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Anti-zionism reading group Week 2 - Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd - Author's Note and Chapter 1

Link to last week's reading group post, Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish. by Mohammed El-Kurd.

The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I've pasted the summary below.

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.

This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.

Comrades who can't afford to buy the book should definitely not go to annas-archive (dot) org and find a digital copy there, since that would be wrong and we are all law-abiding, copyright-respecting citizens.

This week we will be reading the Author's Note at the beginning of the book, as well as Chapter 1 (the sniper’s hands are clean of blood). Let me know if you think we should increase or decrease the pace. I was thinking 1-2 chapters a week depending on how long they are - they vary from around 10 to 20 pages.

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