Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

Chapter 7 opens with the well‑known incident of Edward Said tossing what he later called “a pebble” at an Israeli guardhouse in southern Lebanon in July 2000. Despite Said’s stature as a celebrated Palestinian intellectual, media outlets and academic peers condemned the act as “primitive” and “gratuitous violence,” revealing the racism that deems Palestinian resistance unacceptable—even when performed by a professor armed only with a stone. Newspapers used provocative language (“stoning,” “horseplay”) to depict Said’s gesture, and institutions like the Sigmund Freud Society in Vienna disinvited him from lectures, underscoring how Palestinian dissent is delegitimized in Western and Israeli forums.

El‑Kurd uses this episode to ask who is permitted to speak for Palestinians. He argues that Western outlets eagerly quote Israel’s most “respectable” critics—refuseniks, ex‑soldiers, diaspora intellectuals—while dismissing or sidelining indigenous Palestinian voices. Even when Israeli human rights groups label occupation an “apartheid regime,” that admission becomes the headline, while the ongoing violence—home demolitions, checkpoints, mass displacement—remains marginal. Palestinian knowledge‑producers and grassroots historians are routinely omitted from citations, reinforcing a hierarchy of credibility rooted in race, nationality, and institutional prestige.

The chapter then turns to the use of childhood in advocacy. Western politicians and NGOs often showcase Palestinian children as embodiments of innocence, inviting them to testify before Congress or the European Parliament.