A group of Palestinian children in Gaza gathered around microphones on November 7 2023 to make a heartfelt plea for their safety as Israel continued its ongoing genocidal campaign on the strip. The speaker of the group, a young boy who looks no older than ten, reads with a heavy accented English from a piece of paper.
“They lie to the world that they kill the fighters,” the boy says, “but they kill the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future.”
I was reminded of the moment while reading Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd as he recounted the story of being a child the first time he spoke out against the Zionist state of Israel. “On Jerusalem’s Jafa Street, fourteen years ago, I distinctly remember searching for non-prescription glasses to make myself look smart,” El-Kurd writes.
Perfect Victims further examines the impossibly high threshold Palestinians must meet to receive a modicum of empathy from the world. For Lit Hub, El Kurd speaks about Perfect Victims and the recent ceasefire.
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Hanna Phifer: It’s been nearly two weeks since a ceasefire has been set. What have been your feelings so far?
Mohammed El-Kurd: There are mixed feelings… you’re overcome with a feeling of hope and you’re overcome with a feeling of pride that the people of the Gaza Strip have been able to, in many ways, defeat genocide or defeat the objectives of genocide.
But also you don’t want to be reductive and kind of just romanticize their resilience and their steadfastness because they have been forced to sacrifice so much and so many of them were killed at the hands of the Zionist regime. Obviously the death toll we understand is gravely underestimated. So certainly the feelings are mixed.
I think the one feeling that overwhelms me is one of failure or one of defeat. We simply have not and were not able to stop this genocide. It wasn’t our efforts as activists and as people on the right side of history that were able to stop it.
So if anything this moment I think lights up a fire under us to start working. It’s not a moment for resting. On the contrary, I think it’s time for us to actually start organizing more.
We simply have not and were not able to stop this genocide.
HP: And to your point about resilience, which I think goes to the thesis of your book, Perfect Victims, about how so much of the way people—even people on the right side of history—talk about Palestinians and about their resilience and how they overcome and these narratives of how they’re always going to survive.
MEK: It ends up being another form of myth-making. So traditionally in the mainstream the Palestinian is made into this myth of a terrorist, this kind of terrifying figure that is going to hijack your planes and is going to use a suicide bomb on your wife and children. And the opposite end of the spectrum is also creating out of Palestinians these mythical figures who will withstand anything and who are as resilient as mountains and who will not be broken and will not be defeated.
And I think there’s a danger in that because whatever part of the spectrum you’re on creating these kind of extreme figures, be it victims or terrorists or like, invincible resistance fighters, you’re ultimately dehumanizing the Palestinian. You’re flattening their prospects, you’re flattening the scope of their humanity.
But at the same time, I think it’s incredibly necessary and important for the Palestinian people to create for their own selves, an image of strength and an image of resilience and stubbornness at the same time.
Because these kind of folk tales and these kinds of narratives, these kinds of things you learn from your parents or from your teachers about who you are in the world can certainly help situate you and situate your psyche under the barrage of rockets and under the the boot of the occupation, because there’s all of these bombs and bureaucracies that are conspiring against you.
There are these prisons and walls and sieges that are there to break your spirit and through these narratives of resilience and resistance, you’re able to create a strong character that somehow, in many ways, can withstand the long years of prison or the long years of besiegement.
HP: I was just reading the passage from your book where you say “jail is an odd place to find freedom but one can still look for it there anyway” and you were paraphrasing Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide. So it goes further to the point of where you’re talking about finding strength, even in occupation, and even in imprisonment.
MEK: I was really surprised to see it like almost word for word in Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide and I I wanted to include it. I wanted to paraphrase it because I think it was just very important for me to kind of draw these parallels in a way that extends beyond the identitarian “we’re all oppressed” and “we’re all marginalized” and blah, blah, blah.
But it’s not only the oppression that unifies us and brings us together, it’s also the ways we have stood up and confronted this oppression that brings us together. It’s this steadfastness and defiance and stubbornness.
But also I think the argument of the book, the idea that we should not be perfect victims, it’s quite an elementary argument. It’s been echoed many times in the Black liberation struggle [and] in the Black literary tradition. It’s been also echoed throughout the feminist movement, particularly with regards to how do we deal with victims of sexual assault.
This book tries to expand on that and kind of take this straightforward argument, this very logical argument that the reader on the face value will agree with and to try to challenge the reader by presenting case after case of like imperfect victims and scenario after scenario of complicated victimhood to see how far the reader is willing to go.
HP: While reading Perfect Victims I couldn’t get over how this book is ultimately ensnared in the same process that it’s critiquing. Did you feel the same while writing it and how do you wrestle with that conundrum?
MEK: Yeah, a hundred percent. I appreciate you pointing that out. It’s like a book that’s anti-appeal, but it’s also making an appeal. A hundred percent.
There’s two things I can say about this. One is that I tried to implicate myself as much as I could and I tried to be as transparent with the reader as much as I could, in the sense that I was still wrestling against certain impulses that have been ingrained in me since childhood.
For example, the story of Omar Assad, the [seventy-eight-] year old man who was blindfolded and gagged and left to die in the cold. I believe in chapter three, at the end of the chapter, I share with the reader that despite my critiques of like creating these perfect victims, I spent a substantial amount of time looking for a source or an article that confirmed that Omar Assad was beaten because something deep within me wasn’t content with the fact that he was blindfolded and gagged and left to die in the cold.
