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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/mohammed-el-kurd-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
Mohammed's Twitter: https://twitter.com/m7mdkurd
Mohammed's Instagram: https://instagram.com/mohammedelkurd
Mohammed's Website: https://mohammedelkurd.com
Rifqa (book): https://amzn.to/3Oqippl
Books Mentioned:
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (book): https://amzn.to/3K7ZtsE

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:18 - Palestine
26:47 - Hate
40:18 - Antisemitism
48:14 - Peace in the Middle East
55:11 - West Bank
1:05:20 - Hamas
1:15:08 - Two-state solution
1:30:58 - Jerusalem
1:37:41 - Role of the US
1:39:31 - Ghassan Kanafani
1:50:16 - 2024 Elections
1:51:25 - Poetry
2:00:45 - Language
2:09:14 - Hope

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Regardless of whatever was written in these books that were written thousands and thousands of years ago, the fact of the matter is no 1 has a right to go on slaughtering people, removing them from their homes, and then continuing to live in their homes, continuing to drink coffee on their balconies decades and decades later with no shame, with no introspection, with no reflection.

No 1 has the right to keep an entire population of people in a cage, which is what's happening to people in the West Bank who have no freedom of movement, which is what's happening in Gaza, which is blockaded through water, air, and land, and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the UN.

The following is a conversation with Mohamed Elkard, a world-renowned Palestinian poet, writer, journalist, and an influential voice speaking out and fighting for the Palestinian cause.

He provides a very different perspective on Israel and Palestine than my previous 2 episodes with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari.

I hope his story and his words add to your understanding of this part of the world as it did to mine.

I will continue to have difficult long-form conversations such as these, always with empathy and humility, but with backbone.

And please allow me to briefly comment about criticisms I receive of who I am as an interviewer and a human being.

I am not afraid to travel anywhere or challenge anyone face to face, even if it puts my life in danger.

But I'm also not afraid to be vulnerable, to truly listen, to empathize, to walk a mile in the well-worn shoes of those very different from me.

It's this latter task, not the formal 1, that is truly the most challenging, in conversations and in life.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Mohamed El Kurd.

Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up.

Sheikh Jarrah is, you know, in a way a typical neighborhood despite the absurd reality that surrounds it.

It's a typical neighborhood in terms of Palestinian neighborhoods.

It's 1 that is threatened with colonialism, with settler expansion, and with forced expulsion.

And it has been that way since the early 70s.

My family, like all of the other families in Sheikh Jarrah, were expelled from their homes in the Nakba in 1948, and they were forced out by the Haganah and other Hazainah parallel militaries that later formed the Israeli military.

And my grandmother moved from city to city and she ended up in Sheikh Jarrah in 1956.

Sheikh Jarrah was established as a refugee housing unit by the United Nations and by the Jordanian government which had control over that part of Jerusalem at the time.

And then people lived there harmoniously.

They were all from different parts of Palestine.

And they managed to rebuild their lives after the first expulsion.

And then in the 70s, you had settler organizations, many of whom were registered here in New York and in the United States, claiming our houses and our lands as their own by divine decree.

And because, obviously, because the judges are Israeli and the laws were written by Israeli settlers and the whole judiciary was established atop the rubble of our homes and villages.

The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli documents, which we argue are falsifies and fabricated, and they would take them at face value without authentication, and they refused to look at our documents.

They refused to look at the documents from the Jordanian government, the documents from the UN, the documents from the Ottoman archives.

So you already have this kind of asymmetry in the court that for any person with common sense would lead you to believe that this is not, in fact, a legal battle or a real estate dispute as Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs likes to frame it, but rather a very, very political battle.

1 that is about social engineering, 1 that is about demographics, 1 that is about removing as many Palestinians as possible from occupied Jerusalem.

So we did what all Palestinian families in Jerusalem do when they're faced with this kind of threat and we bought time.

We pleaded and pleaded and appealed the courts and appealed the cases and we got over 50 expulsion orders in 2009.

Rifle wielding settlers, accompanied by police and Israeli military came over and shoved our neighbors outside of their home around 5 a.m., it's like, it was the most brutal, violent thing I'd seen as a child at the time, and I didn't realize that my turn was coming, my turn was next.

