I Pray You Will Be Safe

“I wonder if you ever have questioned the validity of your state…Please tell your people to stop stealing our humanity and let us determine our fate.”

“I write to you of the harder days…but the truth is it feels almost shameful to mention these things to you after reading how hard you are fighting just for basic survival.”

The remarkable correspondence between two young women—one from Palestine and one from Israel—who developed an improbable friendship in the wake of October 7.

In the early months of 2024, journalist Dimitri Krier reached out to two young women: Tala Albanna, a twenty-year-old from Gaza City, Palestine; and Michelle Amzalak, a twenty-four-year-old from Sderot, Israel. Tala had never spoken to anyone from Israel; Michelle had never spoken to anyone from Gaza. Would they be willing to write to each other?

Hesitantly at first, Tala and Michelle began exchanging letters. Over the course of a year and a half, they opened up about their faith, their families, and everything they’d ever wanted to say to someone on the other side. They comforted each other; they trusted each other; and they shared clear-eyed reflections—including a conviction that the atrocities in Palestine served no one but those in power, and a realization that, if history could be rewritten, they might have had a very different relationship. With the keen insight of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza and the fierce testimony of The Eyes of Gaza, I Pray You Will Be Safe memorializes the border-transcending correspondence, and subsequent friendship, between two ordinary young women.