Where Performance Politics Collides With Palestinian Reality
By Chick Titus
CBB News
The ceasefire in Gaza has been celebrated — at least by its principal architect, Donald Trump — as an epochal breakthrough. But for Palestinians still living through the wreckage, the trappings of diplomatic theater offer little solace. The gulf between what is proclaimed in stages and what unfurls in the bomb craters is growing ever wider.
Despite the fanfare, Israeli strikes have persisted. Humanitarian aid remains choked at the border. Families are still starving. While some hostages were freed — 20 Israelis in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinian detainees — the media spectacle around the exchange starkly underscores a long-standing double standard: Israeli captives are given names, faces, stories; Palestinians released remain nameless, voiceless. Meanwhile, Israel continues to bar international journalists from entering Gaza, raising grave suspicions about what it wants to hide.
From the start, the ceasefire announced in Egypt resembled political theater more than a binding accord. For Palestinians, it reads like a horror show masquerading as a diplomatic triumph. Whole neighborhoods lie in rubble; over a million displaced live in tents; many go without food. Israel, it seems, is applying pressure not only to Hamas but to the civilian population itself.
Trump hailed it as a "comprehensive" arrangement — a document of strict rules and enforceable provisions, he claimed. In reality, what was released was more akin to a statement of aspirations than a binding agreement. Notably, neither the Israeli prime minister nor Hamas leadership were present in the summit; instead, the final text read like a wishlist drafted in Washington.
Analysts and critics have been blunt: the “Sharm el-Sheikh” declaration is a string of diplomatic platitudes, flattering Trump’s ego while saying nothing concrete about ceasefire mechanics, timelines, enforcement, or accountability.
It would be naive to believe Trump has been suddenly converted into a force for peace. Less than two years ago, his administration actively armed and supported Israel’s campaign against Gaza. The summit in Egypt appears more a pageant than a turning point — a PR stunt allowing participating states to claim moral righteousness even as they supplied weapons and logistical support.
Any pause in hostilities sustained by such posturing is fragile. True leverage over Netanyahu would require persistent pressure — something Trump may not be willing or able to maintain. A temporary pause in violence does not warrant a Nobel Peace Prize — especially if the bloodshed resumes once the cameras leave.
From the outset, the ceasefire has been threatened. In Israel, key figures — including its defense minister — have publicly declared that military operations against Hamas tunnels will continue. A far-right finance minister warned against “shortsighted celebrations” and in the Knesset, the ceasefire’s approval was met with hesitation.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes have not ceased: strikes in Shajaya, Gaza City, reportedly killed civilians even after the deal was declared. The media blackout on Gaza is deeply alarming; it suggests Israel is determined to control the narrative. If journalists can’t go in, what remains unexamined may stay unchallenged.
The rationale for interrupting the ceasefire? Israel claims Hamas is hiding bodies of dead captives under rubble, and until those remains are recovered, the truce can be declared violated. But that argument is riddled with moral hazard: human remains becoming leverage to re-open the war. Israel is effectively weaponizing uncertainty to resume full-scale operations.
Perhaps most glaring is how Western media continue to amplify Israeli narratives. The release of 20 Israeli captives generated saturation coverage — profiles, photo galleries, emotional human interest stories. In contrast, the 2,000 Palestinians released from jails are largely unnamed, their stories untold. Their plight is framed as ordinary, expected — while Israeli captives are universalized as victims of injustice.
This pattern is systemic: BBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Deutsche Welle, AP — none are immune. The ease of telling Israeli stories is tied to powerful public campaigns, to Western identification with Israeli lives, to narratives of “our people held by terrorists.” Palestinian detainees, often held without trial for years, are normalized in many media narratives and reduced to numbers or abstractions.
Many of those Israeli “captives” were soldiers, yet in coverage they were often portrayed as civilians. The public is more likely to identify with a soldier returned home than with a nameless, faceless Palestinian.
Israel appears to use starvation as leverage, targeting Gaza’s civilians to pressure political concessions. The logic is cold but calculated. The humanitarian blockade, restricted access for aid, combined with military pressure, constitutes a visible strategy to degrade civilian life until political objectives are conceded.
Hamas counters that many bodies remain buried in rubble; they lack equipment and information to retrieve them. Israel, rather than negotiating or coordinating removal, frames civilian pressure as leverage. This is collective punishment. It is war by attrition.
Donald Trump, ever boastful, spent weeks lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize. But that nomination went unfulfilled — instead, it was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. In a surprising twist, Machado dedicated the accolade to Trump, praising his “decisive actions” in resolving conflicts and urging him to extend that influence to Venezuela and beyond.
