Inside the Narrative War: Mohammed el-Kurd’s “Plea Against Pleas”
Mohammed el-Kurd, 26, was born and raised in occupied East Jerusalem. In 2009, an Israeli court ordered the seizure of half his family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah, handing it over to American Jewish settlers. Since then, el-Kurd has devoted himself to sharing the brutal realities of life under Zionist occupation and warning international audiences of Israel's systemic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. At just 11 years old, he appeared in a documentary recounting how settlers stormed his home, assaulted his grandmother, and threw out his family’s furniture — adding yet another chapter to the neighborhood’s long history of violent dispossession. At 14, he penned an open letter to then-President Barack Obama, writing: “Mr. President, we want our houses back. And our pre-1948 land.”
When an Israeli court approved the decision to expel six Palestinian families, including his own, from Sheikh Jarrah in May 2021, el-Kurd paused his graduate studies and returned home. His documentation of Israeli soldiers stepping on Palestinian men’s necks and of stolen Palestinian homes went viral, forcing a post-George Floyd America to confront exactly what its tax dollars were funding.
During the “Save Sheikh Jarrah” movement, el-Kurd and his twin sister Muna became internationally recognized figures of Palestinian resistance. Later that year, he published his debut poetry collection, “Rifqa” (Haymarket Books), dedicated to his grandmother.
In February 2025, el-Kurd released his second book, “Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal.” Each chapter dismantles tactics used in Zionist propaganda that obscure its ultimate goal: genocide. For el-Kurd, any meaningful conversation about Palestine must start with abolishing Zionism itself. He critiques activists, artists, intellectuals, and even Edward Said, arguing that by engaging in a “politics of appeal,” they have unintentionally upheld the social and institutional structures responsible for Palestinian suffering.
Throughout the book, el-Kurd seamlessly transitions between poetry and prose, sometimes switching from first to third person to disrupt prevailing narratives (“Hamas uses women and children as human shields”; “‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for genocide”). His central critique revolves around the illusion of the “perfect victim”: Palestinians are expected to conform to unrealistic standards of civility and nonviolence to earn international sympathy. Such expectations, he argues, erase Palestinian anger, absolve the perpetrators of violence, namely US-backed Zionism, and reduce the Palestinian people to pitiful victims rather than complex humans struggling against a settler-colonial state seeking to erase them.
An aerial view of Jerusalem captures the evolving cityscape of the early 20th century, featuring the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the historic American Colony. Jerusalem, Palestine. 1931. (Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
El-Kurd has become well-known partly because he refuses to engage with Zionism’s most vocal supporters, from legacy media personalities to US politicians like John Fetterman. His rejection of respectability politics when discussing Palestinians’ right to resist, whether in media interviews or university halls, and his refusal to audition for the role of “perfect victim” have contributed to his growing prominence as a key figure in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. He contends that the only viable strategy to achieve Palestinian dignity and freedom is to “raise the ceiling of what is permissible” when a people must resist in order to live.
With incisive analysis and moments of candid humor (“I occasionally get invited onto CNN — well, once; I never seem to get invited onto the same channel twice”), el-Kurd invites readers into his living room — a majlis where visitors, including himself, are comfortable admitting their mistakes and eager to learn from them. The readers, el-Kurd’s esteemed guests, unclench their jaws, release their tongues, and recenter what is truly at stake: liberation.
The Public Source spoke with el-Kurd about his book, his refusal to perform civility to earn sympathy, and his growing prominence in the battle over the narrative around Palestinian resistance. This interview was conducted on March 4, 2025, and was slightly edited for clarity and style.
In the author’s note, you mention that writing feels “shamefully insufficient in the face of 2,000lb bombs.” What is the intended function of this work? Is it persuasion, preservation, documentation, or something else?
That’s a really good question. You know, “Perfect Victims,” in essence, is a plea against pleas, a book that critiques persuasion, which is what makes it a persuasive book. The book chooses to use dignity as the framework of persuasion, or at least it attempts to use dignity as the framework. There are a lot of ideological debates that can be had about the role of literature, or the role of writing, and why I write or why you write. But beyond all of these abstract ideas, what anchors me most is the belief that this is an obligation.
This is for the historical record, and it stems from the understanding that the war we’re in is, in fact, and fundamentally, a narrative war. There is a side that is far more equipped militarily and backed, in terms of Western and global support — but this is also a war of consciousness. So, this is the role of unabashed, unapologetic literature.
