A Land Without Peace: The Fragility of Life in Palestine

cw: sexual assault and genocide  

For Palestinians, who have endured 77 years under occupation, the notion of peace is a distant dream, overshadowed by cycles of violence and temporary ceasefires. A lifetime lived under siege, surveillance, and war. No Palestinian alive today has experienced lasting peace, only the illusion of it. Fragile and always on the verge of collapse.

For Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and in exile, peace has never meant freedom or safety. It has meant the temporary absence of bombing. It has meant a pause between tragedies – not the end of them. From the Oslo Accords of the 1990s to the brief and broken ceasefires of recent years, what the world has been sold as peace has always been a temporary reprieve from violence. That transience is not accidental. It is structural. It is political. It is designed.

Even in times that the international community labels ‘calm’, life under occupation is anything but. Kifeya Khraim, an international advocacy officer with the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, has spoken publicly about the gendered violence Palestinian women and girls endure at Israeli military checkpoints. She details how women are routinely subjected to sexual assault during searches and describes ‘infamous checkpoints’ where Israeli soldiers expose their genitals to women inside closed rooms. In one case, she recalls a 14-year-old girl being molested by male soldiers who touched her breasts under the pretext of a security search.

Anthony Bourdain’s visit to Gaza for Parts Unknown offered one of the few instances where mainstream Western media paused to listen, rather than lecture. He emphasised the importance of seeing individuals and their experiences rather than reducing them to numbers. A decade later, his quote ‘It’s right there for all to see and it feels like something out of a science fiction film. This is the wall…the Aida [Palestinian] refugee camp in the district of Bethlehem, it doesn’t feel like anything other than what it is: a prison’. Those words feel heavier now. The walls are higher. The attacks are deadlier. And the silence is deeper.

And yet, Palestinians continue to speak, even when no one wants to listen. On the 2024 International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Dr. Tanya Haj Hassan, a paediatric intensive care physician, stood before UN member states and read messages from people trapped in Gaza. One of them came from Saed, a nurse who had been detained and tortured. His words, read through her tears, were a direct and human plea: ‘We are being buried, every minute we are being buried. Every minute we disappear. Every minute we are abducted. We are experiencing things that the mind cannot even comprehend. We die and don’t find anyone to bury us. I’m asking you to share my story, my whole story, with my name. I want the whole world to know that I’m a human being. At the end, I’m not pen on paper. I’m not anonymous. I’m a human being created by God.’ His message is a refusal to be erased, a demand not just to be mourned, but to be remembered as a person. Not a statistic. Not a body. A human being.

In 2024 the documentary No Other Land, created by Palestinians and Israeli allies, received global acclaim for documenting the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian community in South Hebron. It won awards, including at the Berlinale and the Oscars. And then, it disappeared. The film is not available to stream. It cannot be rented or purchased. That erasure is not accidental. It is the machinery of silence at work.

But Palestinians are not silent. They have become the documentarians of their own survival. Journalists like Plestia Alaqad and Bisan Owda, and photographers like Motaz Azaiza, have shared Gaza’s devastation in real time, reaching millions of people around the world. They put names to the dead, captured the heartbreak of survival, and challenged the world to bear witness. In return, their posts have been removed, their accounts restricted, their visibility suppressed. Their truth is considered too disruptive, too raw, too politically inconvenient.

We must ask ourselves: whose interests do our governments serve? Our universities? This is not a conflict. It is not complicated. It is occupation. It is apartheid. It is settler colonialism. And it is enforced not only with tanks and bullets, but with silence and delay and distraction. Peace in Palestine has never been real. What exists is a manufactured quiet between massacres, a silence enforced by drones, checkpoints, soldiers, and fear. The question is not whether peace is possible. The question is whether the world will allow it to last.