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.
I’m making this post a double-chapter one and keeping it up for two weeks, since I tend to forget to update them. We’ll see how that works. This is now past where I’ve read the book, so I’m going to do my best to join the discussion more for this one. Thanks to everyone who has participated so far!
The description in chapter 2 of the only acceptable people to be shown to a western audience “if he was a wolf, he must be defanged” felt like a high-brow Citations Needed by a Palestinian expert. Good stuff.
Also appreciate the way he utilizes his definition of humanity/inhuman as well as his desire to become human (feels like Fanon sitting in the background nodding along)
I’ve caught myself thinking about the human comment too tbh part of me has been reworking the term to not be speciesist but yeah I think this is why it stuck with me so much and why the word irked me in a way I couldn’t describe. Real on the fanon part