Celestial | Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
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Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
Mohammed El-Kurd
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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.
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Posts about this title from Celestial
Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Jun 21
makeup and books tag! | GRWM and chat about reading
17 books
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Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Dec 8 2025
💭 what’s your favorite 2025 book?
💭 what’s your favorite 2025 book?
drum roll please … welcome to the THIRD annual StarrySteph Book Awards! no questions at this time!
📚 books mentioned: - The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar - The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King - Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei - Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd - Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resilience by D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales - Fate’s Bane by C.L. Clark - Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto - Magic in the Melanin by C.M. Lockhart - Somadina by Akwaeke Emezi - Love Be Damned by Briana Garrett - The Coven Tendency by Zoe Hana Mikuta
👗💄: - dress is from Free People, rented from Nuuly - eyeshadow is In Trance palette from Colourpop - lip combo is Lingerie Lip Liner Stain (Send Nudes) and Jelly Job Gloss (Honey, It’s Jelly) from NYX Cosmetics - (also if you have a question about my makeup or something i’m wearing, most of it is curated in my shopmy!)
thank you to Saga Press, Tordotcom, William Morrow, Flatiron, Atria/Primero Sueño Press, Harper Voyager, Ingram, Get Underlined, and Disney Hyperion for the gifted copies!
#goodreadschoiceawards #starrystephbookawards #bestbooksof2025 #bestbooksoftheyear #2025books #fantasybooks #scifibooks #horrorbooks #bookrecs #starrysteph #nycinfluencer #diversebookstagram #nycbookstagram #bookstagram #SagaSaysCrew #sagapressbooks #SagaSays #TorPartner #WilliamMorrowPartner #atriapartner #FlatironPartner #HarperVoyagerPartner #GetUnderlinedPartner #ingram @sagapressbooks @tordotcompub @williammorrowbooks @flatiron_books @haymarketbooks @atriabooks @primerosuenopress @harpervoyagerus @writtennmelanin @ingramsparkbooks @getunderlined @disneybooks @freepeople @nuuly @colourpopcosmetics @nyxcosmetics
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Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Oct 3 2025
🇵🇸 what’s your favorite book you’ve read by a Palestinian author?
🇵🇸 what’s your favorite book you’ve read by a Palestinian author?
the September Read For Palestine initiative raised £10,000 (double the goal)!!! and people are STILL making donations!! 📚 books mentioned: - Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd - Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad - The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza
👗💄: - eyeshadow is Sparklestik (shades: frostiwinkle, the dreamies) from @halfmagicbeauty - (also if you have a question about my makeup or something i’m wearing, most of it is curated in my shopmy!)
#ReadForPalestine #palestinianbooks #palestinianauthors #literaryfiction #nonfictionbookrecs #memoir #memoirbookrecs #haymarketbooks #groveatlantic #catapult #starrysteph #nycinfluencer #diversebookstagram #nycbookstagram #bookstagram @haymarketbooks @groveatlantic @catapult
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Posts about this book from across Bindery
Basement Books\ \ Kaitlyn\ \ • Jul 24
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\ \ Summary\ \ 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.\ \ Review\ \ A book filled with unapologetic candor and wit that makes you come to terms with your own mentality and beliefs in regards to Palestine. This is a must read. \ \ What I learned\ \
- El-Kurd argues that repeated exposure to images of Palestinian suffering has normalized atrocities that would once have shocked the world. I've learned more about this mentality when I read "Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag. I have a lot of thoughts on this subject.\
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"Are we too aquainted with the horrific? What was once horrifying, what was once a harbinger of doom, now blends into the terrain of boring scarecrow."\ \
- Something that's discussed in this book as well as a few others on this topic ("One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This"), is the violence of language during this genocide. The headlines we see lack agency. People "die," buildings "collapse," or civilians are "caught in crossfire"instead of explicitly identifying who carried out the violence.\ \
- The thesis of this book is incredibly powerful as it argues that Palestinians have to prove their humanity rather than be perceived as humans. They're held to an impossible standard (by design) to be expected to be patient, peaceful, articulate, and morally flawless in the face of genocide. Any perceived imperfection is used to undermine sympathy for their humanity.\
