52 pages • 1-hour read
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Tropes and Drones”
El‑Kurd explores the semantic minefield Palestinians must navigate under occupation, where words carry more peril than drones. He opens with a James Baldwin epigraph highlighting the impossibility of equating Palestinian suffering with that of Black Americans, setting the tone for a critique of imposed rhetorical limits.
El‑Kurd recounts childhood memories in occupied Jerusalem. Jewish settlers and state officials—soldiers, bureaucrats, judges—carved his family’s expulsion into law and daily life, while he was taught to distinguish “Jews” from “Zionists” to avoid collective blame. Despite living under a “Jewish state,” Palestinians were pressured to sidestep visible markers of colonial power, like the Star of David on flags and court documents, and to self‑censor any language that might be deemed tropes of antisemitism.
He argues that this linguistic policing effectively shifts the onus of violence onto Palestinians’ words, not the settler state’s material brutality. From childhood, Palestinians learn that misusing terms can render systemic oppression invisible, whereas ignorance becomes a luxury. To secure international solidarity, young activists memorize hieroglyphics of acceptable discourse: Denouncing global antisemitism takes precedence over naming the settlers who demolished their homes. This preemptive defensiveness, El‑Kurd contends, is a survival tactic born of fear that any rhetorical misstep will strip Palestinians of credibility and humanity.
The chapter then critiques the performative nature of solidarity politics. He describes an open letter by Palestinian intellectuals condemning President Abbas’s Holocaust denial—a rapid response to protect alliances with progressive Jewish and Western academics. However, El‑Kurd observes, no comparable joint statement emerged when Israeli police branded a young man’s cheek with the Star of David, or when dozens of Palestinians were killed in raids and at checkpoints. The disproportionate focus on repudiating alleged tropes over documenting live violence illustrates how semantic conformity has become a form of self‑colonization.
El‑Kurd contrasts this with drones—literal instruments of violence—arguing that while drones kill with impunity, tropes kill reputations and erode solidarity. He insists that Palestinian discourse must resist prioritizing optics over material reality. The chapter concludes by reclaiming the right to speak freely: Palestinians need not apologize for systemic violence they did not commit, nor preemptively distance themselves from tropes they have inherited by virtue of colonial imposition. Instead, El‑Kurd calls for a shift toward holding the colonizer accountable for their actions, not policing the colonized’s vocabulary. In this way, he reframes language as a site of resistance, urging Palestinians and allies to dismantle the rhetorical constraints that sustain occupation.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Mein Kampf in the Playroom”
Chapter 6 opens with an account of Israeli President Isaac Herzog presenting BBC viewers with a copy of Mein Kampf “found in a children’s living room” (95) in northern Gaza, using the discovery as purported evidence of Palestinian intent to exterminate Jews. He notes the book was marked up, implying ideological indoctrination. State media and pundits quickly seized on Herzog’s claim to justify military actions, while Palestinian activists mobilized to debunk the story—arguing the volume was pristine, likely planted, or simply one among many copies available in Israeli libraries.
El‑Kurd observes that Palestinians have developed a reflexive “muscle” for rebuttal, honed over decades of countering false narratives. He questions why this laborious exercise of earnest refutation is necessary at all, questioning when a book became a weapon. He argues that meeting absurd propaganda with serious argument only reinforces the colonizer’s logic, which treats thought as a crime and demands “perfect” innocence as a condition for survival. Instead of accepting the premise that possession of an inflammatory text is incriminating, he proposes another stance: Even if the text were genuine, it does not entitle an occupying power to exterminate Palestinians.
The chapter then examines the nature of propaganda itself, likening it to a “children’s book” built on simplistic slogans and logical fallacies. Effective talking points, El‑Kurd explains, are both straightforward enough for mass repetition and incoherent enough to provoke endless side debates, thereby distracting from the core issue of colonial violence. He lists common Zionist fallacies—ad hominins (“our men are gentle fathers”), straw‑man arguments (equating “from the river to the sea” with genocide), slippery slopes (a free Palestine equals “a second Holocaust”)—and notes how Palestinians spend hours refuting them while the lived realities of occupation persist unaddressed (97).
El‑Kurd critiques the strategy of granting propaganda legitimacy by debunking it. Logical rejoinders may momentarily sound convincing, but they ultimately dignify fallacious premises. He draws an analogy to a robber using a hostage as a shield: Even if militants sometimes endanger civilians, that does not absolve the state of responsibility when it kills those same civilians. Colonialism, he asserts, is both the robber and the policeman, criminalizing resistance and legalizing slaughter.
