regardless of whatever was written in these books that were
written 1000s and 1000s of years ago, the fact of the matter is,
no one 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, that's no one has the right to do that. No
one 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 to water, air and land and is
deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the
UN. No one has a right to do that.
The following is a conversation with Mohamed El-Kurd, 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 two 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 one, that is truly the most challenging in
conversations and in life. But to me, it is the only way.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast. 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
one 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
Nakbe in 1948. And they were forced out by the Haganah and
other Zionist parallel militaries that later formed
the Israeli military. And they were driven to various cities.
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
you know, 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 laws were written by Israeli settlers
and the whole judiciary was established atop the rubble of
our homes and villages, we had no, you know, we had no real
pull in the courts. The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli
documents, which we argue are falsified and fabricated. And
they would take them at face value without authentication.
And they refuse to look at our documents, they refuse 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 real
estate dispute as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
likes to frame it, but rather a very, very political battle, one
that is about social engineering, one is about
demographics, one 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, 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 5am. 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 look on that process 2009, you said 50 expulsion
orders? What, 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 Amkam El-Kurd, we're not related,
but we live on the same street in the same neighborhood. She
was thrown out of her home. Her husband, an elderly man also
named Mohammed El-Kurd was pronounced dead on the spot. He
had a stroke and died. 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 Ghawiy and
Hanun families, which are you know, 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 Ghawiy 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 this is what God wants. This is the promised
land. 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 continue 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 these journalists who would, you know,
subjugate me to their subject me to their, you know, racism and
biases and, and so on and so forth. And I had to prove my
humanity time and time again. And they had to, you know, do
all of this, all with broken English. And we were lucky even
if we got a, 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 haven't 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 of the judicial system. And you know, 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
past eviction orders, it set a precedent. And it also proved
that this was a political battle, not a legal one.
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, Sheikh Jarrah is
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 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 two
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 one country. It's just
one 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. Its jurisdiction
is illegitimate. We shouldn't even be going to their courts in
the first place, but we have no other option. 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, you know, for example me, I don't have a
citizenship. I'm a resident, a mere resident. 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, 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. So there's another neighborhood
called Silouan. And the people in Silouan are also threatened
with expulsion, but not through evictions, but through home
demolitions. And if you look at American state, American media
or Israeli state media, you would read the headlines, you
know, Palestinians living in homes built illegally, are going
to face, you know, their homes as they're going to 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 95% of building permits applications submitted
by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are
rejected by the Israeli authorities. And to make this
even more absurd, the guy, the councilman who is responsible
for rejecting and accepting building permit applications,
his name is Yonatan Youssef, and he's an activist in the
settler movements, and he's a Jerusalem council member. And
he last week, following the expulsion of a subluban family
in the old city of Jerusalem, he posted to his official Facebook
account NakbaNow, demanding a second Nakba, promising another
Nakba. He has done so on many occasions. He has chanted with a
megaphone just a few months ago, walking down the street in my
neighborhood, chanting, we want NakbaNow. 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, 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 1000 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. And 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 there's no in fact,
there is for Palestinians with Israeli citizenships, for
example, there's over 60 laws that specifically and
explicitly discriminates against them.
So again, it's technically legal, the evictions and the
demolitions.
Yeah, so as Jim Crow was legal also, you know.
When something is legal, it can also still be wrong.
Absolutely. History has shown us time and time again, that
legality does not necessarily mean morality and the law, you
know, is 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 need 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's
fleeing, you know, fraud charges.
This is the case in my house, live in their front yard.
That's hateful.
So I don't need, you know, confirmation.
This is something we see a lot, actually, you know,
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 recent the last Israeli prime minister said
that he has killed many Arabs and that he has no qualms with
it. Netanyahu has said slew of racist, hateful things.
Jabotinsky, the pioneer of Zionism, Herzl, one of the pioneers
of Zionism, all have said horrible, hateful things.
We also like cannot wait to, you know, 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 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 event?
What was this displacement and dispossession of Palestinians
in 1948?
Well, you know, like May 15th, 1948 is commemorated every
year as, you know, the anniversary of the Nakba.
But I would even argue, and I think this is like a very popular
idea, is that the Nakba did not begin or end in 1948.
The 1948 was rather, you know, 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 Sudan, you see
it in Hebron, 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 nine months.
He was imprisoned by the Israelis.
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, you know, the slashing of the pregnant
women's bellies in the Deir Yassin massacre with laws that
say, you know, 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.
One piece of context for the listener who doesn't, who is
not familiar with the Nakbe, 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 schools of thought in Zionism.
You know, people like Zangwill said that this was a country
without a people.
And Palestinians who have existed there, who have cultivated
the lands, who have, you know, had diverse cultural and
religious and political practices, they were completely
erased.
And other people like Zhabotinsky 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, you know, 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 100 years war on Palestine
by Rashid Khaledi that, you know, traces the Zionist movement,
oftentimes in the Zionist own words.
And so today what we're seeing is a continuation.
And, you know, people like Zhabotinsky who are like profoundly
and explicitly racist, who have called for genocide, who
have called the Palestinians barbaric, who have said and
done racist things, you know, Zhabotinsky also was like the
founder of the Irgun, one 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 streets named after him and Netanyahu just two
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
historical right to the land?
So if you stretch not across decades, but across centuries
into the past.
This kind of thing is a red herring.
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 one 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 one has the right to do that.
No one 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 to water, air, and
land and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations
like the UN.
No one has a right to do that.
Do you have hate in your heart for Israel?
Why does that matter?
As one 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.
But this is also a human story, and 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.
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.
I would be concerned for my own dignity.
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.
Palestinians, 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 insufferable.
But most of us, 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, 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's 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?
And does it cloud your judgment?
Does it cloud my judgment?
I don't think so.
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.
I was 14 years old when I first flew to Congress to speak
to Congress people and to speak to 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 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. That's where the real anger lies.
And I'm quite honestly proud of, you know, our unabashedness
and our refusal to like bow our heads or bury our heads
in the sand.
I think that's the only way forward.
So anger, whatever it is, is a fuel for action.
Absolutely.
And it has been throughout history.
It has been.
How much of this tension is religious in the practical aspects
of the courts and the evictions and the demolitions?
And you mentioned something divine decree.
How much underneath do you feel the division over religious
texts and religious beliefs?
You know, it's convenient to market what's happening in Palestine
as a religious conflict, because it allows the listener
the luxury of believing that this is an ancient, complicated
thing that stretches thousands and thousands of years ago.
But the fact of the matter is the people who invented Zionism,
who pioneered the Zionist movement, who called for emigration
and settling into Palestine, a lot of them were atheists.
A lot of them were not religious at all.
And the leaders of the Israeli state today, a lot of them
are atheists and a lot of them are secular and so on and so forth.
It's easy to say that this is about Muslims and Jews fighting
over the land and so on and so forth.
But it's not.
It's about the land itself.
And it's about people being forced out of their homes.
Benjamin Netanyahu said anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Of course he said that.
Do you disagree?
Absolutely, I disagree.
What's the gap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?
Those who are against the policies of Israel versus those
who are against the Jewish people?
I watched the Netanyahu, well, the first like 20 minutes
and then I couldn't do it anymore, you know, but I watched.
And then what was interesting about Netanyahu is that he said,
you know, being anti-Zionist is like saying I'm okay with the Jews.
I just don't believe the Jews have a right to form their own state.
That's like saying I'm okay with Americans.
I'm just not okay with Americans having their own state.
And there is so much wrong with that statement in the sense
that Jewish people are a religious group and Americans
being an American is a nationality that consists of a diversity of religions
and so on and so forth, first of all.
And the second thing that's wrong with that statement is the whole idea
that states somehow have a right to exist or whatever.
