52 pages • 1-hour read
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
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Background
Literary Context: Reimagining Palestinian Literature as Resistance
Perfect Victims positions itself as part of a rich and urgent literary lineage, the tradition of Palestinian resistance writing. From Mahmoud Darwish to Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian authors have long used literature not only to express grief and beauty, but to fight against invisibility and erasure. El-Kurd’s contribution modernizes and expands this tradition, blending memoir, polemic, and poetic prose to confront the politics of representation in a media-saturated era. His language is both defiant and lyrical, drawing equally from revolutionary texts and cultural idioms, making the work personal while remaining collectively resonant.
Unlike earlier writers whose works circulated largely in Arabic, El-Kurd writes in English for a global audience, often confronting Western liberalism, NGO discourse, and journalistic “objectivity” head-on. His essays disrupt expectations about tone, politeness, and genre, choosing instead to prioritize clarity and moral urgency. In doing so, El-Kurd reclaims the Palestinian voice from the realm of third-party analysis and returns it to the center of the narrative, not as victim but as agent, speaker, and author.
Moreover, the book engages directly with questions about the literary function of metaphor, narrative, and testimonial. In one chapter, El-Kurd questions whether poetry can do anything in the barrel of a gun, while elsewhere he insists that language—when wielded fearlessly—can crack through the moral fog of empire. This tension between the limits and possibilities of cultural production is a recurring motif, especially as El-Kurd contends with the commodification of Palestinian pain in global markets. His refusal to reduce his people’s struggle to palatable soundbites aligns him with other postcolonial and decolonial writers who challenge dominant paradigms of taste, audience, and moral acceptability.
Ultimately, El-Kurd’s work is not just part of the Palestinian literary canon—it is also a fierce intervention into how that canon is received, legitimized, and misinterpreted by institutions of power. In this sense, Perfect Victims is both a literary work and a manifesto, one that refuses to allow Palestinian literature to be read as merely symbolic, metaphorical, or historical. Instead, it insists on its immediacy—its blood, breath, and body.
Sociohistorical Context: Palestinian Struggle in the Shadow of Empire
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal is grounded in the sociohistorical legacy of settler colonialism, militarized occupation, and global complicity in Palestinian dispossession. Understanding the broader context of El-Kurd’s writing requires familiarity with the historical events and political structures that shape Palestinian life, including the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), the 1967 war and occupation, the Oslo Accords, and ongoing Israeli settlement expansion. Each of these episodes marks a stage in what El-Kurd frames as a continuous Nakba—a state of enduring catastrophe that defines Palestinian existence across generations and geographies.
El-Kurd’s writing emerges from a post-Second Intifada generation, one shaped not just by Israeli military violence, but by the hollow promises of peace processes and the fragmentation of Palestinian society. His text references neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah, refugee camps in Gaza and Lebanon, and the political repression faced by activists in the West Bank—all sites that exist within the global architecture of occupation. The book insists that this reality cannot be understood solely through humanitarian discourse, but must be contextualized within a colonial framework maintained by Western powers, media institutions, and regional actors alike.
The “politics of appeal” El-Kurd critiques are rooted in this sociohistorical imbalance. Palestinians, he argues, are forced to curate their pain, to sanitize their resistance, and to conform to narratives that erase the full scope of their oppression to gain sympathy from an international community that often upholds the very systems harming them. This history of selective recognition mirrors earlier colonial patterns, where indigenous people were only humanized when deemed “noble savages”—nonviolent, apolitical, and ultimately powerless.
The global rise of securitization and Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era also plays a crucial role in the book’s context. Anti-terror legislation, surveillance technologies, and media tropes have fused to paint Palestinian resistance as inherently suspect or criminal. El-Kurd draws connections between these global regimes of control and the lived experiences of Palestinians under occupation. He also invokes the power of solidarity movements—Black liberation, anti-colonial struggles, Indigenous land defense—as necessary counterparts in understanding and resisting Zionism.
In this way, Perfect Victims situates itself within a long arc of history. It is both a response to immediate atrocities and a reflection of centuries of displacement and erasure. The sociohistorical context makes clear that this is not just a local or religious conflict, but a global struggle for land, dignity, and liberation.
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