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Part 1: Palestinian Writer Mohammed El-Kurd on “Perfect Victims,” Trump & Israel’s Criminalization of Thought
Part 1: Palestinian Writer Mohammed El-Kurd on “Perfect Victims,” Trump & Israel’s Criminalization of Thought
Palestinian Writer Mohammed El-Kurd on “Perfect Victims,” Trump & Israel’s Criminalization of Thought
February 11, 2025
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Israel & Palestine
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Mohammed El-Kurd
Palestinian journalist, Palestine correspondent at The Nation and an editor-at-large at Mondoweiss.
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"Perfect Victims"
We speak with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd on the publication day for his new book, Perfect Victims. It comes at a time of heightened censorship and attacks on Palestinian expression in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as in the United States and elsewhere. Perfect Victims explores ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and human rights abuses and the “impossible demand made of the Palestinians” to be sympathetic in the eyes of international observers. He says that pressure leads to “curating yourself in a way that is not offensive to the Western gaze.” El-Kurd also discusses U.S. attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, President Donald Trump’s calls for ethnically cleansing Gaza, Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank and his own family’s history of fighting eviction from their home in East Jerusalem.
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. democracynow.org
We spend the rest of the hour with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd. His new book is out today, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. The book’s publication comes at a time when even books about Palestinians are seen as a threat to the Israeli state. On Sunday, Israeli police raided two locations of the Educational Bookshop, a beloved Palestinian-owned store in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel detained the bookstore owners, Mahmoud and his nephew Ahmad Muna, who were held for two nights before being released earlier today. Ahmad spoke after his release.
AHMAD MUNA: We have just been released after two days of arrest. I have been released. Mahmoud is — we are waiting for his release. This arrest was brutal. The bases are not clear. We have been released today with conditions. We have to stay at home for five days of arrest, and we are not allowed in the shops for 20 days. It was a brutal, hard arrest. And it’s obvious that there are no charges so far, so we are — there’s nothing to be that we’re held for.
AMY GOODMAN: Witnesses said the Israeli police used Google Translate during the raid to determine the names of books in Arabic. He said, quote, “Anything they didn’t like, they took.” There are reports books seized included a children’s coloring book titled From the River to the Sea and Noam Chomsky’s book Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé.
Our guest, Mohammed El-Kurd, grew up in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where Israel has spent years trying to evict Palestinian families in order to give their homes to Jewish settlers.
Mohammed El-Kurd, welcome back to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your new book.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: As you go around the country presenting Perfect Victims, you hear about this bookstore being closed — the owners being arrested. Your thoughts? And the significance of going after the books?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, I think this is — the attack on the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem is yet another saga in the Israeli regime’s scholasticide, the attack on culture, scholars. You know, we’ve seen them literally bomb every single university in the Gaza Strip. And the Educational Bookstore is, in fact, not the first bookstore in Jerusalem to be closed down, its owners arrested.
So there is, you know, a criminalization of thought, a criminalization of the intellect, really. And we’ve seen this extend even to the realms of social media, where so many thousands of the people who have been arrested in the past 15 months have been arrested over Facebook posts. So, the Israeli regime really is waging a war of consciousness against the Palestinians’ ability to express national sentiments. And we see this also here in the United States with President Trump saying things like people who — students who support the resistance will have their visas revoked. So there is an attack on, you know, the intellect itself.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mohammed El-Kurd, you ask why Palestinians have to preface their support for the struggle against the occupation with some kind of statement distancing themselves from resistance actions like the attacks of October 7th of 2023. Why is this problematic, while supporters of Israel are never expected to decry the everyday violence of the occupation?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Because it’s racist. Because there is an impossible standard. There is an impossible demand made of the Palestinians to be, you know, for lack of a better expression, perfect victims, to portray themselves with this ethnocentric civility that adheres to Western guidelines; otherwise, they would be deserving of death, they would be deserving of being bombed. And to reject this is to say that the Declaration of Human Rights is unconditional, and it’s universal. And to reject this is to say that, you know, we believe in dignity. We don’t believe in having to shrink ourselves or to perform a different script in order to be awarded freedom and dignity. These are things we are entitled to.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This became a flashpoint, is still a flashpoint, in the United States for attacking pro-Palestinian groups for being antisemitic or anti-Israel. Yet many in the Israeli government, in the current Israeli government, actually support “from the river to the sea” as an Israeli state, and no one raises a fuss about it.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, of course, because the issue is not the statement itself. The issue is who says it. The Israelis could say “from the river to the sea” and more. They could say all kinds of explicitly genocidal statements. And yet, with us, they have to read between the lines. They have to infer and look for the hidden insidiousness in such chants. But it’s comical, in my opinion, that we are being often interrogated about our chants, about what we say on social media; meanwhile, when we talk about them, we’re talking about bombs and airstrikes and burning people alive in their tents in hospital beds.
AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed, before we talk about your title, Perfect Victims, I just want to ask about your background, because we repeatedly interviewed you here and when you were in Sheikh Jarrah. And for people to understand that neighborhood and what happened there and the people involved being the leaders of Israel today, talk about the occupation of Sheikh Jarrah and what happened in your own home.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, I mean, the story of our home is as unique and absurd as it is common. This is a neighborhood where tax-exempt charities registered in the United States, settler organizations, Jewish American organizations, will come and claim our homes by divine decree, and they will exploit an already asymmetrical judiciary that is built by settlers for settlers to say these are — “Your homes are ours, and we have the right to kick you out of them.” And so, I, like many, many Palestinians, grew up with, quite literally, an American settler in my house. And it’s —
AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. Now, you’re 25 right now.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Twenty-six, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-six.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: When was your home — were you forced to share it with someone who wasn’t in your family?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: It was about 2009. 2009, I came home from school, and half of our house was going. There was a settler inside it, a settler from Long Island. And, you know, right across the street from us, our neighbors, the Ghawi family and the Hannoun family, had lost the entirety of their home to settler organizations. And across the years, these settler organizations have gotten more and more funding. And like you said, their accomplices and people who work for them and people who lead these organizations have found their way increasingly to the government. But this is indicative of a larger, larger —
AMY GOODMAN: They set up offices in Sheikh Jarrah.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, they set up offices in Sheikh Jarrah. They kind of use our homes as the home bases to build their electability, their popularity, because the Israeli public is really eager to see this kind of desperation, to see this kind of brutality. And it invokes a sense of safety in the Israeli public to see their politicians literally in the backyards of Palestinians saying, “We will take these homes. We will Judaize them. We will colonize them.”
AMY GOODMAN: And your home today?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, my home today, like eight others, we have managed, through a massive, massive global solidarity campaign, to postpone the expulsion orders. But we still hang in the balance. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years.
AMY GOODMAN: How does that fit into your title, Perfect Victims?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, I mean, to do a global campaign and to demand solidarity for our neighborhood, you know, we were told and we were taught to perform this role of perfect — to read the script of the perfect victim.
So, to tell you more, you know, I grew up — as a child, as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, we would have journalists, diplomats, all kinds of people visit our neighborhood as if it’s some kind of zoo. And I remember, constantly, I would talk to them. I would show them, you know, photos of the brutality that the settlers did against us. And I would be pulled to the side by, you know, other concerned diplomats or journalists, and they would tell me, “You shouldn’t use this phrase. You should use that phrase.” And it got to a point that, even as a child, I would correct my grandmother when she would refer to the Jewish American settlers in our home as “Jewish.” I would say, “No, no. Don’t mention that.”
But this kind of obfuscation, this kind of omission was kind of drilled into us. And then you grow up, and you have internalized this entire framework of editorializing yourself, of curating yourself in a way that is nonoffensive to the Western gaze. And then you begin to curate and editorialize all the people around you. You look at people who have suffered pager attacks in South Lebanon, people who have had their homes demolished in the Gaza Strip, and you think, “What is the way I can make this victim, this young victim, nonoffensive or compelling to a Western racist audience?” At some point, you have to liberate yourself from these shackles and say, “Actually, this is the victim. This is the oppressed, not the oppressor, not the perpetrator.” And we should shift our focus and scrutinize the perpetrators, the oppressors, the colonizers, the focal point and the root cause of all of the violence in Palestine, which is ultimately Zionism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mohammed, I wanted to ask you how Donald Trump’s recent comments on Gaza tie into what’s at the heart of your book. He’s described Gaza as, quote, “a big real estate site” and basically said that he doesn’t believe Palestinians should be able to return once they’ve been removed.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, ultimately, this so-called conflict has always been about the land, and any obfuscation of that fact is simply dishonest. Zionist greed has always been about Palestinian land. American interest in Palestine has been about keeping up a certain status quo, a military status quo, in the Middle East, but it’s also been about exploiting natural resources. I mean, Gaza is rich in natural gases.
