Perfect Victims

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.

“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“Perfect Victims is an astonishing achievement: precise, sharp, and poetic.”—Nicki Kattoura, LitHub“Perfect Victims is punctuated with tonal shifts, a seamless blend of reporting, analysis, poetry, humor… With Perfect Victims, El-Kurd shows up as his full self: the journalist, the poet, the academic, the humorist.”—Kylie Cheung, Jezebel“El-Kurd’s book offers a fresh, unapologetic, and powerful critique of mainstream modes of representation and the years of Palestinian politics of appeal that have only served to concede too much. It is an assertion of Palestinian dignity unshackled from the need for recognition, an insistence on a politics that does not hinge on the benevolence of an imagined audience.”—Abdaljawad Omar, Mondoweiss“The writing in Perfect Victims demands empathy while rejecting victimhood. It echoes with anger and discards pretense. El Kurd deplores the insistence on humanizing Palestinians by denying them their rage. He calls this phenomenon the defanging of Palestinians. Then he bares his fangs.”—Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

• author’s note(s)one: the sniper’s hands are clean of bloodon dehumanizationtwo: the politics of defangingon “humanization”three: shireen’s passporton the invention of the civilianfour: a life in cross-examinationon forbidden sentimentsfive: tropes and droneson discursive land minessix: mein kampf in the playroomon propagandaseven: miraculous epiphanieson testimonyeight: are we indeed all palestinians?on identitynine: “do you want to throw israelis into the sea?”on irreverence epilogue