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Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
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Themes
The Burden of Performative Victimhood
El-Kurd interrogates what he regards as the pervasive expectation that Palestinians must present themselves as passive, meek, and morally spotless in order to be deemed worthy of global sympathy. This construct—what El-Kurd and others have referred to as the politics of “performative victimhood”—demands that Palestinians suppress grief, anger, and resistance, especially in public discourse, lest they be framed as complicit in their own oppression. El-Kurd challenges this logic head-on, arguing that it is not only dehumanizing, but a form of emotional and political control that maintains colonial hierarchies while denying Palestinians their full humanity.
El-Kurd argues that, “if you want to humanize the Palestinian, you have to defang the Palestinian” (35). The language here is stark and strategic—”defanging” evokes the image of a wild animal subdued for safety, a creature made harmless for the comfort of spectators. This figurative language crystallizes the contradiction at the heart of performative victimhood: Palestinians are granted recognition only to the extent that they appear docile, grateful, or apolitical. By demanding compliance as a prerequisite for empathy, dominant narratives deny Palestinians the right to speak with anger, to resist, or to claim justice on their own terms.
The book explores how Palestinians are often asked to meet an impossible ethical standard, one that refuses them the normal range of emotional responses to violence and trauma. Grief must be dignified, not defiant. Resistance must be symbolic, never disruptive. Even joy or humor, when expressed in the wrong context, can be interpreted as dangerous. This conditional empathy operates through the framework of “worthiness”—only those who can convincingly perform a particular kind of suffering are granted space in the media or solidarity from liberal audiences. El-Kurd asserts that this framing does not emerge from neutrality but is rooted in colonial logic: Palestinians are presumed guilty until they prove themselves harmless. Even then, their innocence is conditional and revocable.
This impossible calculus is especially evident in how mourning itself is portrayed. El-Kurd points out that obituaries for Palestinian men frequently include biographical “credentials”—academic degrees, political affiliations, or family roles—not as part of remembrance, but as justification for sympathy: “Obituaries of dead Palestinian men deploy certain identifiers […] to satisfy the requisite conditions for grieving the deceased” (38). The line draws attention to how even in death, Palestinians must qualify for empathy by proving their decency, intellect, or alignment with Western norms. Without these traits, their deaths risk being ignored—or worse, justified.
Notably, El-Kurd extends this critique to the realm of solidarity. He notes that many well-intentioned allies participate in this framework without realizing it, favoring sanitized or symbolic expressions of Palestinian identity while recoiling from more confrontational or unapologetic forms of resistance. As a result, even acts of advocacy can become subtly complicit in the same systems they seek to challenge. The book calls on readers to question not only how Palestinians are portrayed but why certain portrayals are so persistently demanded—and what is lost in the process.
Ultimately, El-Kurd’s engagement with performative victimhood is a call to reject respectability politics in favor of authenticity, rage, and agency. It urges Palestinians and their allies not to waste energy on fitting into narratives designed to undermine them. Instead, he insists on the right to be complex, contradictory, and human.
Resistance as Refusal and Reclamation
A notable throughline in the book is El-Kurd’s exploration of resistance not simply as a reactive impulse, but as a sustained act of refusal and reclamation. Throughout the book, El-Kurd expands the definition of resistance beyond physical confrontation to include the act of asserting Palestinian presence, identity, and narrative in spaces that seek to erase or distort them. In this context, resistance becomes not only a political imperative but a cultural and psychological necessity.
El-Kurd makes it clear that resistance is not limited to moments of public protest or visible defiance. Rather, it is embedded in everyday acts such as writing, speaking, teaching, remembering, or refusing to forget. To live in the face of colonial erasure is, in and of itself, an act of resistance. This framing is especially significant given how often Palestinian resistance is portrayed in mainstream media as irrational, violent, or extremist. El-Kurd counters this distortion by emphasizing the logic, continuity, and moral clarity of Palestinian resistance. He insists that it is not a call to vengeance, but a refusal to surrender to dehumanization.
