Book Review: Perfect Victims by Mohammed El Kurd

                Iranian missiles light up the Tel Aviv skyline during the June 2025 Israel-Iran war

"After they have burned my homeland, my friend and my youth / how can my poems not turn into guns?"

So muses the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, whom Mohammed El Kurd quotes from in "Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal." El Kurd returns the to this refrain a number of times throughout the book, elsewhere writing: "it's hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun (189)."

Fair enough. But as far as books do go, this is a good one. And it blows out of the water a lot of other writing about Palestine, at least compared to other books that circulate in mainstream, Western circles.

Anyway, these are the notes I scratched down after finishing the book, which I read while skulking around my girlfriend's parents vacation house in Colorado, miserably trying to explain to my girlfriend the connections between christianity, whiteness and capitalism on the one hand, and Judaism, depression, Marxism and anti-colonialism on the other hand.

I think the book really conveys the maxim of "Decolonize Your Mind." To my chagrin, my Dad lives in Jerusalem and is an ardent Zionist. Every once in a while, I try to educate him about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. This effort has been largely futile, though I have managed to send him articles from "The Electronic Intifada" without him screaming at me. But when we do talk, I find all the bullshit I have to engage with and respond to.

Recently, I asked him to make a donation to an organization that supports starving Palestinian children in honor of my birthday. He said he was not sure and he would have to look into it, the obvious implication being his concern that the organization was secretly raising money for terrorism (no comments about my cousins who donate money to Friends of the IDF, nor any adult discussion about the difference between terrorism and armed self defense). And I just notice how much energy I spend in these conversations defending and refuting the most absurd, spurious, and flat-out waste-of-my-time accusations. El Kurd encourages the reader to consider: what if we didn't.

In El Kurd's writing, the Palestinian is born on the witness stand, a defendant at a criminal trial. If the Palestinian can argue sufficiently for their innocence, they will still likely be killed, but maybe they will be mourned. A child, a woman, a journalist. Dead, but how sad (not like the terrorists!).

Well, what if we did not accept this situation as reality. El Kurd writes about the ways Palestinians must always prove they are not anti-semitic. Why do they have to prove this? Or the way they must always denounce Hamas, and tactics the west hypocritically and without justification terms "terrorism." Why this constant burden.

Free your mind from the Zionist logic that requires every Palestinian to have perfectly proved their innocence! This is the statement that leaps out from me most clearly from El Kurd's writing. And Palestinians deserve the freedom to make jokes, be irreverent, laugh in ways that make people uncomfortable, least of all their oppressors! A trope, a refrain that one might hear as carrying anti-semitic connotations? This cannot be accepted. But Merkava tanks and bunker busting bombs, what's the harm?

Great book. I recommend reading. Probably better than the lib Zionist crap I was reading a few weeks ago (gripping as it was).