Rethinking Victimhood in Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

El-Kurd offers a stark formulation that captures the central argument of Perfect Victims: “What makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.” This statement serves as the thematic anchor for the book. Written in the shadow of Gaza’s ongoing destruction and from the intimate terrain of occupied Jerusalem, the book returns again and again to this asymmetry: the same acts that are celebrated as “defence,” “courage,” or “resistance” when performed by certain subjects become, in Palestinian hands, proof of congenital criminality. The task of the book is not to correct this misunderstanding by supplying better Palestinian examples, but to question why Palestinians are required to perform moral perfection in order to be legible at all.

A recurring focus of El-Kurd’s critique is what he calls the “politics of appeal”: the exhausting labour of trying to win sympathy from audiences who already exercise overwhelming power over Palestinian life. He is interested in the familiar images that circulate in moments of intensified violence—a child’s last phone call from a besieged car, the smiling school portrait of someone now buried in rubble, the grandfather feeding cats before a bomb falls. Such stories matter, and El-Kurd never mocks the grief that shares them. But he worries about what happens when they become the primary currency of Palestinian speech: when only the most spectacular, “trauma-porn” deaths are allowed to count, and only so long as the victims appear passive, apolitical, and untainted by rage.

This concern leads him to a sharp critique of “humanisation” as it is usually practiced. El-Kurd writes, “I have always wanted to be human,” but he is acutely aware that under dominant media regimes, humanity is not assumed; it is a status to be earned. Later, he condenses this logic into one devastating formulation: “We are not human, automatically, by virtue of being human—we are to be humanized by virtue of our proximity to innocence: whiteness, civility, wealth, compromise, collaboration, nonalignment, nonviolence, helplessness, futurelessness.” The “perfect victim” must therefore be wounded, weak, and grateful—“too wounded to fight and too weak to frown or furrow their eyebrows.” Any sign of militancy, affiliation, or even bitterness threatens to cast them back into the already-criminal category.

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One of the strengths of Perfect Victims is that it shows how deeply this logic is internalised, even by those most critical of Zionism. El-Kurd describes being told, as a young writer, to “humanise” his grandmother by stripping away her sharpness and her political commitments in order to make her palatable to Western readers. He recounts how, within minutes of the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, he was inundated with messages urging him to stress her US passport, as if only American-ness could make her death legible. These are not simply cynical moves imposed from outside, he suggests, but habits that Palestinian writers, activists, and allies have learned to perform almost instinctively in an attempt to outwit a racist common sense.

Where the book feels especially contemporary is in its attention to the ritual cycle of clarifications, condemnations, and disclaimers that seems to accompany any public statement on Palestine. El-Kurd is not interested in proving that Palestinians do not possess the forbidden books or harbour the forbidden thoughts constantly ascribed to them. Instead, he presses the “even if?” question: even if someone did own the wrong text, utter the wrong slogan, or express hatred toward their occupiers, would that justify siege, mass displacement, or the bombing of hospitals and schools? The point is not to celebrate cruelty but to refuse a regime in which Palestinians are “guilty until proven otherwise”—and where “otherwise” is often impossible.

This insistence has implications beyond Palestine. El-Kurd repeatedly draws parallels with Black Americans killed by police, whose lives must be retroactively sanitised (“they were artists,” “they were unarmed”) in order for their deaths to be mourned, and with survivors of sexual violence who are believed only if they conform to an impossible script of sobriety and propriety. What he offers is not a grand comparative theory so much as a vocabulary—“defanging,” “perfect victimhood,” “criminals of thought”—for naming how sympathy is distributed and withheld across racialised and gendered lines.

Stylistically, Perfect Victims resists the sober neutrality often expected of political non-fiction. El-Kurd moves fluidly between reportage, autobiography, media analysis, and prose-poetry; he mixes invocations of Fanon and Toni Morrison with humour, family stories, and sudden, cutting asides. Irreverence is not decorative here. For him, laughter and sarcasm are “a dignifying act of refusal,” a way of resisting the colonisation of the inner voice. The sections on public talks are especially memorable: repeatedly asked whether he wants to “throw Israelis into the sea,” he begins to respond with flippant lines that expose the absurdity of the question before returning to the deeper issue—that such questions demand Palestinians pre-emptively disavow not only certain tactics but even certain emotions in order to be granted basic legitimacy.

At the same time, the book is candid about the limits of discourse. El-Kurd notes that global public opinion on Gaza has shifted far more rapidly than official policy. Appeals to conscience, he suggests, can at best make it harder for governments to manufacture consent; they cannot by themselves halt arms shipments or dismantle the structures of occupation. This recognition does not lead him to abandon writing—the book itself testifies to his faith in language—but it anchors questions of representation within a broader horizon of organised struggle, boycott, refusal, and, where it exists, armed resistance.

For readers, the book’s relevance lies less in comparative geography than in its conceptual vocabulary for analysing power, legitimacy, and the conditionality of voice. The pressures El-Kurd describes—the demand to distance oneself from “undesirable” actors, the criminalisation of association, the imperative to appeal to hostile audiences through politeness and respectability—resonate across many sites of racialised and colonised life. His reflections on how knowledge is curated and circulated—whose stories translate, whose analyses are cited, which images go viral—invite self-reflection within academic fields, including Palestine studies itself.

Perfect Victims is not a work of area studies, nor does it offer an empirical mapping of Israeli policy. Its contribution lies instead in clarifying the moral and rhetorical terrain on which Palestine is discussed, and in exposing the costs of pursuing recognition through innocence. The book serves less as a source of data than as an invitation to examine how our own scholarship may unconsciously reproduce the demand for spotless, apolitical suffering as the condition for being heard. El-Kurd offers no simple roadmap out of the politics of appeal. What he offers—candidly, forcefully, and with notable stylistic control—is a sustained argument that liberation struggles cannot be built on a promise to remain harmless, grateful, or pure.

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