Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

by Mohammed El-Kurd

We die in fleeting headlines, in between breaths. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather: Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past ten days. And much like the weather, only God is responsible—not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes.

We die a lot in abandonment.

If we are lucky, diplomats say that our death concerns them, but they never mention the culprit, let alone condemn the culprit.

Our people decompose in the courtyards of hospitals, like their grandparents who decayed on the Tantura beach.

Their children are held hostage in the cemeteries of numbers or frozen in mortuary chambers. Their bodies become bargaining chips.* Or harvested for organs.†

We die a lot in stubborn refusal.

When I speak of dehumanization, I am referring to the West’s refusal to look us in the eye.

What makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals.

WHEN TELEVISION PRODUCERS INVITE US to participate in their programs, they do not seek to interview us for our experiences or analysis or the context we can provide. They do not offer us their condolences the way they do our Israeli counterparts. They invite us to interrogate us.

the liar holds a journalism degree; and the butcher’s knives are publicly funded.

We have seen a nation punished for another nation’s genocide. And we have seen God employed as a real-estate agent, bestowing Jerusalem houses to Brooklynites.

Zionism—the political ideology, born in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe, that argued that the creation of a Jewish state would be the only viable solution to the persecution of Jews—is an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise. The Nakba, enduring and ongoing, remains the clearest crystallization of the Zionist ideology.

You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head. Crass statements are corrosive to your plight, even when such statements are about those who first steal your home and then loot your tent.

To illustrate: when the Israeli occupation forces killed fifteen-year-old Adam Ayyad in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem,* the question was, Did he really throw a Molotov cocktail at the soldiers? Aren’t the Israelis known for fabricating such stories? When instead the question should have been, Why are Israeli troops in Bethlehem in the first place? Why was Adam Ayyad born in a refugee camp? Why is “Molotov” in the headline of a story about soldiers killing a boy? So what if he throws a Molotov cocktail? Who wouldn’t?

That email was undoubtedly well intentioned, but it felt like a slap in the face. The logic is straightforward: certain citizenships can transform the slain—usually a number in a given statistic—into a person of blood and flesh, a victim worthy of sympathy.

basic question posed by Rashid Hussein:* “After they have burned my homeland, my friends, and my youth, / how can my poems not turn into guns?”

Resistance, in their case, meant something profane, disgraceful, not suitable for readers. Their victimhood was not a perfect victimhood, so they were not offered a spot in the LA Times.

Why not focus on the sitting politicians describing Palestinians as “savages” that “have to be eradicated”;37 politicians whose battle cries are “finish them,”38 “level the place,”39 and “bounce the rubble in Gaza”;40 politicians who, when asked about our children, say with enthusiasm, “We should kill ’em all”?41 Wouldn’t the explicitness of these comments make them easier to denounce, or at least easier to report?

so, why did the New York Times omit that the Israeli defense minister referred to Palestinians as “human animals” when it reported his instructions to tighten the siege on Gaza by cutting off water, electricity, and food?

the Israeli occupation forces openly considered journalists employed by media organizations associated with or run by Hamas “to be legitimate military targets.”

It also brings to mind a Jewish Insider headline that reads, “One-Third of Journalists Killed in Gaza Were Affiliated with Terrorist Groups.”45 A headline where journalists justify killing journalists.

Doctors justify killing doctors Women justify killing women And so on.

They do not need to be humanized.

LOUDER, KING.

Jerusalem city councilmen boasted of “tak[ing] house after house” on our street.3 They stood at our doorstep and told us, “You are against the Bible.... God says this area belongs to the Jewish people.”

Before I threw the rock, they stole my land. Before I picked up the rifle, they shot my loved ones. Before I made the makeshift rocket, they put me in a cage.

Colonialism is the robber and the policeman at once, committing the crime and legalizing it.

At first they denied it, then they said it was a misfired rocket, then they said it was a precision attack on a military leader (who was hiding among civilians), then they said the number of martyrs was fabricated, then they said it was a tragic mistake.

In situating the Holocaust outside of history, in placing it not just in the past but in an eternal future, Zionism today has created a status quo in which the possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present.

Yitzhak Rabin, the West’s beloved “Soldier of Peace,” instructed the Israeli military to break the arms and legs of hundreds of stone throwers and peaceful protesters alike during the First Intifada,

.........oh

The specter of their nuclear arsenal looms over us. Their warplanes target our loved ones and burn them alive. But Said’s stone! “What if [it] hit someone* on the other side?”

