Every time someone asks me how I feel about the ceasefire, all I can think of is: collective gaslighting.
Gaslighting about the meaning of peace, about ethnic cleansing, about a slow, well-engineered genocide, and about colonization itself.

One of the defining features of modern oppression is the battle over perception; the violence on the ground matched by a constant effort to reshape how that violence is understood, justified, or dismissed.

---

Narrative Control as a Political and Legal Strategy

Every colonial project relies on a story that makes domination seem reasonable. The language shifts, but the formula stays the same: the aggressor becomes the victim, the occupied becomes the threat, and massive, disproportionate violence becomes “self-defense.”

Controlling the narrative is strategic because it manufactures consent and reshapes how actions are interpreted under international law.

And the law is explicit:
Annexation is a crime. Collective punishment is a crime. Targeting civilians is a crime. Attacking medics and journalists is a crime. Blocking humanitarian aid is a crime.

So, the strategy becomes reframing these violations as “complex,” “necessary,” or “security driven.” Once this narrative is accepted, accountability collapses, and international law is neutralized through manipulated perception.

---

The Psychological Battlefield

Despite overwhelming evidence, the public is repeatedly encouraged to doubt what they see:

• Tens of thousands killed, including over twenty thousand children reframed as unfortunate but justified.
• Hospitals hit with 2,000-lb bombs dismissed as collateral.
• Ceasefires violated hundreds of times buried under security language.
• Neighborhoods erased blamed on “human shields.”
• Humanitarian aid blocked framed as logistics or safety concerns.

This is textbook gaslighting: deny the violence, minimize it, justify it, then blame the victims. The goal is to weaken the world’s ability to recognize reality even while watching it unfold in front of their eyes.

Gaslighting also targets the colonized themselves: their suffering is doubted, their testimony dismissed, their death tolls scrutinized more than the weapons that kill them, and their identity reframed as a threat.

This makes it nearly impossible for oppressed people to assert their own truth.
It is why documentation, journalism, and testimony become existential threats to colonial power and why journalists are killed at unprecedented rates.

---

Global Activism

This war on perception is not only about Gaza. It exposes deeper structural failures:

• Who is believed?
• Which deaths are mourned, and which become numbers?
• Who is granted self-defense, and who is denied even the right to exist?
• Who gets to define truth?

Activism now faces two fronts: violence on the ground and the violence done to truth.

People are not blind to what’s happening; the real struggle is whether they are permitted to name it.

When truth becomes a target, naming it becomes resistance.