Ayala Reznik

A comment on the Palestinians and Israeli conflict made by a Palestinians and Israeli Students – Jana Ghayalini and Ayala Reznik.

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For a near century Palestinians and Israelis have held on to the tangled web of conflict. This web – weaved well before the Six-Day War and even before the creation of the State of Israel, as many mistakenly believe – is comprised by a cumulative sense of anger, resentment, hatred, fear, and above all by a pervasive unwillingness to accept the ‘other’. With each passing generation that begins to release this web – not in an attempt to let go of it, but because the hand that holds it begins losing its grip – the hand of the next generation rises in its place and grabs hold of it; and with each generation, the web becomes heavier and more tangled, laden with the anger, the fear, and the blood of its predecessor. And so we carry this weighty burden and stare at this tangled web of conflict in dismay, rather than striving to look beyond it, into the eyes of the ‘other’, to abandon it and join hands – hands that can be used for constructing, rather than for stubbornly grasping on to a web knotted with destruction.