I was somewhat skeptical when I set out to read Mohammed El-Kurd’s latest book, Perfect Victims. I’d been following El-Kurd as a principled voice on Palestine for years, but as he says himself at the outset of the text, so much has already been written on the topics he’d be addressing in the book (see for example, Judith Butler’s writings on “grievability” and Achill Mbembe’s Necropolitics, among plenty others.).
Namely, he asserts that under the Western gaze, Palestinian death is quotidian and negligible, and that Palestinians themselves lack narrative credibility when it comes to their own accounts of loss, grief, and resistance. Yet, they must still appeal to Western audiences, through presenting themselves in the most immaculate light possible, in order to garner enough sympathy to galvanize those residing in the imperial core.
In many ways, this dynamic exists for all oppressed groups today. Women get put on trial when they publicly accuse a man of assaulting them. Black people murdered by the police must be presented as upstanding citizens who would never hurt a fly in order for their deaths to circulate in the news. God forbid any of them did something that could be interpreted as a provocation; God forbid they tried to resist.
But El-Kurd’s addition to this discourse still feels refreshing. He cuts through so much of the propaganda that (still) shapes discourse around Palestine, daring to speak with clarity in a way that made it abundantly clear that what he has to say still needs to be said: The moral character of Palestinian victims of Israeli occupation and genocide is irrelevant.
Not only does he describe the ways that the stories of martyrs were dropped in the western media once it was ascertained that they died resisting their annihilation. He argues that Palestinian must first be defanged to be grievable. But he also unflinchingly goes a step further than most are willing to go, at least publicly, and certainly in Germany.
He asks, “But what about the other [Palestinian victims]? The others who suffocate under this shrinking definition of humanity? … What about those without halos, the angry men who wander the streets with mouths full of venom, the children whose shoulders are burdened by the straps of rifles, the women who choose an explosive path?”
In this context, he references an interview on CNN with Christiane Amanpour who attempts to advocate for a sympathetic stance towards the Palestinians, but is quick to clarify: “And I am not talking about Hamas.” To which El-Kurd contends: “Through her resounding exclusion of Hamas from the category of those entitled to ‘live with rights and dignity,’ Amanpour effectively suggests that the supposedly universal Declaration of Human Rights can be conditions upon one’s political affiliations.” Moreover, “When the [Israeli] sniper finds your bedroom in the scope of his rifle, he… does not care whether the photograph beside your bed is of Nasrallah, Gandhi, or Haifa Wehbe.”
Still, this line of argument isn’t exactly new, even if El-Kurd’s contribution is valuable as applied to the case of Palestine. What is particularly striking about this book, however, is that he argues that the reflex to qualify support for the Palestinian cause with a rejection of antisemitism is itself a logical fallacy. This is something that in Germany feels especially stunning.
Here he gives the preposterous example of the IDF claiming they found a copy of Mein Kampf in a Palestinian child’s playroom, justifying the confiscation of the home on these grounds and turning it into a military base. El-Kurd points out the trap of trying to argue against such allegations as the intended effect by the Israelis: to distract from Israel’s crimes.
Instead of falling into antisemitism in any discourse in favor of the Palestinian cause, he poses the question, even if? Even if there was a copy of Mein Kampf in a Palestinian child’s playroom, does it justify occupation, apartheid, and even genocide? Yet, very often, one must argue as if it does. As he writes, “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?”
But, El-Kurd asks, what if Palestinians hate their occupiers?—Israelis who themselves insist on committing their atrocities in the name of Judaism? Why is it that Palestinians are expected to constantly temper their grief and rage toward them, as they collect their loved ones’ limbs in bags? Does it change the quality of Israeli atrocities against them? Or in other words, must victims be “good” and possess all the “right” views to deserve human rights, to deserve life?
He writes, “Here is where I stand. […] it is not my fault that [the Israelis] are Jewish. I have zero interest in apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. […] Most of all, I am tired of the false equivalence between semantic ‘violence’ [against the occupier] and systemic violence: only one party in this ‘conflict’ is actively engaged in the intentional and systematic eradication of an entire population. I know this […] will be taken out of context, disseminated, and disfigured, but I will never be the perfect victim.”
As many have done, El-Kurd also uses the response to Ukraine as a foil, citing an article in the New York Times where some expert in psychology argues it’s actually natural and even healthy for the Ukrainians to hate their Russian occupiers and to engage in armed resistance against them. But he doesn’t reduce this identitarianism, where in contrast to the Palestinians, they have the backing of the west simply because they’re white. He emphasizes that who is humanized in Western discourse has a lot more to do with what currently serves the interests of the empire.
And much of this book is really about carving out the discursive space for Palestinian anger and grief—without qualification and even if western audiences have been conditioned to feel uncomfortable with it. “If we are assessing a certain ideological project (say, capitalism, Zionism, so on) why not judge it based on how it materially manifests rather than on the perceived attitudes of its subjects?,” he asks. “When Zionism’s most recent manifestation is genocide […] What difference does it make how the grieving grieve? Curating the native as ‘respectable’ is a misplaced priority because it redirects critical scrutiny away from the colonizer, which in turn neglects the innate injustice of the colonial project. This misplaced focus insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and human rights.”
In doing so, El-Kurd also points out that Palestinians aren’t really allowed to exist under the Western gaze as civilians or regular people. When they’re not cast outright as (inhuman) terrorists, they’re expected to speak for all Palestinians, with a palatable political solution for a free Palestine polished and ready anytime they might express their anger or, dare we even say, hatred toward their occupiers. And he makes the point that he is not a Palestinian politician in a tie, let alone the occupying forces themselves who really ought to be the ones answering for the state of things in the occupied territories over the last 76 years.
Indeed, this book is about humanizing Palestinians by refusing the idea that they must qualify their rage or be perfect victims in order to be worthy of an end to apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
