Living on the Frontline: What Kinmen and Gaza Teach About Peace Under Continuous Threat

Written by Hazem Almassry. 

Image credit: author.

The tunnel stretches ahead, carved into rock by soldiers who expected war to arrive any day. We’re walking through Kinmen’s military installations in September 2025, part of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s Taiwan Peace Fellowship. Our guide explains the engineering, the preparation, the decades these tunnels stood ready. Other tourists take photos. Children run ahead, their voices echoing off stone walls that were built for battle. 

Outside, I watch fishing boats move across the water that separates Kinmen from mainland China by less than two kilometres. You can see Xiamen’s skyline from here. During the shelling years, 1958 especially, this island absorbed hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. Now it’s a tourist destination. The threat that shaped everything here changed form, became something else. 

I’m Palestinian, from Gaza. I’ve lived in Taiwan for about ten years. Standing in Kinmen made something visible that I’d been circling without naming. 

Threat as Permanent Condition 

Kinmen remains a frontline. Military infrastructure stays functional even as it becomes heritage. People live full lives here – raising families, running businesses, building futures. Everything happens against ongoing militarisation, unresolved political status, proximity to potential war that never quite arrives and never quite disappears. 

In Big River, Big Sea, Lung Yingtai wrote about how the 1949 division created a generation marked by unresolved separation. Families split across the strait, losses that couldn’t be mourned properly, grief with nowhere to land. Kinmen shows what happens when that unresolved condition extends across generations. The separation persists. People adapted to living inside it. The wound didn’t heal. Life grew around it. 

Peace here means something specific. Threat absorbed into daily rhythms. Militarisation is treated as normal. Waiting has become a form of existence rather than a state you pass through. The tourists photographing gun emplacements seem unbothered by the contradiction – maybe because when the threat is continuous, contradictions stop feeling exceptional. 

Gaza’s Different Lessons 

Gaza taught me other things about living under continuous threat. The siege officially started in 2007. I left in 2014, before the genocide devastated everything. Even then, “peace” felt like a word from another world. 

The comparison with Kinmen requires care. Kinmen’s threat is deferred, mostly quiet, allowing normal life even while shaping infrastructure and psychology. Gaza’s threat has been immediate, violent, and has made normal life structurally impossible. One is a frontline in waiting. The other is a frontline where violence is active and relentless. 

Still, both contexts expose assumptions built into standard peace discourse. The assumption that you move from war to peace, from crisis to stability. That threat interrupts normal life temporarily and then ends. That “building peace” means transitioning from violence to its absence. 

Kinmen and Gaza both exist outside these categories. The threat is not temporary. It is the ground itself. 

In Kinmen, this produces specific adaptations. Life continues, development happens, futures get made — but the military presence stays, and strategic uncertainty remains unresolved. Taiwan’s relationship with China, Kinmen’s position as a potential battlefield: these are not problems moving toward a solution. They are conditions being managed indefinitely. That management works. People live well. The approach has prevented war from returning. But what it requires is visible: accepting militarisation, accepting division, accepting that pushing for resolution might trigger the very war one is trying to avoid. 

Gaza produced something else entirely. The siege meant restriction of movement, goods, and development. Bombardment came in cycles, predictable enough that people named them – 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now the catastrophe still unfolding. Between major assaults, the threat continued through the siege itself, through the slow violence of containment and dispossession. International discourse kept calling it “conflict,” implying symmetry. Kept talking about “peace process” while structural violence continued. The siege wasn’t counted as violence – it was background. The occupation wasn’t measured as an ongoing threat – it was context. The framework assumed negotiations could happen while the structure of domination remained intact, treated as given rather than as violence requiring address. 

What Peace Requires 

Both contexts reveal what peace often demands in practice. Kinmen’s stability requires accepting permanent militarisation, ongoing division, and strategic ambiguity that can’t be resolved. This acceptance isn’t failure. It’s how peace actually works under continuous external threat. People make real lives within these constraints. But the costs are visible if you look – the narrowed range of political possibility, the way certain questions can’t be asked because asking might destabilise everything. 

Gaza shows a different version. The structural violence – occupation, siege, dispossession, the systematic denial of political and economic freedom – gets excluded from peace frameworks entirely. International institutions treat these conditions as background. “Peace” means Palestinians accepting the structure while negotiations happen elsewhere, disconnected from material reality. The framework separates structure from violence, assumes peacebuilding begins after violence stops, in some cleared space. 

Both Kinmen and Gaza make that separation impossible to maintain. Where violence is structural, there is no “after,” no cleared space from which to begin again. The standard frameworks break down because they assume conditions that do not exist. 

The situations are not equivalent. Kinmen exists within a framework of deterrence and strategic ambiguity that has, so far, prevented war’s return. Gaza exists under occupation and siege, where violence is both structural and episodic, and where the governing logic is domination rather than deterrence. 

But both make visible what dominant frameworks conceal: peace, as actually practised and lived, often requires people to accept ongoing violence as the price of avoiding worse violence. And both raise difficult questions about what happens to politics, to imagination, to possibility when those are the only options available. 

Where This Leaves Us 

The Taiwan Peace Fellowship brought together people working across different zones and fields. We visited sites where Taiwan remembers its authoritarian past, grapples with ongoing geopolitical pressure, and tries to imagine futures under constraint. 

Kinmen didn’t give me answers. It sharpened a series of questions: 

How does one think about peace from within a continuous threat? What happens when standard frameworks fail to describe your reality? What remains when resolution is simply not available? 

Perhaps a different kind of thinking begins here. The categories we inherit — war and peace, crisis and stability, violence and its absence — do not capture what many people actually live. Recognising that may matter more than forcing reality into frameworks that were never made for it. 

I don’t know what peace looks like for Taiwan, for Palestine, for anywhere else living inside an ongoing crisis. The standard answers aren’t sufficient. Kinmen taught me that much. The question now is what becomes possible once you stop pretending that they are. 

Hazem Almassry is a Palestinian writer and postdoctoral researcher currently based at the University of Victoria, Canada. Originally from Gaza, he lived in Taiwan for nearly a decade. His research focuses on energy transitions, geopolitics, and structural violence. His memoir, Under the Jasmine Tree, is forthcoming from China Times Publishing in Taiwan.