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........

© Dawn