274 Palestinian lives donโt matter to the Biden administration
This week provided further evidence โ if any were lacking โ that anti-Palestinian bias is simply a rule of American politics, and today maybe the leading rule.
Yesterday Israel killedย 274ย Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in Gazaโs Nuseirat refugee camp while freeing four Israeli hostages, and the U.S. promptly hailed the โrescueโ. It is beyond question that this was an indiscriminate massacre, but Joe Biden saluted the Israeli action, and soย did Secretary of State,ย without a mention of Palestinian lives.
โAs if we needed more proof of how little this administration values Palestinian lives,โย Khaled Elgindy wrote.
Mainstream reporters are horrified, but politely. After the last outrage earlier this week, when Israel killed dozens of Palestinians in a school, a reporter asked at theย State Department: โPeople might find it very puzzling that you have the leverage of $3.8 billion of defense supplied to the Israelis per year, and you cannot compel this situation to change.โ
The State Department said the U.S. has prodded Israel, and thereโs been progress. โWe have seen them [the Israelis] take improvements over time.โ
So the U.S. keeps pouring money and weapons into Israel, andย the Democratic base believesย overwhelmingly that itโs a genocide, and Biden keeps saying he wants a ceasefire, but wonโt apply any pressure to achieve it.
Republicans are at least more honest about their policy. Nikki Haleyโa possible running mate for Trumpย โvisited Israel at the end of May and wrote โFinish themโ on an Israeli shell. Even as the death count in Gaza crossed 36,000.
This disdain for Palestinian life is consistent throughout the American establishment.ย Variety reportedย this week that a Hollywood marketing guru warned her employees that they should hit โpause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.โ
In an email, Ashlee Margolis said, โAnyone saying Israel is committing a โgenocideโ is someone we will pause on working with, as that is simply not trueโฆ. While Jews are devastated by the loss of innocent lives in Gaza, we are feeling immense fear over the rising Jew Hatred all over the world.โ
So again, Palestinian lives just donโt matter, next to Jewish fears.
This special degraded status for Palestinians has become an area of study for Palestinian intellectuals. Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer and doctoral student at Harvard, wrote a lengthy legal argument for a new term for the Palestinian condition.
โThe law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination,โ Eghbariah wrote โand offered the idea of โNakbaโ as a legal concept to encompass that subordination.
But Eghbariahโs argument was censored, first by the Harvard Law Review, in โan unprecedentedโ move against a fully-edited essay,ย as the Intercept reported.ย Then, in an even more unprecedented fashion, by the Columbia Law Review this week, whose board of directors, which includes alumni with ties to the Biden administration, actually shut down the entire website when Eghbariahโs piece went up. (In the ensuing controversy, they have now restored the site).
In the eyes of the world, Palestinians only count when they are dying. That is what Qassam Muaddiย wrote at our site this week, in an essay titled,ย โAgainst a world without Palestinians.โ
Over the years, learning our Palestinian history, I began to notice that in order to be acknowledged by the rest of the world, we Palestinians always had to dieโฆ. It is as if in order to exist without justification, Palestinians had to intimately deal with death โ they could master it, put up the best show of it, but they always had to die.
Qassam went on to explain that all that builds Palestinian character, including culture and stories, has no place in the world as it is. It must always be dismissed as terrorism or something less than human.
He actually ends that essay with hope, that the global discourse of Palestine is finally changing.
And the next day, another 274 Palestinians were killed, with full U.S. support. And Democrats wonder why democracy is in crisis.
