NEXT YEAR IN GAZA? A STORY OF THE THREE FACES: PUTIN, WEISS, BARGHOUTI

Such a flawless combination of evil and naivety can exist

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(Picture: Pyramid of Skulls (1898-1900) by Paul Cézanne; Paul Cézanne,

We are bombarded daily by grisly details of the horrors in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan... No wonder we are gradually becoming insensitive to this type of news, their horrors losing the power to shock us. Ten children killed in Gaza – so what? Yesterday it was 20! Long analyses are also getting repetitive and boring: although new key details are appearing, like clear signs that Israel knew about the forthcoming October 7 attack and allowed it to justify the creation of Great Israel, analyses basically retell the same story again and again (for the simple reason that the same story is going on). So what if we change our approach and focus on an apparently minor detail which, like a Freudian symptom, tells a lot about our global situation: the expression of the faces accidentally caught on camera, the faces of those who are part of the ongoing horrors.

Let's begin with weird changing facial expressions of Putin when he appeared with Trump in front of the press at the end of their Alaska meeting, with journalists trying to catch their attention, shouting questions at the two big war criminals, mostly about the prospect of the war in Ukraine.¹

The first thing that strikes the eye is the contrast between Putin and Trump who stands at his side – it is as if they exchanged their usual roles. Trump is much more subdued, trying to maintain some kind of dignified appearance of a serious negotiator, while Putin acts in a relaxed way, making faces that pass from anger to laughter. This is how the clear winner of the summit behaves: slightly annoyed, not really caring about appearances, while Trump desperately acts as if he is a partner in a dialogue of equals – this is how the loser acts. Putin's triumph is clearly signaled by the fact that Trump, the alleged neutral mediator in the conflict, spoke like Putin and said in one of his later reactions that "peace now depends on Ukraine." Another thing to note is that, even if no big result will follow the summit, Putin not only was given a reception as a superpower-leader but obviously again established with Trump a relationship of comradeship that is totally missing when Trump meets Zelensky or Western European leaders – for Putin, Trump was certainly not a neutral mediator trying to mediate between the two sides in conflict. Although Trump pretended to act as an ally of Ukraine and the EU trying to make a deal with the common enemy, his effective behavior was that of a Daddy Cool who made the deal with his ambiguous enemy-partner and was now engaged in making his unruly children see the necessity of the deal.