For Drew Steele
Two old men, one with a raggedy spray tan,
the other an industrial comb-over,
sat facing representatives of the world’s
media outlets, who appeared to believe
that public pronouncements by the one
with the orange face and the white hands
were to be understood literally.
Behind them a high-banked
coal fire appeared to blaze and crackle
in the hearth of a mantelpiece laden
with gilded objects. The older man
had – to ‘Stupéfaction Mondiale’,
as the headline in Libération put it –
just outlined his real estate plan
for one hundred and forty square miles of land
in the so-called Middle East, a plot
about the size of Las Vegas but with
a population two thirds the size.
The younger man smirked briefly. Few noticed
that, in the proposal for the final
solution to Gaza’s long history of
mayhem, the number of Gazans cited
was at least half a million fewer
than the estimate fifteen months before.
But, anyway, the whole lot would be cleansed.
Neither of the senior citizens
mentioned then, or subsequently, that beneath
the rubble-strewn and charnel house surface
of the Strip, and its contiguous seabed,
are extensive, untapped and unfracked
reserves of oil and gas.
By David Selzer