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 wanted to say that I am reading along it but I don't have much to add. Except the writing really reminds me of Sarah Schulman. I searched to find if they have anything to do with each other and just found a facebook post she made of a short quote of his. And they have both written for Mondoweiss, which I don't know much about.
Technical question: Does anyone know what is the intended difference between end/footnotes, asterisks notes, swirls
§and the little crosses†, and‡? And any tricks to reading pdf/epub where you are in 3 different locations (main text, astersisk/cross notes, and endnotes) all together? They aren't just citations, there is meat in them.(I don't know if it is polite to talk about zionism in the anti zionism reading group and if not please forgive me I will refrain in the future and remove this.) Probably due to the specifics of how I came to know about this struggle, I have always found their snipers so especially repellent. That's just an emotional thing on my part, not a rational argument. For many years I have this recurrent thought: Among israelis, what is the per capita rate of people who have blown the knee off a child? Is there any other place on planet earth where you are more likely to have a friend or family member who has committed that specific crime? And more or less openly. Consider the social requirements of the situation.