“Pakistan as a Missing Headline”, Pakistan
, November 28, 2025
“AFTER THE BLOOD RITES INVOLVING some of the most aggrieved as well as aggressive in history, a closure is in sight. The day after peace in Gaza may be fragile and the remains of the hate unforgiving. Still, the battleground has been replaced by the charred earth struggling to rebuild a future. The defeated may not have abandoned the politics of hate for the simple reason that scriptural revenge continues to power Hamas; the idea of Palestine is no longer separable from the inevitability of jihad as the darkest pursuit of justice in our times. The story of closure in Gaza is written by memories of denials and deprivations.
Ukraine, too, is swinging between hope and fear as closure becomes a possibility. What really stops the indefatigable fighters of an invaded country from accepting the terms of ceasefire is the intention of the invader. In the craft of peace-making, the perceived winner is entitled to more power at the table. On Ukraine, the deal maker in Washington is by nature an appreciator of brute power, not a sentimentalist who stands by the little guy still defending his country, which has already suffered immense personnel and territorial loss. A peace formula, in Putin’s imagination, includes capitulation and humiliation of a badly mangled Ukraine. That Kyiv has not fallen into the Russian trap tacitly approved by Trump is a measure of how deep is a battered little nation’s determination to be alive on its own terms.
What matters now is not the nature of the peace plan itself but the willingness to talk. Putin may be on a mission to reclaim a lost empire through Soviet methods but without communism, which has been replaced by grievance-fuelled nationalism. Ukraine, for him, is a lie born in the aftermath of an imperial meltdown, which was in a way like the benefactors of Hamas seeing Israel as a lie legitimised by a colonial conspiracy. In a convergence of national conservatives’ detachment and Trump’s macho internationalism, Russia’s grievance, no matter how much enemy land it needs to feel good, is more genuine than Ukraine’s victimhood. Both sides have now realised that a conversation about their future cannot be postponed further, and Trump has acknowledged the limits of American power in influencing places like Ukraine where the purpose of nationalism is not to feed paranoia. Peace is now a shared goal despite the setbacks……”
Read full article at openthemagazine.com
