What the witness actually reported
On the morning of 11 September 2001 a woman in the Doric Towers apartments in Union City, New Jersey, looked across the Hudson at the burning World Trade Center and then down at the parking lot below her, where five men had got out of a van.
Her account, in the words recorded by the FBI: "All of the males appeared to be jovial in that they smiled, hugged one another, and gave 'high fives.'" Speaking to ABC News a year later she put it differently and more carefully — they did not look shocked to her, and she thought it was strange.
None of them was dancing. The theory is named after something that did not happen, and almost everything else about it has travelled the same distance from the record.
The five men
They were Sivan Kurzberg, who was driving, his brother Paul Kurzberg, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Yaron Shmuel and Oded Ellner — Israeli nationals working for Urban Moving Systems, a removals company based in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Their van was stopped that afternoon near Giants Stadium in East Rutherford. They were arrested, held for about seventy-one days, some of them in solitary confinement, and questioned repeatedly, including with polygraphs. Yaron Shmuel later described the arrest to the Israeli paper Ma'ariv: "They pulled guns on us, threw us to the ground like terrorists, and citizens that were in the area yelled 'shoot them in the head.'"
They were never charged with any offence connected to the attacks. They were never charged with any criminal offence at all. What was found against them was immigration: they had been working in the United States without authorisation. All five signed documents admitting those violations and were returned to Israel.
What the investigation concluded
The FBI's field report says this:
Both the Newark and the New York Divisions conducted a thorough investigation which determined that none of the Israelis had any information on prior knowledge regarding the bombing of the World Trade Center. Furthermore, Newark and New York determined that none of the Israelis were actively engaged in clandestine intelligence activities in the United States.
Two findings, and the second is the one usually left out. The Bureau looked at both questions that matter here — did these men know the attacks were coming, and were they intelligence officers working under cover — and answered no to each. The document is public; it was released under the Freedom of Information Act and is the same file the theory draws its details from.
That the case was handled seriously is not in dispute. The men were held for over two months on immigration grounds that would not normally produce anything like that, precisely because the Bureau was satisfying itself on the first question before it let them go.
The claim this gets attached to
The five men are routinely presented alongside a second claim: that Israelis, or Jews, were warned in advance to stay away from the World Trade Center. That claim has a traceable origin and a documented first form, and the distance between them is five days.
On 12 September 2001, the day after the attacks, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem had received the names of some 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time — families ringing a ministry to ask whether their relatives were alive.
On 17 September, Al-Manar, the Lebanese television station linked to Hezbollah, broadcast that 4,000 Israelis had been told to stay home.
The same number, inverted. A list of people feared dead became a list of people warned away, inside a week, and the second version is the one that survived.
What the casualty record shows is the opposite of a warning. Israeli citizens died in the attacks — among them Daniel Lewin, aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and Alona Avraham aboard United 175 — and the number of Jewish victims is generally estimated at between 270 and 400 of the 2,977 killed.
Why it lasts
This story has a durability that invented ones do not, and the reason is that its skeleton is entirely real.
Five foreign nationals really were arrested in New Jersey on the day. A witness really did report them behaving in a way she found strange. They really were held for seventy-one days. There really is an FBI file, and a 20/20 segment, and a company whose owner left the country. Anyone checking the basic facts finds that they check out, which creates the impression that the rest of it will too.
The step the theory takes is from a detention that happened to a motive that was investigated and not found. And because the men were detained at all, the detention itself is offered as the proof — an argument that cannot fail, since an investigation that cleared them and an investigation that never happened look identical from outside.
It has also travelled in specific company. The Anti-Defamation League's work on 9/11 conspiracy material identifies this episode as the most common piece of supposed evidence in antisemitic accounts of the attacks, which is the context in which most people now encounter it.
Urban Moving Systems
The company the five worked for does real work in the theory, and it is worth separating what is known about it from what that is taken to mean.
Urban Moving Systems was a removals firm in Weehawken. It was investigated after the arrests, it closed, and its owner, Dominik Otto Suter, left the United States for Israel. Those three facts are not in dispute and they are the ones the theory is built from: an ordinary business is exactly what a cover would look like, so a business that collapsed and an owner who left the country are read as an operation being wound up.
What the record does not contain is any finding that it was one. The FBI's conclusion — that none of the men was engaged in clandestine intelligence activity in the United States — was reached by the divisions that investigated the company as well as the men. A firm employing people without work authorisation has ordinary reasons to fail once immigration authorities take an interest in it, and an owner facing that has ordinary reasons to go home.
Both readings fit the same facts. Only one of them was investigated and reported on, and it is not the one that circulates.
What the Commission looked at
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks examined the question of advance knowledge at length, across intelligence services and governments, and its report is public and searchable. It identifies failures of warning in detail — the ones inside the American system, which are extensive and specific.
What it does not contain is any finding that a foreign service knew the attacks were coming and said nothing. That absence is sometimes offered as its own evidence, on the reasoning that a Commission would not report such a thing. It is worth noting what the same Commission was willing to publish about the FBI and the CIA before accepting that it would have protected anyone.
What the record supports
Five Israeli men were working illegally in New Jersey, watched the attacks from a car park, behaved in a way a neighbour found callous enough to report, were arrested, were investigated thoroughly by two FBI divisions, and were found to have had no advance knowledge of the attacks and no role in clandestine intelligence work. They were deported for working without visas.
No evidence has been produced for the rest of it. The warning that was supposedly given was a misread casualty enquiry from the day after the attacks, and the men the story is named for were not dancing.