It's such a distraction.
You have people getting shot in the street.
You have like millions and millions of people besieged.
You have people losing their homes.
You have people who are held in Israeli prisons without trial or charge indefinitely.
But the conversations that are being held on the hill,
the conversations that are being held on CNN are does Israel has a right to exist
or like why would you negate Israel's having a right to exist?
That's one.
Now, of course, I just find it's ridiculous again,
like that opposing a secular political movement
that was explicitly colonialist, expansionist, exclusive and racist
through the words of its own authors is somehow
and also, again, opposing such a political movement
that is quite young and quite recent is somehow equivalent to opposing
a religion that is thousands and thousands of years old.
But it is convenient again for Israeli politicians
to frame us who oppose Zionism, a form of racism and bigotry as anti-Semites.
But I can guarantee you Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem with anti-Semitism.
This is the same man who has no problem getting on stage
and shaking hands with Pastor John Hagee, doing webinars with Pastor John Hagee.
For those who don't know,
Pastor John Hagee is the founder of Christians United for Israel
who has said on multiple occasions that Hitler was a hunter
who was sent to hunt the Jews,
who said on multiple occasions that Jewish people are going to perish in hell.
All of this is like very viable by Google.
And this is one of the Israeli regime's closest allies, right?
So the Israeli regime does not have a problem with anti-Semites
when it serves its interests.
It has a problem.
I mean, if you look at evangelicals or Christian Zionism at large,
anti-Semitism lies at the heart of Christian Zionism.
It's the idea that we want to drive all of the Jews outside of the United States
so that Armageddon could happen or whatever the fuck.
This accusation has been a muzzle.
It has been used as a muzzle to silence political opposition.
And to stifle political advocacy for the liberation of Palestine.
And a lot of the time people get caught up in denouncing it
and in justifying themselves and disclaimers and so on and so forth
that you lose the point,
that you're distracted from the focal point,
that there is an ongoing colonialism happening
where people every single day are killed.
I cannot count.
This morning a kid was shot in Palestine.
It's embarrassing even for me that I don't even know the numbers here.
But this muzzle has been effective.
And I think the only righteous option is to oppose these labels,
these smear campaigns that target us.
I myself have been labeled an anti-Semite
by the ADL.
And I mean like if you want to talk about that at surface level,
people will say like,
wow, the ADL, Anti-Defamation League, you know, condemned you.
But people do not look at the history of the Anti-Defamation League,
do not look at the present of the Anti-Defamation League,
the fact that they are the largest non-governmental police training department
in the country where they train police in racial profiling
and militarism, the fact that they have historically
and continue to have engaged in surveillance on black liberation movements,
on anti-apartheid South African activists,
most recently in Charlottesville when white supremacists were marching
and chanting anti-Semitic shit,
the ADL advised local police departments to spy on the black organizers,
opposing the white supremacists.
This is, again, all verifiable on the internet.
Go to droptheadl.org.
So the ADL does not alleviate the hate in the world
as it probably is designed to do?
No, it's a guise.
I don't think the apartheid defense league is really our most progressive.
That's what it stands for.
Yeah, now you know.
If we can just linger on this idea of anti-Semitism,
there's quite a bit of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States,
especially after 9-11.
I've spoken to people about that.
There's also anti-Jewish, anti-Semitism sentiment in the United States,
but also throughout human history.
What do you make about this kind of fact of human nature
that people seem to hate Jews throughout history,
especially in the 20th century, especially with Nazi Germany?
What are your, in general, thoughts about the hatred of the Jewish people?
I mean, I think it's obviously wrong.
I don't know.
It's this idea that I even have to clarify what I think about anti-Semitism.
That doesn't sit right with me.
I think it's completely unfortunate and wrong
that Jewish people have been persecuted across history.
So one of the criticisms, I think I've read the ADL making this criticism of you,
is maybe you've tweeted a comparison between Israel and Hitler,
and thereby diminishing the evil that is Hitler.
What would you say to that?
Amy Césaire talks about this a lot.
The exceptionalization of Hitler.
Hitler is a deplorable, I don't know, condemnable, rotten, racist,
horrible human being that belongs in the depths of hell.
Obviously, that goes without saying.
But I am allowed analogy.
And I'm allowed to say whatever I want.
Now, I don't necessarily think that such an analogy is a good strategy to have.
But at the time, the context came in 2021,
when Israeli soldiers and policemen and settlers
were literally burning down our neighborhood.
Again, verifiable by Google.
And I tweeted it.
And also, I remember I tweeted something I hope every single one of them dies.
And to this day, this is some kind of gotcha for me,
as if I should have tweeted like,
oh, here's the apple pie for every single soldier
that's throwing tear gas in my house.
You know, there is such an exceptionalism when it comes to Palestinians.
We're not allowed analogy.
We're not allowed expression.
We're not allowed armed resistance.
We're not allowed peaceful resistance.
We're not allowed to boycott because that's anti-Semitic.
We're not allowed to do anything.
So what are we allowed if I can't boycott?
And that's against American law now to boycott.
And if I can't pick up a rifle because that's against the law.
And if I can't even tweet my frustration out,
what am I allowed to do?
Maybe Netanyahu can send me a manual.
He's happy with it now.
So you've spoken about the taking of homes, the IDF,
killing civilians, killing children.
What about the violence going the other direction?
Israelis being killed in part by terrorist action?
Well, it depends on how you define terrorism, right?
Across history, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
I don't necessarily subscribe to the definition of terrorism.
If a foreign army is in my neighborhood, which it's not supposed to be,
and they're shooting live ammunition at my house,
I'm allowed to do what I'm allowed to do.
And again, this is yet another case of Palestinian exceptionalism,
because when it comes to Ukraine, people have no problem
seeing Ukrainians defending their homes,
seeing Ukrainians dying for a time,
seeing Ukrainians making makeshift Molotovs on Sky News.
Sky News was running Molotov making cocktails.
The New York Times ran an article interviewing a Ukrainian psychologist
who said that hatred, I'm paraphrasing,
but he said hatred for all Russians is actually a healthy outlet.
The New York Post ran a headline
championing a quote-unquote heroic Ukrainian suicide bomber.
These things we would not even dream of as Palestinians.
We are told to turn the other cheek time and time again.
We're told that we should continue living inside these enclaves
without access to clean water,
without access to the right to movement,
without access to building permits,
without our natural right to expansion,
without a guarantee that if we leave our house,
we're not going to be shot.
And we're supposed to not do anything about it.
That is absurd.
Any person watching this understands this completely.
People understand that if somebody is attacking your home, you fight back.
If somebody is attacking your family, you fight back.
That is not.
But again, who gets to call who a terrorist?
Who gets to define terrorism?
This is all about who has power.
Who gets to write these laws?
Who gets to write these definitions?
You know, why is it that American actions in Iraq
is not called terrorism by American politicians?
Why is, you know, violence is like this mutating concept,
you know, and it takes on many shapes and forms.
And if it's in a uniform, if it speaks in English,
if it has blonde hair, it's somehow acceptable.
It's okay.
We make movies about it.
You know, we sell out tickets about it.
We make games about it.
But if it's without a uniform, if it has a thick accent,
if it has a beard, you know, that's condemnable.
That's wrong.
That's terrorism, you know.
Do you think violence is an effective method of protest and resistance in general?
In general, I think it has been.
But I think, you know, I believe in fighting on all fronts.
I don't think violence alone is going to bring about change.
I think there's so much to do in culture and shifting public opinion.
There's so much to do in media and fighting back against media, erasure and censorship.
There's so much to do diplomatically and politically.
And I think I would be naive if I don't take the power imbalance into consideration.
