‘On Trial for Crimes Committed Against You’: Mohammed El-Kurd on Palestine and ‘Perfect Victims’

“Even if the worst you say about me is true, you have no right to steal my land, oppress me, erase me,” the writer told Jezebel of life under Israeli apartheid.

By Kylie Cheung  |  February 12, 2025 | 10:10am
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‘On Trial for Crimes Committed Against You’: Mohammed El-Kurd on Palestine and ‘Perfect Victims’

Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd remembers when, as a child, journalists would visit his home in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, as settlers from Israel and the U.S. increasingly displaced families like his. In his new book, Perfect Victims, he writes about the journalists’ interest in documenting his community’s suffering, sometimes interviewing children like him. But they weren’t interested in Palestinians’ political analysis about their own oppression—the “conflict,” as the decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land is often gently labeled, was supposedly too complicated for the people experiencing it to understand. And, as El-Kurd writes, the journalists weren’t interested in the voices of adults, who might hold anger toward settlers who looted their homes and jailed their children without charge; the adults’ anger made them imperfect victims.

Telling Palestinian stories to a mainstream audience, El-Kurd has observed, requires the impossible performance of perpetual innocence and respectability. Perpetrators are never named, passive voice is deployed at all times, and “perfect victims” are required. But those don’t exist, he puts forth in Perfect Victims, his second book after the 2021 poetry collection Rifqa, which was named in honor of his grandmother who survived the Nakba. Written in intricate, scathing prose reminiscent of his poetry, Perfect Victims excoriates the absurd politics of how colonized people must appeal to their colonizers. Even those who are sympathetic to Palestine sometimes rely on dehumanizing talking points about Palestinians, in a world that treats their desire for freedom as more dangerous than bombs and genocide. And, as its name suggests, Perfect Victims is an exploration of how victimhood is both assigned and erased—similar to how feminist thinkers have exposed the paradoxical ways rape victims must audition for credibility and justice under patriarchy.

Early in the book, El-Kurd addresses the role of gender in conversations about Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023. We often see outsized focus on the suffering of women and children in media coverage, but El-Kurd stressed that gender doesn’t shield anyone from harm: “Bombs don’t discriminate, they don’t spare women and children—it’s a wholesale targeting,” he told Jezebel. And under occupation, day-to-day oppression doesn’t differentiate either. There is no childhood for Palestinian children, when girls are subjected to sexual assault by Israeli soldiers performing body searches at checkpoints, or boys are detained and jailed without charge. The global community, El-Kurd writes in Perfect Victims, is indiscriminately desensitized to Palestinian suffering:

We die in fleeting headlines, in between breaths. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather: Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past 10 days. Much like the weather, only God is responsible—not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes. … Correspondents kill us with passive voice. If we’re lucky, diplomats say our death concerns them, but never mention let alone condemn the culprit.

In Perfect Victims, El-Kurd observes how victims must be “sanitized and subdued” before anyone can sympathize with them: “One could say the same about sexual assault victims: we must notify the listener that the victim was sober and dressed appropriately,” he writes. Sexual violence researchers have drawn comparisons between political discourse about Israel and Palestine and the tactics wielded by abusers. First, there’s DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-offender), which we see when strikes on Gaza schools are justified by Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Then, there’s “orchestrated complexity,” the manufacturing of nuance that always privileges the abuser; this is often achieved by starting in the middle of an abusive situation, when a victim first resists or responds to abuse. Most news reports about Gaza start with October 7 and nothing before it. 

“We never tackle things at the root—we’re angry at symptoms but not the disease, which is colonialism and occupation.”

Palestinians are condemned for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers or, in Edward Said’s case, throwing a pebble at an Israeli military watchtower in 2001, El-Kurd writes. But the voices issuing condemnation never ask why soldiers are there at all. In Perfect Victims, El-Kurd describes this as the phenomenon of starting with “secondly”—that is, only discussing what comes after the initial occupation of a land and aggression against its people. He writes, “Before I threw the rock, they stole my land. Before I picked up the rifle, they shot my loved ones. Before I made the makeshift rocket, they put me in a cage.”

“We never tackle things at the root—we’re angry at symptoms but not the disease, which is colonialism and occupation,” El-Kurd said. “The discourse is so regressive that people refuse to see resistance as a reaction to something, a survival mechanism.”

Palestinians’ subjugation under imperialism holds parallels to victims of police brutality too, El-Kurd told Jezebel. In 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed four Palestinian boys playing soccer on the beach, and El-Kurd watched as Israeli spokespeople went on TV to question why they were on the beach and if they were members of Hamas. “You’re a person who a crime was committed against, but somehow you are on trial, in cross examination about crimes committed against you,” El-Kurd said. “To shift blame from perpetrator to victim, this has all the parallels to sexual assault, police brutality victims.”

El-Kurd raised that Israeli statehood itself is often justified by the fundamentally racist premise that Palestinians are born wishing to kill all Jewish people. Israeli soldiers pretend to find copies of Mein Kampf in Palestinian children’s nurseries, warranting airstrikes on entire residential buildings. “The hatred we supposedly possess, lurking within our hearts, receives more concern than the nuclear arsenal of our colonizers,” he writes. The first pages of Perfect Victim state, in big, sprawling letters, “even if.” This, he told Jezebel, is the thesis of the book: Even if every worst circumstance Israel has invented about Palestinians is true, that doesn’t justify occupation, apartheid, and genocide. 

It’s a “hard task,” El-Kurd told Jezebel, “to get people to see violence as a more complex, structural mechanism.” Most people are conditioned to see “violence orchestrated by Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or [former Secretary of State Antony] Blinken as something other than violence—as management, bureaucracy, a necessary fact of life.” Many only see informal militias or middle-aged Palestinian men “in tracksuits and flip-flops” throwing rocks as violent. 

“I argue those people in suits, who speak with such sophisticated, polite language, are the biggest threats to humanity,” he said. “Hunger is violence, not feeling safe [under occupation] is violence—it’s not just a punch and slap, but policies, legislation.”

Early in Perfect Victims, he presents a metaphor comparing U.S. politicians and one-sided western media coverage to snipers: 

The snipers are everywhere: the underhanded journalists, spineless bureaucrats, television anchors who obfuscate tragedies. The sniper’s hands are clean of blood, but his body count is insurmountable.

Perfect Victims introduces numerous, similar frameworks that challenge even those supportive of the Palestinian cause to reflect on their approaches to advocacy. For example, El-Kurd interrogates why we often see Israeli sources, such as those who have “miraculous epiphanies” about Israel’s cruelty, or refuse to join the army, prioritized and platformed over Palestinian voices in mainstream media coverage. He further critiques the “fetishization” of Israeli-Palestinian collaborations on storytelling projects, while stories exclusively told by Palestinians are sidelined. “It comes off to me as satisfying this selfish urge in audiences to see reconciliation between slayer and slain on screen, because it’s not taking place in real life,” he said. El-Kurd joked that this “reminds me of how the feminist literature I was first taught in school was written by men.” 

“I don’t know what to do with brutality except to laugh at it,” El-Kurd writes toward the end of Perfect Victims. The book accounts horrific examples of brutality, anecdotes of Israeli soldiers branding Palestinians’ faces with the Star of David, Palestinian journalists and children killed by Israeli soldiers with impunity, followed by more Palestinians killed at their funerals. But Perfect Victims is also interspersed with sharp humor, as El-Kurd responds to bad faith, absurd questions, like whether Palestinians would kill all Israelis if they gained self-determination, by refusing to take these questions seriously. “It’s a ridiculous thing, Palestinians being bombed, burned alive, and you’re asking me what’s going to happen in the future, hypothetically—that’s ridiculous. We should treat it as such,” El-Kurd said. “We’re asked these hypotheticals as if they’re sacred questions we should all bow before. Humor exposes what these questions really are.”

Perfect Victims is punctuated with tonal shifts, a seamless blend of reporting, analysis, poetry, humor. Since publishing Rifqa in 2021, El-Kurd joined The Nation as its first Palestine correspondent. He told Jezebel that he initially feared that journalistic writing, with its more rigid, technical demands, would “hinder me as a creative writer.” But with Perfect Victims, he shows up as his full self: the journalist, the poet, the academic, the humorist. “Writing was this constant wrestling between creative impulse, journalistic impulse, two voices battling at all times,” he explained.

The battle between these impulses is one of many riveting tensions that unfold across the book’s pages—tensions that could read as contradictions, but which El-Kurd skillfully writes as clarifying interrogations of the human condition. Perfect Victims is an exploration of how powerless and powerful we all are, of the simultaneous uselessness and inescapability of the guilt we feel living in a world ravaged by colonialism. The book is a meditation on the coexistence of Palestinian suffering and dignity: “We [Palestinians] need to live with dignity no matter what,” he said. “That means refusal to stand trial, be cross examined—even if the worst you say about me is true, you have no right to steal my land, oppress me, erase me.”

 
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