Mohammed El-Kurd

Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

Lukas

There are people who have contempt for the world that greets a nurse with her husband's corpse on a stretcher, the world that forces a boy to carry his brother's limbs in a bag. I am one of those people. And I am grateful for my disdain, for it is dignifying; it reminds me that I am human.

What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother's limbs in a bag grow up to be? Does it matter whether he emerges as Abd el-Hadi or as Abu Obaida? Does it make Zionism any less indefensible?

The chanting crowds forced the start of a new chapter of the battle over our city, which for decades saw rapid colonial expansion and shrinking of the Palestinian presence. Albeit temporarily, her funeral catapulted us into a glorious, emancipated future. Everyone was there: the stay-at-homes, the engineers, the stone throwers, the self-described apolitical passerby, the paramedics, the students, the elderly bus drivers, the clergy. For a fleeting moment, the wounds didn't hurt, the jail-time didn't matter, the tear gas wasn't so bad. For a fleeting moment, Shireen Abu Akleh liberated Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, in turn, gave her a funeral fit for a martyr.

It is interesting to consider why student and independent press in the West also often provide these same frameworks and analyses. Perhaps the writers have an interest in receiving legitimacy or avoiding backlash (both factors controlled by imperialists), but I think part of the motivation also is simply that these narratives are the Western public's 'common sense,' to use the Gramscian term. This offers another layer of understanding imperialist power — how imperialists can control institutions even without directly controlling the capital those institutions rely on.

Thus, it is not so much of a surprise that newspapers owned and operated by the ruling class delegitimize Palestinian rebellion in the same pages where they celebrate that of Ukrainians.

(on the difference in framing Western journalists use to cover Ukrainian vs Palestinian resistance). The 'Ukrainians get better press because they're white' take is unfortunately the mainstream opinion in the pro-Palestine world (at least digitally) with little pushback, so this is a refreshing note to see. Race is not the world's primary contradiction — imperialism is. Western media is guided not by the interests of the KKK, but rather by the interests of Western imperialists that bankroll and offer legitimacy to the media (and of course, Western imperialism is racialized, but it is not primarily based on racial difference)

Nor is it solely because of Ukrainians' skin color; one needs to look no further than the Irish Republican Army to see that whiteness alone is no golden ticket—at least not in a war against British colonialism.

In this mythology, vanguard parties and resistance factions are necessarily replaced by NGOs.

Also, love the phrase "invention of the civilian" — highlights that every identity and means of categorization is imagined, and we must ask: Who is the imaginer? And what are their interests?

The invention of the civilian as a "nonpartisan," "neutral" figure has exacerbated the depoliticization of the Palestinian cause. To be deemed a civilian necessitates that we exist in a mythological dimension where we are without perspective. Our cause, as imagined in this mythology, is no longer understood as a liberation struggle but as a "humanitarian crisis"

When the IOF killed Palestinian journalist Ghofran Warasneh at the Arroub refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, zionist media propagated a claim that she was armed with a knife. Those who bothered to pay attention do Ghofran's story spent their time questioning whether the knife story was fabricated (which it was). But what if it wasn't? What would it matter? Does the presence of a knife really change the 'validity' of her murder? Be serious.

We waste our time fixating on whether the knife was planted next to the slain—

—instead of fixating on why the slain might have sought to pick up a knife in the first place.

We and our allies have spent generations reiterating the Palestinian People's right of resistance, [...] Yet when decolonization abandons the conceptual to chase after its material manifestations, many of us tend to lose our compass.

when the Israeli occupation forces killed fifteen-year-old Adam Ayyad in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, the question was, 

Did he really throw a Molotov cocktail at the soldiers? Aren't the Israelis known for fabricating such stories?

 When instead the question should have been, 

Why are Israeli troops in Bethlehem in the first place? Why is "Molotov" in the headline of a story about soldiers killing a boy? So what if he throws a Molotov cocktail? Who wouldn't?

it eats me alive thinking about how this time period will be looked at in the future 

sujj

Protest movements are generally revered in the past tense, once their radical demands become a boring norm. In real time, though, they are led by killjoys and looters who don't understand that there's a time and a place. 

sometimes it feels like we’re in a different world and no one is seeing the same things we are. this book is a great grounding but also recentering to remind us what is really important at the root of it all. 

