The second challenge facing Netanyahu and Zelensky is dealing with the narcissist Trump

I detest using the term ‘paradigm’ or ‘paradigmatic’ outside its grammatical meaning, namely the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. Along with ‘suspended time’ and ‘emblematic’, it deserves Francesco Merlo’s guillotine – a highly effective tool for readers of *La Repubblica*, who are in desperate need of it (and not just them). So I shall not use it to describe the image of Zelensky and Netanyahu standing alongside Trump at Lindsey Graham’s funeral, whilst the sad little sycophant Sean Hannity evokes the late senator and Realpolitiker to suggest that, from heaven, he sees Mar-a-Lago as an extension of paradise. Feeling himself being praised (sic), Trump dozed off and occasionally handed out menthol sweets to Vance (Deputy) and Bessent (Treasury). The two – the Ukrainian and the Israeli – are epic champions of freedom and of civilisation’s resistance to barbarism, so different and so differently detested: one for the deep-rooted corruption in his heroic country, for the boldness with which he opposes the brutal master of the Western world’s troubled conscience, and the other for the brutality of the war in Gaza (a misguided, cynical moralistic calculation, an abject reversal of roles) and the forced alliance with the fanatical right in Jerusalem and the West Bank (understandable, as the settlers carve out their rights from the graves of others). The problem is that behind them, at the front during the funeral service, stands this greedy, narcissistic 80-year-old child at heart, who does not know what to think because he thinks exclusively of himself and perhaps of his loved ones.

What a fatal triangle. In order to survive as a Middle Eastern identity and democracy, Israel must confront the sole, the Iranian driving force, the Islamist and jihadist revolution in its pre-nuclear era, the monstrosity behind the seven battlefronts that sparked the events of 7 October, a nihilistic threat cast in the shadow of the forgotten Shoah and the new wave of anti-Semitism amongst the prevailing generational elites in Europe and even in America, at least in the mass imagination of the flotilla movement. Ukraine has been forced to confront – for a period that has now exceeded, or is about to exceed, the duration of the two world wars of the twentieth century – an autocratic, nuclear power ten or twenty times stronger than itself, which seeks to annihilate and annex it in alliance with that monster Kim Jong Un and with the Ayatollahs and Pasdaran of Tehran, under the sly watchful eye of the Chinese giant (not to mention the mythical and dissolute Putinist faction operating amongst us). The two are defending the exposed front line of what remains of civil liberties and rights, whilst those very freedoms and rights are being used to delegitimise them – indeed, to criminalise them – in the most callous betrayal of their and our causes, including those of feminism and the LGBTQ+ community, which are certainly not examples of supremacism.

Not everything, but a great deal, depends on Trump. And that’s all I’ve got to say, as Don Quixote and Peppino De Filippo used to sing. I know the old tune. America is always America; the system holds firm and corrects itself; presidents come and go, the Constitution remains, and so on. But put yourselves in those two men’s shoes. They have to constantly flatter a man thirsty for praise. Their second job – as if their first and most crucial one weren’t enough – is to go to court and provide the right information to a character who is at once comical, good-natured and despotic character, preoccupied with business, the price per gallon, propaganda, and his personal historical legacy – that is, matters which, compared to the Israeli and Ukrainian epics, are minor incidents in a history stretching back to the time of the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen colonies (ah, the colonists), the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet these are minor incidents that two states and two peoples – the righteous ones – must face, with the costs we are aware of, including for others: the civilian prisoners of the armed enemy, and the price we know is being paid by Jews and Ukrainians. A terrible paradigm.