Returning to classrooms with people who marched for every cause except Palestine.

“I’m sorry.” A little phrase, and an empty one. It does not come close to what is happening. It allows them to gesture at sympathy without ever carrying the devastation themselves. It protects them from the kind of pain that would consume them if they let themselves feel it. Maybe they believe those words can offer something, but they cannot. They only serve the speaker, never the people they are spoken to.

Next week I start school again, and I find myself staring at my phone, scrolling through the same names I’ve seen for months. The ones who made sure to keep the world updated on their analysis of ‘Love Island’ or what meal they had at a basic Miami tourist trap. The pasta at Carbone made the cut, but emaciated bodies didn’t.

These are the people who posted black squares for George Floyd but stayed silent while 18,000 Palestinian children were murdered. The ones who filled their bios with Ukraine flags. The ones who marched for Stop Asian Hate. The ones who railed against Trump from the comfort of their ivory towers and Starbucks cups. They could speak with passion about every other injustice, but when my people were starved, bombed, and buried alive, they had nothing to say. The ones I thought I knew, the ones I am ashamed to have ever called friends.

I keep rehearsing conversations that have not happened yet. Someone will ask how my summer was, and I will have to decide whether to tell them I spent it watching children choke on rubble or pretend I am happy. Someone will ask if I am excited for the new semester, and I will have to choose between honesty and the performance they expect from me. Someone will ask how I am doing, and I will not know if they are asking because they care or because they have already forgotten that Palestinians exist at all.

How do you face people who watched genocide happen and said nothing. How do you sit in the same classroom as someone who liked vacation photos from Tel Aviv while Palestinian children were being sniped by Israeli soldiers. How do you make small talk with people who think your people’s elimination is too complicated to have an opinion about, or whose cowardice is stronger than their morality.

The worst part is knowing that some of them will act like nothing happened. They will greet me with the same empty enthusiasm, complain about professors, invite me to parties, talk about how stressful their lives are while many carry the ongoing acts of watching Palestinians be exterminated. They will expect me to be normal, to laugh at their jokes, to care about their problems, to pretend that their silence did not betray exactly who they are.

How are you? The question that is coming, the one I dread most. “I’m fine” is the easiest lie, the one that lets everyone move on without having to confront what their silence cost. “I’ve been better” opens a door I am not sure I want to walk through, because it requires them to care enough to ask why. “How do you think I’m doing” forces them to acknowledge what they have ignored, but it also assumes they have enough shame left to feel it.

Maybe I will tell them the truth. Maybe I will say that I am not okay, that I have not been okay for months, that I will not be okay as long as my people are being murdered while the world watches and does nothing. Maybe I will ask them how they sleep at night, how they scroll past videos of dying children and feel nothing, how they manage to care about their midterm grades while Palestinians are being buried alive. Or maybe I will say nothing at all. Maybe I will let the silence stretch until they realize they have to live with what they chose, until they understand that some things cannot be forgiven or forgotten or smoothed over with casual conversation.

Maybe I will ask them instead… How are YOU? How are you okay living with yourselves? How are you fine knowing you watched and said nothing? How do you wake up every morning and move through the world with the comfort of silence, with the knowledge that you had the chance to speak and chose not to? How are you able to carry that absence without it crushing you the way generations have been crushed while you lived, slept, dreamed?

But I will be there next week, walking into classrooms where professors will assign readings about human rights while ignoring the genocide happening in real time. I will sit next to people who think Palestinian lives are a political opinion rather than a moral fact. I will participate in discussions about justice and democracy while living under a system that has decided my people do not deserve either.

The hardest part is not the strangers who never pretended to care. It is the people I trusted, the ones who revealed themselves to be the kind of people who would have looked away during any other genocide. Their friendship was conditional. Their morality had limits. Their silence was a choice they made over and over again every single day.

How are you? They will ask. But I will have the memory of who they showed themselves to be. And I will carry the shame of ever having known their names.

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