Link to last week’s reading group post.
Summary of this book.
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.
Comrades who can’t afford to buy the book should definitely not go to annas-archive (dot) org and find a digital copy there, since that would be wrong and we are all law-abiding, copyright-respecting citizens.
Sorry about the delay posting this thread. I wanted to wait until after the New Year and then recent events happened.
Anti-zionism reading group Week 3!
Tagging everyone who I had marked down as potentially interested as well as anyone who participated in the last thread and this one so far. Let me know if you want to be added to or removed from this ping list.
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I’ll probably trim some of the people I initially added as “potentially interested” who don’t end up participating after another thread or so.
Damn, I actually gotta discuss the book? I can’t just read it, and lurk on the discussion thread?
Haha, no need if you don’t want to! Just a comment or DM letting me know to keep you on is enough. I might also not bother trimming people preemptively and just remove people if they request it.
Echoing what oscardejarjayes said, I thought the 2025 Capital reading group was pretty much dead at this point but people popped in in the last couple weeks to comment. I’d say leave em unless they tell you to take them off, or the account is deleted.
Threads where I get at’d to remind me to read the book have been pretty great, even if I didn’t actually discuss much Cowbee’s Capital bookgroup really helped me power through to actually finish it, instead of using up all of my energy on 1, and slowly stopping reading before I even get to book 3.
Don’t worry too much about trimming people or not, I’ll definitely bring myself up to you or participate in the threads if I have to, it’s really no biggie. My comment was somewhat truthful, but mostly facetious.
Hey. I haven’t been participating because life sucks a bit right now, but I am interested. Could you keep me on the list?
No problem!