Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (w/ Mohammed el-Kurd) | The Chris Hedges Report

Mohammed el-Kurd's new book sheds light on the ways in which Palestinians are forced by the panopticon of the West's gaze to censor and curate their true identities.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Any account of the decades-long occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian is immediately expected to be refined within a specific lens to appeal to the pathos of Western society. Well meaning activists, journalists and politicians may intend to share the stories of Palestinians, but too often end up curating them into a digestible format, one adjacent to the truth rather than one that embodies the whole of it. In other words, society forces Palestinians to justify and format their identities, experiences and traumas in order to be seen. Yet through this process, crucial pieces of their stories are sacrificed.

Mohammed el-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and poet who defines this concept in his new book, “Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal.” He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to share the ways in which Palestinians must bog down their identities, even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, to crack through the limited and racist perspectives of Western audiences.

“None of these anchors or pundits are interested in what my political analysis or my assessment of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are just keen to know whether I fit in in their world order, whether I submit to their worldview and they would operate accordingly. And if I don't condemn Hamas or if I don't fall into their kind of world order, then I am condemned and it's okay for me to die,” El-Kurd tells Hedges.

Any positive support for Palestinians is always conditional, El-Kurd explains. He says, “in order for these people to become sympathetic victims or order for them to acquire a spot in the newspaper… they need to be transformed from this political subject into this humanitarian subject. And in doing so, you obfuscate who the killer is, you obfuscate what the genesis of their suffering is, which is, again, in our case, Zionism.”

In writing about Palestine, El-Kurd admits that “you're talking to an audience that is suspicious of you.” That changes the way people and particularly Palestinians write and speak, implanting a self-censorship that is hard to overcome. “So you write and you draft your eulogies as if they are addressed to people who are eager to indict you,” he says.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos and Max Jones

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

The writer and poet Mohammed el-Kurd, who is the Palestine correspondent for The Nation magazine, grew up in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. His childhood was dominated by the intrusion of Israeli colonists who steadily seized larger and larger parts of his neighborhood, ruthlessly evicting Palestinian families from their homes. Harassment, detentions, arrests, beatings and shootings of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces was a nearly daily occurrence. Mohamed, who earned an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a BFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), also came to understand that the way the world perceives Palestinians, and the way Zionists and their supporters manipulate the narrative of Palestinian dispossession, puts Palestinians into an impossible position, one he refers to as the “perfect victim.”

Palestinians, dehumanized and condemned in western narratives, are repeatedly asked to prove their humanity, forced into the impossible role of perfect victims. “Dehumanization has situated us – ejected us – outside of the human condition,” he writes, “so much so that what is logically understood to be a man’s natural reaction to subjugation is an uncontained and incomprehensible, primal behavior if it comes from us. What makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.” Joining me to discuss his new book, “Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal,” is Mohammed El-Kurd.

I want to begin with Sheikh Jarrah, which you do in the book. You as a boy are actually part of a documentary about the dispossession of homes in Sheikh Jarrah, including your own home. But just before we talk about what's happening in Palestine, talk about your childhood and talk about Sheikh Jarrah.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Thank you Chris for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'll give the elevator pitch about the history of Sheikh Jarrah. Essentially what happens to us is what happened to many, other neighborhoods and is kind of a microcosm of the larger Palestinian condition of the Nakba, which is we were living in our homes before several organizations, most of which are tax-exempt, registered in the United States as charities, kind of collaborated with the Israeli government and the Israeli judiciary that is already asymmetrical to expel us out of our homes under the claim that our houses were theirs by divine decree.

And this kind of started in the early 70s and it was framed as this kind of legal battle or quote-unquote real estate dispute as Israeli Foreign Ministry of Affairs likes to put it and we have been in this kind of long tumultuous battle that is ultimately and very obviously a political one for decades and it's been all of my life but this is part of the larger Israeli architecture of displacement. You know, in Sheikh Jarrah, they can say this is a real estate dispute. Meanwhile, in a place like Silwan, that is a 10-minute drive from Sheikh Jarrah, they can say that Palestinian homes are built on top of an archaeological site, and thus they need to be taken or demolished or whatever, or like if you travel an hour, two hours away from Jerusalem to go to the South Hebron Hills, they will say that they're expelling people because they're living on quote unquote military zones or firing zones without disclosing that these zones have been explicitly designated as firing zones for the sole purpose of expelling the Palestinian. So you have this kind of big ecosystem of dispossession that takes on different forms and mutations all over the map.