Conversations about Palestine in the West are steered by abstractions, about the meaning of Zionism, about the threat level of words, about a logistically impossible yet impossibly imminent genocide of the Jewish people. 

Not all statements are made in good faith. Often, the impulse to debunk myths, the reflex to refute fabrications- whatever you want to call it -leads us to forget that propaganda is, by design, a diversion. “Even if" does not forget this fact; "even if" is a sobering refrain. 

Sara Salem

In my dreams, I return to Palestine of the future. I return to “what was mine: my yesterday. / What will be mine: the distant tomorrow." There are no sirens, no settlers, no strip searches under the streetlights, and I do not stop to wonder why.

These days I am haunted by a subtler though deadlier refrain, an unwanted realization: Gaza has the right to forsake us, to never forgive us, to spit in our faces. How many wars has it confronted? How many martyrs has it given? How many bodies were stolen from it, snatched from their fathers' embrace? And how many of us stutter when asked about resistance, or disavow our right to resist entirely, our need to resist? How many of us choose our careers over our kin? How many of us could have done something, anything, and did not?

Obituaries like these demand that we sew the wings of angels on the Palestinian's back, so that he will then, and only then, become mournable.

What is it—power? race? coloniality? language? class? media? religion? geography? identity? culture? politics? tribalism? behavioral patterns? environment? fear? love? human nature? animal aggression?—What is the profound force, the impetus that incites in our foes and friends alike the refusal to look us in the eye?

a quote from my favorite poet, Nizar Qabbani

You changed me from a poet who wrote love poems 

I’ve been flying through this book too fast to highlight my fav quotes but this one (originally from his article “Are We Indeed All Palestinians?”) lives in my head. The book is basically all of my thoughts (even ones I wasn’t conscious of) written down. 

“And the vultures, even in our midst, will tour museums glorifying, romanticizing what they once condemned, what they did not deign to defend - our resistance - mystifying it, depoliticizing it, commercializing it. The vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh.”

Marion

For Palestinians, the Nakba is relentless and recurring. It happens in the present tense—and it happens everywhere on the map. Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation since the 1940s.

Our poets, it seems, can sometimes defy the rules of this game, reaching where no spokesperson or scholar has reached.

Still, they perform a solely ornamental function. Academics use Palestinian poets to aestheticize their research; they are placed in the epigraphs of nonfiction books that rely heavily on Israeli and Western scholarship. Perhaps the obvious example here would be Mahmoud Darwish, the most quoted Palestinian poet and one of the most brilliant. Seldom do we encounter the Darwish who tells the colonizers: "Do not pass between us like flying insects.

... Pile your illusions in a deserted pit, and be gone. ... Live wherever you like, but do not live among us. ... Die wherever you like, but do not die among us." Or the Darwish who warns,

"But if I hunger, I eat the flesh of my rapist." In fact, that line is often mistranslated. They defang him before they recite him.

What is the psychic cost of creating one's self-image through staring at a distorted, manipulated reflection?

Perhaps another reason underlying our dependence on such rhetorical devices-be it decorated Western expertise or defanged Palestinian testimony—is simply that it is what sells.

It was disorienting, albeit sobering, to realize that advocating for Palestine, like all things, is entrenched in and informed by capitalism, that there was a market for our suffering, something that, for many, may have already been self-evident. In this real-ity, not only are Palestinian cultural and national symbols com-modified, but the Palestinian himself becomes a commodity, the audience, of course, the consumer. The market demands we manufacture a manicured version of the Palestinian, meant to serve one purpose before anything else: to entertain. To sustain itself, this industry of commercialized advocacy becomes depressingly reliant on a set of tried-and-true tropes, mythmak-ing, and sensationalized spectacles that satisfy in the consumer an almost lubricious craving.

Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory's charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversa-tion, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain.

Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become mastur-batory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer's fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.

