Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal

“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? 

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