Chris Hedges

And I just, before we go on, I want to note that since the genocide began in Gaza, 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in the West Bank. Tanks have been moved into the West Bank. Three refugee camps, including Jenin, have been virtually demolished. And the settlers—and we're going to talk about it—the colonists, the Jewish colonists who deeply disrupted your life, and I want to talk about what they actually did to your physical home, I mean, half of your home was occupied by these people, have been given assault weapons and we now have these kind of rogue militias or death squads terrorizing in a way that those of us who covered the West Bank have I don't think ever seen before.

Mohammed El-Kurd

You definitely see the rifles. You know, they talked about handing out 100,000, 200,000 machine guns to the Israelis, and you definitely see them when you're driving around the West Bank. But harassment at the hands of settlers and at the hands of military-backed settlers or militant settlers is not new. It's something that I grew up with. Like you said, our house, it's absurd to say, but our house, half of it was taken upon, half of it was taken in the year 2000, and various groups of young Jewish settlers, young men, would move in and out of the house.

Chris Hedges

And from Brooklyn, I believe you wrote.

Mohammed El-Kurd

The guy currently in our house is from Long Island. We've had people from Brooklyn. We've had quite the international audience, but there's large Jewish New York residents in these kinds of settler groups. And it's because they're also able to flee. The guy in our house, [inaudible], has fled fraud charges in the United States and has found himself like a safe haven in our home, in our front year. But over the years, we've been subjected to all kinds of physical, verbal, and psychological abuse by the settlers.

And they've always been not only coddled by the Israeli military, but kind of backed and in partnership. It's always been done in partnership with the Israeli military and in partnership with the police. And you almost hesitate to share these stories because they feel almost minuscule when you compare them to the kind of settler harassment people in Jenin are experiencing or people in the Gaza Strip. When we're talking about bombs, you know, the spits are being beaten by a rifle, but it almost seems like trivial, even though of course it's not.

Chris Hedges

It's also important to note that once these settlers or colonists seize Palestinian property, it inflames the security situation because I've spent a lot of time in al-Khalīl or Hebron where you have these Jewish colonists living right in the center of this Palestinian city, but they require heavy security presence. When Israel talks about the need for security, there's a kind of counterintuitive understanding, or should be, that it's the very fact of settlement or seizure of land itself that exacerbates the security crisis.

Mohammed El-Kurd

It's also, there's a need not only for this kind of a big security apparatus, tight security apparatus, but there's also a need for it to be a spectacle of security, like a very, very visible. And this is why we see the Israelis broadcast images of them broadcasting, sorry, bombarding and leveling residential blocks. And this is why in Sheikh Jarrah, for example, we've had multiple Israeli politicians that are very popular set up makeshift offices in literally our front yards, in our streets, because they are communicating to the Israeli public a certain sovereignty and a certain, you know, stronghold over our lives. And in turn, the Israeli public feels safer by the very subjugation or by the very sight of the subjugation of Palestinians.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about what this did to you as a child. I think you were about 10 and you were the subject of a documentary. But growing up in this environment, and then I want to get into, which I found fascinating, how you were kind of lecturing or schooling your own family in the vocabulary that they had to use in order to, when they spoke to the outside world, to activists or journalists. But let's just talk about what it was like as a child, I mean, obviously extremely stressful, but you know, the scars that it left behind.

Mohammed El-Kurd

I think I'm yet to understand the kind of psychological toll of the role that many, many, many Palestinian children are shoved into or like forced into by virtue of the calamity they have survived by virtue of losing their homes to Israeli settlers, by virtue of being direct victims of Zionism and they automatically become spokespeople because we have so little political representation in the world. And because, you know, the Western audiences and American audience, in my opinion, are so racist to a troubling degree that they would rather hear from a child than from an adult.