One side has makeshift weapons and the other side is one of the most sophisticated
armies in the world.
So I don't know how effective violence could be in this case.
But if you look at the flip side, do you see the power of nonviolent resistance?
So Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the power of turning the other cheek.
He spoke negatively about turning the other cheek.
So I sense that doing so has not been effective for the Palestinian people.
We've turned the other cheek generation after generation.
There is this Zionist trope that is used against us.
They say Palestinian rejectionism.
They say that we reject everything.
But if you look at the history, like our leadership, the Palestinian authority has given up inch
after inch, has compromised on acre after acre,
has signed deal after deal after deal after deal.
And still there is no peace.
So turning the other cheek is not, you know, the most effective method in my book.
What are the top obstacles to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians?
The occupation comes to mind.
The shoot to kill policies come to mind.
The siege comes to mind.
The asymmetry of the judiciary comes to mind.
The whole system needs to be dismantled.
I will quote my dear friend, Rabia Ghbaria, who's a lawyer who says, you know, the solution
justice comes about through recognition, return, and redistribution.
There are millions of Palestinian refugees who are living in excruciating circumstances
in refugee camps around the world.
There are thousands of Palestinian prisoners who are held in prisons for defending their
homes, hundreds of which are held without charge or trial.
By the way, there are many Palestinians who get killed in broad daylight with no recourse,
journalists and medics and everyday people, not just the freedom fighters.
We need, again, recognition, return and redistribution.
And peace comes about when they stop killing us, when they stop keeping us in a cage.
I mean, that's quite simple.
Can you describe recognition, redistribution, return and redistribution?
Return, return, right of return, the right of return to all of the Palestinian refugees
to their homes.
You know, when I'm driving around Haifa and I see my grandmother's home that's now turned
into a restaurant, you know, I could have, you know, I made a joke in one of my essays
recently that had I had that, I could have had it all, you know, beachfront views, her
smug attitude.
You know, she grew up by the sea after she relocated to Haifa after, you know, Jerusalem.
We want that.
We want that.
You know, they're lucky.
I don't want Netanyahu's home, but I just want my home.
I just want my home.
We want to return.
Also, I believe in the 1960s, the Israeli government classified 90% of all of historic
Palestine as state-owned land.
This is all land that was owned by Palestinian farmers who have cultivated their lands for
decades.
You know, since the establishment of the Israeli state, there has been Jewish-only towns popping
up every few years and not one town, not one Palestinian town has emerged.
We are, even those of us who have Israeli citizenship, who live outside of the wall
are encircled and cannot have their natural community growth in their towns.
That needs to change.
That needs to change.
You mentioned the wall.
Can you describe the wall?
The wall is a nine-meter high cement wall that was finished in 2003.
And if you're American, you've probably heard the whitewash sanitized version of the name,
which is the security wall, but it's a wall that literally has stolen thousands of dunams
of land and has ripped apart families.
My mother is a poet or was a poet at some point, and she had this poem she published
in the paper called Love Behind the Wall.
And it describes, you know, it's a poem, but it describes the real-life situation of two
families who lived right across the street from each other, but were then separated by
the wall and they would fly balloons, you know, to see each other from each side of
the wall or something like that.
This, although it sounds absurd, but it's the reality for many Palestinian families
whose lives were torn apart, whose livelihoods also were torn apart by the wall.
Maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about the legal classifications for Palestinians.
You know, Israel, much like any other colonial entity, has divided and fragmented the Palestinian
people.
As I said earlier, I have a blue ID, which means I'm a resident.
A friend of mine who lives in Haifa, for example, two hours away from me, 150 kilometers,
nothing too bad in this country, has an Israeli citizenship.
He can, you know, travel.
He can enter the West Bank.
He can do a lot more.
He's a citizen.
He can vote if he wants to.
Not that we want to.
You know, I always tease my friends, oh, you can go to Italy without a visa because you
have an Israeli citizenship.
But, you know, they battle national erasure.
They battle crime in their own communities because of police negligence.
They battle land confiscation and have battled land confiscations in the 50s.
Whereas somebody with a green ID, somebody from the West Bank, cannot leave the West
Bank, cannot go anywhere without a special permit and lives behind these walls.
And even within the West Bank, the West Bank, I think hilariously, George Bush described
as Swiss cheese because of the holes.
Every hundred meters, there's a new settlement or there's a new military checkpoint.
So even if you live behind the wall in the West Bank with your green ID, even though
you're robbed of your right to movement, you still even can't move from town to town
within the West Bank without encountering settler violence or military violence while
you're crossing the checkpoints and so on and so forth.
And then the last category we have is people who live in Gaza.
We are talking about over two million people who live in an open-air prison, who have no
right to movement, but also have no access to clean water and no access to supplies,
no access to good food, no access to good health care and so on and so forth, who routinely
get bombarded every few years.
Gaza is like two hours away from my house.
It feels like an absolute faraway planet because it's so isolated from the rest of
the country.
So imagine all of these different legal statuses fragmenting your everyday identity and creating
different challenges and obstacles for you to deal with, for each group to deal with.
You know, it's amazing and impressive that despite these colonial barriers, the real
cement ones and the barriers in the mine, despite all of these barriers, the Palestinian
people have maintained their national identity for 70 years.
That is incredibly impressive.
And it also sends a message that as long as we have a boot on our neck, we're going to
continue fighting.
You know, violence, cracking down on refugee camps, bombarding refugee camps is only going
to bring about more violence.
So West Bank is a large region where a lot of Palestinian people live and then there
are settlements sprinkled throughout and those settlements have walls around them with security
cameras and security guards, security guards, almost a million settlers in the West Bank.
And so what are the different cities here, if you can mention?
In the West Bank.
In the West Bank, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus.
They have their own stories, they have their own histories.
Yeah.
And it's fascinating also how interconnected they are, you know, like a friend of mine,
Mona Omari, recently did a documentary report on the day that Haifa fell during the Zionist
invasion.
The Haganah led the Palestinian residents of Haifa down to the city center and as absurd
as it sounds, those of them who stood on the right side of the street were forced into
cars that took them to multiple stops that would later become multiple refugee camps.
The last of which was Jenin refugee camp and those who stood on the left side of the street
were forced to board boats that took them to Lebanon to become refugees there.
Last month, we saw the Israeli army invade Jenin in maybe the largest military invasion
of Jenin since 2002.
And they killed many people, they attacked medics and journalists in broad daylight on
camera, they have destroyed infrastructure, and it was all very painful.
But I think the most compelling aspect of the raid on Jenin was what followed.
Israeli soldiers at night held their megaphones and instructed hundreds of Palestinians to
flee their homes.
And they told them if you don't leave, if you don't have your hand up in the air, you
will get shot.
And they were forced to leave their homes in the camp and walk to God knows where.
I can guarantee you, because the Nakba is not that old, I can guarantee you that some
people who were marching away from their camps were chased away from their homes in the
camp in Jenin were some of the same people who were chased away from the homes in Haifa
in the first place.
This perpetual exile that Palestinian people continue to live is unbearable.
I mean, in my case, my grandmother was removed from her home in Haifa in 1948.
And then she moved from city to city.
And then in 2009, she saw half of her home taken over by Israeli soldiers.
My grandmother died in 2020.
And two months later, we got the next expulsion order from the Israeli court.
I'm quite ashamed to admit that I was relieved that my grandmother had died because I did
not want her, 103 years old at the time, to go through yet another Nakba.
And this is the fact for so many Palestinians, regardless of where they are on the map.
If I may read the description of the situation in Jenin, and maybe you can comment.
So this is on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
Just reading Washington Post description.
So this was an Israeli military incursion to Jenin.