They threw them out in the middle of the night with sound bombs and rubber bullets, and they had to live in tents on the street for many, many months and even lived in our front yards for a few months and lived in their cars.

Can you link on that process, 2009, you said 50 expulsion orders, what was happening?

Between the 70s and 2009, there had been many, dozens of expulsions orders against us and against many other families in the neighborhood.

28 other families, 28 families in total, actually.

And in 2008, 2009, the first wave of expulsions finally happened.

It actually began with Umm Kamal al-Kurd, we're not related, but we live on the same street in the same neighborhood.

Her husband, an elderly man also named Mohammad Al-Kurd was pronounced dead on the spot.

The Israeli soldiers pulled him out of his home while he was urinating and threw him into the streets and he died.

A few months later, the Ghawi and the Hanun families, which are kind of not a clan, but you know, in Palestine, you have sometimes a building that contains multiple brothers and their wives, each have little apartments.

So the Ghawar and Hanun families, about 35 people were thrown out in the middle of the street right across from us.

And then by the end of 2009, I had come home from school to find all of my furniture scattered across the length of the street, and I saw the settlers, many of whom had American accents, living in our house.

And their justification for this, their reasoning for this is, you know, divine decree.

This is so and so, as if God is some kind of real estate agent.

So they took over half of our home, and we continued to be in courts for the following decade.

This was, I was still a child and I had broken English, and I was talking to all of these diplomats and all of these journalists who would, you know, subjugate me to their, subject me to their, you know, racism and biases and so on and so forth.

And I had to prove my humanity time and time again and I had to do all of this, all with broken English.

And we were lucky even if we got a quote in the article written about us by the Times or so on and so forth.

Move forward to 2020, I was in New York City studying a master's degree, getting a master's degree and My father calls me and he tells me, you know, we have yet another expulsion order and we decided to launch a campaign.

It was quite ambitious at the time, but the whole objective of the campaign was to demystify what is happening, right?

Because it's reported on in the news, it's reported on around the world as this real estate dispute, as these evictions, which was not really what's happening.

Evictions do not entail a foreign army in an occupied territory forcibly removing you out of your home.

So I came home from New York and we launched a campaign which turned into a global success.

And I believe it was a global success because finally the images on the screen matched the rhetoric that was being said.

It wasn't so confusing or complicated anymore.

All of this asymmetry was pronounced and articulated in a way that any viewer, be it in Alabama, be it in New York, be it in Egypt, was able to understand the asymmetry of the judicial system and the agenda of colonialism that was taking place here.

And due to immense international and diplomatic pressure from all over the world, even the United States, the Israeli Supreme Court was forced to cancel all of the eviction orders in Sheikh Jarrah until further notice.

This, I consider, was a small victory because Obviously we are still at risk of losing our homes once they decide to do the land registry, which we can get into a little bit later if you'd like.

But nonetheless, it was something that we haven't seen before.

And the fact that the Supreme Court canceled all of these dozens and dozens of fast eviction orders, it set a precedent, and it also proved that this was a political battle, not a legal 1.

So let's just add a little more detail to the people who are not familiar with the story, with the region, with the evictions, with the courts.

So first of all, it shakes your eyes in East Jerusalem, maybe you can say what is Jerusalem, where is it located, what are we talking about in terms of regionally, and second, what kind of people that live there, so if you could talk about the Palestinian people.

And we should also make clear that these evictions is literally people living in homes and their homes are taken away from them.

I suppose technically it's legal evictions, but you're saying that there's a asymmetry of power in the courts where the legal is not so much legal, but is politically and maybe even religiously based?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest, the most important context here is that oftentimes Americans think that Israel and Palestine are some kind of 2 neighboring countries that live next to each other and they are at war.

But the fact of the matter is, Palestinian cities exist all over the country and it's just 1 country, it's just 1 infrastructure and Israel is literally on top of Palestine.

It was established on top of our villages in the late 40s.

Now, according to international law, the eastern part of Jerusalem is under occupation.

So Israeli presence and jurisdiction over the area is completely illegitimate.

They say the evictions are legal because the settlers write their laws, so obviously they're going to allow settlements to expand, but according to international law, according to even US policy, Israel occupies the eastern part of Jerusalem.

