52 pages • 1-hour read
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Shireen’s Passport”
Chapter 3 opens with the fatal shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51‑year‑old Al Jazeera correspondent, during an Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp on May 11th, 2022. While several independent investigations—including those by CNN and the UN—concluded that she was likely killed by Israeli fire, the Israeli government initially denied responsibility, and conflicting narratives circulated widely.
El‑Kurd recalls watching footage of her death live on his phone while traveling to the airport, and describes the immediate sense that “the world would stand still” (45) at losing such a familiar presence. Within minutes of the news breaking, he received an urgent email instructing him to publicize her American citizenship—“an American journalist” (46)—to generate broader outrage. He refused to reduce her identity to a passport, insisting instead that her death mattered regardless of nationality.
Despite the email’s well‑meaning intent, El‑Kurd highlights its underlying logic: Certain citizenships confer worthiness. He contrasts Shireen’s global resonance with the muted response to Ghofran Warasneh, a Hebron reporter killed three weeks later, whose death barely registered beyond local news. He further invokes the cases of Rachel Corrie, Omar As’ad, and Yusef Sha’ban—each seeking American ties or foreign backing to garner attention—and questions what tangible justice or protection such affiliations ultimately deliver.
El‑Kurd urges readers to weigh the short‑ and long‑term costs of leveraging passports as diplomatic tools. While Western governments may feel compelled to act when their own citizens are targeted, this strategy reinforces racist hierarchies that treat lives as commodities. He calls on advocates to reassess whether the transactional narrative of “innocence by nationality” is worth the broader sacrifices it demands of Palestinian self‑representation.
Turning to mainstream media, El‑Kurd documents a pattern of obfuscation: The Associated Press rewriting Ministry of Health statements, the New York Times headline framing Shireen Abu Akleh’s death as occurring amid “clashes” rather than naming Israeli gunfire; and the routine use of passive voice. He describes how her funeral in Jerusalem, which was stormed by occupation forces, with hearse windows smashed and flags torn, was reported as “clashes” or “tussling,” even as Israeli snipers fired on mourners.
The chapter then interrogates the civilian/militant dichotomy. Palestinians who bear arms are stripped of context and labeled “terrorists,” while journalists and medics must disavow any affiliation to be deemed neutral. El‑Kurd contrasts this with Western coverage of Ukraine, where civilians who resist occupation are celebrated as defenders. He attributes these divergent framings to geopolitical interests: Russia as existential threat, Israel as entrenched ally.
In its final pages, the chapter chronicles the unprecedented scale of Shireen’s funerals across Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, and ultimately Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands, green‑ and blue‑ID holders alike, crossed walls and checkpoints, transforming the procession into a momentary reclamation of public space. For once, class, religion, and political affiliation dissolved in collective grief. Evoking her own words— “Some absence brings forth a greater presence” (61)—El‑Kurd frames Shireen’s “martyrdom” as both a personal loss and a catalyst for unity, briefly dispelling the isolation imposed by occupation.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Life in Cross Examination”
El‑Kurd examines how Palestinians are forced into a perpetual “cross‑examination,” required to prove their humanity through constrained expressions of emotion and behavior. He begins by challenging the notion that language or intelligence alone distinguishes humans, noting that other species exhibit complex communication and tool use. Instead, he locates the unique hallmark of humanity in the depth and refinement of sentiment, yet observes that Palestinians’ “affective allowance” is tightly policed. Under the prevailing humanization framework, they may show hospitality, meekness, or sorrow, but any display of ambition, resistance, or anger risks re‑exiling them outside accepted norms of “civilized” emotion.
El‑Kurd illustrates this dynamic through the canonical poem “Abd el‑Hadi Fights a Superpower” by Taha Muhammad Ali, in which the illiterate Abd el‑Hadi insists on treating even a nuclear aircraft carrier’s crew with courtesy. He links such idealization to the burden placed on Palestinians to inhabit a singularly benevolent identity. Drawing on a conversation in London, he recounts how his friend Ahmed Alnaouq—who lost 21 family members in Gaza—felt compelled to declare that he “does not hate the Jewish people” (68). El‑Kurd argues that this voluntary disavowal, offered amid unbearable grief, reflects external pressures that prioritize opponents’ comfort over authentic expression of rage or despair.
Moving from personal anecdote to collective experience, El‑Kurd critiques narratives that demand Palestinian exceptionalism, such as stories of bereaved Palestinians who forgive rather than those who mourn with anger. He contrasts media profiles of a Harvard‑trained doctor who forgives his daughters’ killers with the silence surrounding other survivors whose pain is deemed inexpressible. Such portrayals, he suggests, flatten the multifaceted reality of Palestinian lives into reductive tropes of forgiveness and restraint.
