Colin Sheridan: The one word missing from all this so-called talk of peace in Gaza is 'Palestinian'

The world may celebrate a ceasefire in Gaza, but without Palestinian agency and justice, peace remains an illusion

Palestinian children celebrate at a camp for displaced people in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday, following news of a new Gaza ceasefire deal. Picture: Eyad BABA / AFP via Getty Images

As someone — a non-Palestinian someone — who has written thousands upon thousands of words about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, today seems an odd time to suddenly fall silent. 

Because today is the closest we've come to “peace” after two years of the worst inhumanity man has shown to his fellow man. 

And that should be a cause for celebration, not scepticism. 

But if history has taught us anything it is simply this: Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs (beware Greeks bearing gifts).

A ceasefire, we are told. 

White doves circling the headlines. 

Relief agencies daring to exhale. 

Commentators reaching for the word “hope” like a long-mislaid lighter at the bottom of the drawer. 

But behind the fireworks of diplomacy, the question remains: who exactly has called time on this horror? 

And more to the point, who was consulted before the whistle blew? 

Because if there’s one word missing from the choreography of this so-called breakthrough, it’s Palestinian. 

The people, whose lives, homes, and futures have been flattened beneath the euphemisms of “security” and “defence” have, once again, been spectators to their own story. 

A ceasefire that arrives without their agency is no peace — it’s an intermission. 

A pause before the next act of subjugation.

We’ve seen this script before. 

Relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip celebrate after the announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan. Picture: AP /Ohad Zwigenberg

It’s written in the Oslo Accords, in Camp David, in the endless handshakes that made good television and bad reality. 

The same pattern: men in suits, some of them soon to be out of office, chasing a page in history while those in the rubble are not consulted. 

Gaza becomes not a homeland but a bargaining chip — a backdrop against which Western politicians can audition for sainthood. 

And now we have Donald Trump, looming once more like an over-lit extra who’s wandered onto the set. 

A ceasefire, coincidentally, just as his legal dramas and electoral campaign collide. 

A Nobel Peace Prize whisper drifting conveniently through the air. 

You can almost hear him rehearsing the acceptance speech — the same voice that once threatened to “wipe Iran off the map” now purring about “the art of the peace deal". 

If hypocrisy were a commodity, we’d never need oil again.

Then there’s Netanyahu. 

The man who’s made political survival an Olympic discipline. His premiership now so frayed that even the ghost of his legacy must wince. 

The elections on the horizon, the legal troubles nipping at his heels: what better time to rebrand himself as the reluctant peacemaker? 

It is, after all, a tradition in Israeli politics: when the walls close in, build new ones elsewhere.

But a ceasefire, in the narrow sense, is not peace. 

It is the silence that follows an air raid, not the rebuilding that follows justice. 

Even as headlines cheer the “end of hostilities”, the West Bank burns on, largely unmentioned. 

Two years of near-daily violence, raids, checkpoints turned execution sites — a slow bleed so normalised it barely flickers across Western consciousness.

Any “peace plan” that ignores that theatre of oppression is a peace plan in name only. 

Displaced Palestinians gather on the coastal road near Wadi Gaza after the announcement Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first phase of a peace plan to pause the fighting, as Israeli tanks block the road leading to Gaza City. Picture: AP /Abdel Kareem Hana

Gaza may fall silent for now, but Nablus, Jenin, and Hebron have not been offered a reprieve. 

The choreography is painfully familiar. 

Western diplomats applauding themselves for “bridging divides” while sidestepping the central truth: this was never a conflict of equals. 

One side holds F-16s and vetoes; the other holds the dead bodies of their children in plastic bags. 

To call that a negotiation is to mistake coercion for consent.

And yet the world, fatigued and yearning for good news, will embrace this with open arms. 

The same world that watched, livestreamed, and rationalised the slaughter will now speak of “the day after". 

We are told to doubt is to be cynical, that we must “give peace a chance". 

But the people of Gaza have given peace every chance it never deserved. 

History whispers warnings to those who will listen. 

The armistice of 1918 that paved the way for 1939. 

The “end of history” declared in 1989 that gave us the ruins of Mariupol. 

Injustice does not dissolve with signatures; it ferments like rotten fertiliser in a Beirut silo. 

Until it explodes, stronger, more embittered, more convinced of its own righteousness.

To truly end this, Palestinians would have to be authors of their own destiny, not footnotes to someone else’s campaign strategy. 

That would require moral courage — the kind that’s in short supply among those currently congratulating themselves in press conferences. 

So yes, today, the guns may fall silent. 

Children might, for the first time in months, sleep without the roof trembling above them. 

That alone is worth something sacred. 

But peace is not the absence of bombs; it’s the presence of justice. 

Until the world stops treating Palestine as a problem to be managed rather than a people to be freed, scepticism isn’t just warranted — it’s a moral duty. 

So, forgive me if I don’t wave a flag or post a dove emoji. 

I’ll believe in this ceasefire when the men who brokered it stop using Palestinian lives as stepping-stones to their own redemption. 

Until then, I’ll keep my applause on standby.

Because we’ve seen this movie before. 

And we know how it ends.