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"On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of our colonizers sense of 'security'."\ \ "You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head. Crass statements are corrosive to your plight, even when such statements are about those who first steal your home and then loot your tent. The violence inflicted upon our lands and our bodies, we are told, is secondary to the blemishes tarnishing our image, the blemishes that stand between us and justice, it seems. The smears we live to scrub clean."\ \
- Golda Meir is often displayed as a hero or peacemaker. In fact, a library is named after her at my hometown's university. However, her reality was violent and she blamed Palestinains for forcing her to kill their children:\
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"When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to fogive them for having forced us to kill their sons...This was Golda Meir's vile catchphrase, and it has reverberated ever since. But Golda Meir could have spared our children. No one forced her. She chose to kill our children."\ \
- The Palestinian Authority (which were founded as part of the Oslo Accords in the 90's) functions in collaboration with Israeli counterparts. One example is in the killing of Nizar Banat, a dissident political leader. Protests broke out and the PA beat up and used tear gas on the protestors.](https://basementbooks.binderybooks.com/item/0pGyyQ9nrkPlCrNCQuAe/)
Everything I learned from "Perfect Victims" by Mohammed El-Kurd
3 books
Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Jun 21
makeup and books tag! | GRWM and chat about reading
17 books
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Boundless Press\ \ Jananie\ \ • Apr 10
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all the books I want to read this spring 🌸📚 a long overdue book haul!
open for an exclusive giveaway! 👀
22 books
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Boundless Press\ \ Jananie\ \ • Jan 7
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Anti Brain Rot Reading Challenge: Announcing the 2026 Boundless Book Club Picks 📚📖
watch for the full list of picks for 2026!
25 books
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Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Dec 8 2025
💭 what’s your favorite 2025 book?
💭 what’s your favorite 2025 book?
drum roll please … welcome to the THIRD annual StarrySteph Book Awards! no questions at this time!
12 books
1
Basement Books\ \ Kaitlyn\ \ • Nov 23 2025
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[Welcome to my new Syllabus Series. I was a high school English teacher for over five years (before I burned out and changed careers) and nothing gives me more joy than to help others learn something new. As someone who also reads a large amount of non-fiction, I wanted to create a new series where I pick a singular topic that you might want to learn more about. The first edition will be all about Palestine.\ \ First, I’ll take you through books to read through various genres and the order you should read them in to scaffold and layer your learning. But learning isn’t all about reading, so I’ll also share video resources, shorter articles, and give you a list of people to follow on social media in order to stay up to date well beyond today. Finally, learning means nothing without action, so I will also provide you ways that you can do something with what you’re learning.\ \ This isn’t meant to be overwhelming and is laid out in a way that it’s learning you have time for. Therefore, the list isn’t extensive and manageable. Of course, there’s always more learning to be done.\ \ \ \ Books to read\ \ A collection of books read to read. For the best learning experience, try to read the books in this order.\ \ (*note: this section contains affiliate links)\ \
- Non-fiction“Palestine: A Socialist Introduction” edited by Sumaya Award and brian bean\ \ This is a great place to start if you don’t know or understand the history of Palestine. The book is a collection of essays from all different authors exploring various parts of Palestinian history and present. Of course, this book is also written from a socialist lens, but from that it pulls in calls for action as well. Overall, this is a really helpful and easy to understand text that helps you understand historical context.\ \
- Fiction“Minor Detail” by Adania Shibli\ \ Sticking with understanding Palestinian history as well as how that history carries into the present, I recommend reading this incredible piece of fiction next. This is a super short book (144 pages) that is impressive and haunting. It starts in the summer of 1949 during the Nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians from Palestine) and follows a young girl who is captured by Israeli soldiers. Years later in the present, we follow a young woman who finds the girl’s story that is considered a “minor detail” in this history. She becomes obsessed with finding out what happened. Check content warnings before reading this book.\ \
- Poetry\ \ " Rifqa” by Mohammed El-Kurd\ \ This is a collection of poetry that looks at Palestinian history, but also addresses the present. It’s both a deeply emotional eulogy and a call to action for the liberation of Palestine.\ \
- Poetry\ \ “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” by Mosab Abu Toha\ \ This is a really accessible collection of poetry where the author talks about his life living under siege in Gaza. This was published in 2022 and helps paint a picture of what every day life was like for Palestinians. In 2023, Abu Toha was captured and imprisoned by Israeli forces. His newest collection which comes out this November will look at the horror of the last year.\ \