On Fox News, she asserted that Trump had been pivotal in ending eight wars — a sweeping claim echoing his own rhetoric. Her dedication of the prize to him was, in many eyes, a political gesture: flattering to Trump, positioning her as a key U.S. aligned figure, and a message to the Biden administration to lean harder on Maduro. Machado’s moment is yet another page in the long history of U.S. backing for regime-change actors in Latin America.
In Venezuelan media, reactions were stark. Some outlets labeled her “coup plotter turned Nobel laureate,” denouncing her close alignment with U.S. policy. But in the shadowlands of international politics, her gesture offered Trump the aura of global legitimization.
Beyond peace deals and wars, a subtler shift is occurring within MAGA’s ideological machinery: the growing visibility of conservative women influencers. Traditionally, the right’s media presence skewed heavily male; podcasts, YouTube channels, political commentary were dominated by men. But the 2024 election signaled change: Trump made gains with female voters, and an emergent “womanosphere” has followed.
These women merge culture, politics, lifestyle, and identity into content — all with a right-wing spin. They offer feminist critiques from the right, embrace family and faith tropes, and package their beliefs as authenticity. At the vanguard is Brett Cooper, now 23, who launched her own show after time at the conservative media network The Daily Wire. Her blend of political commentary, hot takes, cultural critique, and aesthetic presentation has resonated deeply with Gen Z.
Cooper comments on hormonal birth control, “wokeism,” university culture, Hollywood scandals — all filtered through conservative thought. She's become a lightning rod: smart, provocative, relatable. But her presence also carries paradox: she affirms traditional roles of motherhood and family even as she appeals to women seeking public influence.
Some conservative women within the Trump administration — Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, Christine (Homeland Security) — occupy symbolic spaces. Their prominence is part performance, part political optics: show the administration has “credible women,” while reinforcing gendered politics of conservatism.
Within the womanosphere’s rhetoric is a critique of “boss feminism” — the idea that career, personal fulfillment, and family can all coexist without cost. Many influencers argue this promise was false: too many women are exhausted, childless, lonely. Their solution is nostalgia: return to the family, return to tradition, reject liberal feminism as unending disappointment. It’s a seductive narrative for disillusioned women who find themselves squeezed by structural inequalities, mental health pressures, and broken institutions.
But the right-wing alternative doesn’t necessarily address root causes: unpaid caregiving burdens, gender wage gaps, limited parental policies, childcare crises. Instead, it often asks women to retreat, not reform. In the race over cultural identity, the left must offer stronger, more grounded arguments for equality — not just critiques of the past, but visions of structural change that align autonomy with care, influence with justice.
In a final twist, a Washington Post investigation revealed that Israeli government agencies ran YouTube advertisements presenting Gaza’s food markets as plentiful. The images were shot immediately after Israel allowed limited supplies into the strip — yet prices remained beyond reach for most Palestinians. According to internal Google emails acquired by the Post, the company deemed the ads compliant with its policies, and instructed that future Israeli content asserting food abundance should not be flagged under Google’s misinformation or safety rules.
In effect, Google gave Israel a free pass to reshape public perception. The optics of abundance — stacked shelves, bustling markets — were broadcast globally, obscuring the reality of widespread hunger, rationing, blocked borders. Google and YouTube, therefore, became accomplices, allowing state-sponsored narratives to move unchecked.
Once more, truth becomes casualty of war. The Gaza that viewers saw in these ads was a mirage — a propaganda framing overlaid on starvation, rubble, and blockade.
What is clear is that the disparity between geopolitical gestures and lived suffering in Gaza remains stark. The ceasefire in name offers little protection for those still under bombardment. The release of detainees highlights media hierarchy: some lives matter, others do not. The international spotlight remains selective.
The celebration in Egypt was a spectacle. The PR optics for Trump, for the states that attended, for Israel — all leave room for plausible deniability down the road. But for Palestinians, the real test is ongoing: will aid reach them? Will hospitals reopen? Will rubble be cleared? Will the war resume?
The global community — and especially liberal media — must demand that the spotlight does not flicker off. The narrative must be expanded: to include the nameless, the displaced, the silenced. Because until we tell all their stories, we risk reducing human life to what can be televised — and in that reduction, many perish unseen.
That is the real peace test — not the plaques, not the signatures, not the applause — but whether theaters, schools, homes, lives can be rebuilt. Anything less is performance politics masquerading as pepeacemaking.
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