The chapter then explores the role of language and narrative in both oppression and resistance. He invokes Mourid Barghouti’s observation that omitting origins in storytelling reverses moral order: “Start your story with ‘secondly,’ and the arrows of the [Indigenous Americans] are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim” (72). Language thus serves as a battleground: It can obscure historical injustice or, if reclaimed, illuminate and mobilize collective action.
El‑Kurd reflects on his own participation in a Berkeley encampment, noting how student protests created temporary utopias of solidarity across identities. However, he warns that these acts risk being sensationalized or erased if they do not fit prescribed scripts of nonviolence and civility.
Concluding with a meditation on Taha Muhammad Ali’s later poem “Abd el‑Hadi the Fool,” El‑Kurd embraces the legitimacy of rage. The poem’s speaker confesses a “sharpened hatred” and vivid fantasies of burning and dismembering the world—emotions traditionally deemed “inhuman.” El‑Kurd asserts that such impulses are an elemental response to what he describes as “genocide” and dispossession, dignifying rather than diminishing one’s humanity. He contends that true freedom lies not in conforming to an external moral code, but in the right to express the full spectrum of human feeling.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In Chapters 3 and 4, El-Kurd deepens his interrogation of narrative and Media Power and the Politics of Legitimacy by turning to the question of who is grievable, how grief is permitted to manifest, and what forms of identification or performance are required to validate Palestinian suffering. He critiques not only the external standards imposed by media and diplomacy, but also the internalized pressure to present oneself in ways that earn global recognition. While Chapter 3 concentrates on the mechanisms that commodify Palestinian identity in exchange for international empathy, Chapter 4 shifts towards the psychological consequences of living under such scrutiny, particularly in how Palestinians are expected to grieve and respond to their own dispossession.
One of El-Kurd’s most important critiques in this section is the idea that Palestinian life must be mediated through Western institutions of value, such as passports, citizenships, and affiliations with American or European powers. His observation that “passports are a currency” (47) distills a broader argument about the uneven distribution of sympathy and protection. This “currency” metaphor recasts identity not as intrinsic but as transactional—a tool that can buy legitimacy or attention if properly leveraged.
The death of Shireen Abu Akleh becomes a focal point not just for collective mourning but for strategic advocacy. The urgency to foreground her American citizenship following her killing reveals how geopolitical proximity—not humanity—often dictates which lives warrant outrage. El-Kurd neither dismisses the instinct to highlight such affiliations nor suggests that doing so is entirely ineffective. Instead, he challenges readers to reflect on the long-term implications of appealing to power using the very criteria that sustain global hierarchies. He stresses how journalistic language, diplomatic framing, and media headlines participate in the same systems they purport to critique.
The emotional toll of this representational burden becomes clearer in Chapter 4, where El-Kurd turns inward to explore the limits of performative grief and The Burden of Performative Victimhood. Palestinians, he argues, are not only subject to occupation but to constant surveillance of their emotional expressions. They are expected to mourn with restraint, forgive their aggressors, and remain legible as “civilized” victims. Through the figure of Abd el-Hadi, he critiques the pressure to perform unwavering kindness in the face of violence. The line, “What a burden it is to live in a world that expects us to be a nation of Abd el-Hadis” (68), encapsulates the exhaustion of being held to moral standards that deny the legitimacy of rage. While Western media celebrates grief that is tempered and articulate, Palestinian expressions of anger are pathologized or erased. This dynamic illustrates how Palestinians are offered empathy only under specific, depoliticized conditions.
El-Kurd’s stylistic choices also play a key role in reinforcing his argument about Resistance as Refusal and Reclamation. His tone shifts between indignation, irony, and quiet sorrow, mirroring the emotional range he insists Palestinians should be allowed to inhabit. The repetition of “unnamed” spaces in Chapter 3—e.g., “unnamed tree,” “unnamed street”—serves to emphasize the erasure of context that often accompanies Palestinian deaths. By naming some victims and leaving others faceless, he highlights the arbitrariness of global attention.
Similarly, the refusal to romanticize forgiveness or valorize restraint in Chapter 4 becomes an act of protest. El-Kurd does not reject grief, but he insists on its plurality: “Sometimes it is graceful, other times it is vengeful” (79). This defense of emotional complexity functions as a broader political claim, one that seeks to restore Palestinians to the full spectrum of human feeling without requiring them to perform innocence or apology.
Together, these chapters highlight how external systems of recognition shape Palestinian self-representation and emotional life. Rather than propose a solution, El-Kurd offers a rupture—a refusal to continue participating in a system that demands selectivity, apology, and deference in exchange for basic dignity. In doing so, he invites readers not to feel sympathy for Palestinians, but to question why such sympathy ever requires justification.
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