between the Palestinian cause and the Al-Qaeda attacks, even though the two had zero structural or ideological overlap.
Honestly, the impact of those few seconds of film cannot be overstated. It basically cemented a narrative that the entire Palestinian population was "pro-terror," a label that stuck for a generation.
But here’s the thing about "the street." In any conflict zone, you can find twenty people to cheer for almost anything if you look hard enough. Journalists at the scene later reported that the crowd was relatively small and didn't represent the mood of the broader city, let alone the millions of people living in the West Bank and Gaza.
Was the footage faked?
There’s a long-standing conspiracy theory that the footage was actually from the 1990s, filmed during celebrations of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
That’s actually not true.
The German public broadcaster ARD investigated these claims thoroughly. They confirmed the footage was shot on September 11, 2001. However, there were significant questions about how the "celebration" started. Some witnesses claimed that the journalists on the scene encouraged the children to cheer or handed out candies to get a "better shot." While the AP and other agencies vehemently denied "staging" the event, the presence of cameras in a highly charged environment often changes the behavior of the people being filmed.
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It’s a classic observer effect. You put a camera in front of a frustrated, oppressed population and ask them how they feel about a blow to their perceived enemy’s primary backer, and you might get a reaction that looks much more uniform than it actually is.
A Tale of Two Realities: The Official Response
While those images were playing on a loop, the actual leadership of the Palestinian people was in a state of absolute panic.
Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the PLO at the time, didn't just issue a press release. He went in front of the cameras in Gaza to donate blood for the American victims. He looked visibly shaken. His advisors knew immediately that 9/11 changed everything. Before the towers fell, the Palestinian struggle was often viewed through the lens of national liberation. After the towers fell, the world—and specifically the United States—viewed everything through the lens of a "Global War on Terror."
Arafat’s administration condemned the attacks in the strongest possible terms. They called them a "terrible crime."
Why? Because they weren't stupid. They knew that being associated with Al-Qaeda would be a death knell for their diplomatic goals.
In Nablus and Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority actually moved to suppress celebrations. They didn't want the world to see what they knew would be interpreted as a collective "win." There were reports of Palestinian police confiscating film from journalists who were trying to record small gatherings of people cheering. They weren't just protecting their image; they were genuinely terrified of the American response.
The Contrast in the Streets
You’ve got to remember the context of 2001. The Second Intifada was in full swing. Palestinians were living through intense military incursions, checkpoints, and a collapsing economy.
For the average person in Gaza, the United States wasn't seen as a neutral arbiter. It was seen as the provider of the F-16s and Apache helicopters being used in their neighborhoods.
So, did some people feel a sense of "schadenfreude"? Probably.
When you feel powerless and you see the world's greatest superpower take a hit, there is a human impulse—however dark—to feel that the "other side" finally knows what it feels like to be vulnerable. That’s a far cry from supporting Bin Laden’s ideology, which most Palestinians (who were largely secular or nationalist at the time) found alien and dangerous.
Most Palestinians were actually horrified. Thousands of them had relatives in the U.S. Many worked for American NGOs. The idea that "Palestine" as a monolith celebrated is a total fiction, even if "some Palestinians" definitely did.
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How the Narrative Was Used
Politics never lets a good crisis go to waste.
The Israeli government under Ariel Sharon immediately drew a straight line between Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden. By highlighting the footage of the celebrations, the Israeli PR machine was able to reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was no longer about land or occupation; it was now a small outpost of Western democracy fighting against the same "Islamic terror" that had just struck Manhattan.
This was a masterclass in messaging.
It worked. It basically gave Israel a green light for "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002. The nuanced reality—that the PFLP, Hamas, and Fatah all had different (and often negative) views of Al-Qaeda—was lost in the noise of those few seconds of people dancing in East Jerusalem.
Public Opinion Polling from 2001
If we want to be objective, we have to look at the data from that time.
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) conducted polls shortly after the attacks. The results were... complicated.
While a majority of Palestinians opposed the killing of civilians, there was a significant portion of the population that expressed "support" for the attacks. But researchers noted that this support wasn't about radical Islam. It was a "protest vote" against U.S. foreign policy.
It’s like when people cheer for a villain in a movie because they’re tired of the hero being self-righteous. It doesn't mean they want the villain to move in next door.
Key takeaways from the data:
- The majority of Palestinian political factions (including Hamas at the time) distanced themselves from the tactics of 9/11.
- Spontaneous vigils were held in some Palestinian towns to honor the victims, though these received almost zero international media coverage compared to the "celebration" footage.
- The "celebrations" were largely confined to refugee camps and specific neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, involving a tiny fraction of the total population.
The Long-Term Impact on Palestinian Identity
Because of how 9/11 was reported, Palestinians found themselves in a defensive crouch for the next two decades.
They had to constantly prove they weren't terrorists. Every interview with a Palestinian diplomat for the next ten years started with, "Do you condemn the attacks of 9/11?"
It shifted the burden of proof.
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Even today, you see that 2001 footage resurface on social media every September. It’s used as a "gotcha" to shut down conversations about human rights in the West Bank. It’s a classic example of how a single, decontextualized image can override thousands of pages of diplomatic history and millions of individual human experiences.
What Most People Get Wrong
The biggest misconception is that the celebrations were state-sanctioned or representative of a national mood.
They weren't.
They were the actions of a few dozen people caught on camera, amplified by a global media hungry for "us vs. them" narratives, and then utilized by political actors to justify future military actions.
Most Palestinians spent 9/11 the same way most Americans did: glued to the TV, wondering if the world was ending, and worrying about what came next. In their case, "what came next" was a massive shift in global politics that made their quest for statehood infinitely more difficult.
Moving Forward: How to Verify Historical Narratives
When you encounter highly emotional footage from conflict zones, it's vital to apply a few filters before accepting the "standard" narrative.
Look for the scale of the event. Was the footage a tight shot of twenty people, or a wide shot of a whole city? Tight shots are often used to make small groups look like a movement.
Check the official diplomatic record. What were the actual leaders saying? In the case of 9/11, the Palestinian leadership was arguably more vocal in their condemnation than many other regional powers.
Investigate the "Observer Effect." Consider whether the presence of international cameras influenced the behavior of the people being filmed. In the 2001 Jerusalem footage, the role of the camera crew remains a point of intense scholarly debate.
Consult local sources. Read what was being written in local newspapers (like Al-Quds) at the time, not just what was being broadcast on American cable news. You’ll find a much broader range of grief, fear, and political analysis than the "celebration" narrative suggests.