Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal - Mohammed El-Kurd
Published in 2025 by Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL
256 pages
ISBN: 9798888903155
In 2009, documentary filmmakers Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi released their short film, My Neighbourhood. The twenty-five-minute documentary centers on the family and experience of a 13-year-old boy, named Mohammad El-Kurd, whose home in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem was taken over and occupied by Israeli settlers in 2009. Throughout the documentary, we get a glimpse into how these Israeli settlers took over the house that his grandparents built after fleeing during the Nakba (النَّكْبَة) when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and driven off of their land. The short film also shows how anti-Zionist Jews organized around Sheikh Jarrah, standing in solidarity with their Palestinian neighbors against the brutal repression of the Israeli state.
Twelve years later, El-Kurd has become a large name within the movement for Palestinian dignity. In 2021, a video went viral of Mohammed’s sister, Muna, as she argued with an Israeli settler named Yaacov (Jacob). Attempting to take over her house in Sheikh Jarrah, Jacob infamously justified his actions by saying, with a heavy Brooklyn accent, “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it. So why are you yelling at me?” Mohammed returned to the West Bank from New York City during this dispute in which Palestinians were being evicted from their homes. This long legal dispute regarding Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid in the West Bank ultimately contributed to the crisis in Palestine from May 10 to May 21, 2021.
In the years since, El-Kurd has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, as he advocates for Palestinian rights in the face of Israeli human rights abuses. In 2022, El-Kurd released a book of poems, titled Rifqua. Named after this grandmother, the collection vividly painted a picture of life under occupation. Most recently, El-Kurd has been busy giving speeches at Oxford and appearing on American television programs as he continues to speak out against Israel’s genocidal, expansionist policies in Gaza and the West Bank. In his 2025 nonfiction work, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, El-Kurd provides a provocative and poetic critique of how Palestinian suffering is framed and consumed in global discourse. Through this poignant and timely work, El-Kurd challenges the demand for Palestinians to present their pain in ways that satisfy external expectations, particularly those of Western audiences.
Overview:
At the heart of El-Kurd’s argument is the concept of the "perfect victim," a term that captures the way Palestinians are often depicted in global media and political circles. It encompasses the Western impulse to defang Palestinians to make them a perfect victim worthy of mourning, rather than questioning why Palestinians are resisting in the first place. It suggests a certain kind of victimization that is both idealized and politically strategic, often framed in a way that can dehumanize the individuals it refers to. El-Kurd critiques how the international community, including humanitarian organizations and media outlets, selectively constructs Palestinian suffering in ways that can sometimes sanitize or obscure the deeper political realities of occupation, dispossession, and resistance.
Palestinians have long been trapped in a suffocating theater: in order to receive Western empathy, they must perform their pain in precise, regulated ways. They must be docile, passive, and devoid of anger. They must bleed without resisting. This framing, El-Kurd argues, reduces Palestinians to figures of pure suffering—passive, helpless, and in need of external intervention, typically in the form of humanitarian aid or diplomatic gestures. This victimhood narrative, while eliciting sympathy, is politically charged and dangerous: it strips Palestinians of their agency and reorients the struggle for justice into a humanitarian crisis rather than a political fight for liberation.
El-Kurd illustrates his main argument through a series of examples. Drawing from his experiences growing up in the occupied Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, El-Kurd intertwines personal anecdotes with broader political analysis. From the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh by IOF forces and the immediate desire by Western media to emphasize her American citizenship, to contrasting media depictions of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against the Russian invasion and Palestinians resisting Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and deconstructing the pearl-clutching within academia over Edward Said’s infamous image of him throwing a rock toward the Israel/West Bank border wall, El-Kurd grounds his analysis in the day-to-day struggle and brutality that Palestinians face. This blend of memoir and reportage serves to humanize the political struggle, illustrating how personal histories are inextricably linked to national narratives of resistance and survival.
El-Kurd explores how Palestinian narratives are often shaped by outside forces, resulting in a portrayal of Palestinians as passive victims in need of rescue or as unilaterally oppressed individuals. However, he pushes back against these simplifications, arguing that this view erases the agency, resilience, and activism of the Palestinian people. By highlighting their struggle for justice, El-Kurd calls attention to the importance of recognizing Palestinians as active agents in their liberation, not just as victims of an overwhelming system of violence.