But what I think Donald Trump is doing is that he is dropping the script of the State Department, the official American script, and just saying things as they are without a filter. And that is helping people understand the long-term American project, because as disgusting and as abhorrent as Trump’s comments were about creating property on the Gaza Strip, it would have never been possible had it been not for the Democratic Party and President Biden flattening Gaza and allowing the flattening of Gaza in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Shireen Abu Akleh, as you talk about her in Perfect Victims, the renowned Al Jazeera journalist who was shot dead by an Israeli sniper, though she was wearing the helmet and the flak jacket — she was outside of the Jenin refugee camp — and how you feel she has been described?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, I want to quote Palestinian scholar Orouba Othman. She uses this phrase that “Shireen Abu Akleh was killed twice” — one, first time, by the Israelis, and the second time when we all started to refer to her as an “American.” You know, and we did this for a good cause. We had the best interests, the best intentions. We think that Americans will be exonerated, will be compelling in ways that Palestinians aren’t, right? It’s every day that a Palestinian journalist gets killed, but it’s not every day that an American journalist gets killed.
But when we refer to Shireen Abu Akleh as an American, we are not increasing her chances of justice, but, in fact, we are divorcing her further from the remainder of her people. We are exceptionalizing her from the very people that she was part and parcel of. And Shireen Abu Akleh was never a bystander. She was never silent. She was always on the side of justice. In 2002 during the Jenin massacre, she was digging with her bare hands in the rubble, helping mothers look for their children. This is not — you know, and this kind of paradigm that separates the journalists from the rest of their people is really like an outdated paradigm, I think, and it does a lot — it does a lot more harm than good. It doesn’t humanize people. It actually exceptionalizes them. It transcends them into this kind of infallible status that nobody else and their peers can ascend to.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — while so much attention has been focused on the Israeli wars in Gaza and in Lebanon, talk about what the situation is right now in the West Bank for Palestinians. And has it ever been at this crisis level in the past?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: No. I mean, it’s horrifying, what’s happening in the occupied West Bank. And it’s like you said. It has never — excuse me. It has never been at this level of brutality. UNRWA reports that there’s been 40,000 Palestinians displaced. We are seeing the Jenin refugee camp and other places in the West Bank bombed every single day. There are more and more martyrs. And we’ve heard, you know, many months ago that the Israelis gave the settlers 200,000 rifles. And you see these rifles while you’re walking around the West Bank.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there now, but we’re going to do Part 2 right afterwards and post it at democracynow.org. And I want to ask you about your dedication to Dr. Refaat Alareer. His body was just found. Mohammed El-Kurd, his new book is out today, Perfect Victims. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
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Part 2: Mohammed El-Kurd on the Dehumanization of Palestinians, the Legacy of Refaat Alareer & More
Mohammed El-Kurd on the Dehumanization of Palestinians, the Legacy of Refaat Alareer & More
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February 11, 2025
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Web Exclusive
February 11, 2025
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Author Interviews
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Mohammed El-Kurd
Palestinian journalist, Palestine correspondent at The Nation and an editor-at-large at Mondoweiss.
In Part 2 of our interview with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, he talks in depth about stories from his new book, Perfect Victims, including about the beloved poet, academic and activist Refaat Alareer, who has finally been laid to rest, more than one year after he was killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza along with his sister, brother and four nephews. His family recovered their remains after a neighbor buried them in a yard at the site of the Israeli attack. Alareer was buried in a cemetery in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, where Alareer was born.
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Part 2 with our conversation with Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestinian journalist, whose new book is out today. It’s titled Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. He’s an editor-at-large at Mondoweiss and the first Palestine correspondent at The Nation magazine.
I want to ask you about the poet, beloved academic, activist Refaat Alareer, who has finally been laid to rest more than a year after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with his brother, his sister and his four nephews. His family recovered their remains after a neighbor buried them in a yard at the site of the Israeli attack. Refaat was buried in a cemetery in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, where Refaat was born. He appeared on Democracy Now! several times.
REFAAT ALAREER: The only hope we have is in the growing popular support in America, in the movements of — the movements, the human rights and the rights movements in America and across Europe, to take to the streets to pressure their politicians into putting an end to this dark, dark episode of not only the history of the Middle East, but also the history of humanity. If people are asking how was the Holocaust allowed and other genocides in Africa and across the world, now you can see this live on TV, live on social media. Palestinians’ whole blocks destroyed, hospitals, schools, businesses. We are speaking about thousands and thousands of housing units destroyed by Israel. So, my message to the free people of the world is to move to pressure, to mobilize and to take to the streets.