- Non-fiction\
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“The Palestine Laboratory” by Antony Loewenstein\
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This is definitely the most dense book on this which is why it’s at the end of the list. This is an incredible piece of journalism that looks at Israel’s development of occupation-enforcing technologies that they test out in Palestine and then sell to other Western countries to help them enforce their own occupations. It helps showcase the danger of these technologies well beyond Palestine and the dangerous (and deadly) effects it’s had on the rest of the world.\
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Other media to consume\
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- Mixed media\ \ “Not That Complicated” by US Campaign for Palestinian Rights\ \ An incredible resource that plainly lays out history and common misconceptions about Israel’s occupation of Palestine. This provides a general overview of specific topics that makes everything easy to understand while also providing links and videos to learn more about each subject.\ \
- Infographics Visualising Palestine\ \ If you’re more of a visual learner, this is the resource for you. Again, this project breaks down various subjects into interactive infographics that are constantly updated to not only talk about historical facts, but up-to-date information.\ \
- Article“ We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.” by Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa\ \ The deliberate targeting and destruction of hospitals over the past year has been a well-documented war crime through first-hand accounts and videos. This is an example. Written by two doctors from the U.S., this is a primary account on what they witnessed in Gaza.\ \
- Documentary"Investigating war crimes in Gaza” by Al Jazeera\ \ Just published on October 3, Al Jazeera has done an extensive investigation into the war crimes perpetrated by Israel in the last year as well as exposing the individuals behind them. Content warning: graphic images of death and violence.\ \ \ Extra credit \ Since I first wrote this syllabus back in 2024, there have been many new incredible pieces of media published on Palestine and the fight for liberation has continued. If you want to continue learning about Palestine, here are some futher texts for you to read.\ \
- Non-fiction book"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad\ \ If you or someone you know is new to learning about Palestine or is still not understanding the weight of what is happening, I think this is a great book to read. This book grapples with what it means to live in the West and our role in watching a genocide occur before our eyes.\ \
- Non-fiction book" Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal” by Mohammed El-Kurd\ \ After you read El-Kurd’s poetry collection above, pick up his newest book, a denser exploration as to why it is that Palestinians need to prove their humanity to the Western world and who holds the power to shape narratives.\ \
- Report\
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Latest UNRWA report on the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and West Bank\
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A detailed report that outlines the latest data since Israel broke the ceasefire and the effects this has had on health, food scarcity, civilian protection, and aid.\
(photo by Adam Rouhana) Who to follow \
When learning about a subject where up-to-date information is key, it’s important to find people who are experts and on the ground to help keep you informed. Here are a few people and organisations I encourage you to follow:\
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- Lets Talk Palestine broadcast channel on Instagram shares news every single day about what is happening in Palestine (as well as Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen). This is what I use to stay the most up-to-date.\ \
- Bisan Owda: One of the few freelance journalists still in Gaza (Israel has murdered and targeted 175 journalists in the past year). Bisan reports and posts from the ground every single day.\ \
- Hind Khoudary: Another journalist who has been reporting from Gaza.\ \
- Adam Rouhana: a photographer currently living in Gaza.\ \
- Mosab Abu Toha: The same poet mentioned above is also consistently active on Instagram, often posting breaking news stories before news publications.\ \
- Leen (@vivafalastinleen) : This Palestinian-American content creator is consistently posting about what is happening in Palestine and encouraging calls to action.\ \
- Naz (@bdsbabe): Naz is consistently posting updates on the BDS movement and creating guides to BDS-friendly brands (learn more about the BDS movement below)\
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Take action \
Mutual aid Mutual aid is an incredibly effective way to utilize community in order to directly impact those who need our help. One way that we can do this is by donating to families currently in Palestine where food, shelter, hygiene, and access to healthcare are hard to come by (and in some cases impossible). Our help can make these things more accessible.\
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Here are some families that I have been in contact with that I would encourage you to donate to:\
