GALLERY 2010/2011

This is a very impassioned piece of writing and calls mainly for acknowledgement of the pain that Marita felt that inspired her to write it. Thank you for trying to maintain a sense of decency and humanity in a world that too often justifies squelching those feelings in the name of one cause or another. Also, thank you for not simply falling for propaganda from one side or another, even though when we are in distress about the state of the world, it is tempting to look at things only in black-and-white terms that make it all easier to grasp, and then to place it in an intellectual or emotional comfort zone. The best way to confront these feelings is to be involved in an active project where you can see some results, although almost certainly the results will be modest in scope – perhaps you already are doing so.

Although I have a lot of sympathy for some of the sentiments expressed in this short non-academic essay, I feel that, precisely in order to be more effective, the arguments presented here should have been subjected to more elaboration and backup. As they stand now they do not do proper service to the case studies and theories offered by critical writing.
Furthermore, the work, concentrating on the specific example of the Israeli-Palestine conflict could also have benefited from seeking to supply answers to questions such as what are the roles of imagination and love as fuelling, transcending, etc., this conflict itself? Given that the essay is written out of an activist competition subfield, a further question that demands answering is what are the possible practical and more collective strategies of resistance? Finally, the effectiveness of the arguments would have gained immensely if the essay had been subjected to a detailed review and correction of its use of the English language.