Book Thoughts: Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd
I honestly didn't think I was going to finish this book due to being in the Stress gauntlet for the past month. Luckily for me, audiobooks are there to the rescue, even though you also trade some comprehension away for it. Regardless, I probably wouldn't have finished reading this otherwise, much like I didn't finish reading Enemy Feminisms...which reminds me that I should probably dump whatever thoughts I have about that one too really quick and hand in my "GAVE UP BECAUSE OF LIFE, SORRY" card.
The audiobook is read by El-Kurd himself, and it's not professionally produced by any means. Rather, the varying audio quality between sections gives you the feeling that he did all of these in single-take chunks and then stitched them together later. Not the easiest book to listen to, especially when names are involved as someone who doesn't speak Arabic, but there's probably an argument to be made out there about letting the author, who embodies what the work is about, speak their own words even if it isn't radio-perfect. Like someone at book club said to me, I'm always on the fence about this because it's like, what matters more, accessibility (if the production isn't high-quality or if the author actually just sucks at reading aloud) or the metacommentary vibe added by having an author voice their own book? Can't say I have an answer to this one. I also cannot say that I remotely understand all the context of this book's production: Granted that it's faced suppression by the sheer silence of news outlets about it despite winning the 2025 Palestine award, it's entirely possible that this was the only, or easiest way for the audio version to be made.
El-Kurd himself was a "perfect victim," a child who was featured in a documentary. He was even asked to write a letter to Obama as a 14-year-old, which he did, and it was ignored. Respectability politics tries to focus on maximizing "humanization" by only selecting stories about women and children, and the people they select are never allowed to express any sort of political will or hatred, even when they are staring down the reality that many of their loved ones have been killed.
A notable choice in this book is that the default pronoun is "he" when referring to a single Palestinian, and this is specifically because, as El-Kurd says, he wants us to confront the Palestinian man instead of just writing him off because he feels too dangerous and doesn't match perfect victimhood. When listing multiple examples, though, the book does indeed sometimes use "she," and most notably, "she" is often paired with militant or revolutionary actions, unlike the typical gendered assumptions. His biggest example of the revolutionary hearts that burn in women is his own grandma, who often said rude things without filter, and who he used to filter himself when presenting her story to maintain some form of respectability in hopes that would be more effective. This is probably the first book I've read where the primacy of the pronoun "he" took on a very specific politically subversive meaning, and I do appreciate it.
This book asks us to ditch the idea of the perfect victim and to understand that Palestinians have a very real reason for resisting, sometimes violently, and the facts are right there on the ground in terms of whole is being killed and who has the state power behind them to kill. It asks us not to conflate words with actions, and to not get derailed by obsessively fact-checking propaganda that is meant to be a distraction in the first place. To center the obvious power imbalance.
The most important part of this book is featured on the first pages of the text format, which shows a page just with EVEN IF! in big font repeating down the page.
And “even if” remains logical. When confronted with the racist trope that Palestinian resistance fighters use civilians as human shields, it is tempting to pull up video footage of Israeli soldiers using our bodies for that exact reason, or maps showing the Israeli military’s headquarters situated in the heart of bustling, densely populated Tel Aviv. These, after all, are cogent retorts. But why accept the premise of the question in the first place? Even if the human shield allegations were true, why submit to a logic that argues it is acceptable to kill those classified as civilians if, hypothetically, “terrorists” hid behind them? If, say, a robber took your mother hostage and hid behind her, would the police officer on the scene be absolved of all responsibility if he decided to kill your mother to neutralize the robber?
I use the analogy of the robber and policeman consciously. Zionists have penned a narrative where they are a force for good, legitimately fighting off intruders. But the reality, of course, is the inverse. Colonialism is the robber and the policeman at once, committing the crime and legalizing it.
Thing thing about propaganda is also a good reminder as someone who tends to chase facts.
Hitler’s manifesto in northern Gaza has everything in common with any other Zionist cliché: it is rooted in glaring logical fallacies. At first, it may seem shocking how a tale so ridiculous can be so potent and effective. But how many hours have you wasted defending against ad hominem attacks (No, our men are gentle fathers!) or assuaging the paranoias of strawman arguments (No, “from the river to the sea” is not a secret call to genocide!) or navigating slippery slopes (No, a free Palestine will not lead to a second Holocaust!) or pausing for red herrings (No, there are no tunnels under the hospital!) or appealing to authority (Even the Israeli scholars agree that it is a genocide!) or debunking equivocations (No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!)? The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction.
Distraction from what? The focal point: colonialism, siege, military occupation. Our children’s remains collected in shoeboxes, the torture our men endure in detention centers that can only be described as concentration camps, the women threatened with rape at gunpoint, the demolished homes, the demolished dreams, the generations robbed of a future, the people burnt alive in tents. And is there room for side conversations in the presence of burning flesh?
