Cracked open

IN the summer of 1989, I was 17 and newly arrived at a summer school in New York, fresh from Kuwait, where the world had edges I thought I understood. I had grown up knowing, with the certainty that only the very young and the very sheltered possess, that Palestine was occupied. That this was not complicated. That the facts were the facts.

But my certainty had faces. There were Palestinian kids in my school; children of families who had been displaced, some who had never seen Palestine. They told you things. Not as political arguments but as facts of life, the way you might mention that your family couldn’t go home for the holidays. Except the home they couldn’t go to had been taken. I had seen the images of the First Intifada on the news — children with stones vs soldiers with rifles — and those images had names and textures for me because I knew people who knew those streets. My certainty was not innocent. It was built from testimony.

Then I met Jewish American teenagers for the first time.

What struck me was not hostility. It was the genuine, complete sincerity of a totally different story — one that had no Palestinians in it, or had them only as a threat. Theirs came from community, from history, from a terror of what had been done to Jewish people in Europe. Mine came from kids who had seen their grandparents’ houses get bulldozed. I didn’t have the language for that difference then. I just felt the collision but couldn’t quite put my finger on what was unequal.

Real antisemitism now has more room to breathe.

There was no social media to referee. No viral video to settle it. Barely cable news. Our silos were intact and invisible to us, the way silos always are from the inside. I left that summer unsettled in a way I couldn’t articulate. Not converted. But cracked open.

That feeling — of two genuine certainties colliding, one grounded in testimony and one in mythology — is something I have thought about all these years. With each passing year as a writer, I have seen how only one of those certainties was allowed to be spoken aloud without consequence.

For most of my adult life, to criticise Israel — not Jewish people, not Judaism, but the policies of a state — was to risk the accusation of antisemitism. It was, as journalist Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the worst thing you could be called. Nothing destroyed careers and reputations with greater certainty, speed or force. The charge didn’t need to be proven. It only needed to be made.

And then something shifted.

After Oct 7 and the assault on Gaza that followed, students set up encampments on America’s most elite campuses. They held vigils. They demanded divestment. And the response was swift — donors, politicians, and employers blacklisted graduates for the crime of holding a sign. At Columbia, at Harvard, at UCLA, the antisemitism charge was deployed not to protect Jewish students, but to shut down a conversation about Gaza. Jewish students who joined the protests were told they were self-hating. The charge had become so elastic it could be stretched to fit anyone.

That is when people started to notice. It had been so cynically weaponised to shield Israel that it had been utterly trivialised. The shift wasn’t coming from the fringes, it was coming from Jewish Voices for Peace, from Jewish members of Western parliaments, from commentators with no history of radicalism. It was coming from within.

What happens when that mechanism breaks? When the charge loses its force not because antisemitism isn’t real but because it was spent on silencing students, blacklisting graduates, shouting down anyone who loo­k­ed at Gaza and called it what it was? The consequences are not abstract. Real anti­s­emitism now has more room to breathe, precisely because the word has been so abused. That is not a progressive outcome. That was entirely avoidable.

And now we are somewhere none of this was supposed to lead to. A war with Iran, fought with American blood; a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say openly that it is being waged on Israel’s behalf, that the question ‘why are we fighting this war’ is one most American politicians still cannot answer honestly. But people are asking it. Loudly, and from places that cannot easily be dismissed. The narrative is cracking in the same way language cracks when it is pushed past what it can bear.

I think about those kids in New York sometimes. I wonder if the story they were given — sincere, complete, certain, with no Palestinians in it — still holds. I wonder if they watched what happened in Gaza and felt it begin, slowly, to crack. The way mine once did. Not in Gaza. Not in Kuwait. But in a classroom in New York, in 1989, sitting across from people who had never once had to put a face to the word ‘Palestine’.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2026

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