The raid included more than 1,000 soldiers backed by drone strikes,
making it Israel's largest such operation in the West Bank
since the end of the second Palestinian uprising in 2005.
The Israeli military said it dismantled hundreds of explosives,
cleared hundreds of weapons, destroyed underground hideouts,
and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in, quote, terror funds.
Many of the 50 Palestinians who have attacked Israelis since the start of the year
have come from Jenin camp and the surrounding area.
Palestinian attacks inside Israel have killed 24 people this year.
UN experts describe the Jenin operation as collective punishment, in quotes,
for the Palestinian people, amounting to egregious violations of international law.
Many of the more than 150 Palestinians killed by Israelis this year
have also come from these communities.
Palestinian fighters say they need arms to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation
and military incursions into the camp,
during which Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed.
So those are the, I would say, different perspectives
on the many people on both sides who have been killed, many more Palestinians.
Can you comment more about the situation?
I mean, I think the Washington Post article is a little bit more,
you know, careful than other media that came out recently about Jenin.
I think, you know, I was listening to a Reuters
radio show and they failed to ever mention the occupation.
I don't even think this paragraph mentioned that Jenin is under occupation
by the Israeli forces, by the Israeli regime.
I think this is the most important piece of context that gets
upsecured in our media reporting is these cities,
these refugee camps are under illegal occupation.
The Israeli army has no business being there in the first place.
That is the most, that is the departure point, that is the most important piece of context
that will answer to you why these people are arming themselves.
Many of which, by the way, lived through the 2002 massacre and bombardment of Jenin
and grew up in that violence.
The context that Palestine is under occupation, that these Palestinian cities
are under occupation, that they have to deal with land seizures at all times,
that they cannot leave their towns without a special permit.
All of this will give context to the violence and, you know,
the thousands of Israeli soldiers that raided the camp that day,
that traumatized an entire generation.
They think they will quell that generation.
They think that with such bloodshed and such barbaric violence,
destroying infrastructure, attacking medics, killing people left and right,
they think with this kind of terror that they can, you know, quell people,
tell people that, you know, they can guarantee that these kids are not going to grow up and resist.
But that's the opposite of what happens.
One thing about Palestinian people, they will not compromise their dignity, you know.
These people live in dire, excruciating circumstances.
And it is so courageous, in my opinion, that they even think
to defend themselves against one of the most lethal,
one of the most sophisticated armies in the world,
against a nuclear state that can wipe them out in a matter of seconds.
But it's not, at the end of the day, it's not even about courage.
It's about survival.
They don't do this because, you know, of machismo or because of heroic tendencies.
It's because this is about survival.
So the degree there's violence, it's about survival.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think if there is no, if there was no occupation, there would be no violence.
It's quite obvious.
And again, people understand this.
I mean, like we saw on Twitter in the recent month,
all of these Israeli propagandists who had tweeted pictures of like little girls with
guns in Ukraine and like women making bombs in Ukraine and young men carrying their rifles
in Ukraine and praising them as heroes, post very similar pictures of Palestinians.
And calling them terrorists.
It's glaring, the double standard.
I don't even need to linger on it.
Well, the double standard is glaring, but I also think the glorification of violence
is questionable.
There's a balance to be struck, of course.
But.
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think we should be glorifying violence at all, but I don't
think we should be normalizing violence either.
I think that's, that's, that's what it is.
You know, I'll tell you a story.
I was interviewing a person whose brother was killed by the Israeli military during
an Israeli raid on their village.
And the person was so concerned about whether I was going to report that her brother
allegedly had a Molotov cocktail in his hand.
And he found it absolutely insane, absolutely absurd that we can just glance over the fact
that there is again a foreign military in tanks with rifles and snipers invading the
village at 4 a.m.
In the morning, shooting live ammunition at people's houses, throwing tear gas that we
can just glance over.
It's normal.
We could just report on it.
No problem.
Nobody's going to bat an eyebrow.
But the fact that potentially somebody might have picked up a Molotov cocktail to throw
it at this invading army is where we draw the line.
It says a lot.
It says a lot about whose violence is normalized, is accepted, is institutionalized, is glorified
even, right?
And you walk around Tel Aviv and you see all of the plaques plastered around and around
the streets of the country, of the city, celebrating the battles that they had won,
the massacres that they had enacted against the Palestinian people.
But God forbid, God forbid Palestinians have any kind of similar sentiment.
So on July 4th, during this intense period, a Palestinian rammed a car into pedestrians
at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, injuring eight people before being shot dead by a passerby.
Also that night, Hamas fired rockets into Israel, and then Israel responded with strikes
on what it said was an underground weapons site.
So just to give some context to the intense violence happening here, what do you think
about Hamas firing rockets into Israel?
Well, the framing makes it seem as though like unprovoked Hamas is like firing rockets
onto Israel, regardless of what you think of Hamas, obviously, but unprovoked.
But that's not the case.
The provocation is the fact that they are forced to live in a cage, that they have no
access to clean water, they have no access to basic rights, no access to imports, no
access to anything that they can't leave.
They're living in a densely populated enclave that was deemed uninhabitable by the UN, that
was deemed an open air prison.
So the rockets, in any case, are retaliation for the siege.
Let's start there.
But again, this is just to prove my point.
Violence begets violence.
Palestinian people are not violent people.
We are not violent people at the core.
And I think what serves this narrative is Islamophobia, is like xenophobia towards Arabs,
which I don't have the luxury to write laws about.
By the way, I'm quite frustrated by this.
I am preoccupied and the Palestinian people are preoccupied with the material violence
that we have to deal with on the day to day, the demolitions, the bombings, the imprisonment.
That's what we're distracted with and busy with, that we can't even talk about the racism,
the casual racism against anti-Palestinian racism in the media, on social media and
diplomatic circles.
But all of this racism that has gone unchecked, that has not been regulated for decades, allows
for these tropes to continue in which Palestinians are promoted as these barbaric terrorists.
And the only way we could remedy that situation is by marketing them as these defenseless
victims.
But the fact of the matter is not this simplistic.
Palestinian people are human beings who should enjoy a full spectrum of humanity, which includes
rage, which includes disdain, which includes happiness and joy and laughter, which includes
celebration, which includes all of these things.
But we're not allowed this.
But we are doing exactly what any people throughout history who have been oppressed, who have
been colonized, who have been occupied, have done and continue to do as we see in Ukraine,
which is celebrated by mainstream media.
I'm sorry to keep reiterating this point.
But, you know, at this point, I am quite, you know, exhausted by how exceptional Palestine
and Palestinian resistance is when the world tells me time and time again that it doesn't
have a problem with violence.
It just has a problem with who does that violence.
Do you, in your mind and the way you see this region, draw a distinction between the people
in power versus the regular people?
So you mentioned the Palestinian people.
Is there something you can comment on Hamas and the PLO?
Do you see them as fundamentally different from the people?
What does Hamas do well?
Where do they fall short?
I think governments, wherever globally any, are different from people.
No government is a true reflection of its people.
I think, you know, this is even true in the case of like Arab countries that normalize
with Israel.
In many of the cases, they're unelected governments.
I think the Palestinian Authority continues to fail.
I think they are subcontractors of the Israeli regime through their security coordination.
And also, I'd like to use this as an opportunity to comment a little bit on the on the analogy
thing, not to like stray away from the question.
But, you know, the Palestinian Authority two years ago killed an opposition activist named
Nizar Banat.
It was a horrendous crime.
And I was in Ramallah with the people protesting against the Palestinian Authority.
And at some point they had their batons, the Palestinian Authority police, and they beat
us with it.
And many of the people in the crowd were liking the Palestinian Authority to Zionism.
I think people, this is what people do when they are confronted by a great evil.
