Mohammed El-Kurd is bored with the metaphors

It’s frigid outside Judson Memorial Church in New York as hoards of people try to get inside, clutching their copies of Rifqa and The New York War Crimes. The church’s iconic poster board facing Washington Square Park now presents a quote by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We suffer from an incurable malady: hope.”

Inside, people with every keffiyeh colour combination possible are scrambling to find a seat at the front in hopes of getting the best view of the stage where Mohammed El-Kurd is about to appear. It’s the official launch event for Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, the first non-fiction book by the Palestinian writer and poet. He cracks a sarcastic joke as soon as the talk starts, as he’s known to do. The majority of people in the crowd laugh, but a few look side to side for a sort of permission. Are they allowed to be in on this joke? Is his obvious jab at propaganda okay to laugh at?

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here

As soon as he steps off the stage, a crowd of people swarm to the front, waiting to say hello, and sheepishly asking if it’s okay to take a picture or get their copy of his previous work signed. In this room, he is an icon of sorts, an unapologetic voice for Palestinian freedom. Down the street, however, perhaps in an NYU business classroom, his welcome might not be as warm. 

But El-Kurd has made it clear that he has never been interested in impressing people, especially those who don’t see Palestinians and Arabs as full, complicated, and indeed flawed human beings. The first page of his book, before his prologue even begins, is a succinct refrain:

Even if!
Even if!
Even if!

“It’s the idea that no matter what Palestinians do, nothing justifies colonialism and occupation,” he tells me a few days later when we sit down for coffee. “Nothing justifies supremacist ideologies. Even if there were tunnels underneath Al-Ahli Hospital, that doesn’t justify bombing a hospital. Even if fighters hid behind civilians, that doesn’t justify killing civilians.”

Perfect Victims builds off of a series of speeches and articles over a two-year time span. It began as a lecture delivered at Princeton University in February 2023, then a longer article in The Nation (where El-Kurd was the first-ever Palestine correspondent) after 7 October, but eventually, he knew it needed to be expanded into a full-length book. At the time, he had been working on the memoir of his upbringing in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, where settlers took over half of his family home, as they have many others in the neighbourhood. But then the genocide in Gaza began, and everything changed.

“It’s the idea that no matter what Palestinians do, nothing justifies colonialism and occupation. Nothing justifies supremacist ideologies.”

Mohammed El-Kurd

The book is a masterful dissection of all things de/humanisation. Rooted in intense historical research, journalism, and references to Arabic proverbs and poets, Perfect Victims provides the language many of us have been searching for during the ongoing Nakba. The opening lines of the first chapter (“The Sniper’s Hands Are Clean of Blood”) are blunt: “We die a lot. We die in fleeting headlines, in between breaths. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather: Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past 10 days. And much like the weather, only God is responsible—not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes.”

El-Kurd’s writing is so sharp, so quick, and perfectly targeted towards the specific argument he aims to make in each chapter. He speaks of the “politics of defanging” whereby Palestinians, particularly men, must be polite and grateful for the crumbs they receive. God forbid a Palestinian is angry or that they harbour hatred for the occupying state. “I cited the tears, never the spit,” he says of his grandmother’s thoughts on the settlers who made her stateless. He then moves to the invention of the civilian, to propaganda, to testimony and who is allowed to testify (where he is very self-aware of his unique privilege at times), to identity, and finally to irreverence.

While most people are receptive to his advice, others try to poke holes in it. “The response that I find the most uninteresting is that people will say that I am coming at them from a place of moral purity, when that’s not true at all,” he says. “Defanging, submission, cowering, burying your head in the sand, throwing fighters under the bus, conceding to colonial logic—one could say these things are strategies, but they haven’t been very effective. They have failed miserably, and they have kind of shrunk the scope of what is available for us and what is permissible for us.” We’ve learned this from feminist movements, Black movements, and Indigenous movements across the world. “They’ve led with dignity and self-respect,” he reflects. “They did not concede and, to a certain degree, they succeeded.”

Throughout the book and our conversation, El-Kurd admits that it is very difficult to unlearn the politics of appeal. It’s difficult to walk away from a stupid argument that is clearly aimed to provoke. It’s difficult to not offer up the perfect victim when we’ve been raised to do so, to protect our community—one that is always under attack. Rejecting the politics of appeal is a constant battle, he says. He is not above it. The book also serves as self-critique, and he is the first to admit that he is not perfect. “You want to ask yourself, am I conceding to colonial logic? Am I victim blaming? Is the implication here that the victim has to behave a certain way in order for them to be redeemable? And that is when I think things are problematic.”

***

El-Kurd is certainly no stranger to mainstream Western media, but in many ways, he has become their least favourite guest. As a poet, writer, journalist, activist, and indeed a victim of ethnic cleansing and military occupation, he has been invited onto several broadcast news segments on CNN and BBC, but never seems to be invited back. Perhaps this has something to do with his quick, sardonic responses to frankly stupid questions: “Do you support the protests, the violent protests, in solidarity with you and other families in your position right now?” a CNN anchor asked El-Kurd during the height of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement in 2021. “Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?” El-Kurd responded, looking directly at the camera. An awkward silence ensued as the host scrambled to find a way to end the interview.