Deeper Dive:
In his opening author’s notes, El-Kurd sets the tone for the book, outlining his intent to challenge the prevailing narratives that demand Palestinians to perform a sanitized version of victimhood to gain sympathy. He emphasizes the importance of presenting Palestinian experiences authentically, without succumbing to external expectations. He also clarifies the book’s purpose, writing, “I do not consider Perfect Victims to be a critique, per se. Nor is it a manifesto, or a monograph. Rather, it is an interrogation of strategies and tactics, ideologies and impulses, and hypotheses and beliefs, an infiltration of the dominant discourses” (2).
In the First Chapter, El-Kurd opens with a stark critique of how Palestinian deaths are often reported in a detached, almost routine manner. He highlights the normalization of violence against Palestinians and the dehumanization inherent in such reporting. By comparing Palestinian deaths to weather forecasts, he underscores the systemic nature of their suffering and the world's indifference.
He also compares the coverage of Israeli deaths with Palestinian deaths. While Israeli deaths are grieved without qualifiers and then utilized to justify genocide, Palestinian deaths are “the sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are” (11). He highlights the dehumanization of Palestinians through the process of colonization, as well as how they are portrayed in Western media as one of two poles: as either victims or terrorists (21). While the politics of appeal is a natural response to pull Palestinians out of being immediately deemed terrorists, it can also reify the very conditions of their oppression, merely utilizing “the master’s tools” instead of challenging the narratives that sustain the current apartheid regime. This dehumanization not only affects the self-perception and psyche of the Palestinian, but it also becomes a justification for their displacement and death.
Chapter Two delves into the concept of "defanging," where Palestinians are expected to present themselves in a non-threatening manner to gain sympathy and humanity. El-Kurd argues that this demand strips Palestinians of their dignity and reduces their resistance to a palatable form that aligns with colonial expectations. Such representations either sanitize the nature of occupation or reduce the Palestinian identity to that of a passive, suffering group without acknowledging their agency, resilience, and ongoing political resistance. He critiques this dynamic, advocating for a narrative that does not seek permission or validation but asserts Palestinian humanity on its own terms.
In Chapter Three, El-Kurd examines the selective empathy that characterizes global responses to Palestinian suffering, using the case of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as a primary example. On May 11, 2022, beloved Palestinian journalist and reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper while she was covering the raid of a Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. A fixture within Palestinian households through Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts, Abu Akleh was a beloved figure within Palestine, as she bravely reported on some of the most egregious acts and conflicts within the region. Her murder was heavily condemned by the rest of the world, although Israel denied responsibility and violently disrupted her funeral by attacking mourners with batons and stun grenades.
While highlighting her importance and the shock of the loss of Abu Akleh, El-Kurd also recounts how, immediately, the press emphasized that she held an American passport, which instantly made her “a victim worthy of sympathy” (53). He lambasts the impulse that we feel to immediately distance Palestinians from any sort of political affiliation to make them “grievable” to a wider, Western audience. Doing so, he argues, reifies the colonial logic that rendered them disposable in the first place. He writes, “When we do what we do to Shireen Abu Akleh, to Omar As’ad, to Hind Rajab, to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, when we do it out of love, out of a desperate desire to legitimize mourning them, we are inadvertently reifying the colonial rationale that killed them and rendered them killable in the first place” (73).
El-Kurd also recounts how Israel initially denied responsibility for her assassination, blaming Palestinian militants instead, before a series of external investigations led Israel to gradually admit that she was “accidentally” killed, although no one has yet faced repercussions for her death. Additionally, he highlights the Western media’s passive voice when they depict Palestinian killings and contrasts the valorization of Ukrainian resistance fighters in the war against Russia with the demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians against the Israeli occupying force. As such, El-Kurd highlights how narratives are shaped to fit geopolitical agendas, often at the expense of truth and justice. This chapter critiques the commodification of Palestinian pain and the ethical implications of such representations.