AMY GOODMAN: Those were the words of Refaat Alareer on Democracy Now!, October 10th, 2023. He was killed two months later. After his death, the actor Brian Cox recited Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die.”
BRIAN COX: If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
AMY GOODMAN: Brian Cox reciting Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die.”
I remember it, while we were in Dubai at the U.N. climate summit, when we learned. Talk about, Mohammed, where you were. You begin your book with a dedication. I want to ask you about who Omar is, but also in loving memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer. Where were you the day you learned he died?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I was in my apartment in New York, and I was en route to go to the airport to go to London. And it was quite the shock to hear that.
AMY GOODMAN: You had been communicating with him in the weeks before?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, yeah, we’ve been in constant communication. And there are just people who you can only think about in the present tense, and it’s hard to think that they would pass, and he was one of them. I don’t want to — I don’t want to talk about, you know, him as though he was infallible, but he really did not mince words. It was just, he was — he was not my personal teacher, but he always felt like a teacher, just watching how he utilized humor, how he’s — and, you know, there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of his students that speak for him.
AMY GOODMAN: He had already — his home was bombed —
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — when you were texting with him.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he had just left his home?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, yeah, he did. And he sent me — you know, it’s almost hard to talk about, but he sent me a message, a very, very sweet message, saying that the only two things that he took from his home was a copy of his anthology, Gaza Writes Back, and a copy of my poetry book. And it was — it was very — it was a very profound message to receive from such a giant, you know? Yeah, it meant a lot to me.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he was talking about your book Rifqa, which —
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — you began as a teenager —
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — a collection of poetry, named for your grandmother. Before we continue talking about Perfect Victims, talk about your grandmother.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: You know, I like — you know, I like to say that my grandmother was an icon of resilience, in the sense that she lived through the British Mandate, she lived through the Israeli, you know, occupation of '48 lands and then ’67 lands, and then she lived through First Intifada, Second Intifada, and then our house being taken once and twice, you know, and being threatened with expulsion in Sheikh Jarrah. And she was very, very, very — she was a very stubborn woman. People like to say — people like to say defiant. I think that's also true about her, but she was also very, very stubborn. And she always — she loved to call things by their names.
And she was just emblematic of Palestinian women at large. You know, they’re largely erased. We often talk about women and children being the people who bear the brunt of war, which is true, but oftentimes in that framing, we kind of erase the contributions that women have contributed to the anti-colonial struggle. Palestinian women have played vital roles in the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, in the Unity Uprising in 2021 and today, you know, and they’re often disregarded.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you talk a lot in Perfect Victims, and that’s implied in the title itself, about the framing and who gets to frame your life, your community’s life —
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — the life of Palestinians. Can you talk more about that? Who is the perfect victim, and who isn’t? You begin with, and you had little postcards at your opening event last night at the Judson Church, “even if! even if! even if!”
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah. Ultimately, “even if! even if! even if!” is the thesis of the book. It’s to say, you know, the demand of us is to be perfect victims. And by that, it means you have to kind of adhere to a certain civility, to be — to have proximity to whiteness, to, quote-unquote, “innocence,” to nonalignment, to to being nonpartisan, to all these kind of mythical adjectives that are demanded of you in the war zone.