And so you burden your children with this kind of task of teaching humans about humanity, of teaching the world about Palestine and the Palestinian plight. And then, you know, because we become de facto trained spokespeople and we learn this kind of language of human rights and human rights advocacy and UN resolutions and Geneva Convention and so on and so forth, you become trained in this language of NGOs, then you start kind of exporting it to your family members.

And it's comical and it's heartbreaking that someone like me at 11 years old would tell my 80 year old grandmother, no actually don't call the Jewish settlers in your house Jewish because that will offend Americans or that will offend Europeans. Call them Zionists or just call them settlers. Don't mention the religion that they so proudly wear on their sleeve that they claim to do everything in the name of. It's a cognitive dissonance and it's a humiliating also, it's a very humiliating ritual to demand this of your family members.

Thank God, this is no longer the case for me, but unfortunately, this demand for Palestinians to be perfect victims, to be so sanitized and polished and to water down their language is very much still alive and well. And actually you think that with Israel's aggression, breaking every threshold, crossing every threshold, you'd think that the ceiling for the Palestinian and the ceiling for Palestinian speech would be raised, but it's quite the opposite. The more they kill of us, the more we are expected to be polite in our suffering. And this is a paradigm, I think, that we must reject entirely.

Chris Hedges

You saw it with the prisoner releases. So you had Israelis released after 16 months. Hamas was condemned for turning it into a show, a propaganda show. While you had Palestinians who were being released after decades, clear signs of torture, malnutrition, people who had been detained or imprisoned having acid thrown on them. The Israelis would put t-shirts on them when they came out of prison saying we will not forget. And yet the focus, certainly within the international media, was on the Israelis being released to the International Committee for the Red Cross out of Gaza and the Palestinians were at best an afterthought.

Mohammed El-Kurd

I couldn't have put it better myself. It's really a refusal to see Palestinians as human beings. And also there is this implicit understanding in the international community that the brutality enacted against Palestinians systemically is business as usual. It's to be expected, and it's to be tolerated, and it's to be ignored. And of course, this doesn't apply to the Israeli hostage because I don't think people really have a principled stance against brutality. I think they just care about the victims of brutality. Rather, they're not against brutality. They're just against... They're okay with Palestinians being the victims of it.

Chris Hedges

This concept of the perfect victim, which I want you to spell out a little bit when you use that term, what you mean, but it really isn't, well certainly I got from reading your book, was imposed on you at a very young age by, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, well-meaning activists, well-meaning NGOs, but they demanded that the Palestinian victims conform to a very rigid stereotype, which of course means probably the majority of Palestinian victims who can't be, as you call them, “perfect victims” are almost excluded and perhaps are excluded from their concern. Talk about that.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah, there is this ethnocentric standard that is set by the West and it's defined by Western standards for what civility is. And, you know, you demand from the Palestinian to adhere to that standard. You know, the affect you employ and perform, the kind of characteristics and traits you showcase, but also your beliefs and your opinions and your certain takes on certain things all take the center stage and the occupation, the colonialism, Zionism all become an afterthought. They're secondary, they're marginal, they're secondary to how you carry yourself in the world and this may be well intentioned but most importantly it diverts the attention from the colonialism, from the focal point, from the material reality and it puts it on the victim, it demands, it says to the victim essentially, unless you portray these characteristics, unless you have these beliefs, unless you condemn who we ask you to condemn, then you deserve to die.

Then you are not worthy of being grieved. Then you do not have the right to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You don't have the right to dignity or liberation or so on. And it's a very messed up framework. And once you notice it, you see it everywhere. And of course everybody should be good, a good person, everybody should have a good character, whatever, why does it matter what's in the Palestinian's heart when we're talking about bombs, when we're talking about siege? Let's assume that Palestinians are bad people in their hearts, that they hold bad beliefs. That still does not justify bombing them, that still does not justify genocide. You know, it's almost like a very basic thesis, yet people fall into these traps over and over and over again despite the obviousness of this conclusion.

