Edanur’s Reviews > Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal > Status Update

He's arguing that Palestinians are instructed to be careful in how they talk about the settler colonial state and to separate Zionists and Jews. The critique is that this demand becomes even more important than the oppression Palestinians are facing. They are expected to prioritize someone elses well-being — their own oppressors', their anger and reality is being policed.

Palestinian grief is only legible if it is forgiving and reassuring to those in power. The people’s humanity is recognized through a refusal to hate. That expectation is obscene. Hate is valid in the face of such violence, and insisting on forgiveness from the bereaved is another form of dispossession as it strips them of emotional sovereignty. "Moral clarity" more like cruelty dressed up as humanism.

He reflects on his own impulse to search for additional brutality in Omar Asad’s death, even though the violence was already undeniable, and how deeply internalized colonial logics make Palestinian lives seem grievable only when their suffering is extreme and fully proven. A personal reckoning and critique of how love and solidarity can unintentionally reproduce the structures that normalize Palestinian death