Emily is a Junior in high school who splits her time between the Jewish city of Netanya and the Arab town of Nazareth. This piece is titled “Reflections”
As little kids, the world promised us a safe future, as if they could guarantee us one, maybe in the long run.
As a teenager, all I witnessed was a world divided into two parts:
One for ones who hold sovereignty and strive for ruthlessness, and the other is an audience with crossed legs, eyes wide, jaw dropped with zero actions.
The world treated the conflict as a piece of art, the blood its artists had on their hands was just a red paint, the kind of piece people visit the gallery to see once a year, or once a decade. “More replicas” is what the gallery wanted to create.
We got used to the bomb alerts and rockets flying above our heads became our routine like it’s something we ought to normalise. Was it all a sacrifice?
They call them hostages, we call them innocent lives trapped in a nightmare they never signed up for. They call it genocide, we call it erasing history and the spirits of its ancestors from their land. The kind of history that no propoganda will prohibit us to carry until the light no longer enters our eyes, until the last breath our lungs will hold on to.
Lack of peace leads to lack of lives. But the world wants to put the theme of peace in the largest of billboards on one condition: that they define it in their own way. We want peace, but the next day on one side there is death and grief and on the other there is fear and sounds of bombs here and there, everywhere. How many masks should a person put on to have the urge to say that there is peace when the word is not used for its meaning in the first place?
Speeches here and there, that get a round of applouse so loud we forget the sound, that sound of bombs and crying. Of traumas and scars that will never heal.
Today the little kids shall arise from the bottom of our souls to remind the world of the false promises we have fallen for.
Debate for Peace 