Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
Mohammed El-Kurd, Haymarket Books, £12.99

THERE’s a section titled Concerning Violence in Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial masterwork The Wretched Of The Earth where he writes “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state.”

He goes on to describe the daily violence of the overseer and the police officer, the prison camp guard and the employment market. He explains this violence and the violent reaction it brings from some colonised individuals, usually in the form of criminal activity —assault, theft, even arson. Then he begins to write about the anti-colonial struggle itself, which historically has required violence of its own. 

Fanon was writing from his experience in Algeria and its war against the settler-colonial state installed by the French there. Mohammed El-Kurd is writing from a similar position in Palestine. Consequently, it is this understanding that Mohammed El-Kurd brings to his new text. It is also this understanding that violence is the essence of colonialism that explains the genocidal slaughter by the Israeli military in Palestine more clearly than any other explanation.