Palestinians Face “Impossible Demand” to Be “Perfect Victims,” New Book Argues

We speak with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd on the publication day for his new book, Perfect Victims. It comes at a time of heightened censorship and attacks on Palestinian expression in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as in the United States and elsewhere. Perfect Victims explores ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and human rights abuses and the “impossible demand made of the Palestinians” to be sympathetic in the eyes of international observers. He says that pressure leads to “curating yourself in a way that is not offensive to the Western gaze.” El-Kurd also discusses U.S. attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, President Donald Trump’s calls for ethnically cleansing Gaza, Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank and his own family’s history of fighting eviction from their home in East Jerusalem.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We spend the rest of the hour with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd. His new book is out today, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. The book’s publication comes at a time when even books about Palestinians are seen as a threat to the Israeli state. On Sunday, Israeli police raided two locations of the Educational Bookshop, a beloved Palestinian-owned store in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel detained the bookstore owners, Mahmoud and his nephew Ahmad Muna, who were held for two nights before being released earlier today. Ahmad spoke after his release.

AHMAD MUNA: We have just been released after two days of arrest. I have been released. Mahmoud is — we are waiting for his release. This arrest was brutal. The bases are not clear. We have been released today with conditions. We have to stay at home for five days of arrest, and we are not allowed in the shops for 20 days. It was a brutal, hard arrest. And it’s obvious that there are no charges so far, so we are — there’s nothing to be that we’re held for.

AMY GOODMAN: Witnesses said the Israeli police used Google Translate during the raid to determine the names of books in Arabic. He said, quote, “Anything they didn’t like, they took.” There are reports books seized included a children’s coloring book titled From the River to the Sea and Noam Chomsky’s book Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with the Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé.

Our guest, Mohammed El-Kurd, grew up in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where Israel has spent years trying to evict Palestinian families in order to give their homes to Jewish settlers.

Mohammed El-Kurd, welcome back to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your new book.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: As you go around the country presenting Perfect Victims, you hear about this bookstore being closed — the owners being arrested. Your thoughts? And the significance of going after the books?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, I think this is — the attack on the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem is yet another saga in the Israeli regime’s scholasticide, the attack on culture, scholars. You know, we’ve seen them literally bomb every single university in the Gaza Strip. And the Educational Bookstore is, in fact, not the first bookstore in Jerusalem to be closed down, its owners arrested.

So there is, you know, a criminalization of thought, a criminalization of the intellect, really. And we’ve seen this extend even to the realms of social media, where so many thousands of the people who have been arrested in the past 15 months have been arrested over Facebook posts. So, the Israeli regime really is waging a war of consciousness against the Palestinians’ ability to express national sentiments. And we see this also here in the United States with President Trump saying things like people who — students who support the resistance will have their visas revoked. So there is an attack on, you know, the intellect itself.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mohammed El-Kurd, you ask why Palestinians have to preface their support for the struggle against the occupation with some kind of statement distancing themselves from resistance actions like the attacks of October 7th of 2023. Why is this problematic, while supporters of Israel are never expected to decry the everyday violence of the occupation?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Because it’s racist. Because there is an impossible standard. There is an impossible demand made of the Palestinians to be, you know, for lack of a better expression, perfect victims, to portray themselves with this ethnocentric civility that adheres to Western guidelines; otherwise, they would be deserving of death, they would be deserving of being bombed. And to reject this is to say that the Declaration of Human Rights is unconditional, and it’s universal. And to reject this is to say that, you know, we believe in dignity. We don’t believe in having to shrink ourselves or to perform a different script in order to be awarded freedom and dignity. These are things we are entitled to.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This became a flashpoint, is still a flashpoint, in the United States for attacking pro-Palestinian groups for being antisemitic or anti-Israel. Yet many in the Israeli government, in the current Israeli government, actually support “from the river to the sea” as an Israeli state, and no one raises a fuss about it.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, of course, because the issue is not the statement itself. The issue is who says it. The Israelis could say “from the river to the sea” and more. They could say all kinds of explicitly genocidal statements. And yet, with us, they have to read between the lines. They have to infer and look for the hidden insidiousness in such chants. But it’s comical, in my opinion, that we are being often interrogated about our chants, about what we say on social media; meanwhile, when we talk about them, we’re talking about bombs and airstrikes and burning people alive in their tents in hospital beds.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed, before we talk about your title, Perfect Victims, I just want to ask about your background, because we repeatedly interviewed you here and when you were in Sheikh Jarrah. And for people to understand that neighborhood and what happened there and the people involved being the leaders of Israel today, talk about the occupation of Sheikh Jarrah and what happened in your own home.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, I mean, the story of our home is as unique and absurd as it is common. This is a neighborhood where tax-exempt charities registered in the United States, settler organizations, Jewish American organizations, will come and claim our homes by divine decree, and they will exploit an already asymmetrical judiciary that is built by settlers for settlers to say these are — “Your homes are ours, and we have the right to kick you out of them.” And so, I, like many, many Palestinians, grew up with, quite literally, an American settler in my house. And it’s —

AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. Now, you’re 25 right now.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Twenty-six, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-six.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: When was your home — were you forced to share it with someone who wasn’t in your family?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: It was about 2009. 2009, I came home from school, and half of our house was going. There was a settler inside it, a settler from Long Island. And, you know, right across the street from us, our neighbors, the Ghawi family and the Hannoun family, had lost the entirety of their home to settler organizations. And across the years, these settler organizations have gotten more and more funding. And like you said, their accomplices and people who work for them and people who lead these organizations have found their way increasingly to the government. But this is indicative of a larger, larger —

AMY GOODMAN: They set up offices in Sheikh Jarrah.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yeah, they set up offices in Sheikh Jarrah. They kind of use our homes as the home bases to build their electability, their popularity, because the Israeli public is really eager to see this kind of desperation, to see this kind of brutality. And it invokes a sense of safety in the Israeli public to see their politicians literally in the backyards of Palestinians saying, “We will take these homes. We will Judaize them. We will colonize them.”