Chris Hedges

I think to a large extent, this is my own feeling having spent seven years covering the conflict in Israel, Palestine, five years in Central America, and watching these activists and NGOs come, they, you know, for lack of a better word, dine out on their own humanitarianism. But crucial to that is to paint these perfect victims, because they're not going to dine out on somebody who was a fighter, you know, a Shahid [a martyr in Islam] who was killed fighting for Hamas or Islamic Jihad or anyone else. That's not part of your book, but I want to ask you about it. I think to a certain extent, it is about the self-presentation of the activists themselves as to why they demand this impossible role for not just the Palestinians, but any of the oppressed that they're working with.

Mohammed El-Kurd

I mean, there is the question of funding, it’s fundamental to this and the question of conditional aid is important to this. And it's also the question of the long-term goal of these organizations and these NGOs. Some people, some institutions may have an issue with the occupation, the military occupation, or may take issue with the impolite and vulgar nature of it, but they don't seem to have an issue with Zionism and they don't view Zionism as this existential, racist, expansionist, ideologically driven movement of Jewish supremacy. That's the issue. It's situating the occupation as the cause of all of this. Meanwhile, the occupation is a symptom of Zionism and Zionism should be tackled at the root.

I think ultimately also beyond just like organizational interests and funding and so on, there's also just an issue of racism. I think many of the people who are our allies and who are well-meaning are just racist inadvertently, like have these racial, a racial lens with which they view the world, where the Palestinian and people from the region will always be less than, will always be savages and must always prove they’re guilty and must always prove their innocence. And this is why they could never touch a Palestinian fighter. They will never defend a Palestinian fighter. They'll never go to war for a slain martyr if there's an allegation of him having participated in the fighting.

Chris Hedges

It's beautifully written, by the way, your book. And I just want to read a little paragraph because I want to talk about the way Palestinians are portrayed in the press. You write,

“Our massacres are only interrupted by commercial breaks. Judges legalize them. Correspondents kill us with passive voice. If we are lucky, diplomats say that our death concerns them, but they never mention the culprit, let alone condemn the culprit. Politicians inert, inept, or complicit fund our demise, then feign sympathy, if any. Academics stand idle, that is, until the dust settles. Then they will write books about what should have been done, coin terms and such, lecture in the past tense. And the vultures, even in our midst, will tour museums, glorifying, romanticizing what they once condemned, what they did not deign to defend, our resistance, mystifying it, depoliticizing it, commercializing it. The vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh.”

Yeah, I mean, just expound a little bit on that. And you've got it all in that paragraph. You didn't hold back.

Mohammed El-Kurd

There's lots of talk about tenses and the passive voice and tenses in that paragraph and essentially I think this is the kind of the essential point of what I'm trying to say is that there will be a point. There will be a point in the future, where there will be museums that honor the Palestinian condition, honor the Palestinian plight for justice. There will be merchandise with Hamas fighters.

Chris Hedges

Yeah. But it's just what we do to Native Americans.

Mohammed El-Kurd

100% and what we've done, what we do to the Black Panthers. But the moral obligation is to engage these struggles as they occur in the present tense. And most people do not have the courage, the principles, or the moral clarity to do so. And what is most upsetting about this is not only, you know, the recognition that it seems that justice will only be served to us in our graves, but that people who have benefited and profited off of their silence now will also benefit and profit from finally breaking their silence in the future.

Chris Hedges

Well, as soon as it doesn't have a moral cost.

Mohammed El-Kurd

And that to me is horrific. Yeah. And that to me is horrific to benefit, win, to win in both situations, to have no, to pay nothing, you know, to pay nothing for your silence, to pay nothing for your inertia is a horrific thing to consider. And people love to say that, you know, these people will have a hard time sleeping at night or these people will not know what to their grandchildren. I don't think they care. You know?

Chris Hedges

Well, they'll rewrite their own history. It's like post-war Germany after World War II. It was pretty hard to find anybody who supposedly had been a Nazi.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah.

Chris Hedges

I'm going to read another paragraph. I just love your book too much. Sorry.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Thank you. That is awesome. Thank you.

