Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

by Mohammed El-Kurd

If we are lucky, diplomats say that our death concerns them, but they never mention the culprit, let alone condemn the culprit. Politicians, inert, inept, or complicit, fund our demise, then feign sympathy, if any. Academics stand idle. That is, until the dust settles, then they will write books about what should have been. Coin terms and such. Lecture in the past tense.

And we have seen God employed as a real-estate agent, bestowing Jerusalem houses to Brooklynites.

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. The violence inflicted upon our lands and our bodies, we are told, is secondary to the blemishes tarnishing our image, the blemishes that stand between us and justice, it seems. The smears we live to scrub clean.

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?

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.

If I say Free Palestine and someone hears Holocaust, that is at best apophenia, and at worst their own deliberate distortion, a deflection from the urgent and the tangible—the literal burning flesh of our people.

Such a common tactic to redirect the focus of the conversation to prioritize the comfort of the oppressor rather than the active violence being inflicted on the oppressed