IN Cecile B. DeMille’s magnum opuses as in Indian movies, there is a mandatory intermission during which audiences stretch their limbs and assess what they have watched and surmise the story ahead.

Barring any hiccups, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are on the cusp of such an intermission. Would the horror movie end with any degree of finality or does peace at least look likely to return even if a tad tenuously for now? That’s the question doing the rounds in the interval.

Donald Trump’s realtor-like fulminations about Gaza which he says should be freed of Palestinians “to clean it up” have given the story a dramatic twist, one which could lead to hairpin bends on a precarious climb.

Still, Trump’s intervention hopefully implies that he has jammed the wheels of Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloodied war machinery for now. Evicting Palestinians under Israeli bombardment doesn’t make a plausible script.

With a blend of characteristic intrigue and chaos, Trump also released the sale of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because “they had bought them”. The controversial transfer was stopped by the Biden administration in a gesture to lower civilian casualties.

The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have been calamitous in every humanly possible way and carry images from the hell that the Vietnam War was. And both current situations are struggling to hide the dressed-up frailty of American militarism.

A strong storyline being visualised for the second half of the movie is of the likelihood of abject retreat like Saigon or more tellingly like Kabul recently. Regardless, Gaza and Ukraine present two rather diverse though useful lessons.

In Gaza, far from appearing vanquished by the genocidal horrors perpetrated by the US through its Zionist proxy, the Palestinian militants have recruited 15,000 new fighters and are regrouping for the toil ahead, according to conservative Western intelligence estimates.

In Ukraine, on the other hand, where infinite quantities of Western treasure were poured in with high-end weaponry to “strategically defeat” Russia, we are witnessing another dismal failure by the US and Nato at defending their self-proclaimed turf.

The propping up of the European client has been prohibitive in men and material, making a farce of the Western treasure poured to keep the crumbling edifice from collapsing. In contrast to Gaza, able-bodied Ukrainians have dodged the draft for safer climes if they were not already dragged off the streets to the front lines kicking and screaming.

Anyone who has watched the celebrations amid the rubble to which the Gaza Strip has been reduced couldn’t have missed the link between joy and grief.

Anyone who has watched the celebrations amid the rubble to which the Gaza Strip has been reduced from 15 months of sustained bombardment couldn’t have missed the link between joy and grief.

The pain inflicted by Israel with its racist kindred spirit — after all Joe Biden called himself an old Zionist — dissolved into an amazing spectacle that Ghalib uniquely identified in a quaint verse: “Dard ka had se guzarna hai dawa ho jana” (pain having crossed the threshold of tolerance turns into its own healing balm.)

Seeing the Palestinian celebrations, one couldn’t miss the disciplined Kalashnikov-bearing Hamas militants ferrying joyous men and women in ramshackle trucks through the cheering maze in Gaza — arms-bearing militants, mind you, replete with the V sign they flashed to those who tried to annihilate them. They sent along a simpler message with the Israeli women hostages they released.

Compared to the Palestinian hostages (called prisoners by pro-Israel media) many of whom came out broken and dishevelled, the freed women were cheerful, beaming and above all in good health.

Each of the four freed women hostages on view was carrying a parting gift from Hamas, a bagful of memorabilia and messages embossed in Hebrew and Arabic asserting that Zionism would never succeed. That Palestine would be inevitably free.

“In terms of public opinion, the sight of masses of Palestinians gathering and cheering Hamas’ military wing and its slain commander, Mohammed Deif, was a success story. Through these pictures from Gaza City’s Palestine Square, Khan Yunis and Ramallah, Hamas seeks to shape Palestinian, Israeli and global consciousness,” wrote Israel’s left-leaning newspaper Haaretz.

Its story quotes a Khan Yunis resident whose home was destroyed and who claimed that the ceasefire heralded the failure of Netanyahu’s ambitions. The resident said he was not a Hamas supporter, but was convinced that the organisation is alive and well and that at this point, no other organisation — certainly not the Palestinian Authority — is capable of challenging its rule over Gaza.

“Israelis were already thinking about building settlements in northern Gaza and said that military pressure would get the hostages back,” he said. “But in the end, there’s a deal, residents are returning to northern Gaza and not one settlement has been built.”

On Boxing Day in December, veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh reposted an old piece from Vietnam, a story for which he earned many awards and countless fans. Hersh posted the Vietnam story in lieu of a column he planned for Gaza seeing similarities between the two.

It was Hersh’s description of Biden’s bitter last days, however, that brought to life the spine-chilling movie on Gaza and Ukraine. Two days after Trump’s victory, Hersh described Biden thus: “The president is no longer talking about his failed policy in the Middle East, though American bombs and other weaponry are still flowing to Israel and being put to deadly use.

“Biden is now trying to stem the losses in Ukraine’s war with Russia. … [He] gave the Ukraine government, headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, permission to fire a long withheld advanced American ballistic missile capable of hitting targets 190 miles [305 kilometres] inside Russia. Days later, he decided to provide Ukraine with landmines capable of maiming and killing all whose paths cross them, young and old, friendly and not.”

The second half of the horror movie begins with Donald Trump dressed as a real estate shark doing an aerial survey of the devastated homes and hearths below.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2025