In Chapter Four, El-Kurd reflects on the constant scrutiny Palestinians face in expressing their emotions, likening it to a life spent in cross-examination. He critiques the expectation that Palestinians must justify their humanity and resist the urge to show visceral emotions, even in the wake of extreme suffering and privation. As he writes, “This mandate, to be human in this way, imposes an inordinate burden on those mourning their slain loved ones. Grieving a loss is bad enough; doing it under the panopticon of public scrutiny is abasing. Not only that, but Palestinians are tasked with articulating their grief under the literal surveillance of the settler state and its mercenaries” (86). As such, this section serves as a critique of the performative aspects of victimhood and the burden it places on the oppressed.
In Chapter Five, El-Kurd explores the semantic dance that Palestinians often must undertake when speaking of Israel’s brutality to maintain humanity in the eyes of the West. He writes,
We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It did not matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial; what mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under--burglarized, blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts--or the fact that they kept us at all. Language was more of a minefield than the border that separated the occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria, and we, children at the time, were expected to hop around the land mines, hoping we would not accidentally step on an explosive trope that would discredit us. (99-100)
Following this, he discusses how Palestinians are often caught in a discursive trap, as their resistance against Israel is often automatically labeled as antisemitism. This is despite the Palestinian people repeatedly emphasizing how their fight is against Zionism, “an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise” (106). Instead of constantly engaging in this dance to prove he is not antisemitic, El-Kurd believes that this is a cynical tactic and a red herring utilized by the Israeli state to justify the dehumanization and eradication of the Palestinian people. As such, he calls out the false equivalence that is given between this semantic “violence” and the systemic violence that Israel carries out against the Palestinians every day, calling us to reevaluate which one poses the most danger, as “only one party in the ‘conflict’ is actively engaged in the systematic attempted eradication of an entire population” (109).
In Chapter Six, El-Kurd examines the role of propaganda in shaping perceptions of Palestinians, utilizing Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s dubious claims that copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf were found in a Palestinian children's classroom. El-Kurd critiques how such narratives are constructed to demonize Palestinians and justify their oppression, arguing that even if this claim were true (and not, as many have suggested, a piece of Israeli propaganda that was planted by the IDF), it still would not justify the extermination of the Palestinian people. He writes, “Nothing in my character or on my bookshelf, even the horrid, should determine whether I live or die. Nothing in my ideology, even if it is inflammatory; nothing in my disposition, even if it is uncouth…What I read cannot be used as a pretext to kill me, even if I filled my library with books written by psychopaths, interchangeably stacking copies of Mein Kampf and Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices” (113).
He also urges readers to critically assess the information they consume, as he discusses the ethical implications of such representations and the responsibility of the media in shaping public perception. These pieces of propaganda are often smokescreens to distract from the ongoing colonial military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. El-Kurd calls on us to “‘debunk’ with dignity, always while naming the elephant in the room: propaganda. My mission is not to clear my name from false accusations; rather it is to unmask the deceit and duplicity of my accusers. Otherwise, logic in the face of illogic is short-sighted, because it unwittingly legitimizes insidiousness, it dignifies it with a response” (119).
In Chapter Seven, El-Kurd analyzes the virulent response from Western academia toward Edward Said after he famously threw a rock toward the Israel/Western Bank border wall. If even someone like Said could become a persona non grata in the academic world and be labeled as a terrorist sympathizer, how could anyone stand a chance? As El-Kurd writes, “If the most debonair and worldly among us cannot be trusted with a pebble, how could the unrefined be trusted with a microphone” (133)?
