By Benay Blend
Mohammed El-Kurd’s first non-fiction traces the ways that Palestinians are most often viewed as “perfect victims” rather than as people with dignity who are fighting for the liberation of their land.
Due to length requirements, this article touches on only a few of the many points made in Perfect Victims. In that regard, I’m particularly interested in how the resistance has been demonized in both liberal and conservative media, as well as among some groups in the solidarity movement.
In his thoughts on the current state of advocacy work, El-Kurd spares no-one, not even himself. Expressing a consistent theme in his writing and talks, he questions the value of cultural resistance to “Israel’s” on-going Nakba (catastrophe) against the Palestinians.
“It is not only grief that makes writing in the time of genocide a tortuous task,” El-Kurd explains, “it is, more so, one’s recognition of the written work as shamefully insufficient in the face of 2000-ton pound bombs that the Zionists have dropped on Gaza” (p. 1).
“Within certain progress in media, culture, academia, and politics,” El-Kurd makes clear, “’Palestine’ is emerging as a social currency for certain individuals” (p. 1).
“Our history’s bloodiest chapter has accentuated a morbid correlation that has long existed,” writes El-Kurd, “the more martyrs there are, the more podiums” (p.1).
Significantly, El-Kurd encourages his audience to “raise the ceiling of what is permissible,” to engage those “crushed and invisibilized classes” as “history makers” rather than “historicized objects” (p. 3).
In this vein, El-Kurd expands the role of “sniper” from those who murder with a gun to include correspondents who erase their victims with the passive voice along with certain diplomats who express concern without mentioning the culprit let alone follow through with action (p. 8).
Perhaps the most pernicious of them all are politicians: “inert, inept, or complicit,” responsible for funding the victims’ deaths, then perhaps “feign sympathy” (p. 8).
Finally, there are academics who wait until the “dust settles,” then write books with fabricated pages that are always in the past tense, as if the once troublesome subjects now are gone (p. 8).
What at one time they all condemned–the resistance (“you don’t have to support Hamas to hold dear the Palestinians” as countless memes made clear)—they are now busy “mystifying it, depoliticizing it, [and] commercializing it” in a multitude of contexts (p. 8).
After a brief overview, El-Kurd gets to the core of his book. “Our death is sustenance for the world we live in,” he claims, necessary to ensure the “colony’s sense of ‘security’” (p. 11).
For those martyrs to really matter, to get recognition from solidarity groups and the press, they need to have lived “as spectacular people or endured a spectacularly violent death” (p. 11).
This standard, common across most industries, across many solidarity groups, and official halls, tends to dehumanize most Palestinians and divide them between those who are exalted and those who are not (p. 16). Dehumanization El-Kurd defines as “the world’s reluctance or incapacity” to allocate “fundamental instincts—e.g. survival, self-defense”—to the Palestinian people, especially those who are now undergoing genocide (p. 14).
Whatever their political perspective, in the minds of most inhabitants of the West, Palestinians are either terrorists or victims, the former who deserve to die, the latter divided into those who lived an extraordinary life and/or endured a bizarrely violent death.
In the end, Palestinians are not “human beings, [they]are enigmas, infuriating, frightening enigmas, whose every action invites indictment and whose every sentiment is an embryonic threat” (p. 16).
In western media, academia, and so on, “terrorists” are never given the chance to speak for themselves, while those who are given victim status are sometimes granted an outlet. In those cases, however, they are forbidden to name the culprit and their advocacy must be only for themselves.
“They must narrate only their personal tragedies,” explains El-Kurd. “Neither political ideology nor national ambitions” should enter their campaigning, for it “must remain individualistic, never for a collective cause and never through an organized collective, and must solely seek to remedy humanitarian crises” that, like other natural disasters, are never caused by the “global state of affairs” (p. 22).
Quite similar to the canonization of Martin Luther King, who is seldom celebrated as part of a mass movement, not to mention that his “I Have a Dream Speech” is often privileged over his commitment to combating poverty and the war machine, Palestinians who are given a platform must use it only for themselves.
“Our response to being charged with terrorism, and to being ejected outside of the human condition,” El-Kurd concedes, “has been a politics of appeal,” which consists of “a practice that utilizes a sort of creative advocacy tactic designed to advance our cause, ceaselessly attempting to fulfill the aforementioned requirements” (pp. 22, 23).
The result is a “respectable” and “relatable” subject who has been dehumanized and “defang[ed]” (p. 38) of any sentiment deemed undesirable by the colonizer. Throughout history, this process has been applied to others, including the freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela, who during his life before imprisonment was deemed a terrorist by the West, but after his release was transformed into a saintly icon.
Despite the fact that Mandela was not morally opposed to armed resistance, he became known as the standard bearer of nonviolence, a strategy he chose for its practicality as much as anything else.
After the Zionists assassinated poet/teacher/journalist Refaat Al-Areer in December 2023, El-Kurd found that he could not compose a eulogy for the “Anglophone” news site where he was working as culture editor.
“The colonizer’s language,” El-Kurd proclaimed, demands that that “we wash him of his sins—his geography, religion, color, sex, and affiliations—and exclude him from the ranks of our fighters and fight to exhibit his exceptionalism” (p. 45).
Obituaries like these are not only ethnocentric, they also exhibit a form of cultural imperialism by imposing the colonizer’s world view onto the colonized, thus separating the Other from their origin story as well as from other Palestinians (p. 46).
In the end, El-Kurd’s text is an interactive read. By inviting his audience to review their past perceptions he encourages them to adopt new patterns that better suit the movement.
For example, several months ago an acquaintance wanted to engage in a conversation about October 7. After I explained that it is important to put that day into context, she asked if there were engineers in Gaza (her profession), and what about doctors, PhDs, lawyers, etc.?
By informing her that yes, of course, there is a high ratio of intellectuals, doctors, writers, etc., I fell into what El-Kurd calls the “perfect victim” trap, singling out the best and brightest from the rest, an outlook that is quite divisive as well as ethnocentric because it imposes one’s personal value system onto another group of people.
Instead, I should have replied that her question was problematic because it implied that Palestinians are inferior, but if they engaged in Western education and professions that would raise their status in her eyes, perhaps eventually becoming similar to “us.”
“One could argue that the ends justify the means,” El-Kurd concedes. “But what are those ‘ends?’ Justice? Truth?” (p. 56).
When such an argument becomes a means for selling the worthiness of some Palestinians but not others, it “accepts the racist and xenophobic world views of the audience it attempts to persuade” (p. 55)
Moreover, El-Kurd contends that when “we do not rally behind freedom fighters in the way that we rally behind” the exalted, the unarmed, and extrajudicial deaths, the narrator “inadvertently reinforces the colonizer’s self-appointed jurisdiction, atop our stolen land” (p. 60).
These ideas have consequences. Because the Israelis and Western establishment do not view Palestinians as human beings, Robert Inlakesh contends, they have “carri(ed) on with a level of supremacist thinking that enables a genocide to be carried out, believing that this will work to serve as a lesson to the Arab peoples not to mess with them, when in fact it only does the very opposite.”
Because throughout the text El-Kurd views the Palestinians as more than victims, he concludes that the “Nakba will not last forever” (p. 213). Thanks to the “renaissance of radical movements,” both in Gaza and abroad, “one discovers that this is a new dawn,” one which sees the colonial state “defanged,” thanks to the sumud and resilience of the resistance (p. 213).
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
