In October, only a fortnight after Israel sniped Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi in the neck and rendered him paraplegic, the Israeli army published a list of six journalists, accusing them of being affiliated with Hamas and “Islamic Jihad terrorists.” For over fifteen months, Anas Al-Sharif, Alaa Salama, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf Saraj, Ismail Farid, and Talal Aruki had been risking their lives to report on the dire conditions in northern Gaza under an ever-tightening siege punctuated by daily massacres. The outrage was immediate: this was a kill list. In response, the Palestinian movement and its allies mobilized to counter the accusation in two ways: to debunk it entirely and to appeal to Western mainstream news outlets to finally protect their colleagues.
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Mohammed El-Kurd’s stunning nonfiction debut Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket, 2025) problematizes these two approaches. By defining dehumanization as the “refusal to look us in the eye,” El-Kurd’s nine chapters clarify how attempts to convince the world of Palestinian humanity counterintuitively contribute to our dehumanization and distract us from the daily violences of military occupation. The politics of appeal feeds into a discursive loop that simultaneously shrinks the confines of Palestinian humanity while also validating Zionism’s absurd colonial fantasy.
While there was no evidence that the six journalists targeted by Israel were connected to any party, Perfect Victims asks us to entertain the Zionist accusation that they were—in order to destroy it. Even if they are Hamas members does that justify the targeted murder of those who wear press vests? Implicit here is that when we defend Palestinians on the grounds that they are not Hamas, we delegitimize armed resistance as a tactic in the national liberation struggle and by extension condemn all militants to execution.
The perfect victim possesses neither subjectivity nor agency, ignores the occupation, is feeble, frail, groveling at the feet of their oppressors.
As Jackie Wang has argued, by appealing to innocence “we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law and instead ally ourselves with the State.” Indeed, the search for the perfect victim legitimizes the Zionist argument that the genocidal onslaught is only a “war against Hamas.” Engaging in such discourse deflects from the simple reality that colonialism and genocide are indefensible crimes that must be resisted without qualification. The issue is not merely who is on the kill list and why, but the kill list itself; the legitimacy Israel imagines it possesses to kill any Palestinian they deem a threat. “Zionism’s objection to the Palestinian People isn’t about how we exist” El-Kurd writes, “but that we exist at all.”
In order to even audition for the world’s sympathy, the Palestinian cannot be an adult or a man or able-bodied, must preface their rage with platitudes of peace and coexistence, and certainly cannot pick up the rifle or support those who do. The perfect victim possesses neither subjectivity nor agency, ignores the occupation, is feeble, frail, groveling at the feet of their oppressors all while smiling through their dispossession, the murder of their families, and the wholesale destruction of their cities. The natural response to a century of colonial violence is manipulated into an illogic in which the Palestinian must alchemize their rage to be more palatable for a world that only hears of us through our deaths. Unlike The Atlantic and The New York Times, whose editors are materially connected to the Israeli army and who have beaten Palestinians or guarded their prison cells, “The Palestinian is born in reverse, always defining themselves by what they are not.”
El-Kurd is clear: it is not only Hind Rajab or the thousands of children murdered by the genocidal state apparatus that are worthy of our grief; nor should Shireen Abu Akleh’s life only mean something because she was an American citizen. By producing a perfect victim for our sympathies, we not only limit the humanity of the Palestinian, we also unwittingly create a victim perfect for Zionism’s violence, “the angry men who wander the streets with mouths full of spit and venom.” Palestinians, dead or alive, are put on trial, and required to argue the case for their humanity rather than already being seen as human. In short, we reproduce the very same colonial logic that we seek to resist.
Palestinians, dead or alive, are put on trial, and required to argue the case for their humanity rather than already being seen as human.
The reality is that the perfect victim does not exist; it is a weaponized mirage, a product of Zionism’s racist annihilatory logic. When confronted with this reality, the perfect victim collapses discursively. Its instability is laid bare when martyred children are described as “women” or “young ladies”; Zionists need only to describe the Palestinian child as a “future terrorist” or accuse them of being “human shields” to eject them forcibly from their childhood.
Similarly, Israel must simply label Palestinian journalists as “affiliated with Hamas” in order to undermine the protection of the press during war. And because their word is almighty and uncontested, what was once a perfect victim becomes the perfect target. Despite all attempts, sincere and insincere, our humanization is not in our hands, our pleas will simply never be enough. The perfect victim is not permitted to exist in reality. The ease with which the world condemns (and justifies) the Palestinian to die is astounding and ubiquitous. “Read the ‘wrong book’ [or] follow the ‘wrong leader’” El-Kurd posits “they will kill you.”
But even when trying to be “right,” who are we appealing to? Manifesting the perfect victim is not only counterproductive because it is a figment of the colonial imagination, but because there is no audience. After the publication of the kill list by the Israeli army, many called upon the New York Times and the like to stand in solidarity with their colleagues and demand their protection.