AMY GOODMAN: And your home today?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, my home today, like eight others, we have managed, through a massive, massive global solidarity campaign, to postpone the expulsion orders. But we still hang in the balance. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years.

AMY GOODMAN: How does that fit into your title, Perfect Victims?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, I mean, to do a global campaign and to demand solidarity for our neighborhood, you know, we were told and we were taught to perform this role of perfect — to read the script of the perfect victim.

So, to tell you more, you know, I grew up — as a child, as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, we would have journalists, diplomats, all kinds of people visit our neighborhood as if it’s some kind of zoo. And I remember, constantly, I would talk to them. I would show them, you know, photos of the brutality that the settlers did against us. And I would be pulled to the side by, you know, other concerned diplomats or journalists, and they would tell me, “You shouldn’t use this phrase. You should use that phrase.” And it got to a point that, even as a child, I would correct my grandmother when she would refer to the Jewish American settlers in our home as “Jewish.” I would say, “No, no. Don’t mention that.”

But this kind of obfuscation, this kind of omission was kind of drilled into us. And then you grow up, and you have internalized this entire framework of editorializing yourself, of curating yourself in a way that is nonoffensive to the Western gaze. And then you begin to curate and editorialize all the people around you. You look at people who have suffered pager attacks in South Lebanon, people who have had their homes demolished in the Gaza Strip, and you think, “What is the way I can make this victim, this young victim, nonoffensive or compelling to a Western racist audience?” At some point, you have to liberate yourself from these shackles and say, “Actually, this is the victim. This is the oppressed, not the oppressor, not the perpetrator.” And we should shift our focus and scrutinize the perpetrators, the oppressors, the colonizers, the focal point and the root cause of all of the violence in Palestine, which is ultimately Zionism.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mohammed, I wanted to ask you how Donald Trump’s recent comments on Gaza tie into what’s at the heart of your book. He’s described Gaza as, quote, “a big real estate site” and basically said that he doesn’t believe Palestinians should be able to return once they’ve been removed.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, ultimately, this so-called conflict has always been about the land, and any obfuscation of that fact is simply dishonest. Zionist greed has always been about Palestinian land. American interest in Palestine has been about keeping up a certain status quo, a military status quo, in the Middle East, but it’s also been about exploiting natural resources. I mean, Gaza is rich in natural gases.

But what I think Donald Trump is doing is that he is dropping the script of the State Department, the official American script, and just saying things as they are without a filter. And that is helping people understand the long-term American project, because as disgusting and as abhorrent as Trump’s comments were about creating property on the Gaza Strip, it would have never been possible had it been not for the Democratic Party and President Biden flattening Gaza and allowing the flattening of Gaza in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Shireen Abu Akleh, as you talk about her in Perfect Victims, the renowned Al Jazeera journalist who was shot dead by an Israeli sniper, though she was wearing the helmet and the flak jacket — she was outside of the Jenin refugee camp — and how you feel she has been described?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, I want to quote Palestinian scholar Orouba Othman. She uses this phrase that “Shireen Abu Akleh was killed twice” — one, first time, by the Israelis, and the second time when we all started to refer to her as an “American.” You know, and we did this for a good cause. We had the best interests, the best intentions. We think that Americans will be exonerated, will be compelling in ways that Palestinians aren’t, right? It’s every day that a Palestinian journalist gets killed, but it’s not every day that an American journalist gets killed.

But when we refer to Shireen Abu Akleh as an American, we are not increasing her chances of justice, but, in fact, we are divorcing her further from the remainder of her people. We are exceptionalizing her from the very people that she was part and parcel of. And Shireen Abu Akleh was never a bystander. She was never silent. She was always on the side of justice. In 2002 during the Jenin massacre, she was digging with her bare hands in the rubble, helping mothers look for their children. This is not — you know, and this kind of paradigm that separates the journalists from the rest of their people is really like an outdated paradigm, I think, and it does a lot — it does a lot more harm than good. It doesn’t humanize people. It actually exceptionalizes them. It transcends them into this kind of infallible status that nobody else and their peers can ascend to.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — while so much attention has been focused on the Israeli wars in Gaza and in Lebanon, talk about what the situation is right now in the West Bank for Palestinians. And has it ever been at this crisis level in the past?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: No. I mean, it’s horrifying, what’s happening in the occupied West Bank. And it’s like you said. It has never — excuse me. It has never been at this level of brutality. UNRWA reports that there’s been 40,000 Palestinians displaced. We are seeing the Jenin refugee camp and other places in the West Bank bombed every single day. There are more and more martyrs. And we’ve heard, you know, many months ago that the Israelis gave the settlers 200,000 rifles. And you see these rifles while you’re walking around the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there now, but we’re going to do Part 2 right afterwards and post it at democracynow.org. And I want to ask you about your dedication to Dr. Refaat Alareer. His body was just found. Mohammed El-Kurd, his new book is out today, Perfect Victims. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.