The chapter concludes with a call to shift tactics. Rather than ritualistically disproving every Zionist trope, Palestinians and allies should “spit out the bait” (102), reject the terms set by propagandists, and refocus on material injustices. El‑Kurd describes recent atrocities—burning civilians alive in Rafah tents; siege‑induced decompositions; and the use of white phosphorus—and contrasts these urgent realities with what he regards as trivial side‑conversations about semantics. He reaffirms that the moral burden lies on the occupier, not on Palestinians to preemptively prove their non‑violence or ideological purity. By refusing to play by the colonizer’s rules of debate, he argues, Palestinians can reclaim agency and direct attention back to the ongoing campaign of dispossession and destruction.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In Chapters 5 and 6, El-Kurd presents language as both a terrain of occupation and a tactic of resistance. His metaphor of language as a minefield—more dangerous than geopolitical borders—underscores the semantic precarity Palestinians navigate under colonial rule. A single misstep, such as invoking a phrase deemed too provocative or politically impure, risks invalidating a speaker’s legitimacy altogether. The stakes are not metaphorical but reputational and political, with discourse itself weaponized to police the boundaries of who can speak and be believed. The effect is an internalized regime of self-censorship in which language, rather than clarifying injustice, often functions to obscure it.
El-Kurd’s recurring contrast between drones and tropes dramatizes the hierarchy of violence that structures Palestinian speech, emphasizing The Burden of Performative Victimhood. He asserts that while drones kill bodies, tropes kill credibility, suggesting that symbolic violence can be just as devastating as physical force. “A drone is one thing,” he writes. “But a trope—a trope is unacceptable” (85). The terseness of this construction mirrors the binary logic it critiques, exposing how rhetorical infractions carry outsized consequences for the colonized. In this framework, the demand for rhetorical purity becomes a form of disciplinary control: To grieve, protest, or even describe reality, Palestinians must first clear an obstacle course of externally imposed semantic restrictions. This dynamic suggests the oppressed must continually reframe their language to gain minimal access to recognition.
El-Kurd also invokes intertextuality to complicate and expand his argument about Resistance as Refusal and Reclamation. Chapter 5 opens with a quotation from James Baldwin that critiques false equivalence, immediately situating the Palestinian struggle within a broader history of racialized erasure. In Chapter 6, an epigraph from al-Shafiʿ—“If the fool speaks, do not answer” (95)—functions as a caution against dignifying bad-faith accusations with reasoned responses. These allusions serve both rhetorical and strategic purposes, as they anchor El-Kurd’s arguments in transnational traditions of resistance while affirming his right to reject certain discursive terms altogether. Rather than positioning himself as a neutral commentator, El-Kurd draws on post-colonial traditions that assert rhetorical sovereignty as a precondition for justice. His citations are not decorative but foundational, reinforcing a broader framework of argument.
The central argument of Chapter 6, in which El-Kurd asserts that engaging with propaganda on its own terms often reinforces its power, continues the critique of rhetorical self-policing and Media Power and the Politics of Legitimacy introduced earlier. By recounting the international uproar over a copy of Mein Kampf allegedly found in a Gaza living room, El-Kurd scrutinizes what he regards as the absurdity of weaponized narrative framing. “What I read cannot be used as a pretext to kill me” (97), he writes, before juxtaposing Hitler’s manifesto with Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices—a pairing that he claims highlights the performative nature of outrage, but which may be regarded by some as downplaying the vast ideological differences and associated histories between the two texts. Through ironic juxtaposition and parallelism, El-Kurd challenges the premise that Palestinians must respond to every accusation with sober rebuttals. His larger point is that these rhetorical games shift the focus from real atrocities to what he regards as symbolic debates. As in earlier chapters, El-Kurd argues that journalistic tone and institutional framing exert disproportionate influence on public perception.
In rejecting the premise of constant explanation and rhetorical appeasement, El-Kurd carves out space for what might be called rhetorical disobedience. Rather than engage endlessly with logical fallacies or semantic traps, he calls on Palestinians and allies to “spit out the bait” (102). This shift away from reactive justification and toward unapologetic articulation demands that discourse re-center the material realities of occupation, such as burning tents, siege-induced decomposition, and military checkpoints. Language, in this framework, must be reclaimed as a tool of urgency and truth, not merely a performance of respectability. By disentangling the value of speech from its palatability, El-Kurd reframes communication as an act of agency rather than compliance.
Through these chapters, El-Kurd tries to reorient the focus from a politics of rhetorical precision to a politics of accountability. He is not interested in pleasing gatekeepers or mitigating accusations. Instead, he insists that the terms of discourse themselves must be rewritten—not to gain access to sympathy, but to restore accuracy and dignity to Palestinian expression.
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