“I want my son to be educated, to live a life better than the one I live. I would love for him to obtain scientific degrees, to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer; that is my dream. And I will work to achieve it, but the Israelis have to first allow my child to grow up.”

Somewhere along the line the Palestinian child will stumble across the phrase “legally killed child”

Oh yeah i see the article

“Wait, you’re saying children in Gaza are being shot by snipers?” a CBS News correspondent asks Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon who has just returned from Gaza. “Definitively,” he answers. “I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately.”

a settler in Palestine will make a film about other, worse settlers, who laugh as they testify about Tantura, where they buried our ancestors in mass graves, a massacre we have narrated for decades, with visceral recollection, in our movies, in our novels and songs, in our oral histories.

a soldier suffers a pang of conscience and decides to break his silence, after a long career of maiming children or hunting protesters for sport. He comes clean, under legal immunity, of course, about all the heinous acts he has committed in our towns and refugee camps. He cannot sleep, he has PTSD, so, naturally, he embarks on a speaking tour across universities, where he is met with applause and platitudes. He professes his sins in the confessional of a brightly lit stage, and the audience, unscathed, entertained, grants him a plenary indulgence. What courage.

This book really 'menelanjangi' (couldn't find a better language) those terrorist entity.

The absence of Palestinian knowledge producers in such projects is not a testament to the inferiority of Palestinian knowledge production but an indictment of the erasure that lingers across industries—an erasure that refuses to engage with Palestinian historians

We are not history makers; history stomps on our bodies. Our resistance is obscured, our lineages defaced. We offer our blood and bruises as evidence, reporting our calamities without commentary, to support the author’s thesis. We become their objects—curated into context-free exhibitions, editorialized to wallow unintelligibly.

Perhaps another reason underlying our dependence on such rhetorical devices—be it decorated Western expertise or defanged Palestinian testimony—is simply that it is what sells.

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.

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.

Marah Bakir is a Palestinian former political prisoner from Beit Hanina, occupied Jerusalem. On October 12, 2015, Bakir was shot by Israeli occupation forces and accused of stabbing an Israeli police officer in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem. She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison at sixteen years old. Bakir was one the prisoners released on November 24, 2023, in a prisoner exchange deal.

Ahmad Manasra is a Palestinian political prisoner from Beit Hanina, occupied Jerusalem. He was arrested in 2015 at thirteen years old, accused of partaking in a stabbing against settlers in Pisgat Ze’ev, an Israeli settlement in occupied Jerusalem. He was sentenced to nine and a half years in Israeli prison and has been in solitary detention since November 2021. His case has received international coverage for the physical and psychological torture imposed upon him by the Zionist state.

Nufooz Hammad is a former political prisoner from Sheikh Jarrah. In 2021, at fourteen years old, she was accused of attempting to stab one of the settlers who lived across the street in the Al-Ghawi family home, which had been forcibly taken by a government-backed settler organization in 2008. She was sentenced to twelve years in Israeli prison. She was the youngest Palestinian female prisoner in Israeli custody.

There were 240 Palestinian children in Israeli prisons in June 2024.

When Israeli forces killed Issam Abdallah,* who was reporting in South Lebanon, the media behaved as it usually does, parroting official Israeli state narratives and obfuscating what eyewitnesses and local journalists reported.

Those of us who stand with “the children of darkness” will be blackmailed and blacklisted. “Either you are with us or with the terrorists,” bosses and world leaders say to those who listen, planting fear in their hearts. Are these anxieties based on real threats? Or has the enemy succeeded in using its fear-mongering policies to stifle the masses? What is that fear, anyway, compared to the fear of dying of starvation, of being flattened under a military tank, of being suffocated under the wreckage, of being the lone survivor of your family, of your heart breaking for the millionth time? What is that fear if not theater?

“art cannot exist for art’s sake,”

I provide the easy answers: artists raise awareness globally and fuel the masses locally.

in Ghassan Kanafani’s words, “employed [literature] extensively not only for its propaganda efforts but for its political and military campaigns as well.”

“If you don’t want to be engaged, if you don’t want to confront oppression, your role as an intellectual is pointless.”

the Israeli minister for the advancement of the status of women said to a nodding TV anchor, “I don’t care about Gaza, I literally don’t care. For all I care, they can go out and just swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around Gaza. That’s what I want to see.”