This is similar to our work at The Public Source, I’d say, in creating a historical record, approaching things that are happening in Lebanon through a critical lens, and trying to preserve as many documents and archives as we can, while we still have them. Another key theme in the book is your critique of the “politics of appeal,” which seeks validation from Western audiences. With that in mind, who is the intended audience of “Perfect Victims”? Who do you hope will engage with this book?
Well, I should say that I hope everybody reads the book. But, honestly, it’s for people who are just getting into the Palestinian cause or the movement, and are eager to learn more while also at risk of falling into discursive traps that may hinder their advocacy. But it’s also for people who have been in the movement for many, many years; people who have worked, sacrificed, and faced so many challenges for the movement, but, to a certain degree, don’t realize that times have changed and the circumstances have shifted.
It’s a book of questions that I want people to work through; a book of questions that I’m working through, myself, on how to be a more dignified person.
It’s also for everybody interested in logic, and anybody interested in debate and power dynamics. It’s a book of inquiry. A lot of people were calling this a manifesto, which is… nice. But I think it’s a book of questions that I want people to work through; a book of questions that I’m working through, myself, on how to be a more dignified person.
Why do you think people are calling it a manifesto? What do you think motivates this characterization?
I do really appreciate people who are calling this a manifesto, and the heft they’ve assigned it, and, by extension, assigned me. I don’t want to seem like I’m disrespectful in that regard or unappreciative of people placing importance on me. But I think it’s best to approach this book, like everything else in the world, with a critical lens. Read it critically, think about it critically; it’s a piece of criticism and should be criticized as such. We are in a culture, in this current moment, that is so hostile to criticism, and as a result, so much of what we produce is hostile to nuance, and we now have this extreme black-and-white culture. You can’t tackle things in a complicated manner, which is what I tried to do here.
What’s interesting is that, in the book, you do say that there are black-and-white matters, and we should leave it at that.
Zionism is the one thing — everything can be up for debate, but the one thing is that anti-Zionism is the required position, abolishing Zionism is the required position. It is one of the few things that is clearly black-and-white, because as bombs fall on Gaza, and as they were falling on Beirut and in southern Lebanon, there were then so many conversations about “what does Zionism mean,” who gets to define it, and can it be redeemed? I reject that completely.
In the chapter “Miraculous Epiphanies,” which is now having a moment thanks to the Oscar win of “No Other Land,” you talk about the commodification, and co-opting, of the Palestinian movement. You also recognize your own participation in this, and argue that awards and accolades on an international stage will not bring about liberation.
Palestinians have been documenting and sharing stories of their oppression for decades, the question here is what comes next? How do we move beyond attempts to “humanize” the Palestinians? How do we move beyond small publicity wins?
The task is how do you subvert and how do you circumvent this mass stage to talk about the collective, to legitimize your people’s resistance, and to subvert the main aim of these stages. That is the challenge, in my opinion, and that is what people have been having the hardest time with.
The Palestinian cause, in my opinion, is not unique in the way that activists, activism, misery, and atrocity can be commodified. We’ve seen this with the Black struggle, we’ve seen it with the “Future is Female” t-shirts, we’ve seen this in different contexts, and, unfortunately, we live in a capitalist world and people are driven by capitalist interests. They are also so enamored by capitalist ceremonies, be it the Oscars or the Time 100 — I was actually on the Time 100 list once. People have somehow understood these ceremonial or symbolic wins as indicative of a shift towards progress. Whether we want to go into that debate or consider it a shift towards progress is something else entirely, and it depends on how much heft you assign to the Academy, Time magazine, or cultural production. But we’ve been doing cultural production for 100 years, and not only have we been pursuing cultural or artistic endeavors, we’ve also had our limbs — our severed limbs — broadcast on television screens, and there comes a point when you ask yourself, and then what? We’ve raised awareness. Then what? What is the point? [note:1]
I think that this is why there needs to be an implicit understanding that Palestinian art and Palestinian artists should be rooted in the collective. I know that this is unfortunate or unfair; it’s unfair of me to ask a Palestinian rapper to represent the entirety of the cause, but we have no political representation. So, when you’re an artist, and you’re the only Palestinian show on Netflix, or the only Palestinian nominee at the Oscars, by default, you are representing an entire nation, and your voice is not yours. It is unfortunate, it is unfair, but it is what it is. Your politics have to be rooted in the collective, otherwise you abandon the people.
I don’t want to completely reject these big world stages, and I’m not just talking about the Oscars. I have gone on mainstream television to speak multiple times, but the task is how do you subvert and how do you circumvent this mass stage to talk about the collective, to legitimize your people’s resistance, and to subvert the main aim of these stages. That is the challenge, in my opinion, and that is what people have been having the hardest time with.
