The sight of emaciated, hollow-eyed hostages being steered across a platform by gun-toting barbarians in some sort of triumphalist display calls to mind memories of starving figures being liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The difference is that in 1945 the perpetrators had either been apprehended or were being hunted down, whereas in the current scenario Hamas exults in what it sees, incredibly, as a victory.

This, of course, is a delusion. Talk of victory and defeat in meaningless when two communities which have constructed their identities around the same piece of land are pitted........

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