Shireen Abu Akleh was a person because she was a person. But to the average American, she was a person because she was a woman, a Christian, an American, a journalist wearing a clearly marked press vest. She even had a dog. When we die, for us to make headlines or for our death to matter, we need to have died spectacular people or have endured a spectacularly violent death. And when I say “spectacularly violent,” I think about somebody like Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old boy who lived across the street from my public high school in Shufat, in occupied Jerusalem, who was kidnapped from in front of his house and burned to death by Israeli settlers.
What does it mean to practice a politics of appeal? For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a terrorist. Not only did this produce a false, flattening dichotomy between terrorists and victims, but the victimhood that emerges within this framework is a perfect victimhood, an ethnocentric requirement for sympathy and solidarity.
We often overemphasize an oppressed person’s nonviolence, noble profession, disabilities; we ring them with accolades. And we do this not only in the Palestinian context, but also with regard to Black American victims of police brutality: “They were artists” or “They were mentally ill” or “They were unarmed.” It’s as if condemning the state for sanctioning the death of a Black person is permissible only if the slain person is a sterile model of American citizenry. One could say the same about sexual assault victims: We must remind the listener that the victim was sober and dressed appropriately.
Here’s another perfect-victim situation: There were these two young men, brothers from Beit Rima, a village close to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. One of them had a high-paying job at the Arab Islamic Bank, and the other was studying computer engineering at Birzeit University. They came from a comfortable family. When the Israeli army was raiding their village, which it illegally occupies, these brothers defended their community with stones and whatnot, and they got shot. They both got killed within minutes of each other. Jawad and Thafer Rimawi were their names.
Since then, their sister Ru’a Rimawi, who had been studying to become a doctor, a pediatrician, has operated in a field where she has virtually no prior experience: campaigning. She has been sharing eulogies and anecdotes about her brothers with her social media followers. “After each social media post,” she “breaks down,” she told me. She wants to keep their memory alive, especially as they exist within a framework where the Palestinians who are killed on a daily basis receive little to no media attention. “But it’s hard,” she told me, “to convince the world that your brothers’ lives mattered.” It’s not enough that they were killed—she must show that they had careers and they weren’t eager to throw themselves at death. “They had ambition and they had dreams, like anybody in the world.”
I have been following Ru’a for the past month as she has been trying to publish an opinion essay about her brothers. We pitched it to The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times. We didn’t try The New York Times. All of them refused or ignored the article. When we talked to a media expert about this, he told us that her article was not getting published because her brothers threw stones at the army. Their victimhood was not a perfect victimhood, so they don’t get a spot in the LA Times.
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