In his 1846 short story “The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allen Poe recounts the story of Montresor, who, seething from years of slights, kills his friend Fortunato by burying him alive in his wine cellar, brick-by-painstaking-brick. Little did Poe know that Montresor’s tactics would eventually be put to such effective use by nation-states.
Israel’s latest and brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip is designed to further seal the Palestinians in their wretched prison. As always, Palestinians are doing the vast majority of the dying, while American commentators take ghoulish pleasure in the destruction from the safety of their Barcaloungers.
Already the tragedies of Israeli overreaction are piling up – 46 dead Palestinians in a clearly-marked UN school, extended families “accidentally bombed, aid workers shot and killed. More Palestinians died in the first hours of Israel’s campaign than all the Israelis ever killed by Hamas rocket fire.
This wanton massacre was a deliberate decision by the Israeli leadership, which wanted to shock the Gazan leadership by killing as many people directly or indirectly connected to Hamas as possible. There’s an election to win, after all.
This week the UN suspended aid operations because the Israelis continue “accidentally murdering their personnel. Foreign correspondents have been banned from Gaza on the pretext that they are all in league with Hamas. That leaves, conveniently, no one but teenagers on Twitter to report on the carnage.
For Americans though, it’s okay, because as scholar and blogger As’ad AbuKhalil argues, the Palestinians are “cheap people – poor, stateless, sub-human refugees whose deaths by the dozens are meaningless. Thus 1.5 million Gazans suffer and die cruelly in a years-long, illegal blockade because a small number of militants kill a tiny number of Israelis. Expensive people in the West consider this to be just.
Israel’s ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip is a brazen violation of international law, but if there’s one thing the Bush administration taught us, it’s that international law exists only to keep Masters programs in business. Also: it does not apply to cheap people.
The Egyptian government has served as a reliable partner in the perpetration of this massive crime. The regime’s deftness at playing the role of Montresor has not exactly further endeared it to the Egyptian people. Halfhearted Egyptian mediation with a West Bank government that has no credibility in Gaza only serves to further underline the regime’s impotence in the face of Israeli and American pressure.
A senior Israeli official admitted that part of the war’s raison d’etre was to restore the confidence of the Israeli military after the debacle in Lebanon. It must be comforting to the relatives of dead Palestinians to know that their loved ones perished so that the Israel Defense Forces could feel good about themselves. Perhaps copies of Chicken Soup For the Occupier’s Soul would be more humane?
All of this illegality is typically justified as the Israelis acting in their security interests, which are almost always defined quite generously. Cheap people, on the other hand, don’t have security interests, but rather obligations as per the terms of subservience to their expensive overlords.
As usual Israel’s goals in its latest war are both confused and almost comically unattainable – with many advocating nothing less than the total destruction of Hamas. The dispersed nature of the Hamas network makes it impossible for Israel to accomplish this goal without annihilating an uncomfortably high percentage of the Palestinian population.
The real solution, for which the world has waited eight long years, is the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. A comprehensive Arab peace proposal, offering full peace to the Israelis for the return of all territories occupied in the 1967 war, has been sitting on the table for the past six years like an unopened coffee table book.
However, Israel and its American benefactors considered the Arab peace proposal to be a non-starter. First Palestinians were told they needed democracy before they could have peace, and after they held perhaps the most democratic elections in the history of the Arab world, they were told they needed better results.
Soon the Palestinians will be told that there will be no peace until they stop running mean editorials in their newspapers. Until then, many more Palestinians will die for the electoral aspirations of Israeli leaders, while a just peace will become an even more distant dream.
The expensive people of the United States will sleep peacefully knowing their dwindling tax dollars are once again being well-spent on the extermination of Palestinians, while the palace-dwellers of the Mubarak’s neo-liberal fantasyland can rest assured that their Sinai vacations can be plotted without worrying about dirty Palestinians pouring over the Rafah crossing.
Like in Poe’s greatest horror stories, this tale of burying the Palestinians alive is told in the American media solely from the perspective of the killer.
Few Americans ever hear the truth of Palestinian suffering, just as no one ever heard Fortunato’s cries. Judging from the tepid international reaction to Israel’s assault, the same fate awaits the cheap, expendable people of Palestine.
David M. Faris is an American political commentator and Ph.D candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He did much of his research in Cairo.
