Reading Group Week 13
We're continuing to read Perfect Victims by Mohammed el-Kurd
Readings
This week, let's read
- Chapter 4 ("a life in cross-examination")
- Chapter 5 ("tropes and drones")
- Chapter 6 ("mein kampf in the playroom")
Join the reading group newsletter
You can get this email (and more links throughout the email!) if you sign up:
Reflections
chapter 4 - "a life in cross-examination"
Is disproving libel the sole reason we roam this earth? We talk about the racism that follows the Palestinian name, particularly its manifestations in policy and procedure, but we should also consider its psychic cost.
Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations—Zionism is what Zionism does. When Zionism's most recent manifestation is genocide, what difference does it make whether the encampments protesting this genocide are utopias of coexistence? [...] This misplaced focus insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and basic rights.
What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother's limbs in a bag grow up to be? Does it matter whether he emerges as Abd el-Hadi or Abu Obeida? Does it make Zionism any less indefensible?
There are people who have contempt for the world that greets a nurse with her husband's corpse on a stretcher, the world that forces a boy to carry his brother's limbs in a bag. I am one of those people. And I am grateful for my disdain, for it is dignifying; it reminds me that I am human.
For a little while, I've been thinking about this comment I overheard of a white liberal about the university encampments about a year ago: "look at how peaceful they are". Some sort of encouragement of the students, staff, and faculty who had been camping out and protesting their university's investments in Israeli apartheid, weapons manufacturers who supply Israel with weapons, and to other Zionist land grab projects. I had found it grating, but I couldn't say much more than "so what?"
I feel like el-Kurd taps into this dissonance, and helped me realize why I bristled at this comment and others like it.
I don't care how peaceful or how utopian the encampments were. If students at all of these universities took up sledgehammers and converged on the offices of the administrators to tear those buildings down to the studs, down to nothing... and if that stopped the genocide in Palestine, then what loss would that be?
If all it would take to stop universities from underwriting and profiting from genocide is the sacrifice of the careers of a handful of middle managers in academia, then we need to seriously assess the damage liberals do when they praise protesters for non-violence and use that empty praise to discourage other tactics - tactics that might, and I cannot stress this enough, stop a genocide.
There is no need to lose sleep over the demise of a society that makes a child carry the blood and guts of his family in a plastic bag, desperate for a place to bury what's left of them, so that he can proceed to starve to death. None at all.
chapter 5 - "tropes and drones"
We—how my heart breaks for us—we continue dancing among the land mines. We continue betting on morality and humanity, as they bet on their guns.
... when I read the letter, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Here we are, caught in a discursive crisis once more, frantically denying our culpability in crimes we have not committed.
And what a burdensome impulse! Not only do we live in fear of death and displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians over-enunciate the Jewishness of their operations; we are also told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag, the Star of David they carve into our skin.
Our capacity to produce such distinctions [between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism] is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction is not our responsibility, and personally, it is not my priority.
I find myself thinking about Refaat Alareer a lot as I read this book, and this chapter really felt like I was placing them at odds in some sense. I felt like Mohammed el-Kurd is interrogating his relationship with the belief in being articulate, and literate, and composed, in the face of annihilation. And he's going in a very different direction than Alareer went.
I feel like el-Kurd is bristling and finally rejecting the fake outrage of (mostly) westerners who demand that he ignore the elephant in the room - the elephant in the room that insists that he not acknowledge that the people who took his home were Jewish, that the people who kill his family wear uniforms with the Star of David emblazoned on it, that all of the politicians on TV clear their throat and say "The Jewish State".
Recently there was another case of soldiers carving a Star of David into the skull of a prisoner. But we're not supposed to note it. It's as if we're supposed to see it and say "those are just some triangles". Like we're supposed to make ourselves stupid for the people annihilating Palestine under a co-opted symbol and in the name of a people who, not for nothing, have vociferously rebuked Israel's genocide around the world. Jewish people around the world see what Zionism is, and for that they too get labeled anti-semitic.