They liken it to some other great evil.
And this is where the Hitler analogy came from.
Again, I don't think it's like the best strategy moving forward, but I refuse, you know, to
be, you know, criminalized for a little sentence.
But to linger on those in power, one of the criticisms towards Hamas and PLO, towards
the Israeli government, at least the current coalition government, is that there's a lot
of incentive to sort of perpetuate violence, to maintain power.
There's a hunger for power and maintaining that power amongst the powerful.
That's the way power works.
So is there a worry you have about those in power not having the best interests of its
people?
So those in power, the PLO, Hamas, not being incentivized towards peace, towards justice.
You know, looking at the PA's action today, it tells you a great deal about what they're
interested in and what they're not interested in.
And maybe, yeah, the occupation is in their best interest.
And you can infer similar things looking at Hamas.
But these two entities virtually have no power, even Hamas.
There is, you know, the context that Hamas is permitted by international law to use armed
resistance, blah, blah, blah.
Does that mean Hamas is like, equipped to govern Gaza?
I don't think so.
Does that mean that people around Palestine necessarily want to live under Hamas rule?
In 2006, Hamas was democratically elected.
I don't know if that's still the case today.
There's a lot to be said, but neither of these entities have any real power in perpetuating
the only body that has access that can flip the switch and all of this equation is Israelis.
You know, they're the ones who are keeping people in the case.
They're the ones who are wrapping the West Bank with a wall.
Everything else to me is just secondary, regardless of what I think personally of any of those
people.
Personally, for me, the world I envision, not just Palestine, the world I envision is
a world that goes beyond states, that goes beyond this framing of power, this hierarchy
in which some people rule over other people.
This whole idea of nation states, be it Israel or any other nation states, it's futile.
It's not good.
It's exclusive.
I think that we can achieve a better world than that.
Well, how do you do a better world?
Actually, if you just linger on that, politically speaking, geopolitically, you have to have
representation of the people.
You have to have laws and you have to have leaders and governing bodies that enact those
laws and all those kinds of things.
You probably need to have militaries to protect the people.
Can you not imagine a world without militaries?
I can imagine it, but we're not in that world.
Yeah.
I'm not saying I have all the answers or a PowerPoint in my pocket with the instructions,
but I'm saying the world I'd like to live in is one that transcends borders.
It's one that does not necessitate militaries, that doesn't necessitate all of these prisons,
all of these walls, all of these racist laws.
So you don't think violence is a fundamental part of human nature that emerges and combined
with the hunger for power?
I do think both of these things are truly intrinsic to human beings, but I also do think
there is a way to move beyond them.
I'm not saying I have the answers.
I'm tempted to say sway.
But you have a hope that there doesn't have to be war in the world.
Definitely.
Well, if we look a little bit more short term, people speak about a one-state solution and
a two-state solution.
What is your hope here for this part of the world?
Do you see a possible future with a two-state solution, whether it's Palestine and Israel?
Do you see a one-state solution where there's a diversity of different peoples, like in
the United States, and they have equal rights in the courts and everywhere else?
I don't think there's a geography in which a two-state solution is possible.
As we said earlier, Swiss cheese, there's literally settlements all over the West Bank.
And I don't think it's fair.
A two-state solution is fair to all of the people whose homes are still in Haifa, in
Nazareth, in Yaffa, and so far.
And I don't think it's fair that I'm going to have to travel to another country to visit
my cousin who's married in Nazareth, for example.
And beyond that, it's just not possible.
I do believe that whatever you want to call it, one-state, two-state, 48 states, 29 states,
whatever you want to call it, refugees need to return, land needs to be given back, wealth
needs to be redistributed, and a recognition of the Nakba needs to happen.
That is the only way we could move forward.
And you know, regarding whether this is a possible situation for two people to live
side by side, let's ask two questions.
Let's say you lived in a house with a person, your roommate, you just had a roommate who
constantly beat the shit out of you.
I wonder if you'd want to continue to live with them.
That's one.
And let's try another scenario.
Let's say you live in a house with a roommate who you just absolutely hate, just absolutely
oppose their existence as a people.
You don't even give him a key to your apartment.
Let's say now you're like equal partners in the apartment.
Would you want to live with him?
I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Time will tell.
But I don't think they want to live with us.
Israelis are quite good, especially Israeli diplomats.
They're quite good at using flowery language about peace and coexistence and so on and
so forth, and they're good with making us seem insane or radical or like full of hate
and so on and so forth.
But the policies speak for themselves.
The actions on the ground speak for themselves, and I truly, I mean, every time there's an
uptick, many of them leave, and I wonder, I would like to see, I wonder what would happen
in a one state solution.
Well, okay, so you've spoken eloquently about the injustice of the evictions, the demolitions,
the settlements, but is there, can you comment about the difficulty of the security from
the Israel perspective when there is a large number of people that want to destroy it?
How does Israel exist peacefully, this one state solution?
I don't know, by not shooting a journalist doing her job in the Janine refugee camp,
by not killing a 14-year-old standing in his front yard.
This whole talk about security and security fence and the whole like propaganda of the
Israeli defense forces and this whole iron wall ideology in which somehow they are always
defending themselves, even though they're, you know, Netanyahu and the Israeli government
continue to talk about an existential threat, about Iran being an existential threat.
Even though the Israeli government is the only body that holds nuclear weapons
in the region, they're the most sophisticated army in the region, and yet they continue
hiding behind their fingers and talking about an existential threat and talking about how like
they're insecure and so on and so forth.
I came here on the bus, you know, I live in a house where everybody in the world can easily
google it and get its address and anybody can just walk into my house and this is just,
and I'm lucky and privileged as a Palestinian journalist.
There are many Palestinian journalists who lose their lives.
This is like, that's real insecurity, but we don't even have time to whine about it
because there's real shit going on on the ground that we're preoccupied with and reporting on all
the time that we don't even have the time to talk about how limited is our institutional backing,
how limited is our, you know, cyber security, how limited is our, you know, even healthcare,
you know, like all of these things we don't even have time to complain about.
But they're the real life things that formulate an insecure population
that Israel certainly does not suffer from.
There's a tension here.
It's true that the ideas of existential threats to a nation have been used to expand the military
industrial complex and to limit the rights of its people.
So in the United States after 9-11, Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded under some justification
of there being terror in the world, these big ideas.
And in the same way, yes, Israel with the existential threat of Iran is used to expand
its military might over the region and control over the region.
But it also has some truth to it in terms of the threat that Israel is facing, including from Iran.
If Iran were to get a nuclear weapon, do you think there's a threat from that?
But who has the nukes right now?
Yeah, but like we're talking about this like far away monster that's like, we're scared of,
you know, it's like fear mongering.
What do you mean?
Who has the nukes?
Some of it is fear mongering, but some of it is true.
I don't think it's true.
I don't think it's true.
I think Israelis are obsessed with genocide because they have enacted genocide against us.
Even when we talk about like a future, a liberation of Palestine,
when we're talking about anything, they constantly jump to saying things like,
oh, they want to throw us into the sea.
They want to kill all Jews.
What kind of hyperbolic bullshit is that?
To say that if I am chanting and marching for my home not to be taken away from me by
some kind of settler court, I am somehow demanding the murder of all Jews across the world.
That is hyperbolic.
And the fact that we coddle it is insane to me.
So no, I don't think as things stand right now, as the power of balance stands right
now, I don't think there's an existential threat to Israel.
And also let's redefine what existential threat.
Do we think Israel, the Israeli regime, the Zionist regime should continue to exist in
its forms, subjugating people, enacting the crime of apartheid according to a bajillion
human rights organizations?
Do we think that it should continue keeping people in a cage?
