“It is not only grief that makes writing in the time of genocide a tortuous task; it is, more so, one’s recognition of the written word as shamefully insufficient in the face of 2,000-pound bombs,” Mohammed El-Kurd writes in the introduction to his book Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books, 2025). The sentence suffices to comprehend the discrepancies between the coloniser’s military might and the colonised people’s words.
But the book has a deeper nuance. “There is no denying that the Palestinian in the West and many parts of the Arab world confronts staggering levels of violence, suppression, and erasure,” El-Kurd continues. What feeds the erasure of Palestinians? El-Kurd points towards ‘the politics of appeal’ – the language and rationale used to make the Palestinians endearing and worthy of the West’s attention. And yet despite the conscious or unconscious manoeuvring towards achieving this fabricated state of being, Palestinians are still dehumanised, murdered, displaced, tortured, starving and enduring genocide. Which brings the reader to acknowledge the entirety of the book’s title, especially the opening words: Perfect Victims.
The victims are dehumanised, and the dehumanised try to humanise themselves. While doing so, however, they run the risk of falling into the coloniser’s trap of dehumanisation. El-Kurd illustrates this cycle not only with examples from Palestinians’ lives, but also exposing the web of Western accomplices with Zionism that strangle Palestinian narratives from emerging. If Palestinians could speak freely, what would they say? If Palestinians did not have to calculate every word, what would the narrated experience under Zionist colonialism look like?
El-Kurd asserts that “It is the world’s reluctance or incapacity to see our tragedies as tragedies and our reactions as reactions, its insistence on categorising our normalities as deviance.” This is the space the Palestinian people is coerced to inhabit. To be Palestinian is perceived as a condemnation, and the West demands that Palestinians embody that condemnation.
Humanisation, in the Western perspective, oppresses the Palestinian people and their narrative. “It is the ceaseless infantilisation of the dehumanised subject,” the author notes, noting that the Palestinians displacement happens not only with territorial loss, but also from their own narratives. Humanising Palestinians fits Palestinians into a sanitised narrative, one that is forced into subjugated coexistence with the Zionist colonisers. As El-Kurd shows, each time the Palestinian experience is validated, it is immediately countered by prioritising the Israeli colonial narrative, so that Palestinian victims are not given a platform on their own human merit, but exist to divert attention to Israel’s security narrative, for example.
This forces the Palestinian people to use language that is accommodating, and to explain the Palestinian narrative in placating terms. Palestinians have to justify their existence through accomplishments that are familiar with Western narratives – degrees, professions, dual nationalities, EU passports are just a few of the categories that humanise Palestinians for a Western audience. However, El-Kurd notes, not even a dual nationality was enough for Shireen Abu Akleh – a Palestinian journalist also holding US citizenship who was targeted and killed by Israeli snipers in Jenin.
READ: Resisting Erasure: Capitalism, Imperialism and Race in Palestine
Throughout the book, the indignation is palpable. El-Kurd explains how “the invention of the civilian” has depoliticised the Palestinian cause, turning the anti-colonial resistance into a “humanitarian crisis” devoid of political rights. Palestinians, he says, “are interpreted as rogue actors senselessly wreaking havoc to the dismay of helpless bystanders – the disinterested women and children, the impartial paramedics and journalists.” As El-Kurd explains in the book, the male Palestinian is often the focal point of his writing, combating the Western categorising of Palestinians into deserving and undeserving of life and humanitarian attention.
Surveillance also feeds into dehumanising Palestinians. Even grieving, El-Kurd, notes, is done under surveillance. Palestinians have to grieve in a way that the West can accept. “Have we,” El-Kurd asks, “in our efforts to disown the legacy of the terrorist, reared settlers into our subconscious?” Palestinian humanity is restricted and reshaped into what is acceptable by Western standards, therefore Palestinians are not allowed to grieve through their own experience as a colonised population that is legitimately and actively involved in various forms of resistance. The West defines the victim, and the victim is often defined as Israel.
Israel, aided by the West, furthers the victim narrative through ‘discoveries’ – one example El-Kurd gives is that of Israeli President Isaac Herzog claiming to have found a copy of Mein Kampf in a Palestinian home. “In a children’s living room,” Herzog told the BBC, while reminding the host that the British fought against the Nazis. El-Kurd deplores the defence that seeks to debunk Herzog’s claims and further more asks why would the discovery of the book justify the genocide in Gaza.
Had the book been discovered in a Western living room, no further attributes would have been associated with the book or its owner. El-Kurd writes, “I once credulously believed that our testimonies would be considered credible only once we attained ‘respectability.’ Colonial logic gaslights us to believe that it is our shortcomings, not colonialism itself, that stand between us and liberation.” This statement encapsulates the essence of the book which, despite narrating many instances that are already known, take on a critique that is extremely vast precisely due to the power of the Zionist narrative, despite the latter’s absurdity.
To counter the narrative is to recognise the immensity of what Palestinians are up against. El-Kurd acknowledges the difficulty of speaking without justifying each word, while also illustrating the entrapment of such reasoning. Debunking the Zionist colonial myths take time and space away from the Palestinian people. “As Palestinians, our every engagement becomes a public trial,” the author notes. Western narratives are concerned with settlers, but not with six million Palestinian refugees. They are concerned with Israel’s security narrative, not the genocide targeting Palestinians in Gaza.
To speak about Palestine entails a responsibility that is different from what we are used to. It requires a consciousness of language and of intent. A consciousness awakened by the realisation that colonialism is not invincible.
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