You talk about subverting or diminishing the heft of these accolades and international stages. But for many Palestinians, these are the spaces where artistic output is rewarded, even if through capitalist means. What effective strategies do you propose for people who do need those international stages, who have no choice but to use them? You said yourself you’ve been on those stages before.
First and foremost, you have to understand the difference between a political or nationalist project and a vanity project. Again, you have to root yourself in the collective, you have to seek counsel. A lot of artists are not activists, and it’s not their fault. We can’t expect everybody to be an activist or politically savvy, or have an interest in political sciences, and have a profound understanding of Palestinian history and the Zionist movement.
Artwork by Mohammad al-Muzayyan, painted in 1983. Poster issued by the General Union of Palestinian Plastic Artists (GUPPA) in 1984. (Photo Courtesy of the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive)
But when you are an artist who doesn’t have any of those things and you find yourself on the international stage, you should seek this education — it requires education — and you become a spokesperson in spite of yourself. This is the conundrum: it’s not our politicians on the stage, it’s our artists, knowledge producers, and, most of the time, people who have suffered great losses. It’s people who have had fifteen members of their family martyred, and thus they get an interview with Sky News. It’s people who have had their homes demolished, and thus they get an interview with CNN. CNN is not really interviewing the human rights activists, they’re interviewing people who have calamities visited upon them, and it’s an unfortunate situation, but this is where political education plays an important role. Intrinsic to lived experience or intimate understanding of a certain topic does not necessarily equate to eloquence when you talk about it. And again, this is not to harp or blame the victim — my main point in the book is that we should not be expecting eloquence from anybody.
For those of us who have access, visibility and privilege, and who are institutionally backed, we shouldn't make demands of people who are too busy putting food on the table. We shouldn't demand they be perfect or speak perfectly or compellingly.
For those of us who have access and who have visibility, who have privilege and who are institutionally backed, maybe they’re tenured at their universities, we should not make demands of people who are too busy putting bread or food on their table. We shouldn’t be making demands of them to be perfect or speak perfectly or compellingly.
You mention distinguishing between a vanity project and a national project. How do you distinguish between the two?
It’s hard to say —which is ironic because I wrote a book and my name is printed on it, and I say “go read my book, please.” But I think that the compass, for me, is that your project always needs to stay rooted in the material world and material analysis. It has to keep the barrel of the gun pointed at colonialism, pointed at Zionism, and pointed at imperialism; not at its subjects, not at its victims. Also, your project needs to talk about the collective. It’s not just you who’s experiencing an atrocity, there is a systemic war waged against the entirety of the Palestinian people and you’re one of them. You use your time in the sun, or whatever it’s called, to focus on the larger issue of settler-colonialism. This is what individualistic recognition is designed to do: they interview you and, by design, they want to make your political problem a humanitarian one, or an individualistic one. It’s your role, in a lot of ways, to flip that script.
If you were to write this book in Arabic, what would you have done differently? What would have been the key differences, and what would you have elaborated on otherwise?
Well, there would be a hyper-focus on normalization efforts in Arab countries. I think the tropes mentioned in the book would also be different. I gave a lot of attention to hiding behind human shields and rockets underneath hospitals, but I would go after [the trope] that Palestinians sold their land or tropes that linger on in the Arab street. There would also be more time given in trying to illustrate — which people have done millions of times in the Arab world — the role of reactionary regimes in the region.
I’ve always known this, but ever since the war expanded to Lebanon, I became keenly aware, it was shockingly obvious, how much sectarianism there is in the Arab world, particularly anti-Shi’a sentiment. But I would still treat the issue at hand as implied, I think this is simultaneously a weakness of the book and a strength of it: I’m telling people that this is my reality, and you’re entering it. You must accept it as is, and if you don’t know it, then you can at least try to learn.
I particularly enjoyed how, in the beginning of the book, you address the reader as though they’re a stranger in your living room. Then, again, at the end of the book, you address your audience, from the “grand stage” to an “intimate living room,” without pretenses, “where we look each other in the eye.” That was an easy way to understand your mission with this book, and how the home is treated in the Arab world as a safe, hospitable place.
That’s really amazing. I didn’t notice that. My friend Abboud also noticed that, and I was amazed to see it. I appreciate that a lot. It’s also just the impulse: we always talk to people in the audience, through our Instagram, as though they’re suspicious of us. You’re trained how to talk to people when you’re assumed guilty before proven innocent, so you defend yourself from people’s stereotypes, and I wanted to reject that. The intention of the book was to write it to a friend; I’m not writing this to an enemy.
