I’m going to make this post and kick off this reading group to get it moving. If I try to plan it perfectly, it will never get done, so let’s just start and see how it goes, adjusting if needed.
The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I’ve pasted the summary below.
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.
We’ll start this week by reading and discussing the following article by the same author, which introduces some of his perspective on anti-zionism as a Palestinian.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
This article is just over 2000 words. Let’s discuss in the comments. I’ll keep this post up until next weekend, then we can move on to Perfect Victims. Please let me know in the comments if you think any changes are needed to this plan.
I’m really glad I read that essay.
Even though it makes sense now that I know, I had no idea there was such a focus on teaching Holocaust and antisemitism history and theory to the Palestinian people.
I’ve been aware of Palestinian academic contribution to that area of study, which I have found to be an interesting phenomenon but I suppose I assumed was a product of organic curiosity/interest (or, frankly pragmatic “tactical” motivation in a diplomatic sense) in understanding the psychology and mythos of Israelis and of Zionism.
How the author describes the complex and distracting (political) necessity of communicating the atrocities and indignities committed against the Palestinian people in politically correct and precise language is something I think we can all relate to.
It has always felt like “first world problems” to be frustrated by this, which it generally is for me, I live in such comparative luxury that the burden of precise speech isn’t much of a burden at all in practice. But often we do have to blunten a lot of emotion and passionate rhetoric in order to communicate around social justice and human rights issues in a way that preemptively heads off bad faith misinterpretation and derailment of our messaging.
That regular Palestinians have to jump through the same hoops and police their own speech while talking about (and actively, continually, experiencing) such brutal mistreatment and exploitation is just… Words fail me, tbh. I can’t imagine how frustrating and disempowering it must be.
What a cruel mindfuck.
I have more sympathy than ever for the people who decide to pick up a gun instead.
As an aside, I think it speaks to the Israeli delusion that their “enemies” are entirely motivated by ignorant and religiously motivated hatred, that they expend such effort on this avenue of propaganda in the Palestinian regions / populations.
Agreed, it’s absolutely perverse that Palestinians are expected to always be mindful of the feelings of their aggressors.
I think the problem is that, not only does the preemptive action against misinterpretation often not work, but it takes a conversation about a genocide committed by Jewish people, with the stated reason by them being their Jewishness (which is wrong, but it’s what they say), and makes the discourse about Jewish feelings instead of the genocide of Palestinians, including (usually especially) the feelings of those actively committing the genocide. Even if it isn’t too much of a burden for westerners to be precise in their speech on this issue, the focus on that shifts focus away from the actual issues at hand, which is absolutely a deliberate strategy employed by “Israelis”.
Someone can make a correct point which is not antisemitic at all, be accused of antisemitism, and their whole professional life and career are over, whereas a zionist can say whatever monstrous shit comes to mind and suffer no consequences. This is partly enabled by some “well-meaning” people in the liberal establishment continuously making every single thing that involves a Jewish person, regardless of if that person is the victim of the aggressor, and making it primarily about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
I realise that I’ve focused in on this without also acknowledging/exploring the complicity of the rest of the world in requiring Palestinian messaging to be so precise and stripped back in order for us to digest it without disregarding it off-hand or interpreting it in bad faith.
I’m not sure what to say further on that specifically, except that the scale of opposition Palestinians face even in telling their stories is so massive. We have an important duty to push back had against lazy or willful misinterpretation of Palestinian voices whenever and wherever we encounter it. To help people properly contextualise these voices and their messages.
100%, absolutely agreed. It’s everyone’s job to push back against zionist framing whenever possible. I think El-Kurd’s work gives a lot of useful tools for doing that, which is why I want to study it here.
I forgot to ask in my previous reply: do you want to be added to the ping list for this reading group?