This observation becomes a launching point for El-Kurd to deconstruct his own history and role within the Palestinian cause. He recounts his upbringing in Sheikh Jarrah, an Israeli-occupied neighborhood in East Jerusalem. He recounts his involvement with the documentary, My Neighbourhood, as a thirteen-year-old, as well as writing a letter to President Obama during the same year. While he initially thought that he would write about how children are often used as innocent, blank canvases for political purposes and NGOs, he instead delves into a more interesting discussion of how colonialism and systemic violence shape one’s perception of childhood. He writes, “The brutal reality of colonial violence, as it manifests now only in constant exposure to checkpoints, raids, and settler and military violence but also in relentless attacks on their personhood, confirms that no amount of support, outside of abolishing colonial rule in Palestine, can shield children from the deep and lasting scars left by the erosion of their daily lives” (146-147). Yet, despite the West often appealing to children to humanize and sanitize Palestinians, these same children are still not spared by the sniper’s bullet or the accusations of terrorism.
This leads El-Kurd to ask the question: if lauded academics such as Said cannot freely speak, and children are likewise silenced, then who can speak for the Palestinians? He discusses the phenomenon of "miraculous epiphanies," where individuals or organizations claim to have discovered the truth about Palestinian suffering. In Western activist and civil society circles, we often hyper-fixate on the condemnations of “Zionist pioneers, the foul-mouthed politicos, the soldiers who shoot and cry” (155), who more often than not turn out to be unreliable narrators. We often rely on anti-Zionist Jewish voices or Israeli scholars to finally validate the experiences that Palestinians have been shouting about for decades, as their endorsement often makes us feel more shielded from accusations of antisemitism.
Yet, these works often erase Palestinian voices. When they are included, they are portrayed as passive victims whose acts of resistance and agency have been wiped away. El-Kurd contemplates the role that capitalism plays in the perpetuation of these stories since this is what often sells well on the market. He uses the example of films that are codirected by Israeli and Palestinian directors, which we tend to blindly celebrate as a radical act in itself, regardless of the film’s content. Thus, we reduce “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” (163).
He also worries that support for Palestine, rather than coming from a place of genuine desire for liberation, is slowly turning into a form of social capital and could be utilized not for “collective emancipation, but to achieve individualist victories at the expense of the the underprivileged classes who are unable to game the system in the same way” (166). To combat this, he calls on the reader to consider the sources of their information about Palestine and the voices that we choose to amplify; to deregulate “the racist structures that elevate one testimony over another on a purely identitarian basis—to name them, challenge them, and refuse to perpetuate them” (169).
In Chapter Eight, El-Kurd shifts his attention to how media outlets will often utilize Palestinian and Muslim identities to further their own narratives. He contemplates his own role and complicity in broadcasting his ideas from mainstream outlets that also obfuscate the crimes of the Israeli state. Reflecting on this, he writes, “Our likeness, whether on a roster, a masthead, or in between quotation marks, is a currency in this identity-abusing world, and it is exploited to legitimize and diversify these complicit establishments, to shield them against accusations of bias and racism while abandoning us when push comes to shove, when the handcuffs are slapped on our wrists” (174).
He also returns to a central question of the chapter: Are we all Palestinians? He recognizes that he exists in a privileged position away from the day-to-day brutality and violence that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip endure, and while a sense of guilt haunts him, he recognizes that “it is an unproductive sentiment, it does not start revolutions” (183). He also questions what exactly his role is in this crisis. While he writes literature to raise awareness and mobilize populations, he engages in self-criticism, realizing that his accolades and awards are increasingly meaningless, especially when so many others are languishing in hospital beds and behind bars. In an admission of helplessness, he confesses that “it's hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun” (189). Yet, he calls on us to bravely speak out against the apartheid regime and “ embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep” (190).
The Ninth and final Chapter addresses a question often posed to El-Kurd and other Palestinians about their stance on Israel: namely, “why do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?” He critiques this as a diversionary tactic that shifts the focus away from the real issues and challenges Palestinians to define their own narratives and responses. He points out that the word “want” implies an element of fantasy and desire, which is assumed in order to malign and discredit the Palestinian. It is also a projection, as the state of Israel is the one actively committing a televised genocide.
In response to the bad faith criticisms levied by Zionists, El-Kurd believes that mockery and facetious humor can refute these bad faith arguments, and points to his flippant response, “If they are so afraid of drowning, why don’t they learn how to swim?” (202). As such, he believes that this points out that the settlers' theoretical future is automatically prioritized over the material reality of extermination that Palestinians face. “Derision, in this context,’ he argues, ‘teaches those who share your frustrations that they should not be shamed into accepting an upside-down world. Instead, it acts as a catalyst for critical thinking and intellectual autonomy, empowering the audience to question the status quo, to satirize it, to strip it naked before its yes-men and sycophants” (204).
