I'm going to make this post and kick off this reading group to get it moving. If I try to plan it perfectly, it will never get done, so let's just start and see how it goes, adjusting if needed.
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.
We'll start this week by reading and discussing the following article by the same author, which introduces some of his perspective on anti-zionism as a Palestinian.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
This article is just over 2000 words. Let's discuss in the comments. I'll keep this post up until next weekend, then we can move on to Perfect Victims. Please let me know in the comments if you think any changes are needed to this plan.
Agreed, it's absolutely perverse that Palestinians are expected to always be mindful of the feelings of their aggressors.
I think the problem is that, not only does the preemptive action against misinterpretation often not work, but it takes a conversation about a genocide committed by Jewish people, with the stated reason by them being their Jewishness (which is wrong, but it's what they say), and makes the discourse about Jewish feelings instead of the genocide of Palestinians, including (usually especially) the feelings of those actively committing the genocide. Even if it isn't too much of a burden for westerners to be precise in their speech on this issue, the focus on that shifts focus away from the actual issues at hand, which is absolutely a deliberate strategy employed by "Israelis".
Someone can make a correct point which is not antisemitic at all, be accused of antisemitism, and their whole professional life and career are over, whereas a zionist can say whatever monstrous shit comes to mind and suffer no consequences. This is partly enabled by some "well-meaning" people in the liberal establishment continuously making every single thing that involves a Jewish person, regardless of if that person is the victim of the aggressor, and making it primarily about the Holocaust and antisemitism.