Status Updates From Perfect Victims: And the Po...

audiobook (danke Libby🫶🏼)

“We must not wait for Haaretz or the New York Times to arrive at the miraculous epiphanies we have long called common truths. We should purge their prestige in our minds, the prestige that renders a Times acknowledgment of an eyewitness account more valuable than the account itself.
There are many ways to describe what I am demanding: decolonizing the press or controlling the means of production.”

This is insanely good

“The very moment that the Palestinian exits the womb, he is “unchilded”—flung away from childhood by a “machinery that exists everywhere and always” and treated as both a good-for-nothing nobody and a dangerous ticking bomb at once” […] “It is the dehumanization of Palestinians, one Nakba at a time, that has led us here: the demonization of our people, one Intifada at a time:”

"When we speak of these horrors, inherent to Zionist ideology, we are perceived at best as passionate and at worst, angry and hateful. But in reality, we are simply reliable narrators. [...] It is not on an identitarian bassi that we must claim the authority to narrate. Rather it is because history tells us that those who have oppressed, who have monopolized and institutionalized violence, will not tell the truth..."

"I remember picking up a copy of I Shall not Hate in a bookshop [... I remember thinking. What if he did hate those who killed his daughters? What then?"

"The invention of the civilian as a nonpartisan, neutral figure has exacerbated the depoliticiziation of the Palestinian cause. To be deemed a civilian necessitates that we exist in a mythological dimension where we are without perspective."

"we become thei robjects - curated into context free exhibitions, editoirzlied to wallow unintelligibly. "No legneds, noe xplanations." These words were the UN's response to a request by Edward Said to hang photograps of Palestinians in the entrance hall fo the 1983 INternational Conference on the Question of Palestine in Geneva."