Mohammed El-Kurd

Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

shaymaa

“Zionism’s objection to the Palestinian

People isn’t about how we exist but that we exist at all.”

“And so, when eulogizing a Palestinian man, we take on the roles of historians, activists, and political analysts, and we riddle our overtures with UN resolutions and human rights reports. The colonizer’s language commands that we qualify him for mourning before mourning, 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. 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.”

“Why do we give the authority of narration to those who have

murdered and displaced us when the scarcity of their guilt means honesty is

unlikely? Why do we wait for those carrying the batons to confess when our

“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 conversation, 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.”

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Finally, throughout the book, there is a disproportionate use of masculine pronouns. That is done on purpose. For far too long the Palestinians have been reduced to "women and children." One implication here is robbing women and children of their agency and their political or revolutionary contributions. Another is the further demonization of Palestinian men as deserving of death and unworthy of mourning, exiled from their loved ones' embrace. I often use "he" in reference to "the Palestinian" because I want to force the reader to come face to face with the Palestinian man. I want the reader to contend with that complex and contradictory demographic, and not just those assumed to be the gentle or generous among us—not only the fathers, but the fighters as well.

ZIONISM IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death-heart disease in the US, dementia in England-and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation. On the con-trary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of the colony's sense of "security." The empire cuts the lives of our loved ones short to prolong its reign. And our grief is negligible, our rage unwarranted. The more our loved ones are killed by Zionist colo-nialism, the less space we are offered to grieve them. We cannot narrate this colossal theft of life, let alone avenge it.

And the snipers are everywhere: the underhanded journal-ists, the spineless bureaucrats, the inconspicuous henchmen, the philanthropists who mine our tragedies for gold, the television anchors who obfuscate those tragedies, the missionaries who find their salvation in our demise, the devil's advocates, the distrac-tors, those who litter our roads with red herrings, the unscrupulous political advisors, the activists who act as puppet masters, the elite capturers, the elitists in our ranks who demand of us a certain dance, who imprison us in the panopticon of their gaze, the self-appointed intellectuals, the clergy who whisper when they should scream, the very well-fed weapons manufacturers and the university administrators who feed them, and the academics indulging in arrogance and willful misinterpretation, who mutilate Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin, deny human nature, and contest even the laws of physics in order to pathologize our resis-tance. In this reality, the sniper's hands are clean of blood, but his body count is insurmountable.

HERE IN THE WEST (WHATEVER "THE WEST" MEANS THESE DAYS), whether on television screens, university cam-puses, in public office, or in the public's imagination, Palestinians exist in a false-and strict-dichotomy: we are either victims or terrorists.

And we have seen God employed as a real-estate agent, bestowing Jerusalem houses to Brooklynites.

The latter, in short, are characterized by an obsessive curation of "reliable narrators," whose testimonies are unthreatening, authoritative, or impartial. To illustrate: favoring Jewish and Israeli sources (books, human rights organizations, rabbis, historians, ex-soldiers, soldiers, cops, government officials, political analysts) over Palestinian sources, not based on the content of their contributions but on an identitarian basis, a choice rooted in the farcical, though deep-seated notion that the former are somehow more credible, more reliable. As if they are unbiased bystanders, as if they have no horse in the race.

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