Book Review: ‘Perfect Victims' by Mohammed El-Kurd
Mohammed El-Kurd's 'Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal,' published in January 2025, is a scorching manifesto against the sanitized narratives of victimhood that dominate Western discourse on Palestine.
With poetic precision and unyielding clarity, El-Kurd dismantles the 'politics of appeal' — the insidious expectation that Palestinians, and other oppressed communities, must contort their suffering into palatable shapes to earn global sympathy. This is not a book that asks for understanding, it demands a reckoning.
Drawing from his lived experience in the occupied Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, El-Kurd exposes the suffocating standards imposed on Palestinian bodies and stories. He unravels how the world's empathy hinges on the display of 'perfect' victimhood: passive, non-threatening, and quiet in its anguish.
He writes against this expectation, refusing to strip the Palestinian struggle of its dignity and defiance. Instead, El-Kurd reclaims his community's narrative as one of survival and resilience, asserting, 'We are not just the sum of our wounds.'
'Perfect Victims' is more than a critique, it is an unmasking. El-Kurd meticulously dissects how language, media, and international institutions become tools of erasure. He shines a harsh light on the global complicity that demands victims remain meek to be seen as worthy of justice.
Through case studies, historical context, and deeply personal reflections, he exposes how even well-meaning solidarity can morph into another form of control, reducing the oppressed to mere symbols stripped of agency.
El-Kurd's prose is vivid and relentless. His words do not simply inform — they pierce. He does not appeal to the reader's charity but instead confronts them with the uncomfortable truth: that selective empathy is itself a form of violence. His analysis extends beyond Palestine, offering a blueprint for understanding how narratives of victimhood are weaponized against marginalized communities worldwide.
Yet, what makes 'Perfect Victims' truly extraordinary is El-Kurd's unwavering refusal to accept the confines of victimhood. His narrative is a rebellion against the expectation of silence. He writes: 'We are not here to perform our pain for your absolution. We are here to live, to love, to resist.' These words resonate as a battle cry — simultaneously a rejection of imposed passivity and an affirmation of life beyond occupation.
This is a book that refuses to be quiet. It is a work of profound defiance, carving out space for Palestinian voices to be heard, not as whispers, but as thunder. 'Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal' is a literary and political act of reclamation — a blazing testament to the enduring dignity of a people who refuse to let their story be written by anyone but themselves.
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