If that's what people are fighting to save, then that says a lot about the people who
are feeling this existential threat, not me.
Do your beliefs represent the Palestinian people, meaning how many people are there
that want Israel to be gone?
But what does it mean for Israel to be gone?
What it means is for people who think of Israel as an occupier, who stole land, that needs
to go away, that this should be all Palestine.
Yeah, but is that a bad thing for these borders to be like, for the occupation to end, for
these, for the land to be given back?
Is that a bad thing?
Well, there's different definitions of occupation.
There's people in their homes now, right?
But is it their home?
I'm not talking about like, I'm not talking about like some random, some random home.
But there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many,
many Israelis who drink their coffee every morning from living rooms that are not theirs.
That are not theirs, that were taken just a few decades ago.
Yeah, where like the owners, the rightful owners of these homes are still lingering
in refugee camps, are still dreaming of return.
There are homes on the land of Israel that you wouldn't classify as stolen.
I mean, there is, like if it wasn't stolen, like if it was built, but is the land stolen,
right, is the, but all of this, again, I try not to like fall into this because it just
like it feels so abstract and far away and this is not how liberation is going to look
like whatsoever.
And I'm not like, I'm not fixated on ethnic cleansing.
That is not, I'm not obsessed with ethnic cleansing.
I'm obsessed with ending the ethnic cleansing campaign that has been visited upon me and
my family and my community for seven plus decades.
That's what I'm obsessed with.
All of this other stuff about what happens to the settlers and like, you know, we want
to kill all Jews and all of this.
I think it's bullshit and I think it's ridiculous.
And I think, you know, fixating on it is like distracting from the focal point.
There needs to be an end to all of the injustices, to all of the atrocities.
You know, a little boy from Jerusalem should be able to go jog around the city without
fearing getting shot.
That's like the simplest thing we're asking for here and we want our land back.
And those things do not mean actually at all, the ethnic cleansing of another people.
Well, but that we should be precise here.
So a little boy being able to run around Jerusalem, that's a great vision, not just safely,
but without racism, without hate.
That's a beautiful vision.
Yes.
But people in West Jerusalem, people in Tel Aviv that have homes, should they stay there?
Do they have the right to stay there?
That's like maybe number 99 on my priorities list.
I'm concerned with the refugees.
I'm concerned with the teenagers in the prisons.
I am concerned with my house.
I'm concerned with my family's house in Haifa.
I'm concerned.
There's a lot for me to do before I can even tend to the needs of my occupier.
That is the least of my concerns.
So you want the low hanging fruit, the obvious injustices to end.
Yeah.
But still the long-term vision of existential survival of Israel, which is the concern of
its government, is the concern of its people.
Do you see a future where Israelis have a home in the region?
Sure, just not in my front yard.
Where's the front yard and where's the back yard?
There are literally Jewish settlers, one of which is from Long Island, in my literal front yard.
And this is the case in hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinian homes.
You know, no one is saying Jewish people shouldn't exist or they shouldn't have a state of their
own.
I mean, I think all religious-based states are like a bad idea.
All nation states are a bad idea.
But whatever, if that's what they want to do, that's what they want to do.
But that doesn't mean that they are allowed or have a right to create and implement a
system of Jewish supremacy at my expense.
That's not a crazy thing to say.
That is not a controversial thing to say.
You can have your state, just don't kill anyone.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
You know, that's not a crazy thought to have.
And seek and establish asymmetry of power in the courts, which is the current source
of injustice.
I mean, that's when it comes to forced expulsions in our home.
But there's a myriad of other ways.
To the military?
The military.
I mean, the police, if you look at like how many times I should have brought the data
with me.
But if you look at how little times the Israeli military or police has investigated its own
people or indicted its own people.
I mean, just recently, the killer who has been hailed a hero by some of Israeli society,
who killed a Palestinian man who is autistic, who lives inside the occupied old city, where
Israeli military has no business being there or jurisdiction whatsoever.
He was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier who was trigger happy because again, they
have this like, siege mentality where like any moving object is going to kill them.
And he was shot and killed.
And despite it being in broad daylight, despite being well documented, despite the victim
being disabled, despite all of this, he was acquitted by the Israeli court.
The military, the courts, the government, they all work together, which is why it's
so ironic to me that there are hundreds of thousands of people marching on the streets
of Tel Aviv, you know, trying to save the progressive beacon that is the Israeli Supreme
Court, when you find its fingerprints all over the injustices perpetuated against Palestinians,
be it, you know, legalizing and upholding the withholding of slain Palestinian bodies
who were killed by the Israeli military to be used as bargaining trips with Israeli
militaries, be it making decisions to dispossess entire villages like Emel Hayran,
be it never once, you know, granting release to any Palestinian who was held in administrative
detention without charge or trial, be it upholding the legality of the family reunification law
that does not allow Palestinian couples who hold different legal statuses of reuniting
and living together as families.
I mean, those are just some of the few things I can think of about the Israeli Supreme Court.
So they're like the real the real tension that exists is the lack of diversity on the
Israeli political spectrum that makes the vision for a future so limited, because those
on what seems to be like the far left are defending an extremely conservative institution
that is a Supreme Court that they regard as progressive when in fact it is the opposite
of such.
So what do we do?
How can we talk?
How can we have peace with people who are chanting to save, you know, the very body
that is displacing us?
You know, it's ridiculous.
What's your vision?
Let's just take it as a microcosm of Jerusalem.
What's your vision for Jerusalem looks like with a peaceful coexistence of people?
You know, as it looked like before the Israeli state emerged, I mean, we should be reading
our history here.
When you read like European and white historians, they'll tell you like Palestine
was barren.
Many of them would say like it was even without a people.
There were nobody.
Nobody was there or like some of them will say we were uncivilized.
But the fact of the matter is Palestine, Jerusalem particularly had a diversity of religion.
Druze, Jewish people, you know, my grandmother continues to talk about.
Well, she continued until she died.
She continued to talk about her Jewish neighbors when she grew up in the old city or like when
she was born in the old city and then her Jewish neighbors in Haifa.
We even had one Jewish member of our family, M. Sami, actually, who just also recently
passed away.
They're like Jews were a part of Palestine and they spoke Hebrew, a different kind of
Hebrew, but they spoke Hebrew and they were people really need to read the 100 years war
on Palestine.
It's really an excellent synopsis of the history.
But this whole idea that this is like some kind of war between two religions is so misleading
because what's happening is a bunch of frankly European settlers with a certain political
secular ideology came and relocated here and turned it into a religious conflict between
people who have lived harmoniously together for decades before that.
And, you know, the whole idea, be it like, you know, Christian Zionism or, you know,
John Hagee or like the calls for Jews to leave the United States and relocate in Israel or
like, you know, recently, which we've heard about a long time ago, but recently an Israeli
historian confirmed the fact that Israeli organizations were bombing Baghdad and bombing
synagogues in Iraq to get Iraqi Jews to leave and come relocate in Israel, right?
All of this is manufactured.
And again, none of this is a conspiracy theory.
I know it sounds absurd.
And, you know, anytime I like look at my life from a bird's eye view, I think, what a circus.
But it's real.
And it's verifiable.
Call the fact checkers.
You mentioned the land registry.
Can you elaborate what's happening there?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So our small victory in the Israeli courts was that they would keep us in our homes until
a land registry is completed.
Basically, it means that they have to check who owned the land prior and then they could
decide if the land is ours or the land belongs to the Israeli settler organizations that
are headquartered in the United States and enjoy a tax exempt status here.
And that sounds great on the surface.
But then you look at Israeli law, you look at Israeli courts, you look at ownership and
you see that, oh, Israelis refuse to authenticate or take into consideration any land ownership
documents from the prior of the establishment of the state.