And so, people will say the Israeli military killed this 15-year-old boy, and then the Israelis will say, “Well, he was throwing a Molotov cocktail.” And I think we should say, “Even if he was throwing a Molotov cocktail, they shouldn’t have killed him in the first place, because the Israeli occupation has no right to be there in the first place. Even if this person who was killed held bad views, or whatever you want to define bad views as, he shouldn’t be killed in the first place,” right? You want to tackle things at the root. You want to start at the very genesis of the issue, which is Israeli colonialism. All of these other things are irrelevant — my character, my disposition, my affect. These are irrelevant. But we live in a world where the oppressed are put on trial for their perceived biases and their perceived bigotries. Meanwhile, the perpetrators can get away with it and can continue to enact systemic violence against us and get away with it.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk a lot about dehumanization and how it happens. Talk about that and how you feel is the most powerful way to be humanized, to humanize your own population, people.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, there is, you know, the dehumanization that says you are hordes and you are insects and you are vermin. You know, that’s very explicit. But there’s also the very sinister implicit dehumanization. In the book, I say it’s the refusal to look us in the eye. But it’s kind of the refusal to acknowledge that we, like others, have the rights and the needs to defend ourselves, to resist, to anger, to hatred, to disdain, to all the sentiments. Right? When people say, “We are humanizing Palestinians,” they’re not really humanizing Palestinians. They’re saying, “We’re going to give this Palestinian a very restrictive script to fit in.” And the true way to be human is to cover the full spectrum of humanity, the full scope of humanity, that includes all of the human sentiments. And again, it is rooted in a very, very fallacious logic, the idea that the oppressed must live a life in cross-examination.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, as you do in your book and your conversations, about the difference in the characterization of resistance? You compare how the Western media covers Ukraine resisting the occupation to those who resist the Israeli occupation, in the different approach.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, I mean, the double standard is really flagrant. And I think we also should move past the double standard. But I think it’s worth mentioning. You know, I think the most absurd of these examples was I saw in the New York Post a headline that called a Ukrainian suicide bomber “heroic.” And I thought I was hallucinating, because, you know, I thought all my life suicide bombing was bad. And, you know, Sky News, I think it was, held what essentially could be described as a Molotov-making cocktail. And then you open the pages of The New York Times, they’re interviewing Ukrainian psychologists who describe hatred of all Russians as, you know, a formative energy — I’m paraphrasing here. And you open other pages of The New York Times, and they’re kind of glorifying or romanticizing Ukrainian police and Ukrainian military wearing civilian clothes, quote, “blending in” to the population — things that they would accuse Palestinians of hiding behind human shields for.
So, this kind of double standard says to you that there is not really a misunderstanding of resistance in the Western mind. There is just a rejection of resistance when it comes from the Indigenous population or from the population that threatens the status quo of the empire as it stands today.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Palestinians being defanged.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Defanged as in, like, nonthreatening, nonoffensive. In order for you to be allowed the microphone or in order for you to be allowed into mainstream spaces, you have to make certain concessions. You are demanded to make certain concessions, to say that you’re not like — you’re nonviolent, and you don’t hate your oppressors, and you want peace, and you want coexistence. And you’re making all of these disclaimers before you even get to your talking point. And I know this from experience, as a child seeing diplomats coming into our living room. I would do this proclamation of, you know, “I don’t hate Jews, and I don’t want to throw anyone into the sea, and all these tropes that you’ve heard about me are true.” And then 15 minutes pass, and then I finally say, “And there are settlers in my house.” But that —
AMY GOODMAN: And explain, for people who didn’t see Part 1 of this conversation, Sheikh Jarrah and what you mean by there are settlers in your house.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, I mean in the literal sense. In 1972, there were many settler organizations that claimed our houses as theirs by divine decree, and they started to try to kick us out of our homes using an asymmetrical Israeli judiciary. And obviously, the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is not unique. It’s happening all across Palestine, all across historic Palestine, in many, many communities. It was just so that our neighborhood was one of the few neighborhoods lucky enough to get media scrutiny.
AMY GOODMAN: You were arrested at that time?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I was arrested and detained multiple times, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What made you decide to leave? And do you consider yourself having left or just visiting the U.S. and Britain?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, I was already gone. I was already at CUNY when the Sheikh Jarrah stuff started to happen. I was already at CUNY doing my master’s. And I just decided to come back for the campaign to be with my family and friends. And, you know, I’ve lived — ever since I’ve come here, I’ve lived, you know, half of the year here, half of the year there. But since October 7th, and since the kind of — since the kind of uptick in crackdown, or, like, you know, the unprecedented level of crackdown on dissent, on activism, on anti-colonial sentiment, it’s been a bit hard. I’ve been advised, you know, not to return just for security, for safety reasons.
