RedOvechkin1948

                    Iranian missiles light up the Tel Aviv skyline during the June 2025 Israel-Iran war "After they have burned my homeland, my friend and my youth / how can my poems not turn into guns?" So muses the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, whom Mohammed El Kurd quotes from in " Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal ." El Kurd returns the to this refrain a number of times throughout the book, elsewhere writing: "it's hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun (189)." Fair enough. But as far as books do go, this is a good one. And it blows out of the water a lot of other writing about Palestine, at least compared to other books that circulate in mainstream, Western circles. Anyway, these are the notes I scratched down after finishing the book, which I read while skulking around my girlfriend's parents vacation house in Colorado, miserably trying to explain to my girlfriend the connections between chr...

You know that Israel is nothing but stolen Palestinian land. But some times you really crave a chicken schnitzel in a Pita. What are ya gonna do? My friend in DSA likes to joke that we should have dress down days once a week where we allow ourselves to have mainstream, milquetoast liberal attitudes towards things. And then Monday will come and we will go back to being anti-imperialist Marxists who have hardline opinions and do not for a moment entertain such naive and misguided outlooks. I've really been feeling that lately. Especially as I have been reading through "Killing a King, The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the remaking of Israel," by Dan Ephron. I understand that Israel was founded through the Nakba, and that Rabin was a violent colonial ruler and upholder of apartheid. But as horrifically violent as Israel's creation was, one cannot help but look back at certain key moments that may have offered a chance of an off ramp and a path towards justice and re...