The ceasefire and prisoner exchange have burst onto our screens in a confusing array of images and clashing narrative frames, with commentators interpreting events differently depending on their geographic and political vantage points.
This essay analyzes the visual and rhetorical strategies surrounding the October 2025 prisoner exchange between Palestinian resistance factions and Israel, Donald Trump’s speech to the Israeli Knesset, and the summit in Sharm al-Shaikh. It exposes how optics are weaponized to invert reality — casting colonizers as peacemakers and resistance as terror — while suppressing Palestinian suffering, agency, and return. Through detailed critique of terminology, media choreography, and civilizational framing, the essay argues that these narratives enable impunity, obscure structural violence, and foreclose justice. It calls for dismantling not through counter-spectacle, but through restoration of what rightfully belongs to Palestinians. ….more