When Palestinians finally arrive in these works, on the screen or on the page, we are represented as victims, not as protagonists or complex characters. We are not history makers; history stomps on our bodies. Our resistance is obscured, our lineages defaced. We offer our blood and bruises as evidence, reporting our calamities without commentary, to support the author's thesis. We become their obiects--curated into context-free exhibitions, editorialized to wallow unintelligibly. "No legends, no explanations." These words were the UN's response to a request by Edward Said to hang photographs of Palestinians in the entrance hall of the 1983 International Conference on the Question of Palestine in Geneva. The UN, where Said was working as a consultant at the time, agreed to his idea, but on the condition that "no writing can be displayed with [the photographs]. No legends, no explanations."

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

encapsulates my thoughts in a truly perfect way; I think about this book all the time 

Rahma A

I think this is one of the most impactful books on Palestine in recent times, unlike others this book is for Palestinians and people in support of the end to their oppression and self determination. It is a call in to us, to advocate for Palestinians in better ways that don't leave them 'defanged' and dehumanized. It is a call for us to be braver in our convictions and to center the Palestinian narrative  as Mohammed el-kurd states "

Palestinian is not just a strategic object in a film or an article but a sovereign protagonist whose real story, no matter how it is received by foreign audiences, is reported accurately. Our testimonies have heft, whether published on Israeli websites or not. Our tragedies are real  whether they are broadcast. Above all, the Palestinian struggle for liberation is heroic--no qualifiers needed

': El-Kurd is asking for a new radical consciousness for Palestinian people and those that support them.

I really enjoyed this conversation Mohammed had with Robin DG Kelley: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcqfLsraJI&t=4065s

I think this is one of the most impactful books on Palestine in recent times, unlike others this book is for Palestinians and people in support of the end to their oppression and self determination. It is a call in to us, to advocate for Palestinians in better ways that don't leave them 'defanged' and dehumanized. It is a call for us to be braver in our convictions and to center the Palestinian narrative  as Mohammed el-kurd states "Palestinian is not just a strategic object in a film or an article but a sovereign protagonist whose real story, no matter how it is received by foreign audiences, is reported accurately. Our testimonies have heft, whether published on Israeli websites or not. Our tragedies are real  whether they are broadcast. Above all, the Palestinian struggle for liberation is heroic--no qualifiers needed" 

Similar to Hadar Eid book 'Decolonizing the Palestinian mind': El-Kurd is asking for a new radical consciousness for Palestinian people and those that support them.

I really enjoyed this conversation Mohammed had with Robin DG Kelley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcqfLsraJI&t=4065s

what an incredibly generous work — in its clarity, in its citations. mohammed el-kurd writes with such precision. 

aisha

It is well-known to everyone who knows me that I'm Mohammed El-Kurd's biggest fan since 2021. Note that I am unbiased towards the literature I read.

This book was immaculate and relieving for me as a Palestinian reader. Mohammed El-Kurd knows how to brilliantly articulate everything we've been trying to scream at the top of our lungs for years. It's an ode to our people- not just the resilient ones portrayed by media as perfect, but also the ones who are fighting back- as much as it is an eye-opening, highly dignifying and contextualising read. He slams the reader out of our humiliating subordination to the customised liberal world order (which is a web of lies) and reminds us to dignify ourselves from said obedience. His usual sarcasm seeps into the margins and surprises me every time. I love him and his writing.

(This review still needs a lot of work. It's an injustice to how much I loved and appreciated the book)

shaymaa

It is well-known to everyone who knows me that I'm Mohammed El-Kurd's biggest fan since 2021. Note that I am unbiased towards the literature I read.

This book was immaculate and relieving for me as a Palestinian reader. Mohammed El-Kurd knows how to brilliantly articulate everything we've been trying to scream at the top of our lungs for years. It's an ode to our people- not just the resilient ones portrayed by media as perfect, but also the ones who are fighting back- as much as it is an eye-opening, highly dignifying and contextualising read. He slams the reader out of our humiliating subordination to the customised liberal world order (which is a web of lies) and reminds us to dignify ourselves from said obedience. His usual sarcasm seeps into the margins and surprises me every time. I love him and his writing.

(This review still needs a lot of work. It's an injustice to how much I loved and appreciated the book)

Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

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