We shouldn't even be going to their courts in the first place, but we have no other option.

We're talking about Jaljarah, we're talking about Jerusalem, we're talking about generations and generations and generations of people who have lived there for the longest time who now, even though, for example, me, I don't have a citizenship.

I have a blue ID card, even though my grandmother and my grandfather were born in Jerusalem, their grandparents were born in Jerusalem.

Even though we've lived there for generations, but Palestinians in Jerusalem, we are not citizens, we're just mere residents.

Same thing with residents of the occupied Syrian Golan.

They are not citizens, they are just residents in their own hometowns.

This is an important piece, But all of this gets convoluted and lost in translation.

And I think I would argue it's a lot more, a lot of the time it's dubious, it's malicious.

The fact that these little pieces of context that frame the entire story get lost.

You know, I'll talk to you about something else.

Just 10 minutes across from my neighborhood, there's another neighborhood called Silwan.

And the people in Silwan are also threatened with expulsion, but not through evictions, but through home demolitions.

And if you look at American media or Israeli state media, you would read the headlines, you know, Palestinians living in homes built illegally are gonna face, you know, their homes are gonna be torn apart.

What these headlines don't tell you, and even sometimes, most of the time, the substance doesn't tell you, that Palestinians seldom ever get building permit applications.

In fact, recently a spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed that it was 95% of building permits applications submitted by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank are rejected by the Israeli authorities.

And to make this even more absurd, the guy, the councilman who was responsible for rejecting and accepting building permit applications.

His name is Yonatan Yusuf and he's an activist in the settler movement and he's a Jerusalem council member.

And he, last week, following the expulsion of a Sublaban family in the Old City of Jerusalem, he posted to his official Facebook account, Nakba Now, demanding a second Nakba, promising another Nakba.

He has chanted with a megaphone just a few months ago, walking down the street in my neighborhood, chanting, we want Nakba now.

This is a man who has vandalized our murals who has screamed Islamophobic slurs.

This is literally a man in the government making these decisions, right?

And this is similar to, you know, Masaf Riatta in the South Hebron Hills.

For those who don't know, it's a place in the occupied West Bank where Bedouin and cave dweller Palestinians have lived for generations, they have cultivated the land.

And recently they were expelled from their homes, over a thousand people were expelled from their remote small villages.

Again, if you're reading American media, they would say, it would say Palestinians living in firing zones were removed because they're living in a military zone.

What these media reports will not tell you that in the 80s the Israeli government purposefully classified many lands in the occupied West Bank as firing zones, as off-limit military zones for the sole purpose of expelling the residents.

And this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.

This is declassified information that was released from the Israeli state archive that was later reported on by her audits.

Also these reports will not tell you that the judge who rules on whether these people continue to live in their homes or not is himself a settler in the West Bank.

I'm not even talking about, you know, a loose definition of a settler, but according to international law, this is a settler living illegally in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.

This is the judiciary that we deal with, which is hilarious considering how it's being reported on in American media recently as some kind of beacon of progress and democracy that the new government is trying to undermine.

So there's no representation in the courts for the Palestinian people?

I mean, we have lawyers, but no, there's no, in fact, there is for Palestinians with Israeli citizenships, for example, There's over 60 laws that specifically and explicitly discriminate against them.

So again, it's technically legal, the evictions and the demolitions.

Yeah, so was Jim Crow was legal also, you know.

When something is legal, it can also still be wrong.

History has shown us time and time again that legality does not necessarily mean morality.

And the law, you know, is a, The law is a bloodbath in many ways.

It has been used and abused to facilitate the most horrendous atrocities.

And in the case of the Palestinians, the law has served to facilitate and bureaucratize our ethnic cleansing.

Do you think there's people, judges, and just people in power in the judiciary that have hate for the Palestinian people?

I mean, I'm not really, I mean, the easy, simplistic answer is yes, but I don't really care about the contents of their hearts, what I care about the policy they enact, right?

The laws they write and enact are hateful.

Demolishing a person's home, so you can have somebody from Long Island, New York, who is fleeing fraud charges, this is the case in my house, live in their front yard, that's hateful.

