When it happens to Palestinians…

I am back now, and it is exactly as I thought it would be.

The classroom feels smaller than I remembered, like the walls have moved closer while I was gone. Professor X assigns readings on constitutional interpretation, and I watch twenty-three students highlight passages about due process while Palestinians are denied the most basic right of all: the right to exist. The girl next to me underlines “equal protection under law” in yellow marker, and I wonder if she knows that phrase is meaningless when some lives are worth more than others.

“The framers intended,” someone says, and I stop listening. The framers intended many things, but they could not have intended for us to sit in air-conditioned rooms debating legal theory while children suffocate under rubble. They could not have intended for us to parse the meaning of justice while justice dies in real time, broadcast live, ignored by everyone in this room.

During breaks, I sit on the steps and watched them. They cluster in their familiar groups, talking about internships and weekend plans and whether Professor Y is a hard grader. Their voices float past me, a steady stream of nothing that matters.

“I’m so stressed about the bar exam.” “Are you going to the Football game this weekend?” “My parents want me to come home for Labor Day, but like, I have so much reading.”

I listen for something else, anything else. I wait for one of them to mention that children are being murdered while we debate constitutional amendments. I wait for someone to say the word Palestinian, or genocide, or even just acknowledge that the world exists beyond their study guides and social calendars. I wait for an hour, and then another, and I hear nothing.

In another class, we discuss mens rea and actus reus, the guilty mind and the guilty act. Professor Z explains how intent matters, how knowledge of wrongdoing affects culpability. I think about my classmates’ guilty minds, their knowledge of genocide coupled with their deliberate choice to say nothing. I think about their guilty acts of scrolling past videos of dying children to double-tap vacation photos. But this kind of guilt will never be prosecuted. This kind of crime never sees the inside of a courtroom.

“Can someone give me an example of willful blindness?” Z asks.

I could give twenty-three examples right here in this room, but I stay quiet.

This is my new reality. Sitting in rooms with people who revealed themselves to be the kind of people who would have looked away during any other genocide. Listening to them complain about reading assignments while Palestinians are denied the right to read anything ever again. Watching them stress about internships while Palestinian children will never have the chance to worry about their futures.

The loneliness is not in being alone. The loneliness is in being surrounded by people who chose to be strangers to their own moral obligations. It is in sharing space with those who had the chance to speak and chose silence, who had the opportunity to care and chose comfort, who had the moment to act and chose nothing.

At the coffee shop, I overhear a conversation about whether the new professor is mean. At the library, someone complains that their laptop is slow. In the dining hall, a group debates which Netflix show to binge next. Normal life continues, mundane concerns persist, and the world beyond their bubble might as well not exist.

The hardest part is not their cruelty. It is their comfort with it. It is how easily they moved on, how quickly they forgot, how completely they have convinced themselves that their silence was not a choice. They live their lives as if Palestinian children were not buried alive while they read for evidence.

I am back now, walking through classrooms where professors teach about human rights while ignoring the most basic human right being violated in real time. I am surrounded by people who think my people’s elimination is too complicated to have an opinion about, whose cowardice proved stronger than their morality.

And I still carry shame that i must even share the same air.

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