When the Gaza genocide started, one of the first things Mohammed El-Kurd noticed was Palestinians and allies once again falling into a loop of auditioning for the world’s empathy.
A sense of déjà-vu prompted the acclaimed poet and activist to put his thoughts to paper, marking the foundations of what would eventually become Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, El-Kurd’s second book since his 2021 poetry collection Rifqa.
“I just saw how time after time, people fell into the same discursive traps. Take the same bait. Be it with the conversation of the weapons under the Al-Shifa hospital or the Hamas bunkers or the human shields trope, or the false accusations of anti-Semitism,” he tells The New Arab.
Published earlier this month by Haymarket Books, Perfect Victims explores the politics of appeal in the context of Palestine and Palestinians.
El-Kurd analyses how Palestinians are forced to frame their struggles in ways that pander to the expectations of global audiences, breaking down the ‘perfect victim’ myth via searing critiques of Western and Zionist narratives (and propaganda) in the media, politics, academia, and elsewhere.
Intertwining this with the long history of Palestinian oppression, El-Kurd also delves into the commodification of Palestinians, critiquing how their suffering and identity are appropriated, exploited, essentialised, or reduced to symbols to undermine their agency and humanity.
Upon opening the book, one of the first things readers notice is a dedication to the celebrated Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer, whom Israeli forces killed in a targeted strike in northern Gaza in December 2023. For Mohammed El-Kurd, this was an opportunity to pay his respect to a writer he greatly admired because of his humour, irreverence, and rejection of the terms of engagement set forth by Zionists.
“Refaat’s work has shown us the importance of the collective,” El-Kurd says.
“One of his students told me recently that while our houses were under the threat of expulsion in 2021 in Sheikh Jarrah, he had suspended the finals. He paused the final exams and told his students, your assignment is to write tweets and Facebook posts about dispossession and settler expansion in Jerusalem,” he adds.
“That kind of practice that involves the collective and actively works against the fragmentation of the Palestinian people is also one of the many invaluable lessons that he’s taught us.”
In the author’s note, El-Kurd states that Perfect Victims is not a manifesto. He tells The New Arab that the book is more of an inquiry – although he admits it can also be viewed as an ‘anti-appeal’ that’s making an appeal of sorts.
El-Kurd hopes the average Palestinian or the average ‘ally’ reading his book would be prompted to confront their impulses and instincts that manifest with certain behaviours. But he makes it clear that this does not come from a place of defamation or denunciation, but from a place of respect, betterment and a belief in constant progress.
“One example of this is elevating Jewish and Israeli sources over Palestinian sources for ‘credibility reasons’,” he explains.
“When you’re quoting an Israeli human rights lawyer or a Jewish human rights organisation, you’re not doing it because they are human rights organisations. You’re doing it because they’re Israeli and Jewish first — there is this implicit belief that the reader will be more receptive to an Israeli/Jewish source than to a Palestinian source.
“This may be successful in the short term, but in the long term, it only reinforces and reproduces this chasm, this power dynamic, in which we are suspicious and uncredible, and they are believable and respectable,” El-Kurd continues.
“My appeal for people is to use dignity as the framework because I believe dignity is an effective long-term strategy. The appeal to people is to please dignify our dead, dignify our living, dignify our BDS, dignify our occupied. Dignify and do not make concessions.”
At various points throughout Perfect Victims, El-Kurd highlights the “secondly” linguistic trick. This is a nod to Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, who once observed how it’s easy to blur the truth by starting a story with “secondly” – effectively omitting the “firstly” that gives the full context to turn a narrative in one’s favour.
El-Kurd tells The New Arab that Palestinians and allies who fall for this trap help divert attention away from the root cause of it all: Zionism.
“Be it talking about human shields or about protests being unsafe for Jewish students, or be it talking about October 7, even – it is by design, a distraction,” El-Kurd reflects.
“When you go on TV and somebody’s asking you, ‘do you condemn Hamas?’, they’re not really interested in your political assessment of Hamas. They’re interested to see whether or not you fall into the liberal world order, the world order that they have decided to expel Palestinians from. It’s not a questionnaire, per se. It’s an interrogation. You are spending the interview in cross-examination,” the writer adds.
“We should just reject these distractions outright. We should make fun of them, satirise them, ridicule them, be appalled by them, not give them the time of day.”
Readers would also note how El-Kurd goes to great lengths to name and honour countless Palestinian martyrs throughout his book, as well as current and former Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and administrative detention. For him, despite acknowledging that certain privileges – such as Western passports – give some martyrs or prisoners more recognition, more visibility in mainstream media or more outcry, he always understood them all to be equal.
“There is a hierarchy of suffering, for sure, but seldom justice,” El-Kurd says.
“We need to reject this hierarchy outright. When you know your martyrs, you understand your national narrative, you understand your anti-colonial narrative. You know the work of creating a eulogy for a Palestinian martyr in the West does so much to sever the martyr from the rest of the people because we exceptionalise the martyr.
“In naming all the martyrs, you are reclaiming them for you as part of your people as part of the collective, because they died for a collective. I’m talking about the people who have consciously made sacrifices and consciously fought, but also people who have made sacrifices in spite of themselves.”
Mohammed El-Kurd says that writing Perfect Victims as Israeli bombs rained on Gaza and as the genocide worsened by the day was a torturous task. While he grappled with many emotions in the process, one he felt worth mentioning was wrestling with the merit of the written word.
“You see the world functionally, fundamentally fund the Israeli and the Zionist regime, and you wonder if all of this hasn’t changed, if all this butchery and massacres haven’t changed people’s minds, why is the written word important?” he tells The New Arab.
“But then you remind yourself that it’s an obligation more than anything. It’s our obligation to write.”
With the Gaza ceasefire now in place – despite the countless violations carried out by Israeli forces – El-Kurd hopes the global pro-Palestine solidarity movement maintains its momentum and pressure on those who are complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Especially now, with Israeli forces turning their attention to Jenin and other parts of the northern occupied West Bank.
“For some months, the height of my ceiling was a ceasefire. I just wanted the bloodshed to end, and then now we know that there is a ceasefire, and yet the bloodshed has not ended,” he says.
“My hope is that the global movement we’ve seen, the kind of uprising we’ve seen for Palestine, is not just fuelled by corpses and the sights of massacres and people feeling sympathy and pity for us.
“I hope that the global uprising is actually rooted in a foundational understanding and rejection of Zionism as an ideology that must be abolished because it’s expansionist and supremacist and racist, but most importantly, because it has shown us over the past 16 months what it means in the material sense; and that is genocide.”
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal is out now
