Michelle and Tala, a dialogue that gives hope

Dimitri Krier is a journalist for the French weekly 'Nouvel Obs', is 26 years old and went to the Middle East after 7 October 2023 to follow the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Places where around 60 per cent of the population is under 30 years old. That is why Krier turned his attention to the youngest. More: he had the idea of giving them a voice by involving them in writing. An emotional and political experiment - four articles by two Israelis and two Palestinians - from which this book was born.

In fact, Krier succeeded in the feat of getting a 20-year-old girl from Gaza, Tala Albanna, and a 24-year-old girl from Sderot, Michelle Amzalak, to talk to each other during the bloodiest months, from March 2024 to July 2025. Both are studying law: only twelve kilometres physically separate them. And yet, it is a world. That emerges from the 14 letters of the correspondence mediated through WhatsApp by the journalist, who asked them both to use respectful language: the aim is to get to know each other's point of view, to discover life on the other side of the wall, to meet with words and - who knows - to understand each other. Without any pretense in an everyday life in which one is brought up to hate, even though this is not their case: to embark on this experience, they inevitably have the sensitivity of those who do not consider resorting to force as a solution. It is no coincidence that Tala's father, who worked in the Gaza administration, was fired by Hamas, and Michelle's father is a staunch pacifist. The protagonists begin to share moments of their days, they tell each other about their families, their distant origins (they realise with amazement that they have common roots in Jaffa), their studies, the pain of bereavement. One forced to leave her home in Gaza and live encamped, with the public baths hotbeds of epidemics and the struggle to secure food; the other moved to the centre of the country from Sderot, who when she leaves home unconsciously calculates the distance to the nearest missile shelter, now that rockets are raining down from Lebanon as well. "How long can we live like this?" she asks herself, as the Israeli military offensive intensifies.

The senselessness of it all, the discouragement and sense of loneliness do not preclude, in the exchanges, space for the telling of the dreams they cultivate, including the one that seems impossible: not two peoples two states, but together in a land to which they are so attached. There is nothing rhetorical in these letters: it is the suffered dialogue of those who are untouched by the logic of power or religious extremism. In a tragic situation, it allows a glimpse of hope.

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Tala Albanna, Michelle Amzalak