On March 2, 2025, the film No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary. In response to this award ceremony, an excerpt from Mohammed El-Kurd’s book Perfect Victims was widely shared on social media this week:
“(…) What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.”
El-Kurd describes the fetishization of Palestinian existence for the satisfaction of a Western audience. The “titillating reconciliation” and the “forbidden conversation” he refers to are mirrored in the structures of our university. The supposed coexistence of the two parties is primarily represented through the hegemonic power of pro-Israel administrative and academic structures.
And the Palestinian existence? It is present through the submissiveness of the working class—the service labor of Palestinian gastronomy, which in our spaces represents a fetishized reconciliation. Excluded from structures of power, the subaltern moves through the hallways of this institution—providing us with drinks and appetizers. Only in this way her existence in this place is permitted and desired.
Fanus is a Political Scientist focusing on the colonially of data. She studies Data Science for Public Policy at the Hertie School.
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