Come, I’ll buy you a coffee. What they call a truce is structural violence under another name, and I want us to look together at how the staging is put together.
You, who paused here. In the midst of everything that today was demanding your eyes, you chose to stay for a moment on this page. I don’t take that for granted. I know how hard it is to stop today, and I know you could be anywhere else. So before anything else, I want to thank you for being here.
Come, sit with me for a moment. I want to show you something, and I don’t want to show it to you from afar, with the cold distance of someone who reports. I want us to look at it together, you and I, on the same side of the window. A few days ago, Doctors Without Borders published a report that seems simple and is not. It says that, nine months after the ceasefire in Gaza, what we call a truce is not a truce. It is, plainly, structural violence under another name. It does not dismantle the mechanisms of violence; it normalizes contempt for Palestinian life.
I know the phrase sounds like jargon. Give me your trust for a moment and you will see it is not: it is one of the most precise keys we have to understand what is happening. Do you dare to look beyond the word with me? Because the whole trap, you will see it with your own eyes, is in the word.
Let’s begin with something you may already suspect, even if you have not yet said it out loud. If they stopped shooting, why are people still dying? Hold on to that question. It is yours and it is common sense, and yet beneath it lies half a century of thought that will allow us to answer it together, without lying to ourselves. Let me introduce you to the one who will accompany us on this journey.
Johan Galtung was a Norwegian sociologist and mathematician, born in 1930 and deceased in 2024, often called the father of peace studies. In 1959 he founded in Oslo the first institute in the world dedicated to studying peace scientifically, and a few years later the first academic journal in the field. His decisive break was against an idea that seems obvious: that peace is simply the absence of war. Galtung showed that this is only half of it. He called it negative peace: when weapons fall silent. And opposed to it he placed positive peace: when the structures that distribute life and death stop killing.
Pause here with me for a second, because everything else lives in this hinge. If a ceasefire silences weapons but leaves intact the mechanisms that continue taking lives, then we have reached negative peace without touching violence. That, exactly that, is what Doctors Without Borders is saying. The fire fell silent and death did not.
Now then, what violence are we talking about if no one is shooting? Here Galtung gives us the sharpest tool. In 1969 he proposed a definition of violence that today seems natural and at the time was a revolution: there is violence whenever a human being is prevented from realizing what they could potentially be, when that distance between the possible and the real was avoidable. Violence, then, is not only the blow. It is the avoidable gap between the life someone could have and the life they are allowed to have (Galtung, 1969).
Think about it with the example he himself gave. If someone died of tuberculosis in the 18th century, it was a tragedy, not violence, because there was no cure. If someone dies today of tuberculosis, with a cure and the means to deliver it, that is no longer fate: it is violence. Someone, or something, stood between that person and the life that was possible.
With this definition in hand, look again at Gaza. Doctors Without Borders documents that, since the ceasefire was announced on October 10, 2025, 1,185 Palestinians have been killed and 3,816 injured. The organization translates it into an image you will not be able to shake: approximately one Palestinian killed or injured every hour and twenty minutes, for nine consecutive months (Doctors Without Borders, 2026). According to UNICEF, more than 265 of those killed were children (UNICEF, 2026). Is this the absence of war? It is, in the poorest and most cynical sense of the term. The weapons officially fell silent. And the avoidable gap between possible life and real death continues to widen every eighty minutes.
And now that we have the figure, I want you to leave the figure for a moment and look. Look, pay attention, like this, over there. Do you see her? That little girl coming from the refugee camp. It is the third time I see her pass today. She wears shoes that are too big for her, huge sandals, and that empty container in her hands. She is waiting for water. They said the water truck would come today. Many come and go, they peek, they wait, they leave, and the truck does not arrive. But she caught my attention precisely because of that, because those sandals are so big for her, and because even so she seems like an expert jumping with them among the rubble, as if the broken world she was given were the only ground she has ever known.
And yes, what you see up there, those buzzing points flying, are drones. Everyone fears them. You never know which one will be the deadly one. But you have to take the risk anyway, because you have to go get water, because without water you cannot live, and so you go out, you walk under the buzzing, you hold your breath. That little girl should be about seven years old. But she looks much younger. She looks smaller than she is. And that, you and I now know, has a name: it is the malnutrition that Doctors Without Borders speaks of. The body that does not grow because the structure decided it would not grow.
You know, my soul is already hurting. I know yours is too. If you want, go get a coffee; I need one too. My steps also feel heavy when I later close this page and go out into the real world, the one of quiet streets where no one moves any lines. Take that moment. Breathe. I will wait for you here. Because what comes next I do not want you to read in a hurry.
Ready? Come, let’s continue.
Here Galtung sharpens the instrument, and this is the heart of what I want us to see. He distinguished two forms of that violence. One has an actor you can point to: someone shoots, someone strikes. He called it direct violence. The other has no visible subject pulling the trigger; it is embedded in the structure itself and manifests as unequal distribution of power and, therefore, of the chances of staying alive. That is structural violence. There is no identifiable executioner, and yet people die on the date the structure decides.