Chris Hedges

“And the snipers are everywhere. The underhanded journalists, the spineless bureaucrats, the inconspicuous henchmen, the philanthropists who mine our tragedies for gold, the television anchors who obfuscate those tragedies, the missionaries who find their salvation in our demise, the devil's advocates, the distractors, those who litter our roads with red herrings, the unscrupulous political advisors, the activists who act as puppet masters, the elite captures, the elites in our ranks who demand of us a certain dance, who imprison us in the panopticon of their gaze, the self-appointed intellectuals, the clergy who whisper when they should scream, the very well-fed weapons manufacturers, and the university administrators who feed them and the academics indulging in arrogance and willful misinformation who mutilate Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin, deny human nature and contest even the laws of physics in order to pathologize our resistance. In this reality, the sniper's hands are clean of blood, but his body count is insurmountable.”

You're talking about all these people who mouth all the right words, they pray for peace. Let's go there. But always in the abstract.

Mohammed El-Kurd

There is, you know, there's a kind of maybe naive, maybe insidious framing that all of this atrocity is a one-man show, which is like, this is all the doing of Benjamin Netanyahu. And that if Benjamin Netanyahu were to cease to exist today, all of this injustice would end. And I think that's by design, it's not naive, think it's by design meant to absolve the Israeli regime and Zionism as the mother ideology of all of this, to absolve it of all of the responsibility, the responsibility for this genocide. And I think in the same vein and in relation to this, you also see this, you also see this kind of, again, maybe naive, but in my opinion insidious pretense that these journalists who become state secretaries who become stenographers for the Israeli government and for the US government whose articles are basically paraphrased IDF press releases, there's this pretense that they're just doing their jobs, that they are not complicit in the killing, that they have no blood on their hands.

It's the same thing we see with the university administrators who are succumbing to Zionist pressure and punishing… And you know, I mentioned many, many, examples in that little rant on the page, but essentially I think I hope I live to see the day that these people also are taken to justice because it's easier to find the sniper with the gun and point at him and like the person doing the act of active killing, you know? But the people who are doing it from behind the scenes, who are financing it, who are coddling it, who are enabling it, who are making cover for it, who are carrying the water for our murderers, I refuse to live in a world where they get off scot-free.

Chris Hedges

Well, I worked for the New York Times. They are doing their job rewriting press releases from the IDF and large corporations. People have very lucrative careers doing that. That's why they're still there and I'm not. I want to talk about the press. You write,

“When television producers invite us to participate in their programs, they do not seek to interview us for our experiences or analysis or the context we can provide. They do not offer us their condolences the way they do our Israeli counterparts. They invite us to interrogate us.”

You've done a lot of press. Explain to us that experience.

Mohammed El-Kurd

I had a back and forth in my mind when I wrote that paragraph of whether I should make it a little less abstract, but what happened was I think I was on ABC News and I was interviewed on ABC News and nothing was said to me. And then as soon as the Israeli person came on after me, the TV anchor literally offered their condolences and that wasn't offered to me. Now I don't want to be pampered when I go on these television shows, but I thought it was an interesting double standard in the way that it is and how flagrant it is. But ultimately what I wanted to highlight is, you know, there's a lot of talk, like it almost became a cliche to talk about, like do you condemn Hamas? Do you not condemn Hamas?

But of course, we can talk about that question and the insidious nature of it and so on. But they're not really asking us about our political opinions. None of these anchors or pundits are interested in what my political analysis or my, you know, assessment of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are just keen to know whether I fit in in their world order, whether I submit to their worldview and they would operate accordingly. And if I don't condemn Hamas or if I don't fall into their kind of world order, then I am condemned and it's okay for me to die. And I say this, ealaa fikra [by the way], and it sounds a bit like an exaggeration, but I'll give you two really quick examples.

Christiane Amanpour interviewed an Israeli author and she was like, Palestinians deserve human rights? And then she quickly corrected herself as she said and I'm not talking about Hamas and in that instance she rendered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights conditional and said that people who are Hamas or people who support Hamas are not eligible for human rights. And then in another instance, I think also in CNN we saw this Muslim Journalist get into a scuffle with a Jewish journalist, a Jewish commentator who said I hope your beeper goes off. And everybody emerged and they like frowned their eyebrows and they were like, this is racist. How dare you say this? And then when the Jewish commentator was like, I thought you were talking about Hamas. It's as though that's okay. As though like if the person had political views that supported Hamas, that means that they should be mutilated with their mobile device. And instead of calling him out on that racism or that like distorted logic, the Muslim commentator was like, no, no, I'm not talking about Hamas. I'm talking about the Palestinians. I'm a critic of Hamas. And so there's this warped logic that says you must adhere and you must submit to certain political ideologies, otherwise you are condemned to die.