Some other quotes that have me thinking:
So I ask again: What if our perfect victims do in fact despise those who have killed their families? Then what? Let me ask the most exaggerated, extreme version of this question: What if, after a Star-of-David-clad soldier of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” killed your loved ones in cold blood, you began to obsessively, irrationally hate Jews, all Jews, wherever they may be? Then what? Does your venomous sentiment undermine your status as a victim? Does it rewrite history to absolve the soldier of his sins? Does it justify the crime?
From a footnote: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he has the power to lynch me, that’s my problem,” and “Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.” Kwame Ture, in response to a student’s question after a talk at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), in October 1968.
AGAIN, I AM OFTEN ASKED IF I WANT TO “THROW ISRAELIS INTO THE SEA.” My answer has become increasingly facetious, even flippant. “If they are so afraid of drowning why don’t they learn how to swim?” Sometimes I get gasps, occasionally a muffled snicker, and other times, unabridged laughter. After the joke comes the thesis: such questions are red herrings and straw man fallacies asked in bad faith. I obviously believe in freedom and dignity for all, etcetera. Those asking, What happens to the settlers? have not once thought about the fate of the six million Palestinian refugees agonizing in exile. This is not so much a polemic but an observation, a fatigued observation, reiterated incessantly. Such distracting questions feed the discursive loop that prioritizes the settlers’ theoretical future over our material present that is already marked with extermination.
As Steven Salaita writes, “The question ‘but what about the Israelis?’ presents itself as innocent, perhaps even crucial, but its underlying rhetoric is insidious.... It informs the audience that Zionism must be affirmed before the Palestinian can speak of liberation.” As such, the decision to answer a derailing question becomes a political act: Should I take the bait? Should I skip over the tanks that set our neighborhoods ablaze, the fires engulfing Khan Yunis to extinguish hypothetical flames? Should I forget about the wells they have poisoned, the waters they have arrogated to quench an imaginary thirst? Lately, I just scoff at the question.
But why laugh at a flammable question when I know my words will be twisted and turned upside down? Why make snarky remarks in front of thousands, many of whom might, on a subconscious level, already be suspicious of me? Because, most important, it is funny. It feels good to laugh, to ridicule the ridiculous. It is said we use humor to cope, to experience a sense of relief, and so on. I could cite Freud, but my grandmother said it more eloquently: “If we don’t laugh, we cry.” However, laughter, like other behaviorally contagious phenomena, has historically played a role in influencing people’s attitudes and interpretations toward social and political issues. If we move beyond the reductive idea that the humor of the oppressed is merely a “defense mechanism,” we can reveal its strategic advantage and transformative potential.
Our enemies employ what Mourid Barghouti calls “a simple linguistic trick” to turn the world on its head: they fail to mention what came first and start their story from “secondly.” “Start your story with ‘secondly,’” Barghouti writes, “and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with ‘secondly’ for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous” as opposed to justified or even admirable.9 The peril of this supposedly inconsequential language game is revealed in its ability to obscure reality. However, more importantly, language possesses a transformative potential to elucidate, demystify, repair, liberate, and rival; to infiltrate consciousnesses and permeate into collective action; to “support the weight of a civilization.” Language, if we can dominate it, can turn our anonymous whispers back into thunderous declarations.
That Ahmed decided (or felt pressured) to declare, mere days after the occupation shelled his family to death, his rejection of antisemitism speaks volumes about him. Volumes for others to discern. I have little desire to interrogate his motives. I am confident they are pure rather than calculated quid pro quo. More than the individual himself, we need to understand the external and internal pressures exerted on the individual, the global context that necessitates such behavior.
Still, there is no denying that there is a hierarchy of lives, that passports are a currency. They help world leaders appraise your tragedy, and their reactions rely on this appraisal—transforming a quotidian elimination of a Palestinian into a dreadful killing of an American journalist, a despicable attack on press freedom, a travesty. Passports as a currency help people buy your story. Citizens—of certain countries, of course—command a larger audience and a louder uproar when they are targeted by Israeli violence. But what did Rachel Corrie’s Americanness give her outside of that uproar? Did it deliver justice for her family? Did it stop the bulldozer that crushed her from demolishing more homes? Do Americans murdered by Israeli settlers receive the same kind of state-sponsored grief as the Americans held hostage in Gaza? What did the hyphen in Omar As‘ad’s nationality offer him beyond a spot in the headlines that otherwise ignore the unhyphenated? Did those headlines name the culprit, or was As‘ad just “found dead”?
My argument is not that we should stop using political and diplomatic maneuvers to coerce powerful regimes into action or in hopes of changing their anticipated stances. I am arguing that we reassess such tactics, taking into consideration their long- and short-term side effects, and ask whether they are worth the gamble. When a passport becomes a political device for “humanization,” the pretext is to coax Western governments to “seek justice” on behalf of their citizens. But the subtext, more dangerously, more humiliatingly, is selling a narrative of innocence, a narrative that accepts the racist and xenophobic worldviews of the audience it attempts to persuade.