"the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism" is the conspicuous and irreconcilable elephant in the room. Can we come even remotely close to acknowledging that basic fact? Are we utterly hopeless? While somebody bombs churches and mosques and hospitals and schools; kills children; prevents humanitarian aid reaching hundreds of thousands of people; and above all does all of this to ethnically cleanse a region so that they can occupy it. Do we collectively have the clarity of mind, let alone the moral clarity, to say what's happening?
I don't need Palestinians to draw such a fine distinction, and yet, as el-Kurd says, it's impressive that they do. It's not their responsibility as the victims of this ongoing annihilation to retain a degree of composure that is frankly unfathomable.
But the rest of us not saying what is so obviously a veneer of utter bullshit, and letting ourselves idly watch while Palestinians desperately beg not to be judged and annihilated for a holocaust for which Germany and the rest of Europe is factually guilty... is utterly contemptible. Demanding this much of Palestinians is obscene, and this deliberate stupidity that we allow ourselves to feign in the face of everything else is despicable.
chapter 6 - "mein kampf in the playroom"
I once credulously believed that our testimonies would be considered credible only once we attained "respectability." Colonial logic gaslights us to believe that it is our shortcomings, not colonialism itself, that stand between us and liberation. And so we spend our years on a circuitous journey toward an impossible atonement. We accept starting the story at "Secondly." But in truth, and to state the obvious, nothing renders me killable.
Hitler's manifesto in northern Gaza has everything in common with any other Zionist cliché: it is rooted in glaring logical fallacies. At first, it may seem shocking how a tale so ridiculous can be so potent and effective. But how many hours have you wasted defending against ad hominem attacks (No, our men are gentle fathers!) or assuaging the paranoias of straw-man arguments (No, "from the river to the sea" is not a secret call to genocide!) or navigating slippery slopes (No, a free Palestine will not lead to a second Holocaust!) or pausing for red herrings (No, there are no tunnels under the hospital!) or appealing to authority (Even the Israeli scholars agree that it is a genocide!) or debunking equivocations (No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!)? The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction.
The idea is to "debunk" with dignity, always while naming the elephant in the room: propaganda. My mission is not to clear my name from false accusations; rather it is to unmask the deceit and duplicity of my accusers.
To be Palestinian today is to feel like you are caught in a fever dream—trapped in someone else's hallucination. It is to be interrogated about the hidden insidiousness of our chants while Israeli politicians boast about ethnically cleansing Gaza in newspapers and interviews. It is to be shouted over, silenced, by people who claim to fear for their lives from the safety of apartments that have never been blistered by white phosphorus, that have endured nothing fiercer than a US winter, while people in another corner of the planet dig for loved ones buried in the wreck of flattened buildings. Conversations about Palestine in the West are steered by abstractions, about the meaning of Zionism, about the threat level of words, about a logistically impossible yet impossibly imminent genocide of the Jewish people.
Israel registered a website hamas . com (don't visit it) and claimed that this was the genuine website of Hamas. It was full of malware and shit, to say nothing of a lot of over-the-top anti-semitic bullshit. Real "Mein Kampf in the playroom" kind of shit. But if you did a whois lookup of the domain, you saw that it was registered with Wix, an Israeli company.
So presumably anyone who had any tech savviness was supposed to believe that hamas went to an Israeli tech company and registered a web domain (called, and I can't stress this enough, HAMAS DOT COM) to host their website.
I thought about this a lot in November and December 2023, about the whole purpose of hasbara that Israel produces and trots out. I think at one time I described it as a liar happily feeding you bullshit - the simultaneous double insult of being lied to in the first place, and also the apparent contempt and disdain that this liar has for your intelligence. It's an insult to be lied to, but to be lied to this lazily and stupidly, they must think we're sub-human in intelligence.
