Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
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“Here's a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare. It will clear the fog.”
—Arundhati Roy
“Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice is unequivocal in a hallucinatory media sphere that portrays the colonized and the occupied as either passive victims of an unnamable crime or the very perpetrators of unspeakable crimes they themselves experience. Perfect Victims is essay and memoir at its best. It portrays children forged by occupation and war and a humble people conditioned by the necessity of resistance for survival in the face of a twenty-first century genocide. Humility, irony, and irreverence are the languages of self-defense, and words are El-Kurd’s weapons.”
—Nick Estes, author, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance