There are broadly two ways in which Palestinians are seen. They are primarily and popularly seen as an exemplar case of Arab Barbarianism. This view, informed by orientalist Islamophobic tropes, sees their every action, from fighting with guns to throwing a stone, from writing a poem to mourning a dead loved one, as murderous, anti-democratic and verging on genocidal. Then there is the other vision of the Palestinian— tortured but silent, dispossessed but gentle, standing politely on top of rubble, telling the story of a house that was.
The first vision of a Palestinian has been questioned, amply but not enough, by many people in the past and the present. But the second one, which is appealing to Palestinians and allies alike, has been internalised beyond measure. Muhammad El Kurd, a 27-year-old Palestinian writer from Jerusalem, takes issue with and problematises this vision of curated victimhood in his collection of essays titled ‘Perfect Victims’. That, despite being the central theme, is not the only thing the book is about. It is about everything Palestine: how it is spoken about, how it is taught, how it is represented in films, and reported in the news.
This is not a critique nor a manifesto, says the author at the very beginning of his book. It is rather an injection of the local perspectives into the extensive global debates that take place in fancy news studios and conference rooms, but have little time and sympathy for the lived experience of the Palestinians.
So many Gazans have died in the last one and a half years that there is almost no point in mentioning the death count in any piece of writing. By the time the article, book, or report gets published, the death count has soared to a far bigger number. Kurd contrasts the numbness that surrounds the loss of Palestinian lives to the pivotal event that is the death of an Israeli. So normalised is a Palestinian’s death to the world that their life is rendered, in Kurd’s words, ‘nothing but a deterministic march to the grave.’ Even in death, language fails to do them justice. With so many deaths to record, it is only the most spectacular ones that are documented and acknowledged as tragedies. The others are reduced to statistics, footnotes or passing mentions while making larger points.
This dehumanisation is not only limited to normalising the murders of Palestinians or Arabs in general, but also in painting the normal human tendencies of these people as abnormalities. Inclinations like protecting one’s home, their children and a basic need for survival are often presented as evidence enough of animal-like bestial character. The book problematises the position of many ‘allies’ that humanisation is the antithesis to the colonial project of dehumanisation. Such a project, it posits, places the focus of analysis on what behaviour is considered acceptable on the part of the Palestinian rather than the bombings, kidnappings, rapes and murders by the regime. “Is there room for side conversations in the presence of burning flesh?” Kurd asks.
The specific grammar of this humanisation, which prescribes certain mannerisms of speaking, walking, even wailing and mourning, reduces the life of a Palestinian to a shrinking island of acceptable behaviour. This humanisation process, through which Palestinians are either described or asked to behave like perfect victims, who do not get angry at the oppression but just gently bow their heads and respectfully point to their displaced families, demolished homes and their destroyed lives, disallows emotions and expressions to a Palestinian that make him flawed, and in a broader understanding, human. The Palestinian is mostly a ‘he’ in Kurd’s writing. This masculine pronoun usage, he announces in the author’s note, which may be seen as regressive, is a protest against the reduction of Palestinians to ‘women and children.’ The disposability of Palestinian men in the global coverage of the genocide in Gaza is thus ironically marked by highlighting the emptiness of rhetorical activism in the face of an active annihilation of people.
The growing specificity about who qualifies as an innocent person exposes more people to be categorised as barbarians just because they aren’t what the new dictionary definition of a perfect victim dictates. The ideal victim is completely submissive; he is defanged, devoid of anger or emotion. He is gentle, ever ready to offer the other cheek. Even well-meaning allies only reward Palestinians with the status of an ordinary human after they have exhibited extraordinary, almost-Godly traits of forgiveness and hospitality, like Izzeldin Abuelaish, who wrote a book called ‘I shall not hate’, after three of his daughters were shot during an IDF raid. A Palestinian has to perform saintliness to be registered as human, while they only have to act human to be berated as inhuman. If Izzeldin, for instance, had shown the human emotion of hate for his daughters’ killers, he would have been clubbed with the majority of Arabs who have forever been deemed as hostile and belligerent.
The book is an introduction for those who don’t know much about the occupation of Palestine and a recap for those who do. If you are someone who has followed Palestine for a while, you probably won’t find much in Kurd’s essay collection that is entirely new outside the author’s own unique experiences. What newness can be expected from the writing of a people whose conditions have not changed? When I say they haven’t changed, I mean they haven’t improved. They do change often in the sense that they get worse. The book, thus, is an essential repetition with one crucial novelty. It records the failures of those who have claimed to be the saviours of Palestine in the past, but whose inefficiency and in many cases, even intentionality, have been brought into question by the newest long-drawn episode of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Kurd strips the politics of progressive language that somehow mutes itself at the Palestinian question. It asks questions of scholars, especially those of the postcolonial theoretical leaning, who decide to stay quiet while the dust settles on Palestinian dead bodies, only to return later to preach better ways to resist or invent new words for resistance. The only effective academic, political and moral position on Palestine is the one that stands for the end of not only the direct genocidal violence against the Palestinians that we see going on right now, but also the under-the-radar systemic indirect violence that has gone on for decades and that permits, justifies, and paves the way for the direct violence of today and the many instances of the past.
If the story of violence in Palestine has to be told, it has to be told from the beginning. Before we speak of the guns they have picked, we have to narrate how their groundwater was poisoned, the sea was cordoned off for them and then how their thirst was criminalised. The stories that start with a de-historicised ‘secondly’ are always going to be misleading.
While writing about Palestine, there is a tendency amongst the scholars and commentators to cite and refer to the work of Israeli or Western civil rights groups more than the Palestinians on the ground. Kurd lists two probable reasons for this. The first one, he denounces as blatant racism, that pushes the idea that Palestinians are less believable than others, and while they may at times be useful enough to provide the facts, they are never given the agency to analyse. The other reason is to make the people believe in the reality while alleviating fears of pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli bias in sources. Stories of dispossession are more likely to be true if even the Israelis and the Westerners say it, not just the Palestinians. However, Kurd posits that even though marked with good will, such reasoning furthers the racist practice of reducing the believability and authority of native voices and narratives.
While Palestinians breathe under cross-examination, Kurd defends the occupied people’s right to have feelings, and not just the ones approved by the occupier. He defends the colonised society’s right to be flawed and still defends their right to freedom. He finds that humanisation, which imposes standards devised in the uptown localities of Europe and the US on the poor Palestinians, is in effect dehumanising. It demotes the Palestinian cause from the status of an emancipatory struggle to a humanitarian crisis.
So, what should we, living outside of Palestine, do at a time like this? Do we have the right to write about Palestine from three thousand miles away when we don’t know the difference between Naqab, where Palestinian Bedouins are being replaced by German pine trees, and Silwan, where homes are demolished to fulfil a Biblical prophecy? Perhaps we should allow Kurds and others like them to tell these stories.
But we should listen to the likes of him, respond to their calls for solidarity and gauge our own struggles and political commitments against the cause of Palestine. For seven decades, the question of Palestine has been a standard setter. Whatever happens there happens elsewhere eventually. Whether it is the homeland security model that became a central doctrine of American security, or the punitive demolitions that have recently become so common in India, it all started in Palestine. Thus, even though we are thousands of miles away from it, Palestine is never really far away from any of us. After all, the world is full of states that desire land but have little regard for the people who live on it.
Bilal Ahmad Tantray is pursuing a doctorate in International Relations and Governance at Shiv Nadar University, NCR.