Humanization diverts critical scrutiny away from the colonizer and onto the colonized, obscuring the inherent injustice of colonialism, thus shielding the colonial project. In misplacing their focus, advocates (or lawyers or journalists, etc.) insinuate that the oppressed must demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity, first and foremost. Otherwise occupation, subjugation, police brutality, dispossession, surveillance, and “extrajudicial executions,” would be excusable or even necessary. The moral code produced within such a framework is rife with logical fallacies and marked by an absence of serious power and material analysis. However implicitly, it accepts the Israeli apparatus, an apparatus of racial and socioeconomic domination, as applicable if need be, rather than an unmistakable example of all that is sordid and deplorable. As such, humanization pulverizes the permissible. And it does so in ways that are far more tangible than they are aesthetic or discursive. The majority of the Palestinian People fail to “humanize” themselves, that is, fail to survive dancing on land mines, and the world abandons them. Those of us who are imperfect or are not as lucky. Those of us who will not extract our teeth. Those of us who are “terrorists.”
This last section really had me thinking, and I don't know what the answer is. So much of perfect victimhood in news media and the like is guided by the idea that it can make people care through empathy for the victims, so the "most innocent" victim is then searched for. Underlying it seems to the belief that people can change their minds if presented with a kicked dog, so to speak. If this is really for nothing, though, then what is the way that we can actually convince others?
Cynically, I think of that Code Switch episode that talked about how people subconsciously align their opinions on different issues according to how the political party they most identify with does, even when they they say that it had no effect at all, and I start to wonder whether the goal then should just be to aggressively change party stances or to invest in creating group identity and having it be a Norm. For all the talk about how the left in the U.S. (I assume liberals) is left for mostly everything "besides Palestine," I wonder if that's actually just because the Democratic party apparatus still sympathizes with Israel, and this is actually just something both Democrats and Republicans agree on.
Then again, Palestine has gotten more support in recent years, probably in proportion to the news coverage of their genocide... but then again, does the average person simply caring about genocide do anything? Here's that other Code Switch episode.
I guess the more thinking I do about all of this, the more I feel like informing yourself about stuff and feeling bad about how something is going in the world has negligible impact. It's the getting together with people, figuring out who is not in the room that is being affected by the current decisions and getting them to pitch in, and then actually aiming for a tangible goal that does anything. I guess this is my question now: Do we actually need to do that much convincing out there to get things to move? There's all sorts of special lobbies that have a disproportionate amount of power — or you can even just think about the book ban lists in schools that's being spearheaded by a handful of people and the only backings they seem to need are white moms. But in these examples, I feel like the group is already coming from a base of power granted by privilege. What do marginalized populations do to get real change moving?
For all the talk about trying to convince your racist family members at the dinner table and all of that, what does that actually do? Does the individual opinion actually matter that much at all, or is what matters forming a core organized base, doing something, and then waiting for public opinion to catch up later?
It's hard because obviously people aren't just pieces on a board. In an ideal society you would be able to stimulate people's critical thinking skills and everyone would be able to pitch in to some actual degree of power. Like, it's also impossible to build a compassionate society without having people care about things like education.
But fundamentally, if we are to take up the "Even if" banner instead of the "look at all these innocent people dying" banner, this is not playing by the usual persuasion game (with dubious efficacy, anyway). It feels like it's more about asserting a right to human life in general, and it's not meant to coddle the feelings of people who are "both sides-ing" but who are actually siding with power. "Even if" is a new framing for a lot of people. Is it more persuasive? Or is it a way to narrow our focus to actions that actually matter?
Like all things, I'm probably oversimplifying. Like some amount of individual convincing people may or may not build to something. But I just wonder, regardless, because I wish I had the answers on what to do. So far, the only answer I seem to have is "everyone needs to learn how to organize," and just like every single time I have thought this, believed it, etc., I have only come up with the feeling that it's beyond my emotional capacity. Does that make all of this thinking process useless, though? I don't know, and I guess only time will tell.
Anyway, it's a good book. I hope that I can see a free Palestine sometime in my life.
In order to tackle the question of authorship, we must be loyal to the Palestinian street. It is not lost on me that I am running the risk of appealing to populism by using language such as “loyal to the Palestinian street,” and the risk of subscribing to the same identity politics I have just denounced. But what I am demanding here is a commitment to a material analysis of the Palestinian question, a learned understanding that is informed by the very streets where the breaking news takes place, by the very people whose slain bodies feature prominently in our documentaries and news reports, but whose experience and expertise are sidelined to make room for Western sources.
(...)
There are many ways to describe what I am demanding: decolonizing the press or controlling the means of production. Though one could ascribe to it the reductive, identity-focused approach that says “Nothing about us without us,” for me it is a lot simpler. Engaging in knowledge production rooted in respect for oneself, one’s people, and one’s craft. It is about artists and advocates refusing to become state secretaries. It is about storytellers triumphing over that boring formula, escaping the colonial gaze. It is about us talking to each other.