I needed him to be beaten too in order for him to be like the compelling victim.
HP: You discuss in the chapter “Miraculous Epiphanies” how you’ve been given “permission to narrate” and how you grapple with how many people see you as a palatable figure within the Palestinian cause. Can you speak about that?
MEK: I think it’s really dangerous for the public figure to believe that they have been put in this position of being able to speak to a large audience because of merit, or solely because of merit.
I understand that there is a collection of circumstances that has put me where I am today. I am not the only Palestinian in the world whose house was stolen by settlers. And our neighborhood is not the only neighborhood in Palestine who is actively getting ethnically cleansed by settler organizations.
But it just so happens that we lived in a nice neighborhood that is surrounded by embassies and consulates where so many so called expats lived and they could see the tear gas from their balconies and they had to say something about it.
So that coupled with me speaking English in a certain way, coupled with me having a certain understanding of American and Western culture, looking a certain way has allowed me to have a position in the world where I’m able to speak to people and understand these kinds of exploits and you look for ways to further utilize them.
HP: You write about being a child the first time you turned to the press to speak about the occupation, and it immediately made me think of the press conference the children of Gaza put on shortly after October 7th.
Can you discuss the way the innocence of children is often wielded, even though we know how not even they are spared from the violence, and oftentimes are intentional targets.
MAK: These kinds of tactics that we employ here and there—and children, I think are the ones that bear the brunt of it all—and it stems from this understanding that they are “untainted” or “unspoiled.” This belief that they are kind of these impartial, nonpartisan figures. We put children on the podium. We sent children to the Hill to speak to Congress.
I was personally wheeled off to talk to the European Parliament and to Congress and I was writing letters to Obama and so on and so forth because there’s this implicit understanding that the audience, the people we’re speaking to, the legislators are racist and they’re not going to willingly sit down with adults, let alone Palestinian men who are so vilified in the global consciousness.
But the issue with this is not only like kind of the psychological damage that is imbued on the child himself or herself or themselves, but it’s also about the distance that is created between our men and women and our children, and the separation that happens.
We act as though these children are just alien figures that are just existing against the backdrop of this senseless conflict when in fact they have been part and parcel of the Palestinian struggle in more ways in more ways than one.
So you know there’s a lot to say about the topic of children, but it ultimately falls into this category of creating these myths, trying to find something that will resonate with certain audiences and creating an industry out of it in the hopes that in the long term it could be effective.
But we’ve seen the strategy, time and time again, backfire. Not only do we see the snipers attacking children, shooting them in the head killing them as they play soccer on the beach, but something as simple as children’s art can be banned. I think shrinking ourselves to like the framework of innocence, which is associated with children, is ultimately shooting ourselves in the foot.
HP: You are very intentional in the book about using the word “Jew” in some cases as opposed to “Zionist,” which is an appropriate word, but is sometimes used to obfuscate having to explicitly name Jewish people as perpetuators of this violence. Can you talk about that choice?
MAK: We’re dealing with a so-called Jewish state that marches under a so-called Jewish flag that says it does what it does in the name of the Jewish people that attributes everything that happens to it and everything it does to others, to the Jewish people. So when you grow up under this explicitly Jewish rule and you are being asked to give it another name it’s quite disingenuous and it’s quite confusing.
And I think it’s really important to call things by what they are because if you know I think, obviously, Zionism does not represent Judaism. I think that’s something we learned from a very young age. And I would argue that the average Palestinian has a much more profound understanding of European antisemitism than the average European adult.
The most comical and the most frustratingly heartbreaking thing about the Palestinian struggle is that there is so much time and energy and effort attributed to language, to what we call them and what we say about them and our feelings towards them, whereas their bombs and their handcuffs and their boots and batons and tear gas is rarely afforded any language
However, the conflation between Judaism and Zionism is not something that I have invented, and it’s not something that I do—it is systemically baked into the DNA of the Zionist regime. They explicitly and intentionally name everything Jewish so that any critique of the state would become antisemitic.
And we are seeing this applied in legislation time after time, like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which was recently adopted in Harvard and other places. This is a very dangerous precedent. It’s very disingenuous.
And what it says to me here is that people who don’t have the luxury to make the separation—people who don’t have the luxury of seeing the Jewish flag, the menorah, the Star of David that they carve onto people’s faces when they arrest them, or the Star of David that they carve on the ground with their tanks in the Gaza Strip in Beit Hanoun, or the menorahs they implant on on the ruins of depopulated villages in the Gaza City.
People who don’t have the luxury to see these kinds of atrocities, and say, wait a minute, these are not Jewish, these are Zionists, will face consequences.
And I think it’s the duty and the responsibility of people like me, people with platforms, people with privilege and visibility and access to try to widen that space and allow for people to err and allow for people to speak what they are, what they want.
Because the most comical and the most frustratingly heartbreaking thing about the Palestinian struggle is that there is so much time and energy and effort attributed to language, to what we call them and what we say about them and our feelings towards them, whereas their bombs and their handcuffs and their boots and batons and tear gas is rarely afforded any language.
We talk about our language, our quote unquote, semantic violence, all their systemic legislated government backed ideological violence that is enacted on our bodies is so often dismissed and disregarded. And that kind of—it’s not a double standard—it’s more profane than a double standard, but that kind of double standard needs to be addressed.