I mean, I give the dedication to my dear, dear, dear, dear friend Omar, who I really hope he’s doing OK. You know, he is one of the many, many Palestinians who have been held for many months on end, without charge or trial, on what the Israelis call administrative detention. And, you know, the Palestinian prisoners right now, the political prisoners right now, are suffering abhorrent conditions. We are not hearing much about it, but so many of them have skin conditions, like scabies. So many of them have been starved, tortured. We heard about sexual abuse in prison, rapes. We’ve seen horrific videos. And, you know, the Israelis have always been incredibly abusive towards Palestinian political prisoners, but in the past 15 months, it has gotten to unprecedented levels of brutality.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk, as a writer, about the writing of your book, Perfect Victims, where you were as you — I mean, you’ve written this over the last years as the Israeli assault on Gaza has unfolded, the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed. President Trump himself calls it a demolition site which is unlivable. Of course, his solution is — he talks about it as a great real estate deal. It can be the “Riviera of the Middle East,” and Palestinians cannot be a part of that, he says. This is his latest in this last few days, saying they should not have a right of return.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, to write a book in the shadow of genocide is a quite, I would say, difficult task, but I think it’s also like an arrogant task, particularly if you’re trying to write conclusions about this genocide. And I don’t think I tried to do that much in the book. I was trying to really tackle advocacy and media framing and how we talk to each other and how our allies and so-called allies talk to us and what they demand of us.
But it was — you know, you’re constantly, first of all, confronted with the enormity of the moment that we were living in, to see people being, quite literally, burnt alive or people hanging from ceiling fans, people being mutilated by the Israeli military. And you are confronted with the question of the insufficiency of words and of the written language and what is the — what even is the point, right?
And there comes a point where you have to reject this kind of nihilism or this kind of pessimism and decide for yourself that to be — you know, it’s the least that you can do is to try to raise the ceiling. I say “to raise the ceiling of what is permissible” in the beginning of the book, but really, like, to say — to see so many students being policed and to see so many people being bombed, and you see your platform, and you see that you’re a person who people who will listen to, and you think to yourself, “What is — what is it that I can do to really raise the ceiling, to make it easier for others to say what they need to say?”
And obviously, this book has been — you know, it has my name on the cover, but it’s a million people, so a million people who have worked on it, from my editors and my publishers, but also just my mentors and friends and people, you know, in Palestine, who have really, like, shaped my analysis throughout the years.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about warning about overvictimization. I mean, in fact, you can’t say enough about the horror that has taken place, and yet how — talk about the dangers of overvictimization and what that means when it comes to people having agency.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, when we editorialize a victim past — like, somebody has suffered a certain atrocity, and we try to editorialize that even further, we are kind of implying that that atrocity they have suffered is not enough and that they have needed to suffer something further for them to be compelling.
And I’ll even implicate myself in this. I was writing about a Palestinian American man named Omar Assad, kind of critiquing the employment of citizenship in our advocacy tactics and saying how shortsighted it is. And this is a man, a Palestinian martyr, who has been bound, gagged by the Israeli military and left to die in the cold. And I remember when I was writing about him, I spent a substantial amount of time looking for an article that confirmed that he had also been beaten, because something within me told me it wasn’t enough that he had been blindfolded and left to die. I needed him somehow to be beaten, as well.
You ask yourself, “What is it that has drilled these tendencies into me?” And it’s dangerous, because it means that they can always move the goal posts. It means that their brutality can never be enough, that there is something that can always go further. But I say, even if the brutality they enact against us is merely bureaucratic, even if they were polite in the way that they kill us, that still is unacceptable. That is still deplorable. Even if, you know, they merely blindfolded him and saved him right before he was dead, that still is deplorable. You know, we do not need to overvictimize.
And also, there is the opposite end of that, which is the, you know, treating people as though they are heroes or as though they are just, you know, incapable of feeling pain or just able to withstand any circumstances. And that, too, is a form of dehumanization. We must understand that people are complex and have — you know, it’s quite a basic — it’s quite a basic thesis that I’m saying here. But, you know, you challenge the reader, you challenge the listener, to really challenge and interrogate their biases, and they will agree with you in theory, but oftentimes they will either want to strip somebody of their agency completely by saying they turned the other cheek all the time and they would never hurt a fly and they loved their oppressors even as they killed them, or by saying that they are, you know, infallible heroes that couldn’t care less about the brutality being waged against them.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to end this conversation where you begin the book, and I was wondering if you can read from “the sniper’s hands are clean of blood,” and start with the quote and where the quote is from.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: This is Padraic Fiacc’s — I hope I said the name right. He’s an Irish poet who my friend Rashin introduced me to. And his quote goes — it’s from a poem. And the quote goes:
“And the men are men and the women are men
And the children are men!”
And I’ll read from the book.