In the first chapter, you write “whether on television screens, university campuses, in public office, or the public’s imagination, Palestinians exist in a false — and strict — dichotomy: we are either victims or terrorists.” In your own experience, how has this binary limited the possibilities for Palestinian agency and self-definition?
It’s this mythology that becomes self-mythologizing, where you’re either described as an absolute evil and you rebuke it by responding, “I’m not a terrorist. Look at me turning the other cheek. Look at me, I’ve never hurt a fly.” Or, as a response to the accusation, you glorify resistance to the point of fetishization, and I think there needs to be a happy medium. We need to understand the Palestinian as a complex individual who is capable of fighting back, but is also capable of heartbreak, and capable of defeat, and capable of wanting to surrender, and just as capable of victory. Neither affect takes away from the righteousness of our plight.
Every year, the threshold of what the Israelis can do is raised. You think, “oh, they’ve killed a journalist in a press vest, the world should stop.” No. And after that, they bomb a hospital. You think that the world should stop. No. After that, they burn people in their hospital beds. The threshold keeps increasing for [them], but the ceiling of what is permissible for [Palestinians] gets lowered and lowered, even though you’d think that our right to resist would only become more necessary.
Front page of the The New York War Crimes. Vol. I, Issue No. 4 (January 12, 2024).
Some news outlets will release a short video about the invasion of a Palestinian refugee camp, and layered over the video is insanely sad instrumental music that is louder than the journalist. It becomes almost like a gimmick. The story at hand is already atrocious enough. You do not need to editorialize it. When somebody gets killed at a checkpoint, I don’t understand what the point is in saying it was their birthday or that they were going to somebody’s wedding, like there’s an underlying implication that the crime itself is not enough — it must be editorialized to be enough; as though getting killed by the Israelis at a checkpoint is just not enough, but because they were killed on the way to a wedding, well, that’s egregious.
We need to understand the Palestinian as a complex individual who is capable of fighting back, but is also capable of heartbreak, and capable of defeat, and capable of wanting to surrender, and just as capable of victory. Neither affect takes away from the righteousness of our plight.
Death by army is so normalized that we have to make sure the victim stands out, whether by highlighting profession or citizenship. And I do this myself, too. It’s this thing that happens in your psyche that you have to work against. This is why we need to have an open conversation about these tactics because they can be well-intentioned, but they simply don’t work.
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian coined the term “unchilding,” which you mention in your book, to illustrate how the Zionist regime uses Palestinian children, from conception until death, as tools to build the state of Israel.
Attempts to “humanize” Palestinians and turn them into “perfect victims” seem to be an inadequate response to this ongoing process of decoupling children from their childhood. What do you make of Palestinian children on social media who have had to use their innocence to raise awareness and donations, especially given your status as someone who gained the attention of an international audience at a young age?
I don’t have an issue with children taking a microphone and speaking out and advocating. I have an issue with innocence as a paradigm; that you need to present this “innocent” subject in order to be worthy of human rights and dignity. The facts on the ground, and the material reality, are quite basic: we are a colonized people and the Israelis are our colonizers. Zionism is the colonizing ideology. There is no affect or personality that we must perform to be worthy of liberation. But we distill these traits into children, because they’re considered innocent beings. Who are we to decide if childhood in Palestine or Lebanon is the same thing as childhood in New York City? And if a child engages in a certain act or says something that is not deemed innocent, does that render them not children? Does their innocence save them from Israeli snipers?
The facts on the ground, and the material reality, are quite basic: we are a colonized people and the Israelis are our colonizers. Zionism is the colonizing ideology. There is no affect or personality that we must perform to be worthy of liberation.
These kids are growing up in extraordinary circumstances, so of course they’re maturing beyond their years. If Palestinian children are taking to the internet to express themselves, whatever it is that they’re doing, there’s no issue there — the issue is what we demand of them. We run the risk of commodifying them and turning them into puppets. But if Palestinian kids want to go on Instagram to cook or become the world’s youngest journalist, I think it’s admirable and it’s beautiful.
Do you think these conclusions you’ve reached about childhood, and how innocence is wielded as a tool to silence Palestinian resistance or to justify Israel’s ongoing occupation, come from your own experience as a child?
I came to these conclusions from observing the way Palestinian children were used and abused, and how they are largely targeted — intentionally targeted — by Israeli snipers. But when you’re going through it, it’s the norm: there’s a trajectory. Not only do you lose your home because it’s been demolished, or your family members are shot in the street, but you’re also expected to become the spokesperson about this. I mentioned Ru‘a Rimawi, whose brothers were killed by the Israeli military. Rimawi was a doctor, and all of a sudden she became an activist. It’s bleak.
What do you think that whiplash does to a person, in your experience? It feels quite unique to the Palestinian experience: One day you wake up and you’re tasked with being the voice of something much larger than yourself, something that will outlive you.
I don’t want to project my experience onto others, but I know that it has caused me a tremendous amount of psychological turmoil and challenges. That isn’t to take away that this platform is a privilege, and this visibility I have today is a privilege. I don’t at all reject that, or the idea that, by virtue of my position, I have been able to reach more people, print more books — but it’s a daunting task for anyone.
How do you think that these simplified narratives of “coexistence,” and exclusively blaming the Israeli government for the occupation, obscure the reality of resistance movements as political entities responding to material conditions?
We overlooked something during that Oscar speech. Of course, everybody rightfully pointed out the power balance between the occupied and the occupier, and how one of us benefits from the occupation. But like I said, men like Basel, me, somebody like Ru‘a — we find ourselves in these situations of dispossession, displacement, demolition, targeting, and we’re just propelled into the spotlight. But Israelis actually make their pilgrimage from Tel Aviv to these places, people who are already activists or have an intellectual or political interest in the matter, who often see these experiences as an opportunity for self-discovery or self-improvement — they have the economic and class advantage here, and the racial advantage, to make that trip from Tel Aviv to the South Hebron Hills for months on end.
Israelis making the pilgrimage from Tel Aviv to the South Hebron Hills often see activism as self-discovery or self-improvement —they have the economic, class and racial advantage to do it.
Of course, when you have somebody who became an activist overnight, as opposed to somebody who is an actual, professional activist, they’re going to hijack the narrative. This isn’t a book written by two academics where one is Israeli and the other Palestinian. This is the equivalent of an investigative reporter making a book with the victim of a certain crime. Just because the victim has firsthand experience of the crime doesn’t make him politically savvy enough to talk about it, and doesn’t mean it won’t be susceptible to hijacking by the Israeli counterpart. This is to say nothing about the conversation around normalization or how this “Oscar debacle” absolves the Israeli public and puts the blame on the Israeli government, and to say nothing of the general insufferability and absolute arrogance and entitlement of the Israeli left. These people are building their careers and they just end up hijacking the project.
What do you make of journalists, directors, writers, and activists who have built entire brands and online platforms for “speaking on our behalf”?
I find it repulsive, and this may be a reductive answer, but I do truly think there is a global crisis of humility. If somebody who was anti-BDS decided they were no longer anti-BDS, but a proponent of it, or somebody who was a Zionist became pro-Hezbollah, just introduced words like “perhaps,” “maybe,” or “I could be wrong,” to their vocabulary, we’d be in a much better place.
I know it’s simplistic, but one of the biggest qualms I have with all of this is the entitlement, the arrogance; which is that they’re treating the Middle East like an anthropological site. Sometimes you hear them speak and you don’t think they’re talking about real people.
If you think about some of Palestine’s greatest spokespeople, like Ghassan Kanafani, many were affiliated or had institutional backing. As someone approaching this individually, writing these books on your own — as a poet, activist, and writer — how is it liberating to produce this kind of work? And how do you navigate this world without an organizational pathway?
I appreciate the question. I think it’s ultimately liberating not to be affiliated with a government or institution. I have always rejected this idea of respectability. I don’t really think about legacy, either. I don’t really believe in those things, I think they’re a bit narcissistic. Not to say I’m not, I probably have narcissistic traits, but thinking about legacy and how you’re perceived or consumed by others is narcissistic. The public persona that I put on stage, to me, I wanted that personality to mirror the average student or average Palestinian who doesn’t care about sanitizing their understanding [of the Israeli occupation] or polishing their image because they have other things to worry about. That is how you make room for others.
It’s not about performing something so unattainable; it’s about making mistakes and having flaws. I don’t think I’m even capable of acting polished, but I do truly believe in having a political home. Even when writing this book, I reached out to experts on the topic at hand in each chapter, and I had them read it to provide critical feedback.
I organize with multiple collectives, and although I operate by myself, I try to always seek opinions from many, many different people when I’m writing or when I’m speaking because I understand that when you get to this place of visibility, your voice is no longer yours.