Palestinians and people who are pro-Palestine and just people who want to make a difference in how this cause is represented, We often run for the first opportunity to cite an Israeli being hateful.

You know, the last Israeli prime minister said that he has killed many Arabs and that he has no qualms with it.

Netanyahu has said a slew of racist, hateful things.

Jabotinsky, the pioneer of Zionism, Herzl, 1 of the pioneers of Zionism, all have said horrible, hateful things.

We also cannot wait to cite a confession from a former Israeli soldier whose guilty conscience is keeping them, you know, up at night.

And we use all of these, you know, confessions or slip ups as evidence to prove that this is a racist country that is enacting racist acts, but we don't need this because the material proof is on the ground.

You see it in the policies that are enacted.

You see it in how the country, how this regime has behaved for the past 75 years.

I don't need, you know, confessions from the likes of Netanyahu to understand that his heart is full of hate.

So if you could return to 1948 and describe something that you've mentioned, the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic.

What was this displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in

Well, you know, like May 15th, 1948 is commemorated every year as the anniversary of the Nakba, but I would even argue anything.

This is like a very popular idea is that the Nakba did not begin or end in 1948.

The 48 was rather a crystallization of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.

And what happened was that many Zionist paramilitaries that again today merged and made the Israeli army, which calls itself the Israeli Defense Forces, even though they're literally always aggressor, committed atrocities and massacres and, you know, they destroyed over 500 villages, they killed over 15, 000 people, they forced a very large portion, a majority of the Palestinian population to flee their homes.

And this was, you know, the near total destruction of Palestinian society that continues on to this day.

We refer to it as the ongoing Nakba and you see it in Sheikh Jarrah, you see it in Silwan, you see it in Heron and all of these people losing their homes.

And in many cases, time and time again, you know, I grew up and my grandmother told me the stories about the Nakba.

She told me stories about her neighbors who were running away in a panic and they had mistaken a pillow for their offspring and they just took it with them and they realized later that they forgot their child and they came back for it.

Many, many people who were separated from their, my grandmother herself, she lost her husband for a few months, for 9 months.

You know, she told me all of these stories and she wasn't just reminiscing about them.

She was, you know, letting me know that this is still happening.

And I didn't need to grow up that old to see it happening in my own front yard to see that expulsion happen in the same fashion she's talked about it.

But you know now they have replaced their artillery with the judiciary.

They have replaced the slashing of the pregnant women's bellies in the Dariusin massacre with laws that say, you're not legally allowed to be here.

We're going to kick you out of your home.

And it's happening and it has happened in broad daylight.

1 piece of context for the listener who is not familiar with the Nakba is the Balfour Declaration, which was a promise, quote unquote promise, made by the British to the Zionist movement in 1917, committing to the establishment, I'm quoting, I think, word for word, committing to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, as if Palestine was, you know, the British to give away.

And there was this whole movement that called for colonization of Palestine.

And there were different there were different schools of thought in Zionism.

People like Zangwal said that this was a country without a people.

And Palestinians who have existed there, who have cultivated the lands, who have diverse cultural and religious and political practices, they were completely erased.

And other people like Jabotinsky were a lot more explicit and a lot more honest and said that we need to fight the Palestinians because they love their land much like the Red Indians love their lands.

And he had a paper called the Iron Wall colonization of Palestine must go forward.

And all of these schools of thoughts were then shopping around for imperialist support for their cause.

They tried to get support from the Ottoman Empire.

They tried to get support from Germany, and this is in the 1800s, and then they got support from the United Kingdom.

A great book to recommend is The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi.

That traces the Zionist movement, oftentimes in the Zionist's own words.

And so today what we're seeing is a continuation.

And people like Jabotinsky, who are profoundly and explicitly racist, who have called for genocide, who have called the Palestinians barbaric, who have said and done racist things.

You know, Jabotinsky also was like the founder of the Ergun, 1 of the other militias that later merged to become the Israeli army, which was responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, which was responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel.

This is a person who still celebrated in Israeli society.

There are still streets named after him and Netanyahu just 2 weeks ago, if I'm not mistaken, honored him in a public celebration.

So this is Zionism, it's not even through my own words.

What do you say to people that describe Israel as having a historical right to the land.

So if you stretch not across decades, but across centuries into the past.