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- Mahmoud, Tamer, and Tala who lost their mother and wife earlier this year. Tamer has Autism and navigating this cruel world is especially hard for him.\ \
- The Tareq family including Amani who is suffering from multiple medical conditions and needs urgent care\ \
- Mohammed’s family including his wife and three kids as they struggle to survive in Khan Younis\ \
- Rozana’s family including her husband and three-year-old son (Ziad) who used to live in Gaza City and now have no home or clean food and water which is making Ziad’s health deteriorate.\ \
\ Here are organizations on the ground to donate to:\ \ - The Sameer Project: Led by Palestinians, the project hosts multiple campaigns to help families across gaza with medical supplies, food, tents, and other necessities. You can also support their Medical Campaign specifically as they work directly with hospitals.\ \ - North Water Aid: Salah Shabat is raising funds to provide displaced families in the north of Gaza with clean drinking water.\ \ - Amal for Palestine: Organization thats been providing meals in the north of Gaza since 2021.\ \ - Gaza Soup Kitchen: Family-run organization that helps provide meals to displaced families.\ \ - Sulala Animal Rescue: Father and son team who help rescue and rehabilitate stray animals.\ \ \ \ Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions If you’re not financially able to support, here’s a great way to make a huge impact (in my opinion, this is what will make the most impact systemically). The BDS movement is a movement to pressure companies, organisations, and governments that support Israel by withholding money. The ask is that you do not spend money at these organisations and/or pressure organisations. This type of organizing has been proven to be effective in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. To double-check that you’re not supporting companies who support genocide, I highly recommend downloading the Boycat app.\ \ Pressure politicians If you live in a country that is currently funding Israel and/or supporting them through complicity or silence, it’s pertinent that we continue to pressure them. If you live in the United States, you can use 5calls.org to get started (note: not all the information in the script is up-to-date), but could be a good template.\ \ Protest If you are able, protesting helps make our voices louder. It’s a tool meant to disrupt and force those in charge to take action. Here’s the most up-to-date list of world-wide protests that I was able to find.\ \ Educate Use whatever platform you have (whether that be on social media or in-person) to speak up about Palestine and continue to educate others. Share resources, share stories, share news. The more we can make people not turn away from Palestine, the more we can collectively come together to enact change. We need to make sure that everyone in the world doesn’t have the excuse that they didn’t know. We are all complicit.\ \
- *\ \ As I mentioned earlier, learning is an ongoing practice. If you would like more resources, don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you have any resources to add to this list, please add them to the comments below.](https://basementbooks.binderybooks.com/item/UHWce0QZX9fFJTyy604i/)
7 books
2-Spirit Bookshelf\ \ (@Indigenousbookshelf)\ \ • Nov 19 2025
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Indigenous bookstagram tour! I haven’t gone to bed yet so it’s technically still my day right? 🙃
Here are the books that started this account, the books I am reading now, and the ones I hope to start soon!!
What are y’all reading for Native American heritage month???? Who is reading Indigenous all year long??????
Check out my bindery for more bookish things 2spiritbookshelf.binderybooks.com 😊
25 books
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Boundless Press\ \ Jananie\ \ • Nov 19 2025
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Boundless Book Club Picks 2026: January, February, March, April
open to find out what the picks are!
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Celestial\ \ Steph\ \ • Oct 3 2025
🇵🇸 what’s your favorite book you’ve read by a Palestinian author?
🇵🇸 what’s your favorite book you’ve read by a Palestinian author?
3 books
7
2-Spirit Bookshelf\ \ (@Indigenousbookshelf)\ \ • Sep 20 2025
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45 books I will never get over🤪 guys, I REALLY TRIED to make this list only 10 books and I struggled for days shaving it down to 45 🙃 Do y’all reread your fav books??? (If so, do you ever change your mind about them?)
It’s been ages since I read something of these so I’m a lil unsure about posting them but I just still think about how much they impacted me
Also, if you didn’t see, I’m on bindery and bookshop!!! Please check it out! Link in bio 2spiritbookshelf@bindery.com
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Boundless Press\ \ Jananie\ \ • Apr 15 2025
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POV: the books are less than $10 so you have to buy them all 😭 a book haul
I should not be allowed near a bookstore.
15 books
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Fairly Queer Books\ \ Fareeha\ \ • Dec 29 2024
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I’m very excited for all of these books (I may get like one more pre-order in before the end of the year and then the ban is on!)
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