But to ask the Times why they won’t protect journalists in Gaza is to obscure their function: to write and disseminate propaganda that preemptively and retroactively defends the crimes of American imperialism. Besides, there is no world in which the Times’ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley, who lives in a stolen home in the Holy City, is the colleague of 22-year-old Hossam Shabat, who has lived through and documented a genocide and four other wars. Meanwhile, Gaza’s journalists expose the crimes of empire and thus operate in direct opposition to the paper of record. Beyond the appeal inherent in the word “colleague,” reporters in Palestine are functionally and politically the enemies of the Times.
When the New York Times published the headline “Lives Ended in Gaza” it was making an active decision to exculpate Israel. How else can we understand such a flagrant manipulation of the English language?
When the New York Times employs the passive voice, lies, or prints, verbatim, the press releases of Israeli state officials, our knee jerk reaction is to correct them as if they have defied their purpose. We point out their untruths and expose the hypocrisy: Palestinians “die,” Israelis are “killed,” our statistics are always followed by the refrain “according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health,” and we bemoan the tales of Hamas tunnels underneath hospitals, schools, and other everyday places that have since been destroyed. By engaging in this critique we ascribe a level of ignorance to the Times instead of understanding their editorial decisions as intentional. To write around Israel’s culpability and to consistently reproduce Zionist hasbara requires intimate knowledge of the genocide in Gaza because one needs to know what to occlude and what facts to manipulate.
When the New York Times published the headline “Lives Ended in Gaza” it was making an active decision to exculpate Israel. How else can we understand such a flagrant manipulation of the English language? The paper of record is not our audience, they do not need convincing because they themselves contribute to and profit off our inhumanity. To constantly appeal to them, to beg them to see us distracts us and exonerates them from their responsibility in facilitating this genocide and the daily violences Israel unleashes against Palestinians. They will not have what El-Kurd calls “miraculous epiphanies” because reporting the truth has never been their objective. We must instead “purge their prestige in our minds, the prestige that renders a Times acknowledgment of an eyewitness account more valuable than the account itself.” It is precisely for this reason that Writers Against the War on Gaza have called on everyone to Boycott, Divest, and Unsubscribe from the paper entirely.
For over 400 days we have publicized our trauma, holding the corpses of martyrs for the world to see, and pleading for protection in front of cameras. When we are inevitably ignored, we convince ourselves that journalists just haven’t seen enough (from which often this search for the perfect victim even begins). The logic is perverse as we wait in vain for future massacres, condemn more Palestinians to death just to locate the tipping point of Western sympathy and change their minds.
El-Kurd’s interrogation into this appeal is as necessary and surgical as it is brutally heartbreaking. We chase our tails, perform and humiliate ourselves to an audience that has already turned its back, we mutilate ourselves and each other, excise the “unappealing” facets of our lives, and throw our neighbors under the bus in the hopes that they spare us. And still, when these institutions proceed with cosigning our demise, we repeat the motions and “continue dancing among the land mines.”
“I want you to feel as if you are a guest in my living room” Mohammed writes in his author’s note(s). Parentheticals and footnotes are tangents, little quips that give his writing life and familiarity—an intimacy that is needed when presenting a critique that spares no one, not even himself, that calls out our most harmful behaviors and strategies no matter how well-intentioned they are. It is also in this living room that the Palestinian can speak without pretense, in which perfection is already understood as not only unattainable, but unnecessary—undesired even.
Perfect Victims is an astonishing achievement: precise, sharp, and poetic. “Palestine is a microcosm of the world” he writes, “The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other, how we see everything else.” Indeed, this is not just a book about the Palestinian condition, but a book about the wretched of the earth, ejected from humanity by colonialism and its disciples. To read it, as devastating as it sometimes is, is also incredibly rewarding, for once the perniciousness of appeal is understood, you see it everywhere, in every interaction, in every well-intentioned takedown. El-Kurd provides a blueprint so that our movement can disengage from the discursive colonial loop entirely and focus on what matters: freedom.
I have always been struck by how large the press vest looked on Al Jazeera reporter, Anas Al-Sharif. It almost consumed his small frame as if it was two or three sizes too big for him. I had only come to know him as a journalist, through his reportage in the north covering daily massacres. Then, on January 15th, as news of a ceasefire spread across Gaza, a video of him went viral. Surrounded by a group of men, he spoke to the camera, his voice swelling: “After more than a year, we can begin to discuss the removal of this helmet which exhausted me… this armor that was a part of my body.” As he spoke, the hands of the crowd around him began to undo his blue vest and hoisted him upon their shoulders. “We announce, from Gaza and Gaza City, the news of a ceasefire.”
At that moment, Anas was not a journalist, the man in front of us was a stranger, no longer defined by who he was or was not; what he had done or not done; what he believed in or what he stood for. He was, like the people around him, a Palestinian, and that was enough.
