Link to last week's reading group post, Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish. by Mohammed El-Kurd.
Summary of this book.
The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I've pasted the summary below.
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.
This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.
Comrades who can't afford to buy the book should definitely not go to annas-archive (dot) org and find a digital copy there, since that would be wrong and we are all law-abiding, copyright-respecting citizens.
This week we will be reading the Author's Note at the beginning of the book, as well as Chapter 1 (the sniper’s hands are clean of blood). Let me know if you think we should increase or decrease the pace. I was thinking 1-2 chapters a week depending on how long they are - they vary from around 10 to 20 pages.
i would be comfortable with the pace you’ve described or slightly increasing it.
i was especially struck by the section after the subheading “The thief holds a gavel,” in which El-Kurd says that those who engage in a politics of appealing to morality are proceeding from an analysis that power is immutable and built on stone instead of “an imposing yet tenuous entity resting on sand”. i think this is correct, and also an important thing to consider with the Palestine Action members currently engaged in a hunger strike in the UK. In the words of Kwame Ture, in order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. Palestinians can, through the power of idealism, sometimes change their role to ‘victim’. This still exists within and reproduces the Zionist and Western narrative, though. It reinforces on the one side the image of the victim, and on the other side does not challenge the image of the terrorist. As a Westerner, i think the official “victim” narrative essentially amounts to saying “something sad but completely unavoidable has happened, please give money or volunteer with a church or NGO”. It’s how people make ads for malaria nets and hurricane relief, and pretending that 2000 lb bombs and cement checkpoints are as natural as mosquitoes and monsoons completely washes the hands of the USA and “israel”. This also connects to the author’s consideration of how the constant discussion of Palestinian death is naturalized, both in the sense of it being commonplace and in the sense of it being compared to natural disaster or disease.
To engage with the airs and masks the West puts on (in narrative, in interviews, in the academy, in the discussion of so-called human rights) is to use “the tools made available by the institution, . . . in line with the institution’s logic.” El-Kurd also says that the above engagement with power is one tool or facet among many. It’s all but necessary to shop around your arguments and positions to try and make them sound appealing. It seems to me that he saying that the error is assigning supreme significance to the politics of moral appeal, and specifically the tactics associated with casting one’s self as a better victim. There was obviously a lot more in the chapter, but i don’t know if i have coherent thoughts about it.