Dear Editor,
In the past fortnight, two columns in the Gleaner told Jamaicans what we ought to think about Israel. Jalil Dabdoub wrote of the keepsakes his Palestinian family carried to Jamaica and concluded that identity cannot be displaced (Dabdoub, 2026). Peta-Gay Ferguson, general secretary of the PNP Youth Organisation, wrote that because Jamaica did not walk out on Israel’s prime minister at the United Nations, our silence has become “indistinguishable from complicity” (Ferguson, 2026).
I am a young Jamaican. Neither Mr Dabdoub, nor Ms Ferguson, nor the PNPYO speaks for me. Like Everald Warmington, who told Parliament last month that no one speaks for him on reparations, I would like to speak for myself.
Ms Ferguson is right that small states depend on international law. That is exactly why it must be applied evenly. Vladimir Putin has been under an International Criminal Court warrant since March 2023. Where was the walkout for him? The ICC warrants she cites, issued in November 2024, also named Hamas’s military commander, Mohammed Deif. A principle applied to one country only is not a principle. It is a preference.
She also treats accusations as verdicts. No court has found Israel guilty of genocide. The International Court of Justice has issued only provisional measures, which it says do not prejudge the merits, and South Africa’s reply is not due until November 2027 (South African Presidency, 2026). Nor is Gaza’s crisis simply “deteriorating.” UNICEF’s own nutrition survey, conducted in June, found acute malnutrition among young children to be low, between 0.2 and 0.8 percent by area on the standard weight-for-height measure. Treatment admissions fell from nearly 17,000 at the August 2025 peak to under 3,000 by March (UNICEF State of Palestine, 2026). Every innocent death in this war is worth grieving. But grief is not served by claims that outrun the evidence.
And the international system she holds up as our moral compass does not meet its own standard. In 2023 Iran, which hangs protesters, was appointed to chair the UN Human Rights Council’s Social Forum (Völkerrechtsblog, 2023). In 2024 Saudi Arabia was elected unopposed to chair the UN Commission on the Status of Women (Jurist, 2024). Moral authority has to be earned.
I respect Mr Dabdoub’s family memory. But he has also called Jewish Israelis “generally recent colonists from Europe and America with no historical ties to the land” (Dabdoub, 2024). That is simply wrong. Nearly half of Israeli Jews, 48 percent, are Sephardi or Mizrahi, with family roots in the Middle East and North Africa (Pew Research Center, 2016). And Jews never left the land at all. Jewish memory runs just as deep, and it carries its own keepsakes.
The most hated people, finally home
Few peoples have been hated as long, or as widely, as the Jews. Babylon carried them into exile. Rome destroyed their Temple and renamed their land. England expelled them in 1290 and Spain in 1492. Russia’s pogroms hunted them, Iraq’s Farhud threatened to annihilate, and Nazi Germany murdered six million of them (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d.). Through all of it, Jews kept a remnant in the land and ended every Passover with the same prayer: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
In 1948 they finally came home. Three years ago this month, on 7 October 2023, Hamas reminded them why they need one, in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust (Anti-Defamation League, n.d.). Since then, 83 percent of Jewish students on US campuses report experiencing or witnessing antisemitism (Anti-Defamation League, 2025). The oldest hatred has found new words. It has not found a new target.
Let us live
I am proud to stand with them. Israel and Jamaica are kindred nations: young countries of many peoples, built on hard histories, that chose nation-building over the politics of grievance and now punch far above their weight. Israel’s anthem speaks of the hope “to be a free people in our land”; our motto answers, out of many, one people.
History also offers Jamaica a warning. Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait took in Palestinians and let armed Palestinian movements operate on their soil. In Jordan, those movements tried to kill the king and blew up hijacked airliners before the army drove them out in 1970 (ADST, 2015). In Lebanon, they built a state within a state that helped ignite a fifteen-year civil war (Fanack, n.d.). In Kuwait, the PLO backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion, and nearly 400,000 Palestinians were expelled (Middle East Quarterly, 2012). Jamaica must never become a base for movements that glorify terror. That is no charge against Jamaicans of Palestinian or Arab descent, whose families have helped build this country. It is a charge against ideologies.
I hope Jamaica will keep standing with Israel, and that we will disavow radicalism, of every colour, once and for all. Israelis have buried their children and still go to work, to school and to the beach, because they refuse to let hatred decide how they live. Like Israel, we the youth of Jamaica just want to live. Let us live!
I am,
Shanice Barrett
Student