I ask if he preps for these sorts of things, if he has an answer ready for every question, if he knows it’s coming and dreads it. “I think it’s great,” he smiles. “I love it. You’re able to pull the rug from under the entirety of the media production to show how this is all smoke and mirrors. That it’s biased and meant to propagandise masses. It’s a great opportunity to kind of flip the script.” Although El-Kurd says he wishes he was better at writing humour, his wit and sarcasm are absolutely evident and almost his signature.

In one chapter of the book, he addresses critics and friends alike who ask why he cracks jokes in front of audiences who may already, even if on a subconscious level, be suspicious of him. “Because, most importantly, it is funny. It feels good to laugh, to ridicule the ridiculous,” he writes. “The issue with human rights advocacy work and tragedy and travesty is that your audience are spectators. Your audience feels sympathy for you. But humour tells your audience that they’re in on the joke. That they’re having a conversation with you. It becomes a family affair because they’re laughing with you. You’re breaking their walls. You’re bringing them in,” he explains. “I think when you make someone laugh, you disarm them and then they see you as someone they could talk to. And for people who have been so dehumanised, this is one of the ways where we get people to see us as equals.”

We both smile talking about the late poet and author from Gaza, Dr Refaat Alareer — one of the people El-Kurd dedicated his book to — whose signature response to ridiculous propaganda would be a simple, sarcastic tweet. “Instead of sitting there and legitimising and debating and blah, blah, blah, he just laughed at it,” recalls El-Kurd. “He was such a legend, Refaat.”

***

By far, one of El-Kurd’s most indicting chapters is “Miraculous Epiphanies”, where he calls out many of us in journalism, especially those working at the so-called “paper of record”—The New York Times. Here, he recalls a protest that he attended outside of the 2023 Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Awards, which was hosted by the American paper. “It was outlandish,” he writes. “The same institution that issued an editorial against a ceasefire in Gaza as the Israeli occupation forces, at the time of our protest, had killed 37 Palestinian journalists and one Lebanese cameraman.” (The number killed at the time of the book’s publication was 175.)

El-Kurd describes the awkward smiles of Muslim reporters heading into the gala. “It was as if their presence, like Obama’s in the White House, debunked the allegations of systemic racism in the institution,” he writes. Midway through our conversation, he laughs as he tells me how recently one of the dinner’s attendees called the chapter a “nothing burger”, which he found quite amusing, explaining how they slammed it for having “no value”.

“We tell ourselves it isn’t careerist aspirations that drive us to the stenographer party; rather, we want to change things from the inside,” he muses. “There is truth in the claim that affiliations with respected publications or affluent organisations may afford us slightly more protection against persecution. But at what cost?”

El-Kurd then tells me about another conversation he had with someone who continued to work at The New York Times despite Palestinians calling for a boycott. The writer believed they needed to use every opportunity to reach “different audiences”. Here, El-Kurd takes a deep breath. Beyond the arrogance, he says, no one is going to have an epiphany about genocide through reading a heavily edited, tone-policed article in the opinion section of that paper. “What does it say when you accept that invitation? It’s weird because we’re saying this organisation is biased. It’s anti-Arab. It’s anti-Palestinian. But please, please let us in. It’s weird, oxymoronic shit,” he continues. And perhaps an op-ed from a Palestinian could change someone’s mind. “But if there’s been a group decision, a group call to boycott, who am I to say, ‘No, actually, my prose style is the one that’s gonna make [US Senator] Chuck Schumer reconsider his life choices.'”

***

Unsurprisingly, when I ask if he’s ever seen value in using Western institutions to his advantage, he immediately says no, citing his grandmother: “If your enemy is a judge, to whom do you complain?” Because of that, he has always understood that these institutions – be it the academy, the judiciary, the media, corporations – were never designed to save us. “They’re set up by settlers for settlers. They’re set up in service of empire. There is no use patching up something that is rotten from the inside because it will collapse at a certain point. It will. The very skeleton of these institutions is rotten. There is absolutely no redeeming them.”

Our anger as Arabs is certainly righteous, but it’s also tiring. It’s hard to tread the fine line between the emotion being a powerful motivator versus it becoming an all-consuming, self-destructive feeling. For El-Kurd, it’s both. “If I’m being very honest and transparent, I struggle really badly with depression and the genocide made it the worst it’s ever been. And I can only imagine what that feels like for people who struggle with mental health issues in the Gaza Strip and just people there in general. So I don’t have any right to complain,” he says.

“But also, my anger in a lot of ways has propelled me to just like… refuse bullshit and refuse pretences, refuse half-truths, refuse double-speak, refuse all of these things. I just refuse to talk in the script that people want me to talk in. I will never speak off the record,” he says. “This is what anger has allowed me, to deliberately speak on the record because I know the consequences and risks associated with speaking up. But then you tell yourself, I am no better than the person being burnt alive in a makeshift hospital bed in a refugee camp.”

“We need to be angry,” he asserts. “And you feel like you’re the insane person, even though it is the definition of sanity right now to be angry at the slaughter. It is actually insane to treat it as business as usual.” But it’s also difficult to reckon with the fact that despite all of our writing, our reading, all of our “bearing witness”, we did not create much material change. Perhaps it’s a pessimistic outlook, but it’s one El-Kurd understands.

“You just have to manually reset your faith every other day and remind yourself that this is ultimately an obligation,” he says. “I think looking at history, looking at how historical narratives unfolded, I do think that the written word has mattered immensely. It’s really hard to see its merit in the face of so much. But then I just tell myself, I want to be able to go to bed at night knowing… maybe this is a bit selfish,” he pauses. “But I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to do at least one thing, you know? It’s my obligation.”

“I think it’s selfish to be like, ‘Oh, nothing’s gonna change. Oh, we have no power.’ And just quit. No,” he adds, shaking his head and tapping the table. “I know there is something I could do. If this is the thing that I can contribute, then it’s my obligation. You have to think of this as an accumulative process. You’re building on a lineage of this kind of literature and journalistic work.”

He admits that it’s much easier to give me this advice rather than take it himself, and asks me what radicalised me about certain social issues. We come to the consensus that it was reading, listening, it was language that helped us understand conditions we may have never been exposed to personally. “And I think this is true in our case—I hesitate to say it, but I do think people do read these things and are influenced by them, no matter how minimally.”

***

With over a million followers on Instagram, sold-out book events across the country, and translations of his work in dozens of languages, El-Kurd’s work has definitely entered the zeitgeist. This often happens with Palestinians who don’t exactly choose to become the face of a movement, but inevitably do because of the quick reach of social media. Whenever Palestine is under attack – whether it’s Gaza, Jenin, or Jerusalem – there’s always a person or group of people that we tend to ‘icon-ise’. We build them up as heroes or perfect survivors and, in many ways, they are not allowed to be a real person anymore. They’re certainly not allowed to make mistakes.

Despite censorship, Anas al-Sharif (an Al-Jazeera correspondent in Gaza) gains new followers every day because of his reporting. Years ago, Ahed Tamimi, a young activist from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, was the profile photo for every news article. And of course, in 2021, Mohammed and his twin sister Muna were thrust into the limelight as the voices of their neighbourhood, of their generation. They were both named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world that year (a title that, he said at the time, was encouraging, but didn’t do enough to advocate for the Palestinian people as a whole).

I ask if it’s been strange. El-Kurd seems to have a keen understanding that the recognition is purely symbolic. “These are kind of ceremonial wins,” he explains. “People know who we are, but our houses are still being taken. People know who Ahed Tamimi is, but her family is still in jeopardy. People know Lama Jamous [Gaza’s youngest journalist at nine years old], but her family, her neighborhood are still getting bombarded.”

“But also, you know, I critique this whole celebrity culture thing, but I use it, right? Like I’m still doing interviews even though I’m like, ‘Oh, this is ceremonial.’ But I think it’s better that I talk than someone else because I think I say the right thing,” he immediately laughs, almost in regret. “I don’t know, that’s really arrogant. Yaani, I’m not an individual project. I have so many people writing my script, so to speak.”

***

“I refuse to talk in the script that people want me to talk in. I will never speak off the record.”

Mohammed El-Kurd

In one of the last chapters of the book, El-Kurd speaks about the future of Palestine, a Palestine without occupation, without genocide, without Zionism, referencing an interview given by the late Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa: “I long for the homeland or the memory that we will create. I long for the future, for the home I will build.” I ask El-Kurd about the future he longs for; about what he wants for his land and people.

“Ideally it would be sunbathing on the beach, but that’s not where we’re going,” he says. “Even if the occupation ceased to exist tomorrow, which hopefully it will, there will be a lot more work to do. There will still be struggle. There will be a lot more trauma, social issues, class issues to address. There will always be injustice, you know? But our land back? That is the future to me. Abolishing all the prisons in Palestine and elsewhere in the world. The refugees’ right to return. All of these things are uncompromisable.”

Just as we’re about to end our conversation, and El-Kurd undoubtedly preps for another book event or speaker series somewhere in the country, I remember a question I’ve always wanted to ask him. “There’s this phrase: Palestine will be free within our lifetime. Do you believe that?” I ask.

He takes a second to think, then smiles. “Yes. You have to say yes. It’s optimism of the will. You have to believe it. You have to. If I don’t believe in that, then what’s the point?” he replies. “All the people before us must have believed that we’d be free in their lifetime. You have to believe it. If you are not energised, if you don’t think a project will be successful, you’re not going to be compelled to do it. So, yes, it will,” he affirms as much to himself as to me. “Inshallah. We’ll see. We’ll talk in 50, 60 years.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here

Grooming TAYLER TREADWELL, creative producer FATIMA MOURAD, producer IMAD ELSHEIKH, production PIQUE, camera assistant SAM SUNDOS, styling assistant OBADIAH RUSSON, production, assistants DASHARI HICKS and KADEEM WALTERS