PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
USA TODAY BESTSELLER
“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley
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.
Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. In 2021, He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time. He is best known for his role as a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he has appeared repeatedly as a commentator on major TV networks. Currently, El-Kurd serves as the first-ever Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. His first published essay in this role, “A Night with Palestine’s Defenders of the Mountain,” was shortlisted for the 2022 One World Media Print Award. Rifqa, his debut collection of poetry, published by Haymarket Books, was named “a masterpiece” by The New Arab and a “remarkable debut” by the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book was one of Middle East Eye’s “Best Books of 2021” and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for “Best First Collection.” El-Kurd holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a BFA in Writing from Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is the Culture Editor at Mondoweiss.
Publication date: February 11, 2025
author’s note(s)
one: the sniper’s hands are clean of blood
on dehumanization
two: the politics of defanging
on “humanization”
three: shireen’s passport
on the invention of the civilian
four: a life in cross-examination
on forbidden sentiments
five: tropes and drones
on discursive land mines
six: mein kampf in the playroom
on propaganda
seven: miraculous epiphanies
on testimony
eight: are we indeed all palestinians?
on identity
nine: “do you want to throw israelis into the sea?”
on irreverence
epilogue
“Great poets are truth-tellers, and the truth hurts. Mohammed El-Kurd’s raw eloquence and razor-sharp clarity will make you hurt and curse and cry and sometimes chuckle. A few will think, only to realize he is also talking about 'us,' the allies, the empathizers, even the comrades whose solidarity unwittingly demands the perfect victim. We are not completely free of Zionist lies; we are not decolonized. Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century. And like Aimé Césaire, he demands that we confront the truth, wipe away our crocodile tears, and take down Goliath once and for all.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Here's a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare. It will clear the fog.”
—Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
“In Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd recenters the Palestinian gaze as compass and metric unit.”
—Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some
“Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice is unequivocal in a hallucinatory media sphere that portrays the colonized and the occupied as either passive victims of an unnamable crime or the very perpetrators of unspeakable crimes they themselves experience. Perfect Victims is essay and memoir at its best. It portrays children forged by occupation and war and a humble people conditioned by the necessity of resistance for survival in the face of a twenty-first century genocide. Humility, irony, and irreverence are the languages of self-defense, and words are El-Kurd’s weapons.”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future
“Perfect Victims is an astonishing achievement: precise, sharp, and poetic.”
—Nicki Kattoura, LitHub
“Perfect Victims is punctuated with tonal shifts, a seamless blend of reporting, analysis, poetry, humor… With Perfect Victims, El-Kurd shows up as his full self: the journalist, the poet, the academic, the humorist.”
—Kylie Cheung, Jezebel
“El-Kurd’s book offers a fresh, unapologetic, and powerful critique of mainstream modes of representation and the years of Palestinian politics of appeal that have only served to concede too much. It is an assertion of Palestinian dignity unshackled from the need for recognition, an insistence on a politics that does not hinge on the benevolence of an imagined audience.”
—Abdaljawad Omar, Mondoweiss
“The writing in Perfect Victims demands empathy while rejecting victimhood. It echoes with anger and discards pretense. El Kurd deplores the insistence on humanizing Palestinians by denying them their rage. He calls this phenomenon the defanging of Palestinians. Then he bares his fangs.”
—Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch
