Liberalism and Genocide

What two new books tell us about the war on the Palestinian people

Book covers for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (left) and Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (right)

Since the beginning of the Gaza Genocide in October 2023, dehumanizing rhetoric against Palestinians has surged, particularly in the metropolises that are most directly implicated in the genocide. In the immediate aftermath of the al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israeli officials began referring to the Palestinians of Gaza as “human animals.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointedly contrasted the “children of darkness” of Palestine to the supposedly superior “children of light” who are perpetrating genocide. Everywhere in the media, we are met with subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — insinuations that Palestinians matter less than other humans, if indeed they are humans at all.

Authors Omar El Akkad (left) and Mohammed El-Kurd (right)

Against this onslaught of dehumanizing rhetoric, well-meaning objectors to genocide often resort to assertions of Palestinians’ humanity, sometimes by separating out the militants from the civilians, or the women and children from the men. Writing as a poet as much as a polemicist in his stunning nonfiction debut Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, Palestinian writer and activist Mohammed El-Kurd alerts us to…