Peace isn’t and shouldn’t be the silence after bombs
Date
October 27, 2025
A ceasefire is not peace. It’s a pause, a pause so the rest of the world can look away for a moment and call it progress.
It is not justice. It is not dignity. It does not remove checkpoints, demolitions, fear, or the everyday control that deny us our rights.
Sometimes, I wonder if the world really understands what we mean when we say we want peace.
Peace isn’t and shouldn’t be the silence after bombs, so that we can bury our dead and count the missing. That’s not peace, that’s just a pause. A ceasefire gives us a moment to breathe, to grief.
And yet, a part of me still dares to hope.
Hope that this year, maybe, we will have Christmas. Not the commercial kind with lights and gifts, but a moment where families can gather without fear, where children can sleep without nightmares, and where the sound of church bells or the mosques adhan are not mixed with drones overhead.
I realized that people around the world don’t even know that we Palestinians actually celebrate Christmas, or that it’s an official holiday. That Christmas here is Palestinian.
It is not an imported novelty. Bethlehem is here and so are our trees, our carols, our streetlights and church bells. In our cities you will see decorations, neighbors visiting each other, and the same rituals that mark the season everywhere. Only ours are wrapped in a different kind of resilience.
Our Christmas is a part of who we are. It’s Palestinian, shared between Christians and Muslims, because here, being Palestinian isn’t defined by religion. Our identity is built from common suffering and common love for this land.
When a family lights a candle in Bethlehem, it is a Palestinian candle, not someone else’s. So yes. Again, a ceasefire is not peace. But maybe this year we will have Christmas.
And maybe, just maybe, that will remind the world that peace, and Christmas is not a privilege, it’s a right.
If the world can recognize our Christmas as real not exotic or distant, but ordinary and Palestinian, then maybe it can recognize the rest of our ordinary rights too: to move, to work, to breathe.
And until then, it will remain only what it is: a pause, not peace.