And its most dangerous trait, pay attention to this, is that by having no face it tends to be read as if it were nature. As if things were simply like that. When Doctors Without Borders lists the confinement of nearly two million people to less than thirty percent of the Strip, the blockade of humanitarian aid turned into a bargaining chip, the expulsion of international organizations whose registration Israel revoked —MSF itself among them—, the yellow line that moves west when Israeli forces decide, without warning and without negotiation, it is not making a list of incidents. It is describing a structure. A structure that produces avoidable deaths. And a structure that produces avoidable deaths is, in Galtung’s exact vocabulary, violence, even if at that moment no bomb is falling.
Let the structure show you its most intimate face, because numbers can anesthetize and here we cannot afford that. A mother told Doctors Without Borders teams that her fourteen-year-old son, with Down syndrome, was shot five times by Israeli snipers near the yellow line while playing next to his home. That day there was, in the language of statements, no combat. There was a child playing. There was a line he could not read because no one marked it, a line that moves when others decide. And there were five shots. You tell me if that is peace. You tell me what you would call it if you did not have to mind your language.
That child is direct violence: the act with its actor, its date, its time. But the line that exposed him, the one that shifts west without negotiation, that is the structure. And there is still the third vertex missing, the one that closes the circle and brings us back to the beginning, to the word.
In 1990 Galtung completed his triangle. To direct and structural violence he added a third: cultural violence. It is that layer of symbols —language, ideology, religion, science, the media— that serves to make the other two violences seem right, or at least not entirely wrong. It is what makes the intolerable appear acceptable. Galtung described precisely how it operates: it changes the moral color of an act, takes something that in red would read as a crime and repaints it green, or at least a tolerable yellow. And it does something more: it makes reality opaque, so that we no longer see the violent act as violent. Or we do not see it at all (Galtung, 1990).
Recoloring and obscuring. Hold on to those two operations, because they are exactly what the word ceasefire does.
Here let me lend you the lens with which I learned to read power, the lens of signs. A term like ceasefire does not describe: it presupposes. In its very grammar it carries an assumption that whoever says it does not need to state and whoever hears it accepts without question: that there was fire and that it ceased. And that is the most effective place of the discourse of power, because what is presupposed is not put to the test. It slips underneath, into the zone that language takes for granted. When Doctors Without Borders documents 1,185 deaths in nine months, it is not arguing against a statement: it is dismantling a presupposition. The one that the fire, in fact, ceased.
And there is a second movement, what Roland Barthes called naturalization: the operation by which the sign transforms history into nature (Barthes, 1957/1999). A political decision —to confine two million people to thirty percent of the Strip, to move a line when convenient, to fold aid into phases of negotiation— is presented, under the name ceasefire, as a state of affairs. Almost like a climate. It stops being read as something someone does and becomes something that simply is. This connects exactly with what Galtung warned about structural violence: by having no face pulling the trigger, it tends to be perceived as part of the order of the world. And cultural violence, through the name, completes that invisibility. Not only does the structure lack a visible executioner: the symbol that wraps it presents it as its opposite. The structure kills and the name promises peace, and both sustain each other.
And do not think this is exclusive to Gaza, because if it were I would not have asked you to sit down. Institutional euphemism is a governing technique as old as power. Pacification. Normalization. Operation. Collateral damage. A whole family of words whose function is not to inform you but to recolor what you see. Ceasefire belongs to that lineage. Once you learn to recognize it, you cannot stop seeing it, and that is precisely the small and dangerous freedom I wanted to share with you.
Now we have the whole triangle, and we can look at it fully. Direct violence is the attack on the funeral, the child hit five times next to his home: the act with actor and time. Structural violence is the system that produces avoidable deaths without the need for a specific attack: the blockade, the confinement, the expulsion of those who provide aid, the disease allowed to spread in overcrowded tents. And cultural violence is the name that takes that system and passes it off as its own overcoming.
That is why, when Doctors Without Borders says this is not a ceasefire, it is structural violence under another name, it is making the exact opposite gesture of cultural violence. Instead of recoloring, it de-colors. Instead of obscuring, it makes transparent. It strips the sign of its legitimizing function and returns the structure to everyone’s view. And there, you and I saw it together, appears the thesis I wanted us to reach without my having to impose it: removing the euphemism is not an ornament of the craft nor a pose of peace journalism. It is its central political act. It is the only thing that interrupts the operation by which a structure that continues killing is read as if it were its end.
And now, before you get up and return to your things, let me give you a hug. A real one, with all the soul, the kind given when two people looked together at something difficult and did not look away.
You know, those who are no longer here —and those hundreds of thousands of children who did not get to grow up, who will not play again near any home— have you and me. They have us and many others who, like you right now, pause from time to time in the midst of everything to bring them back to life for a moment and return to them the only thing we can still give: their dignity, and the truth of what happened to them, spoken by its name, without recoloring, without obscuring.
Thank you for staying. Thank you for looking with me. Now we are two who are not deceived by the word. And two, believe me, are already a beginning.
References
Barthes, R. (1999). Mythologies (H. Schmucler, Trans.). Siglo XXI Editores. (Original work published 1957)
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301
Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343390027003005
Doctors Without Borders. (2026, July 28). Gaza: This is not a ceasefire. It is structural violence by another name. Doctors Without Borders. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-not-ceasefire-it-structural-violence-another-name
UNICEF. (2026, June 19). A child a day: The deadly illusion of Gaza’s ceasefire [Press release]. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/geneva-palais-briefing-child-day-deadly-illusion-gazas-ceasefire