Something I appreciate about Mohammed's writing here is that it finally addresses the incoherent, illogical, borderline-incomprehensible quality of the propaganda Israel produces. It's not supposed to make sense, it's not supposed to add up, it's supposed to trick you into engaging with it and treating it (and them) like anything they say is at least worthy of considering before dismissing.
Why are we falling for it?
To be Palestinian today is to feel like you are caught in a fever dream—trapped in someone else's hallucination...
This quote stuck with me for a while; I even saw this quote before we started the book (maybe before we started this entire reading group) and it reverberated in me.
I was grateful for this piece because it clearly isn't enough to say that Israel's propaganda is false or even total bullshit. I felt like I was getting mired in quicksand and every time I gave this nonsense the time of day I sank a little deeper. I felt like I was debasing myself and, crucially, it was getting me nowhere except deeper in this toxic sludge.
I appreciate the exhortation to "debunk" with dignity. I know Lexi Alex used to have a post on Twitter (she has since been suspended, though she's on Bluesky now) explaining to people that Zionists online just want your attention. If they get you to quote tweet and make fun of them, they win. Many of them are literally getting paid for it. We need to call out the elephant in the room or we're going to get fucking trampled to death and get nowhere for it.
Call out the purpose of this propaganda. Don't just chase every bit of bullshit. Retain some of your dignity. Call out the game these disgusting people are playing, but don't get sucked into it, because it's a game for them; for us, it's life or death.
Let's make our moves to live, and to keep one another alive. Don't waste your time with bullshit.
(Advice I need to remind myself of often)
Share your reflections
If you'd like to chat with me and/or the rest of the people in the Signal group chat, I'd love to see you there.
If you're open to chatting on social media, please consider @'ing or quoting the posts on social media. Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter, whatever you prefer is good.
Otherwise, let's chat on Saturday at 12pm ET, during the weekly video call.
Other news
Palestinians in Gaza in "death loop"
The UN secretary-general says Palestinians in Gaza are in an "endless death loop", and demands an end to Israel's blockade (al jazeera). Israel says they want to control humanitarian aid into Gaza. A year ago Israel was managing the delivery of flour into the northern half of the Gaza Strip and then started firing into the crowds of starving Palestinians, causing people to scatter and ultimately killing and injuring more than a thousand people.
US freezes funds for universities
The US froze federal funds for Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million) (al jazeera), and Penn ($175 million) (the daily pennsylvanian). The White House has given various disparate reasons for the funding freezes (hating trans people, hating Muslims, hating academics in general), but some of the reasons have included that they don't approve of students protesting against the genocide of Palestine, which is a foreign policy priority of the United States.
Academics avoiding the United States
Numerous scholars from around the world have been turned away at the US border over the past few weeks and months; some academic workers are increasingly declining to travel to the US (The Guardian). I know that others who are already in the United States are apprehensive about attempting to cross a national border and end up either apprehended or turned away on their return trip.
(If you'd like for me to compile some resources and advice for people traveling internationally in hostile environments, feel free to let me know. I have some resources, but I'll need to gather them, see if there are any updated recommendations, etc... and I don't want to give stale info.)
Mahmoud Khalil's deportation will proceed
The US immigration judge ruled on Friday that the US can deport Mahmoud Khalil (ap news) solely on the basis of his participation in protests against genocide.
Khalil's attorney has said that he'll appeal, so he won't be deported immediately, but it's all but certain that his wife (Noor Abdalla) will have to give birth to their first child without him.
Israel bombed a hospital
Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital on Sunday in multiple air strikes (reuters).
Support people in need
If you have extra funds, please donate directly to the Sameer Project. Palestinians' needs to get food and other life-preserving resources is immense right now.
If you have extra capacity to donate, you can also donate to Sudan Funds, a project to get money to Sudanese people surviving genocide.
Support the reading group
You can also support the reading group if you have a few dollars to spare per month. Don't worry if you can't support, but if you can, it would help.
Thanks
Thank you for reading to the end. Please reach out if you have comments, or consider joining the Saturday call this weekend.
Regardless, thanks for reading along with me.