Chris Hedges

Well, it's also as if—so my friends in Gaza who are not particularly friends with Hamas, but their anger with Hamas is that when Hamas took control, they took their guns away. Most Palestinian homes had an AK-47 sitting in the closet. And they said, essentially, when the genocide began, we didn't have the capacity to fight back. But it's the whole idea, and it's always the oppressor that determines the configurations of resistance. So the Great March of Return, this almost exclusively nonviolent movement where people marched up to the fence, Israeli snipers picked them off in a shooting gallery. Medics, disabled people, journalists, and a lot of it was to cripple them for life. You know, we lionize, I don't, but we lionize the resistance in Ukraine, but that doesn't translate at all towards Palestinians. I mean, I was in Sarajevo during the war. Nobody talked about pacifism when we were surrounded by the Serbs, but there's a whole, you talk about this in the book, but there's a whole different criteria for Palestinians.

Mohammed El-Kurd

It's all with Ukraine. It's almost cartoonish. There were instances where I thought I was kind of hallucinating. I remember there was a New York Post headline that hailed a Ukrainian suicide bomber as heroic. OK, the New York Post is a rag. There was a New York Times interview with with a Ukrainian psychologist who said that Ukrainians should hate all Russians. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. And that hate is this powerful tool. And you think that you'd stop there, but it gets cartoonish. You go on Sky News and they're hosting essentially what can be viewed as Molotov making cocktails. And on The Guardian, they're like celebrating the Ukrainian civilians who are participating in the fighting. And in The New York Times, they're glorifying and more emphasizing and kind of celebrating Ukrainian police and Ukrainian military wearing civilian garb, blending in and out of the population, fighting from inside. You know, when Amnesty accused the Ukrainian military and Ukraine of, you know, endangering civilians by operating from inside residential buildings and hospitals, the New York Times made excuses for them. The same company, I don't want to call it a paper, the same company that vilified Palestinians for the same, under the same guise for like… and what they called, you know, creative and in Ukraine, they called it hiding behind human shields in Palestine. It's one, racist, and it's also because I think the war on Gaza, the genocide on Gaza serves the strategic interests of American empire in the same way that, you know, fighting Russia serves the strategic interests of American empire.

Chris Hedges

You make this point in the book, you say,

“The consequences of dehumanization, the staggering and the subtle, reveal themselves not only in how we are perceived, but in how we perceive ourselves.”

What do you mean by that?

Mohammed El-kurd

Well, it's in, I don't know, I'm not a scientist of, I don't wanna go into like science, but I do think, and there's probably science to back this up, that how we speak to each other and what we say and what we consume really affects our understanding of ourself, our self-formulating our identities and our characters. And so when you are born and raised in a language of self-reproach, in a language of you don't start your sentence without a disclaimer, you don't define yourself by who you are, but you define yourself by saying, I am not who you think I am, I think that does something to your psyche. I think that does something to how you view yourself and it creates, if I'm not wrong, at least I would guess it creates an inferiority complex where you're constantly self-censoring.

Where the settler does not only live on your street and holds the rifle on your street, but the settler lives on your mind and your gaze becomes intertwined with the settler gaze and so you carry yourself in a way that the settler would approve of or the racist commentator or the university professor who doesn't see you as a human. All of these, you internalize them. You internalize their muzzles. And that's what I mean by this. And I think it's a very, very important thing to be wary of, to reject these premises that they've laid out for us.

Chris Hedges

Well, it's very much what Blacks in America went through, a very similar kind of psychological experience. You talk about the ceaseless infantilization of the dehumanized subject. For the spectators to sympathize with quote unquote the other, they must first sanitize and subdue him, sever him from his origin story, rendering him quote, utterly displaced and effaced. What does that mean, especially severing from the origin story?

Mohammed El-Kurd

Well, the people, the wailing mothers that we see on the news or the children who are kind of disgruntled and crying on the newspapers, they do not exist in a vacuum. They are the products of colonialism. And the origin story here is being the Nakba, is being the creation of the Zionist state. And in order for these people to become sympathetic victims or in order for them to acquire a spot in the newspaper or become… they need to be transformed from this political subject into this humanitarian subject. And in doing so, you obfuscate who the killer is, you obfuscate what the genesis of their suffering is, which is, again, in our case, Zionism, in the case of, you know, Black Americans is racism in the case of white supremacy and so on and we are so desperate for the recognition that sometimes we give way to these requirements but I think we misunderstand how much in the long term they hurt us more than they help us.

Chris Hedges

You raise that, to that point, you write,

“Israeli occupation forces killed 15 year old Adam Ayyad in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. The question was did he really throw a Molotov cocktail at the soldiers. Aren't the Israelis known for fabricating such stories? Instead the question should have been why are Israeli troops in Bethlehem in the first place? Why was Adam Ayyad born in a refugee camp? Why is Molotov in the headline of a story about soldiers killing a boy? So what if he throws a Molotov cocktail? Who wouldn't?”

Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about Refaat Alareer. He was killed in a targeted assassination in December, the great poet and professor, in 2023. And you wrote that you could not compose a tribute for Refaat in the Anglophone news site where you worked as a culture editor. Why?

Mohammed El-Kurd

Because it felt, again, because of this kind of psychological, you know, war that you wage against yourself or the kind of impulses that you have, you can't just mourn the Palestinian man. You have to kind of, again, sever him from his context. You have to, it's not enough that he was killed by the Israelis. I have to also explain why he shouldn't have been killed by the Israelis and why he was a good person in general. And not only this, but you can't just mourn. You have to also be a historian and you have to know the facts and you have to be a political analyst and you have to be a journalist. You can't just mourn simply because you don't in English, I think… And now increasingly with normalization efforts in the Arab world, I think in general, when you're talking about Palestine, you're not talking to, the assumption is that you're not, you're talking to somebody who is suspicious of you.

You're talking to an audience that is suspicious of you. And so you write and you draft your eulogies as if they are addressed to people who are eager to indict you. And this was the impulse that I tried most to reject in the writing of this book. I really tried as much as I could to pretend as though I was writing for a friend, because to have this kind of gaze looking over my shoulder throughout the writing process is a massive hindrance in my opinion.

And it also, just on a technical level, I think readers can see it. I think readers can see when you're... To give an example, one thing I've always had a hard time understanding is that when a Palestinian is killed, let's say at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier, somehow we have to mention that it was their birthday or that they were on their way to a wedding or that they had just given their mothers a rose in that morning. And of course, I think honoring martyrs and honoring victims by giving them the full scope of their story and remembering them in the minor details is important. But I think that's not why it's done. I think because there's again an implicit belief that killing at the hands of Israelis is business as it is to be expected and so we must editorialize it to make it compelling, to make it more than just quaternion news So of course he was killed but it was his birthday and that makes it worse and that impulse is something that we should rage against because killing somebody at a checkpoint is an atrocity that is you know enough, it's enough of an atrocity on its on its own.

Chris Hedges

Well, you raised this issue about the Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, the fact that she was both Palestinian and had an American passport.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah, there is multiple kind of this toolbox that we... I don't want to say that these are bad. I understand why when we highlight that Shireen Abu Akleh is an American citizen, I understand that it's because we know that the US government has a responsibility to go to the ends of the Earth to defend American citizens. But what I'm trying to say with this book is that there's this toolbox that we go into and we pull these tools, be it like over-emphasized hyper focusing on foreign citizenship or like, you know, really highlighting someone's profession that's noble, like be it a medic or a journalist, or kind of talking about if this person was a disabled person who couldn't have hurt a fly.

We think that they're gonna help, but I think in the long term what they do is that they really lower the ceiling. They kind of create this exceptionalism or like this requirement for exceptionalism where death at the hands of the Zionist regime is a day-to-day thing and it's condemned only when you attain this exceptional status or when you have been killed with this exceptional, and I'm guilty of this myself. Like you know, why is it, you know, we saw tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of Palestinians being killed by airstrikes every single day in the Gaza Strip. But somehow when they were burnt alive in their refugee camps, that was to me like a breaking point. And you must, we should wonder like, why do we normalize certain deaths and we exceptionalize others when killing is killing?

Chris Hedges

That exceptionalism is an important point in your book because it's exclusionary and it's exclusionary to most Palestinians. Palestinians are like any other, all of us are complex, good and bad. And you write, you ask that question, but what about the others? The others who suffocate under this shrinking definition of humanity. Those who are not privileged enough to go to a five-star university or be born into a line of feudal lords. What about those without halos? The angry men who wander the streets with mouths full of spit and venom? The children whose shoulders are burdened by the straps of rifles? The women who choose an explosive path? What about the poor? What about those who are cruel with the occupier and cruel with their kin? The not-so-gentle fathers? The reckless in our midst? Those who would furrow the eyebrows of Europeans? The sister who found her rage in the kitchen drawer and the sister learning the anatomy of the gun, do they not deserve life according to whose law? I think what you're doing quite eloquently is, and I think you're right, that that whole concept of perfect victim is, mean, Refaat Alareer was obviously this remarkable, exceptional figure. So we get to mourn him, but not anyone else.

Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah. Yeah, it's the word you use is apt. It's exclusionary. I see it, maybe it's unintentional, but I see it as this inadvertent betrayal of the Palestinian people because some of us are obnoxious people, and that doesn't mean that we don't mean, that they deserve to be bombed. You know what I mean? And it's also like what is a good person and who gets to define a good person? It's a sad situation where we're looking at, we're looking at amputated people and people who have been blown to bits and we're categorizing them into grievable and ungrievable.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about going forward. It's clear there's no hand to stop Israel. I don't expect the ceasefire, maybe the intensity won't be as bad, but there have already been attacks in northern Gaza by Israel. I don't think the ceasefire is probably sustainable. The rampages, displacement in the West Bank has probably reached a level we've not seen perhaps since the seizure of the West Bank itself. Where are we going and what does it mean for the Palestinian people and for those of us who want to resist, what do we need to do?

Mohammed El-Kurd

The optimistic outlook and just like, you know, being students of history would tell us that the way they're going is not sustainable. Of course, it's, you know, killing and genocide is a lucrative business for them and you know, our subjugation is their sense of security, but I don't think it's sustainable. I think there will come a point that they self-employed, they may be able to, if they are course-correct, they may be able to retain the original status quo of the military occupation, but at the rate that they're going in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and elsewhere on the map, I don't think the Israeli project is sustainable and it's not going to continue.

And the question is how many of us are going to go with it and how many it's going to take as it goes away. It's hard again to talk about the future, what is demanded, but I think the one thing that is so clear to me and should be clearer than ever that there is only one correct moral position, which is anti-Zionism. None of this will change as long as we continue to coddle Zionism or treat it as a euphemism that can contain multiple duplicate meanings or can mean certain things or can be redeemed or can be rehabilitated. We must absolutely root out Zionism from the world, from our institutions, from our families in order for us, you know, to save as many people as possible.

Now, the question is how and the questions are where are these contradictions going to exist and where are they going to emerge from that, you know, coerce people or inspire people or, you know, push people to finally reject Zionism. But it cannot be like the sacrifices made by the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, should implore us to not waver on this point. And obviously there is the question of armed resistance and the question of how viable is armed resistance and can you go up against Israel with the kind of makeshift militias? And there's also the view that actually if it weren't for armed resistance the ceasefire wouldn't have been reached and there's a view that Trump is… Anyway there's a myriad of things to be explored in terms of where to go from here and there's also the stuff about culture and narrative, you know this year I don't want to get the numbers wrong, but I think the Israeli government quadrupled its propaganda budget, it's in the hundreds of millions. So there's obviously an angle of narrative wars here. But ultimately, the essential thing should be a total flat out rejection and abolition of Zionism. Because no one would try to rehabilitate Nazism, no one would try to rehabilitate white supremacy. So there shouldn't be an exception made for Zionism.

Chris Hedges

Great, thank you. That was Mohammed El-Kurd on his book, “Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal,” which is as lyrically and beautifully written as it is brilliant. I would like to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges] who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

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Refaat Alareer

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