In his Epilogue, El-Kurd, El-Kurd reiterates the themes of the book, emphasizing the importance of dignity, authenticity, and resistance. He calls for a reimagining of Palestinian identity that rejects imposed narratives and embraces a self-defined existence. Palestinians are more than passive victims; they are also beacons of resilience and refusal to submit to subjugation. Likewise, Zionism is more vulnerable today than ever, as the facade has begun to crack in the wake of this live-streamed genocide. Thus, this section serves as a call to action, urging readers to confront their complicity in perpetuating these narratives and to engage with the Palestinian struggle on its own terms.
Commendations:
Perfect Victims possesses many significant strengths. First and foremost, on an emotional level, El-Kurd’s work is an immensely powerful and evocative account of Palestinian identity in the face of oppression. His visceral and caustic words will challenge and disturb you in the best way, shaking you out of comfortable complicity. El-Kurd breaks from the typical conventions of academic critique by blending memoir, political analysis, journalism, and scathing polemic. The oscillation between deeply personal experiences (especially in Sheikh Jarrah) and macro-level geopolitical analysis offers a textured, decolonial epistemology, centered not in abstraction, but in lived experience.
In refusing to write like a policy analyst or a “native informant,” El-Kurd enacts what decolonial theorists like Walter Mignolo have called epistemic disobedience, which is the deliberate refusal to reproduce knowledge in forms that cater to colonial institutions. His essays pulse with a poetic sensibility, drawing on the political aesthetics of resistance honed through generations of Palestinian struggle. The personal is political here, not as a slogan, but as a method.
Yet, despite all of the brutality and seemingly insurmountable odds, El-Kurd retains glimmers of hope (the epilogue in which he describes the jasmine blossoming next to the school struck me in particular). Tears welled up in my eyes after I finished the book and set it down on my coffee table. As such, it deserves to be read slowly and purposefully, and it will challenge you and change you if you are open to it.
In terms of content, El-Kurd unflinchingly describes the bind that Palestinians find themselves in, both in Gaza/the West Bank and the Western world. El-Kurd's most significant contribution is his sustained refusal of victimhood narratives, of moral legibility crafted by Western liberal sensibilities, and of the frameworks that demand Palestinian suffering be sanitized to be recognized. This refusal echoes Frantz Fanon’s assertion in Black Skin, White Masks that the colonized must not seek legitimacy within the gaze of the colonizer. El-Kurd does not write to explain Palestinians to the West, but to affirm their reality in its raw, painful, resistant totality. That in itself is a radical gesture.
In rejecting the politics of respectability, I noticed that El-Kurd finds particular resonance and parallels with the Black radical tradition. The idea that Palestinians must appeal to white, liberal sensibilities and must “earn” solidarity by being non-threatening becomes, in El-Kurd’s hands, an indictment of a global moral economy shaped by colonialism and anti-Arab racism.
This critique is most powerfully articulated in chapters like “The Politics of Defanging” and “A Life in Cross-Examination,” where El-Kurd exposes how Palestinians are not simply represented but surveilled by the very languages meant to liberate them. He writes from a position of deep interiority, yet with the structural clarity of someone who understands empire intimately, not just as a policy, but as a logic that shapes who may speak, and under what terms.
Another one of the strongest aspects of El-Kurd’s account is its deconstruction of the idea of the "perfect victim" within the Palestinian struggle. El-Kurd criticizes how Palestinians are often represented as helpless victims in global discourse. This critique is essential in reframing the narrative surrounding their struggle, as it challenges our tendency to view oppressed groups as passive recipients of sympathy rather than active agents in their liberation. By elevating Palestinian agency and resistance, El-Kurd pushes against the neoliberal and humanitarian approaches to the issue, which tend to focus on emotional appeals to alleviate suffering rather than addressing the structural causes of the conflict. El-Kurd’s focus on the political dimension of Palestinian resistance reinforces the notion that struggles for freedom are not just about humanitarian aid but about dismantling systems of oppression.