“WE DIE A LOT. 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 pay no heed to the corpses in our fields. Their existence is monotonous, predictable. The slaughter is so relentless, it is almost expected — anticipated — by the soon-to-be-slain. Their wrists, big and tiny, bound with zip ties in the back of police cars. Death is everywhere. Even metaphor is a casualty of war. The figurative has become painfully literal: bloodied beards, furniture in trees, a limb hanging from a ceiling fan, women giving birth on the concrete. Etcetera. Are we too acquainted with the horrific? What was once horrifying, what once a harbinger of doom, now blends into the terrain; death is now a boring scarecrow. Even when the ravens grow louder, their croaking falls on disinterested ears. No sanctity is left in this death. No deities come to the rescue. We die forsaken. We die a lot in abandonment.
“Our massacres are only interrupted by commercial breaks. Judges legalize them. Correspondents kill us with passive voice. 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 us in the past tense. And the vultures, even in our midst, will tour museums glorifying, romanticizing what they once condemned, what they did not deign to defend — our resistance — mystifying it, depoliticizing it, commercializing it. The vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh.
“And we die.”
AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestinian journalist, poet, author. His new book is out today. It’s called Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, To see our Part 1 of the interview, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
Watch Mohammed discuss the book:
"Dehumanisation of Palestinians is so normalised,” --Poet Mohammed El Kurd | UpFront
February 7, 2025
“Death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather” wrote Palestinian poet and author Mohammed El-Kurd amid Israel’s war on Gaza. And with a ceasefire in place, the fate of Palestinians remains uncertain. So what role does the Western gaze play in perpetuating a narrative that dehumanizes Palestinians and how does it shape our understanding of their struggle for justice and liberation? This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill discusses with author and poet Mohammed El-Kurd the resistance and dehumanisation of Palestinians.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxOnQo4hJC8
"Dehumanisation of Palestinians is so normalised,” --Poet Mohammed El Kurd | UpFront
February 7, 2025
“Death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather” wrote Palestinian poet and author Mohammed El-Kurd amid Israel’s war on Gaza. And with a ceasefire in place, the fate of Palestinians remains uncertain. So what role does the Western gaze play in perpetuating a narrative that dehumanizes Palestinians and how does it shape our understanding of their struggle for justice and liberation? This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill discusses with author and poet Mohammed El-Kurd the resistance and dehumanisation of Palestinians.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxOnQo4hJC8
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/
Now Available:
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
by Mohammed El-Kurd
Haymarket Books, 2025
[Publication date: February 11, 2025]
“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”―Robin D. G. Kelley
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured―the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured―the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
REVIEWS:
“Great poets are truth-tellers, and the truth hurts. Mohammed El-Kurd’s raw eloquence and razor-sharp clarity will make you hurt and curse and cry and sometimes chuckle. A few will think, only to realize he is also talking about 'us,' the allies, the empathizers, even the comrades whose solidarity unwittingly demands the perfect victim. We are not completely free of Zionist lies; we are not decolonized. Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century. And like Aimé Césaire, he demands that we confront the truth, wipe away our crocodile tears, and take down Goliath once and for all.”
―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Here's a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare. It will clear the fog.”
―Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
“In Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd recenters the Palestinian gaze as compass and metric unit.”
―Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some
“Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice is unequivocal in a hallucinatory media sphere that portrays the colonized and the occupied as either passive victims of an unnamable crime or the very perpetrators of unspeakable crimes they themselves experience. Perfect Victims is essay and memoir at its best. It portrays children forged by occupation and war and a humble people conditioned by the necessity of resistance for survival in the face of a twenty-first century genocide. Humility, irony, and irreverence are the languages of self-defense, and words are El-Kurd’s weapons.”
―Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer, poet, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. He is the Nation’s first-ever Palestine Correspondent and editor-at-large at Mondoweiss, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and the author of the highly-acclaimed poetry collection Rifqa, which has been translated into several languages.
https://mailchi.mp/haymarketbooks/perfect-victims
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—ROBIN D.G. KELLEY
“Here's a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare. It will clear the fog.”
—ARUNDHATI ROY
“In Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd recenters the Palestinian gaze as compass and metric unit.”
—NOURA ERAKAT
“Humility, irony, and irreverence are the languages of self-defense, and words are El-Kurd’s weapons.”
—NICK ESTES
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal—an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
Support the launch of Mohammed El-Kurd’s indispensable non-fiction debut by purchasing it today from bookshop.org or your favorite local, independent bookstore.