So all of us in Jerusalem who have their taboo papers, their ownership papers from the Ottoman
era, that's not legit in the eyes of the Israeli court, because that existed before
like your ownership deeds existed long before Israel even existed.
So we're not going to take this into consideration.
So not to be cynical here, but unfortunately, the likely result of the land registry is
that they're going to say, oh, all of this land belongs to these Jewish organizations,
because they're not going to take any of our documents into consideration.
But that means that there's going to be another campaign and there's going to be a long winded
fight and we'll see what happens.
But that's the fear.
And there's a huge dreadful fear of a massive loss in property in Jerusalem following this
land registry for the reasons I just told you.
It's the mere fact that they just refuse to look at land ownership documents.
What is the process of the fighting this in the courts look like?
If you can maybe just comment on it.
I always make a joke that being in an Israeli court is like playing a game of broken telephone
because, you know, everybody's speaking in Hebrew and then like your lawyer says something
to your dad and your dad says something to your mom and your mom whispers it in your
ear.
And then you're like, you say it to your cousin, your cousin has like a completely different
idea of the verdict than what the verdict is.
But that's really the reality.
So a lot of the fights happen in family by family?
No, it's like groups.
So like in our case, it's like four houses, every four houses.
But again, it happens in a language we do not speak.
And a lot of the time our strategy is buying time and, you know, building a global campaign.
Like we know that there is no recourse in the Israeli courts.
I mean, my grandmother used to say, and this is like a popular proverb, if your enemy is
the judge, to whom do you complain?
So to whom you complain is maybe the international community.
Yeah.
I mean, in our case, in our case, it was the international community.
But in our case also, it wasn't just the international community.
It was the hundreds of thousands of people in Palestine and abroad who were marching
on the streets, getting beaten and brutalized in Jerusalem.
And I don't know, sometimes arrested in places like Germany and so on and so forth, who forced
themselves inside the media.
This was what was unique about Jerusalem.
We were able to penetrate an industry that usually ignores us and usually refuses to
use any of our framing, any of our quotations.
And these people that marched, these people that spread the rhetoric, spread the facts,
wrote articles, these people that made videos online and got arrested and many of whom are
still in Israeli prisons paying higher prices than I have ever paid.
These people are the ones that truly moved the international community into action.
It wouldn't have, you know, the United States, I don't think would have said anything had
it not been for the immense media pressure that was created from the immense popular
pressure.
There are a lot of moving parts to a global campaign, and I think it's so impressive,
you know, that we were able to do this without any media backing, without any institutional
backing, without any training, without any budget, nothing.
You mentioned the United States.
What's the role of the United States in the struggle that you've been describing?
What's the positive?
What's the negative?
The role is perpetuating what's happening, Yanni.
It's all a negative role, to be honest.
With the money, with power?
Yeah, it's like the 3.8 billion in military aid every year.
It's the standing ovation.
Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid since World War II.
To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion.
As you said, it's providing currently 3.8 billion every year.
That a lot of people raised the question of what's the interest of tax paying American
citizens in this kind of...
Yeah, zero interest.
Foreign aid.
Zero interest.
I think a lot of Americans are concerned with health care.
A lot of Americans are concerned with clean water in Flint.
I don't think they're concerned with funding apartheid in another country.
And I think it's a disturbing phenomenon that although public opinion in the United States
is shifting, I would argue drastically about Palestine.
People in Washington are yet to catch up.
It was only, I think, nine Congress people who boycotted Herzog's speech in Congress
yesterday, and he received standing ovation after standing ovation after standing ovation
after standing ovation.
And I wonder if the everyday American is concerned that many of their politicians are Israel
first politicians or politicians who care more about maintaining a relationship with
the Israeli regime than they care about their own districts.
You've tweeted that 49 years ago, Ghassan Kanafani, or you can maybe correct me on the
pronunciation, was assassinated.
You wrote, quote, his revolutionary articulations of the Palestinian plight for liberation
shook the colonial regime, yet he's not dead.
His ideas remain ever timely and teachable.
And you also tweeted an excerpt from his writing.
Between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the
hands of three separate enemies that were to constitute together the principal threat
to the nationalist movement in Palestine in all subsequent stages of its struggle.
One, the local reactionary leadership, two, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding
Palestine, and three, the imperialist Zionist enemy.
Can you analyze what he means by those three things?
The local reactionary leadership, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine,
and the imperialist Zionist enemy?
And also, could you comment on him as a person?
Yeah, I mean Ghassan Kanafani is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant writer.
And he was prolific.
He's authored so much books, even though he was assassinated in the 70s.
But, you know, he was 37, if I'm not mistaken, 35 when he was assassinated.
You know, he was an inspiration to me in school.
And I remember, like even even my teachers had qualms about him because he was like a
secular person.
But I love Ghassan Kanafani.
He's a beloved figure in the Palestinian community.
And I hope to one day be able to achieve a fraction of what he's achieved in the terms
of like shaping a political consciousness for Palestinians and for people in the region.
Did he classify himself as a politician, as a philosopher, as an activist?
Do you know?
He was a writer, but he was also part of the Palestine Liberation Front, PFLP.
So he used the words to fight for freedom?
Yeah, I don't think he would have thought his words were divorced from other forms of
struggle, but I think he recognized the importance of culture and shaping culture and shaping
public opinion, both in achieving, you know, a shift in global stance and also in achieving,
you know, an awakening in the Palestinian generation as well.
You know, there's a very famous interview of his where he's talking to, I believe, a
British journalist and the British journalist is asking him, why don't you have talks with
the Israelis?
And he means, what do you mean talks?
You mean capitulation?
You mean talking that you can't have a conversation between the sword and the neck?
And I think that really summarizes the kind of, you know, values he stood for.
Now to talk about the three things.
Local reactionary leadership regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine and the
imperialist Zionist enemy.
Yeah, so in today's terms, the local reactionary leadership is the Palestinian Authority.
The regional regimes we're talking about, you know, actually, you know, the normalization
deals that have emerged in recent years, the Abrahamic Accords, have been talked about
as though they're like groundbreaking new phenomenon.
But many Arab countries have normalized relations with the Israeli regime since the birth of
the state.
It's not a new thing.
But yes, I think he was talking about Egypt and Jordan at the time.
Today we can include United Arab Emirates.
We can include Bahrain.
We could include Morocco.
And, you know, again, these Abrahamic Accords, they are promoted and marketed and talked
about as some kind of like religious reconciliation, which I think is the most disgusting thing
ever because they're not about religious reconciliation.
They're about arms deals and economic deals.
And they're about, you know, consolidating power in the region.
They're about mutual strategic interests that all of these nations have together.
And some people argue that, you know, Palestine is no longer an Arab cause because Arab countries
are normalizing.
But most of these governments, if not all, actually all these governments that have normalized,
most of them are monarchies, are not elected governments, and they do not represent the
will of the people or the desires or the opinions of their peoples.
And the proof to this is like places like Jordan and Egypt, even though they've normalized
and had peace agreements with Israel for many, many, many, many years, Palestine and the
Palestinian cause was still a talking point in the political campaigning of politicians,
Jordanian, Egyptian politicians, and continues to be for them to gain popularity because
that's where the hearts of the people are.
And then, you know, the Zionist regime is quite explanatory.
The imperialist Zionist regime.
I mean, what else do you call a regime that sought help from imperialist powers to depopulate
an entire country and build a new one on top of it?
So mostly you say the thing that Abraham Accords achieved is a negative thing for Palestine.
So these kinds of agreements amongst the powers between the leadership is not positive for
the region?
No, no.
Obviously, they're going to be marketed as positive.
And obviously, you know, they're going to have this flowery language surrounding them.