El-Kurd offers an example of this approach in his treatment of the recurring question, “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?” (156). Rather than dignify the provocation with a straightforward denial, El-Kurd deconstructs the question itself, exposing it as a rhetorical trap designed to put Palestinians on the defensive. The question reveals the deep asymmetry of the discourse, with even the most basic Palestinian aspirations distorted into threats. El-Kurd’s refusal to “take the bait” (162) reflects a broader strategy of resistance by rejecting frameworks that presume guilt and to reclaim the right to imagine, to desire, and to speak without first securing permission.
This refusal is not simply negation—it is a form of construction. Resistance in El-Kurd’s vision involves reclaiming the right to envision futures free of domination, even if those visions are derided as dangerous. El-Kurd writes, “To simply imagine Palestine without settlers…that, in the Zionist imagination, is genocidal” (157). Here, imagination itself becomes an act of rebellion. By showing how dreams of freedom are pathologized by the powerful, El-Kurd reveals how language and thought are policed as thoroughly as bodies and borders. He also reclaims that terrain, arguing that to envision liberation is itself an act of resistance.
El-Kurd’s resistance is also deeply collective. He emphasizes the importance of memory and intergenerational struggle, invoking the voices of Palestinians who continue to fight despite displacement, imprisonment, and death. He resists the atomization of pain and insists on contextualizing individual suffering within the broader architecture of colonialism. This refusal to isolate or exceptionalize presents resistance as a historical continuum rather than isolated acts of dissent, positioning these stories within a tradition of collective struggle.
Media Power and the Politics of Legitimacy
El-Kurd interrogates the role of media as not merely a passive reflector of global events, but as an active participant in shaping which lives are considered worthy of mourning, which voices are granted legitimacy, and which struggles are deemed worthy of attention. He consistently critiques what he regards as the Western press’s double standards, particularly its portrayal of Palestinian resistance and suffering. By spotlighting how Palestinians must conform to rigid frameworks of respectability and innocence to even be heard, El-Kurd argues for the deep entanglement between media narratives and the maintenance of colonial power structures.
El-Kurd observes that massacres are interrupted by commercial breaks and legitimized by institutional language, asserting, “Judges legalize them. Correspondents kill us with passive voice” (14). The indictment here is twofold: First, of the judicial systems that ratify structural violence, and second, of the media’s role in sanitizing brutality. Through this line, El-Kurd demonstrates that language is never neutral—word choices like “clashes” or “crossfire” obscure culpability and transform state violence into unremarkable background noise. Such framing not only minimizes Palestinian suffering, he argues, but subtly repositions the oppressor as embattled and the oppressed as dangerous.
El-Kurd critiques how major media outlets frame Israeli violence as defensive and exceptional while treating Palestinian grief or anger as suspect. He documents how journalists edit, reframe, or entirely omit Palestinian voices unless they conform to expectations of sorrowful restraint. This creates a skewed archive of the present, one in which the facts are not falsified, but selectively curated to produce a narrative where the aggressor appears embattled and the colonized appear irrational. The result is a media landscape that perpetuates asymmetry by erasing the structural conditions that make resistance inevitable.
El-Kurd also criticizes the use of children in Western media to curate a certain kind of image of Palestinian suffering. He offers his own experiences as an interviewee in a 2013 documentary as an example, noting how he was pressured into presenting himself a certain way and repeating certain talking points to create an image of innocence and passivity. He argues that this child-centered representation would resonate more strongly with Western viewers than adult anger or defiance would, reinforcing certain narratives about when and under which conditions Palestinian suffering can be taken seriously in the media.
El-Kurd also denounces what he sees as the complicity of media professionals who choose silence over confrontation. El-Kurd recounts scenes of Muslim and Arab journalists attending institutional galas where press freedom is lauded even as Palestinian voices are actively suppressed. He refrains from personal attacks, instead highlighting the structural incentives that reward compliance and punish dissent. This dynamic reveals how power consolidates itself not only through censorship but through careerism, muting the very truths one entered the profession to tell.
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