Infantilising Palestinians, demonising Israelis

Palestinian activist and poet Mohammed el-Kurd first began publicly speaking out for the Palestinian cause when he was growing up in East Jerusalem in the West Bank in the 2000s and early 2010s. After moving to the US to study, he became increasingly influential in pro-Palestine circles there, before moving back to East Jerusalem where he is currently based.

He has now written an angry and eloquent book, called Perfect Victims. Capturing the urgency of the pro-Palestine protest movement that has grown in response to the Israel-Hamas war, el-Kurd takes issue not just with Israel, but also with the way the argument for Palestine has been made in the West. El-Kurd claims it has forced Palestinians into an impossible performance of victimhood.

In particular, el-Kurd critiques what he calls the ‘politics of appeal’, whereby advocates for Palestine feel compelled to sanitise their cause to make it acceptable to Western society – or, as he puts it, ‘appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing us’. To illustrate his case, he points to the ‘Palestine-related books with children, ragamuffin and smiling, on the cover, no matter the specific topic of the book’, and ‘desperately persuasive documentaries that border on “trauma porn”’.

He warns that in ‘ingratiating [themselves] with traditional and non-traditional structures of power’ Palestinians are being ‘defanged’. They are watering down their cause, trying to make it ‘respectable’ and ‘relatable’, to the point that it becomes inconsequential.

El-Kurd goes even further. When he hears the injunction to ‘be good for the good of your cause’, he argues that ‘these claims are blind to their own ethnocentrism: there is no such thing as a universal’. He says that ‘appealing to a “moral universality” cannot save us, for there is no room for us within that morality’. He effectively rejects the very idea of a common humanity as being nothing more than colonialist propaganda.

Humanity is certainly in short supply in Perfect Victims. In the chapter, ‘Tropes and Drones’, el-Kurd tells us again and again that his problem is not just with Israel, it is also with Jews. ‘The people seeking to expel us from our neighbourhood were Jewish’, he writes, ‘the bureaucrat issuing and revoking our blue ID cards was a Jew’, and ‘as for the soldiers who were frisking us to check those IDs… most of them [were] Jewish’.

El-Kurd fumes against the Palestinian notables who wrote a joint letter taking issue with Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Semitic comments in August 2023 – when he claimed that Hitler ‘fought’ the Jews because they dealt with ‘usury, money and so on’. El-Kurd claims that ‘defending ourselves, often preemptively, against the baseless charge of anti-Semitism’ is a mistake, a tactic that ‘elevates the history of Jewish suffering… above our present-day suffering’.

El-Kurd is convinced that Israel is illegitimate and that Israeli Jews are ‘colonisers’. Quoting Frantz Fanon, he says ‘the work of the colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist’.

But Israelis are not colonisers. They are refugees from persecution in Europe up to 1945, and in the Arab world since 1948. Most were born in Israel. By characterising Jews as the ‘colonisers’, el-Kurd is lending a veneer of legitimacy to his vilification of an entire people.

El-Kurd refuses to be drawn on the future of the Jews because, he says, this can only ever mean the de-railing of the Palestinian cause. He protests that the ‘possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present’ – that is, in Gaza.

It is certainly true that Israel has been fighting a deadly war with Hamas since October 2023. But it is not in any sense a ‘holocaust’. The victims of holocausts do not generally have their own armies, nor fire missiles at their persecutors. El-Kurd points to the ‘countless examples of annihilatory rhetoric’ by Israeli officials, but he could just as easily list the genocidal remarks made by Hamas spokesmen, like Osama Hamdan or Ghazi Hamad.

Moreover, Hamas ran riot in southern Israel for just 18 hours on 7 October 2023, and managed to kill 1,200 people, most of them Jews. Its organisational commitment to killing Jews goes back to its founding. After Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked Sderot, Be’eri and other towns bordering on Gaza that awful day in 2023, Mohammed el-Kurd was excited. ‘Much of what is happening in occupied Palestine’, he tweeted on 8 October, ‘will be in future history books as an example of revolutionary struggle’. Like so many among the pro-Palestine crowd, el-Kurd has since downplayed the significance of the massacre, complaining that attention is always on 7 October, not on what came before.

El-Kurd claims that Palestinians are denied the ‘common humanity’ applied to others, and are therefore dehumanised. Yet he ignores the clear dehumanisation of Jews that made it possible for Hamas to slaughter families in their homes on 7 October. That is bad enough, but worse is the evasion of responsibility. It is galling to read him protest against ‘the ceaseless infantilisation of the dehumanised subject’, in reference to Palestinians, when he and his fellow anti-Israel campaigners have done the most to infantilise them. For el-Kurd, Hamas should not be held responsible for its actions – any discussion of its atrocities or brutality, he suggests, is a ‘distraction’. What he ignores is that until a leadership emerges that accepts it has a responsibility to make peace, and live alongside its Jewish neighbours, there is no future for Palestine.

El-Kurd concludes his work like a poet, more than an activist, writing ‘the world is changing because it must’. The world is changing, but not in the direction that Mohammed el-Kurd hopes. Hamas has brought disaster upon Gaza. And the prospect of a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians looks further away than ever.

James Heartfield writes and lectures on British history and politics. His latest book is Britain’s Empires: A History, 1600-2020.