Likewise, the title’s invocation of the “politics of appeal” is a direct critique of liberal human rights discourse that has long depoliticized Palestinian resistance. By analyzing how Palestinians are expected to be “perfect victims” that are non-violent, apolitical, childlike, or tragically passive, El-Kurd dissects the racialized conditions under which solidarity is granted. His analysis here is once again deeply in conversation with Black radical thought and their critique of the spectacle of Black suffering. El-Kurd applies this to the Palestinian context with clarity and personal immediacy.
From a historical and theoretical standpoint, I appreciated how El-Kurd draws on key anti-colonial theorists and movements, highlighting the legacy of figures like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, whose works influenced the understanding of colonial violence and resistance. By positioning Palestinians not just as victims but as fighters for justice, El-Kurd builds on a long tradition of anti-colonial thought that has emphasized the importance of reclaiming identity and autonomy in the face of imperial domination.
Additionally, a central part of El-Kurd’s critique lies in his examination of Western complicity in the Israeli occupation. The United States and European powers have long played a role in perpetuating the Israeli state's expansionist policies through both military aid and diplomatic support. El-Kurd critiques how these powers present themselves as neutral mediators or as humanitarians, while simultaneously upholding the systems of oppression that allow the occupation to persist.
This is a crucially important insight, as it locates the struggle for Palestine within the larger framework of global imperialism. Western nations, while claiming to advocate for peace and stability in the region, have often been the architects of the violence and displacement that Palestinians face. By examining this complicity, El-Kurd provides a lens through which we can understand how global power structures enable and sustain settler colonialism.
When it comes to critique, El-Kurd excels in his ability to weave together the themes of identity, resistance, and politics in ways that challenge both mainstream and even some left-wing perspectives that fall into reductionist or overly simplistic views of Palestinian suffering. He does not spare any punches against Western liberals or even well-meaning progressives, drawing attention to how solidarity with Palestine is often conditional, dependent on tone, composure, or distance from resistance tactics. El-Kurd’s most cutting interventions are directed not only at Zionist institutions or settler-colonial ideologues but at the international liberal and leftist milieus that claim to support Palestinians while policing the forms their resistance may take.
In “Are We Indeed All Palestinians?”, El-Kurd dismantles the empty solidarity slogans that circulate in Western activist spaces. He shows how the flattening of Palestinian specificity into metaphoric shorthand for generic oppression erases the materiality of occupation, siege, and apartheid. The critique is not against solidarity itself, but against a solidarity that costs nothing, risks nothing, and demands that Palestinians be grateful for breadcrumbs. He asks: Is this solidarity rooted in anti-colonial commitment, or simply in palatable outrage?
El-Kurd also takes aim at the humanitarian-industrial complex and the aesthetics of suffering it perpetuates. In “Shireen’s Passport,” the assassination of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh becomes a moment not only of mourning but of theoretical reflection on who is grievable, and under what passports. This echoes Judith Butler’s notion of precarious life, but El-Kurd pushes it further: some lives are not just ungrievable; they are made unintelligible unless their owners conform to the performance of perfect victimhood.
Finally, El-Kurd’s call for a reimagined solidarity with Palestine is another key strength of the book. He critiques the limitations of traditional, liberal forms of solidarity that focus on humanitarian aid or symbolic gestures rather than taking a truly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial stance. True solidarity is not about charity or simply feeling sorry for the oppressed, but about actively challenging the systems of power that perpetuate their suffering. This is a call for a solidarity that engages deeply with the political struggle of the Palestinian people, rather than one that merely seeks to "save" them from their oppression.
In short, El-Kurd’s work is not only a powerful political and literary text but also a vital intervention into the contemporary discourse around resistance, representation, and solidarity. It is a work steeped in urgency, unflinching honesty, and ideological clarity. However, its value lies not simply in what it asserts, but in how it invites readers, especially those in the Global North, to interrogate our epistemic frameworks, our complicit silences, and the colonial logic embedded in “empathy” politics.
