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"If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution."

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TL;DR: Perfect Victims exposes how Palestinians are forced to "perform" suffering to be seen as worthy of sympathy—polite, passive, grateful, and non-angry—while anyone who fails that standard is dismissed or dehumanized. El-Kurd shows that this isn't about morality, but power: respectability politics, "both sides" rhetoric, and media double standards protect occupation by shifting focus from injustice to whether the oppressed are "likeable enough." It's an uncomfortable, necessary book that demands we stop supporting a sanitized idea of liberation and start supporting real people, in all their anger, grief, and humanity.

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I've been struggling with this since I closed the book: how do I review a nonfiction work that grapples with war, death, ethnic cleansing, and genocide? This isn't something I'm used to reviewing. It's not meant to entertain or inform in some detached way. It's meant to challenge, to unsettle, to demand engagement without the safety of distance.

With that uncertainty in mind, this review won't follow my usual format. Instead, I want to focus on what this book accomplishes and what it demands of us.

1) The Heart of the Matter

There's a passage early in the book that captures its essence. El-Kurd writes about how "[r]esistance, in the Western mind, is not defined by the act itself, that is, defending oneself or one’s community against an oppressive force. Rather, resistance is defined on the basis of its perpetrators."

This is the heart of Perfect Victims: Palestinians are forced into an impossible binary. Either you're a terrorist (someone whose very existence justifies violence against you) or you're a victim, but only if you perform victimhood correctly. Only if you're wounded enough, passive enough, grateful enough. Only if you can prove, again and again, that you're one of the "good ones."

El-Kurd dismantles this framework systematically. He shows how Palestinians are expected to be martyrs with perfect records. People who came from humble beginnings and lived peacefully until violence found them. People who, even in their grief, must comfort their oppressors. People who must denounce antisemitism before they're allowed to mourn their own dead.

2) The "Both Sides" Trap

The book takes apart the "both sides" narrative that dominates Western discourse about Palestine. El-Kurd asks a question that seems obvious once stated but is rarely voiced: would it really be so terrible for someone who has been constantly attacked, who has lost family members and their home, to hate the people doing this to them?

Most Palestinians don't express that hatred publicly because they can't afford to. The moment they do, they lose their "perfect victim" status. Support evaporates. They've broken the unspoken rule: suffer beautifully or suffer alone.

The chapters on media coverage are particularly damning. El-Kurd shows how the same actions (taking up arms against occupation, using guerrilla tactics, operating from civilian areas) are described completely differently when Ukrainians do them versus when Palestinians do. The double standard isn't subtle. It's blatant, and it's something we can't turn a blind eye to.

3) Class and Respectability Politics

One of the book's most powerful arguments is about class. El-Kurd argues that "humanization" as a political strategy is largely the invention of Palestinian elites (people with degrees from Western universities, people with connections, people who can navigate institutional spaces).

But what about everyone else? What about the people in refugee camps who don't have the training or resources to perform respectability? What about those who are simply too angry, too tired, too traumatized to code-switch for Western audiences? Why should they ever need to?

El-Kurd insists that Palestinian liberation cannot be contingent on perfect behavior, perfect English, perfect gratitude. Rather than being liberation, that's another form of subjugation.

4) Power, Not Morality

The demand for perfect victims isn't about morality. It's about power.

If Palestinians must prove they deserve to live, if they must audition for the right to exist, then the focus shifts away from the actual injustice. Instead of asking, "Why is this happening? Why must this keep happening?" we're asking, "Are these people worthy of our sympathy?"

The occupation continues while we debate whether the occupied are sympathetic enough.

El-Kurd points out that this framework doesn't even work on its own terms. Shireen Abu Akleh was a journalist wearing a press vest. She was from the USA. She was Christian. She had all the markers of a "perfect victim." And she was still murdered. Her funeral was still attacked.

If even Shireen Abu Akleh can't be mourned without qualification, then who can?

5) Language as Minefield

One of the most interesting sections deals with language and tropes. El-Kurd writes about growing up having to carefully navigate every word, knowing that a single misstep could be used to delegitimize not just him, but all Palestinians.

There's a moment in the book where someone asks if he wants to "throw Israelis into the sea" (that old, tired accusation). His response? "If they're so afraid of drowning, why don't they learn how to swim?"

It's funny, as he says, but it's also making a point: why should Palestinians spend their energy refuting racist fantasies when their actual material reality involves real violence happening right now? The hypothetical oppression of settlers takes precedence over the actual oppression of Palestinians. El-Kurd is saying: no more.

6) What This Book Demands

This book is not an easy read, and El-Kurd would probably say that's the point. He's not trying to make you comfortable. He's trying to make you complicit if you continue to look away.

The book challenges everyone to examine what we really mean when we say we support Palestinian liberation. Do we only support it when Palestinians behave the way we want them to? Only when they're polite enough, peaceful enough, perfect enough? Or do we support the actual people in all their complexity and imperfection and justified rage?

7) A Point of Contention

I'll be honest: there's a note at the beginning of the book (specifically point eight in the author's notes) that I want to address. El-Kurd explains his disproportionate use of masculine pronouns throughout the book. He writes that Palestinians have been reduced to "women and children," which both robs women and children of their agency and revolutionary contributions, and further demonizes Palestinian men as deserving of death and unworthy of mourning.

I understand his perspective, and I think it's important. But I also struggled with it because in these types of conflicts, women face distinct and compounded forms of violence—disproportionate targeting, sexual violence, displacement, and the burden of maintaining family survival amid societal collapse, all while often being excluded from decision-making and peacebuilding processes despite their critical contributions.

I don't have specific data for the Palestinian context, and I recognize that men also suffer terribly. El-Kurd's point about how framing Palestinians as "women and children" strips them of agency while demonizing men is valid and necessary. I personally would have preferred gender-neutral language with emphasis where needed, but I also have to remember: I'm reading this from safety. I'm not the one living under occupation. I'm not the one whose family is being bombed while the world debates whether I'm worthy of sympathy.

My comfort isn't the point of this book. But I did want to state that.

8) Final Thoughts

This book is necessary. It's sharp, unapologetic, and refuses to perform the kind of palatability that Western audiences have come to expect from Palestinian voices.

El-Kurd quotes Mahmoud Darwish:

"Why should I bypass the fires engulfing us for hypothetical flames? And if seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution."

Perfect Victims is that seed. It won't wait for permission to grow.

This is not a book for people looking for easy answers or comfortable narratives. It's a book for people ready to confront their own complicity, their own conditioned responses, their own comfort with the status quo.

Read it if you're ready to be challenged. Read it if you're tired of performative solidarity. Read it if you want to understand what liberation actually requires; not the sanitized version, but the real thing.

And if you're not ready? That's fine. But I still think you should read it (heehee). Because this isn't just about Palestinians; this is about every victim, everywhere, which could be anyone. Demanding that people fit into our narrow definition of how the oppressed should behave will only cause even more irreparable harm in the end.

ETA: Formatting. I wrote 5) two times. ._.

ETA 2: I found who recommended the audiobook (the author narrates it!) tysm @The_BookishBug! (: