Even close friends texted me:

“Why do you keep posting about Palestine? Does it really do anything?”

“Will you keep posting? Isn’t it done now?”

“Thank God it’s over”

But for Palestinians, there was no turning point. There was only rubble, hunger, trauma, and silence.

The ceasefire might have stopped the bombs temporarily, but it didn’t stop the occupation. It didn’t bring back the thousands killed, the homes erased, or the generations left to grow up under Siege. Still, for many in the West, this moment signals emotional closure. The bombs stopped, therefore we can stop caring.

This is what we mean when we speak of white innocence: the ability to disconnect from violence the moment it no longer disrupts white comfort.

A ceasefire does not mean peace. It means the West can exhale again. It means timelines return to normal, the free palestine posts turn back to selfies, and the news cycle moves on.

This desire for closure is not neutral, it is colonial. It assumes the West holds the authority to decide when a conflict begins and when it ends. The same powers that armed, funded, and justified Israel’s genocide now brand themselves as mediators of peace.

When the world applauds a ceasefire while Gaza remains an open-air prison, it performs empathy while preserving oppression.

Language reinforces this performance. Western media calls Israelis hostages and Palestinians prisoners. One word difference, and an entire moral hierarchy is established. To be a hostage is to be innocent. To be a prisoner is to be guilty. This is not reporting; it is storytelling that protects power.

Even now, major outlets warn that Hamas is “using the ceasefire to regroup.” Rarely do they question how Israel uses every pause to rebuild its military dominance, expand settlements, and rebrand its global image.

The same pattern repeats: condemn Hamas, humanize the IDF, and call it “balanced journalism.” What is truly being balanced here are the scales of moral acceptability; deciding which counts violence, and whose right to resist is deemed legitimate.

Because make no mistake: resistance has never been tidy. Revolutions have never been polite. The history of liberation, from Algeria to South Africa, from Vietnam to the Americas, has always been framed as “violent” by those invested in maintaining order. But order, in colonial logic, means obedience.

When the colonized fight back, their rage is called terrorism. When the colonizer bombs hospitals, it’s called defense. The violence of the oppressed is hyper-visible; the violence of the oppressor is structural, normalized, invisible.

To speak of peace while condemning only one side’s violence is to take a side, the side of power.

The West’s obsession with peace without justice mirrors its colonial legacy: impose solutions, celebrate itself, and ignore the people still bleeding.

A decolonial understanding of peace demands more. It demands we name the occupation. It demands we reject two-state “solutions” that erase sovereignty. It demands we center Palestinian voices, not Western saviors.

Real peace will never come from negotiations between colonizer and colonized, but from dismantling the structures that made colonization possible in the first place.