Critique:
Yet the book is not without its limitations. While the book’s decolonial clarity is undeniable and it is rich in political and emotional intelligence, its refusal to engage more directly with theoretical or historical frameworks may leave some readers, particularly within academia, wishing for deeper grounding. For a work that is situated within a decolonial praxis, it might have been strengthened by connecting more explicitly to thinkers such as Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Achille Mbembe, Walter Rodney, or contemporary radical scholars like Noura Erakat, Jasbir Puar, Angela Davis, or Sylvia Wynter, who have interrogated similar terrains of representation, resistance, and colonial optics. While El-Kurd by no means is obligated to theorize for an academic audience, grounding his insights in these broader traditions could have deepened the analytical framework and positioned his work more explicitly within the canon of anti-colonial thought.
Moreover, there are moments when the book’s rhetorical sharpness and unapologetic polemic is more effective in diagnosing problems than offering strategic directions. This is particularly evident in the critique of performative solidarity or media representation: the demolitions are clear, but constructive alternatives (especially for non-Palestinian readers who want to act meaningfully) are less developed. Of course, El-Kurd is not writing a how-to manual. Still, a more explicit engagement with liberatory strategy could offer additional depth. All in all, though, this is not a fatal flaw. Perhaps this book is not meant to build bridges but to burn the ones that have led nowhere.
One final point: a more sustained class analysis would have enriched El-Kurd’s critique. The focus on media, liberal discourse, bourgeois respectability, and NGO culture is powerful, but sometimes the absence of a sustained class analysis leaves some gaps. How do neoliberal structures and the political economy of occupation intersect with the cultural and epistemic violence El-Kurd critiques? There is room to further link the representational struggles with the material realities that sustain the occupation. Integrating a class lens wouldn’t necessarily dilute the narrative, but rather would enrich its radical scope.
Conclusion:
Overall, Perfect Victims is a prescient, compelling, and incredibly valuable contribution to the struggle for Palestinian dignity. While a more explicit engagement with anti-colonial thought and a sharper class analysis could have deepened El-Kurd’s analysis, this book remains a rare and urgent work of political writing which is fiery, deeply rooted, and indispensable for our current moment. It cleaves through the carefully managed discourse that has long mediated Western understandings of Palestine and demands not just passive sympathy but brave and bold transformation. With the same searing voice that defined his poetry collection Rifqa, El-Kurd here turns to the essay form to mount a radical, decolonial critique of the mechanisms through which Palestinian suffering is sanitized, consumed, and rendered conditionally legible.
El-Kurd’s work is not just a book, it is a rupture. His fiery voice refuses appeal not because it has given up on being heard, but because it understands that the ear it once courted was never truly listening. El-Kurd’s work calls for a radical rethinking of how Palestinians are represented and how solidarity is enacted. It challenges the victimhood narrative that diminishes Palestinian agency and instead calls for solidarity rooted in political struggle, anti-imperialism, and the recognition of Palestinian self-determination.
For activists, scholars, and movements invested in anti-colonial and decolonial work, this book offers a powerful framework for understanding the Palestinian struggle. El-Kurd’s call for a more politically engaged and critical form of solidarity is timely and urgent, urging the global left to move beyond superficial gestures and into meaningful action that challenges the structures of power and imperialism that sustain colonial violence. Through "Perfect Victims," El-Kurd has provided a tool for decolonization not only in Palestine but also in how we understand resistance, justice, and liberation in the 21st century.
El-Kurd urgently reminds us that Palestinians are not symbols, metaphors, or moral litmus tests. They are people: fierce, fractured, resisting. El-Kurd reminds us that the demand for Palestinians to be perfect victims is not a neutral or compassionate request; it is a colonial imposition, designed to foreclose resistance and neutralize rage. For those interested in decolonial thought, the plight of the Palestinians, or the ethics of representation in a world of selective grief, Perfect Victims should be read slowly, seriously, and repeatedly.
This book will not comfort you.
It is not meant to.
Instead, El-Kurd’s words will confront you.
And they will make you choose.