It's a distraction because you don't think of any state as having rights, but there is this exceptionalism to the Israeli regime, where it has a right to defend itself, and it has a right to the land, and it has a right to shoot 14 year old boys because it thought they had a knife in their pockets.

You know, a lot of the time people cite the Torah and cite religious books, and, you know, sometimes Zionists will even say like, read the Quran and blah, blah, blah.

You know, regardless of whatever was written in these books that were written thousands and thousands of years ago, the fact of the matter is no 1 has a right to go on slaughtering people, removing them from their homes, and then continuing to live in their homes, continuing to drink coffee on their balconies decades and decades later with no shame, with no introspection, with no reflection.

Do you have hate in your heart for Israel?

As 1 human being to another, you're describing quite brilliantly that the contents of people's hearts don't matter as much as the policies and the contents of the courts and the laws and what actually is going on on the streets in terms of actions.

I feel like at the core of the situation here is hate, or maybe inability for some group of humans to see the humanity in another group of humans.

And so it's important here to talk about the contents of hearts.

If we were to think about the long term future of this.

Yeah, I mean, I would be concerned, actually, if I didn't feel some kind of way in my heart.

Because the people who revolt, the people who are angry, the people who refuse to live under occupation know that they deserve better.

People start revolutions not because of some kind of cultural phenomenon, not because of some kind of desire, but because they cannot breathe.

Because They cannot breathe, they cannot live.

They are living under excruciating circumstances.

You know, Palestinians, you know, I don't know, I don't know how many Palestinians have interacted with, but we are some of the most wonderful people.

I mean, not all of us, I think some of us are, you know, insufferable, but most of us, you know, most of us, you know, we're very hospitable.

We're very hospitable, even like in the early correspondence between the mayor of Jerusalem and Herzl, who wrote the Jewish state, you know, the generosity through which the Palestinian mayor was talking to Herzl, who was plotting to take over his land, is impressive and at the same time, heart-wrenching.

But I personally think there is a lot of dignity in negating your oppressor.

And I think it would be ridiculous today If we look back at Jim Crow, for example, and we ask the person who's lived under Jim Crow, if they have hate in their heart for Jim Crow, as if that's not the absolutely logical and natural sentiment to feel.

In Rivka, you wrote, my father told me, anger is a luxury we cannot afford.

Be composed, calm, still, laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk, answer them, educate them.

So let me linger on this, is there anger in there, in your heart?

I think our campaign to defend our homes was particularly successful because it was honest to what was happening on the ground, because it refused to follow the strategy that we have used in our advocacy before, where we shrink ourselves and we turn the other cheek and we try to convince American lawmakers and American diplomats and journalists of our humanity because we wait for their approval.

You know, I was 14 years old when I first flew to Congress to speak to Congress people and to speak at the European Parliament.

And at the time I thought, wow, I must be such a brilliant 14 year old for them to have me here.

And, you know, looking back, I didn't know what I was talking about.

I had horrendously broken English and I didn't have any talking points.

And I came to realize that the reason why we send our kids with their PowerPoints to the Hill is because of the racism and the hatred that lingers inside the hearts of American politicians who refuse to sit on the table with Palestinian adults as equals.

And so we resort to sending our kids who will not threaten and who will not trigger the biases they have against Muslims and Arab people, which Palestinians, even though we're not all Muslim, are racialized as Muslim.

And this is why we emphasize the deaths of women and children, as though the deaths of our men does not count or does not matter.

All of these things, I think the new generation of Palestinians is rebelling against.

I think words like, you know, I think it's loaded.

It's loaded language, anger and angry and hate and so on and so forth, because it mischaracterizes people and it kind of delegitimizes them a little bit.

You know, I think the real anger is the bulldozer bulldozing through my house.

I think the real anger is the 18 year old soldier who refuses to see me as a human being and strip searches me every chance they get.

And I'm quite honestly proud of you know our unabashedness and our refusal to bow our heads or bury our heads in the sand.

So anger, whatever it is, is a fuel for action.

Absolutely, and it has been throughout history.

In the practical aspects of the courts and the evictions and the demolitions, And you mentioned something, divine decree.

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Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine | Lex Fridman Podcast #391