And the idiots in the room might like nod and smile.
But anybody with critical thinking skills can know that if people continue to be under
occupation, you know, there's nothing positive there.
And it's also there's, you know, let's linger a little bit on the mutual interests.
The only way Morocco could normalize relations with the Israeli regime is so that the Israeli
regime could recognize Moroccan sovereignty over in the Western Sahara, which just happened
actually last week.
And now Morocco, and before that, Morocco recognized Israeli sovereignty over the West
Bank.
It's not like Morocco itself, it just has no interest in this kind of deal.
You mentioned that you hope of accomplishing some of the things that Hassan kind of finally
was able to accomplish.
Let me ask you a silly question, perhaps a silly question.
Do you have interest in running for political office or into leadership?
I hear laughter in the room.
To lead in a leadership position in Palestine?
Not currently, no.
Let's see if this ages well.
I don't think there's a body through which I can run for anything.
It's like, it's completely dysfunctional.
And also, you know, I don't want to wear a suit all the time.
Who would want to do that?
So from which kind of pedestal or from which kind of stage do you think you can be most
effective?
You know, I was born and raised in Jerusalem.
I speak perfect Arabic.
I think my Arabic writing is much superior to my English writing, but I choose to write
in English because I think there's a disparity and there's a chasm between what is said in
Arabic on the street in Palestine and what is said here about Palestinians, both by anti-Palestinian
racists and people who are pro-Palestine and advocates for Palestine.
And I believe I and a few others from my generation or many others actually from my generation
are working to fill that chasm.
And I also believe that literature, culture, the public sphere, changing the public opinion,
changing the narrative is important to affecting policy, to affecting change, affecting material
change.
You know, I'm not going to go read a poem in front of a checkpoint and watch it catch
in flames.
I'm not that delusional about the power of words.
But I do think that I have a responsibility and I have a privilege even to have a voice,
to have some kind of platform.
And if I'm not defining myself, if I'm not talking and representing myself, then other
people will define me and their definitions of the Palestinian people across the few past
decades have not been coined or generous to the Palestinian people.
That's one thing.
The other thing is I believe in the United States as a front for change.
I believe we have a lot more leverage here than we do back home.
Again, I believe in someone said the other day, I can't remember their name, but someone
said no stone unturned.
I believe in fighting on all fronts.
But here really, I can go protest in front of the Israeli Embassy without getting shot.
There's a lot of work to be done here.
There's a lot of people waking up.
I would even argue that a reckoning is coming in the American public.
And more and more American people are concerned where their tax money is going or concerned
what their politicians are invested in.
More and more American people are saying not on our dime or saying not today, not here.
And also there's many Palestinians in the diaspora here in the United States and Europe
who benefit and could benefit from political education in the English language.
Because of the diaspora across history, the Palestinian diaspora has been affected in
the 70s and the 80s.
And I'm hoping ever since 2021, there has been a resurgence of the power and influence
of the Palestinian diaspora.
To ask another silly question, since you mentioned the United States, I don't know if you follow
the politics of the United States, but do you have a preference of presidential candidates
in the 2024 election?
Or is that, do you follow where each candidate stands on the different policies?
I think everybody in the world should be able to vote for American elections, actually.
I do follow.
Because of the influence they have.
Yes.
Yeah.
I do follow.
I don't have a preference whatsoever.
I don't.
You know, I saw Cornel West on CNN.
I don't think, you know, I don't know if he's going to go far with his campaign.
Cornel West is running with the Green Party, and I don't think he's going to achieve much
success.
But I saw him on CNN berating Andrew Cooper, and I enjoyed that very much.
Wouldn't mind seeing that on my screen.
Regularly.
Regularly, but don't really have an opinion about, you know.
You wrote Rifka, a book of poetry.
How did that come about?
Maybe you can tell the story of that book coming to be.
You know, I signed the book when it had a lot less visibility in the world.
So when I didn't think thousands and thousands and thousands of people would be reading it,
I decided to include many poems, which I wrote when I was young.
Because it's a long journey, this book.
It starts in Jerusalem.
It goes to Atlanta.
It goes back to Jerusalem, and then it ends in New York.
And Rifka is the name of my grandmother.
And it's an Arabic name, a Hebrew name, and it means to accompany someone.
And I wanted to write about displacement in a way that was beyond what we read about in English.
Poetry as a medium, I don't know if I have much faith in it anymore.
To be honest, maybe like I'm turned off by it, and I'll revisit it again in a few years.
But at the time of writing this book, poetry as a medium, it really was a source of hope
and inspiration for me.
So my mother was a poet, and she would, you know, her and my dad would play this game
in the morning.
She would read her poems to him, and he would guess which lines would be read penciled by
the Israeli military censor, because she would submit her poems to the local newspaper, Alquds
newspaper.
And you know, the military censor has to go over it.
And you know, she would get her poems back with a bunch of words erased, and they would
laugh about it.
Poetry was very much part of my upbringing, and you know, as a Palestinian, when you're
excluded from mainstream spaces, including media and journalism, poetry tends to be a
place where you can say what you want to say without repercussions.
And I say that, I realize that our greatest writer, Ghassan Kinefani, literally had his
car bombed, exploded because of his writings.
And you know, recently Darin Tatur, a Palestinian poet with an Israeli citizenship, was imprisoned
for a few months for publishing a poem on Facebook, in which he said, resist my people,
resist.
So even that is not necessarily true.
But anyway, it just felt like it's a place where I could talk and express large ideas
in a simplistic way.
And you know, the best example I could give you is one of my favorite poets, Roshu Dahsen.
When the Israeli authorities decided to do the land law, which classified, I believe,
93% of historic Palestine as Israeli owned, state owned, forgive me.
And then when they also did the absentee property law, which allows the Israeli government to
take over homes that were depopulated from the Palestinian owners, he wrote a poem called
God is a Refugee.
It's a kind of a sarcastic, sardonic poem in which he goes, you know, God has become
a refugee, sir.
So confiscate even the carpet of the mosque and sell the church because it's his property
and sell our orphans because their father is absent and do whatever you want.
It's like, it's a sarcastic poem that was in reaction to these laws that translate it
to the everyday Palestinian, to the farmers, to the landowners, what these bureaucratic
complicated laws meant to them, what they meant to their land, what it meant, what effect
are these laws going to have on these people's lands?
And that, I think, is the role of poetry that I try to achieve.
So poetry ultimately prizes the power of words.
And so the medium, the power of the medium of poetry transfers nicely to any medium that
celebrates words.
So even, I mean, just writing novels, tweeting.
Yeah.
You're also working on a new book, a memoir.
What's the title?
What can you say about it?
The memoir is bizarre because I'm so young.
So it's not really my memoir, but rather a memoir of the neighborhood, which I grew up.
The tentative title is A Million States and One, and it's a nod to how many different
realities and universes exist in this tiny one country.
And it's kind of a documentation of the two waves of expulsion in 2009 and 2020 and 2021.
And the kind of behind the scenes of the campaign that took place, the diplomatic and media
campaign and grassroots campaign that took place to save our homes.
And it's also an exploration of other communities that are threatened with the expulsion and
other communities who are resisting in their own way, be it in Beta, in Nablus, or South
Hebron Hills, in Massafariotta, or in Silouan, or in the Nokab, all these communities that
are dealing with different forms of expulsion.
And the emphasis that I'm trying to achieve with this book is dignity.
I want to write a book about my experiences that is super dignified, that kind of kicks
its feet up on the table and says what it wants unabashedly, because we are told not
only are we going to be victimized, but we are going to be polite in our suffering.
And I want to reject that completely.
And I want to lean into the humor of the past few years of my life, because I think that's
really what the world needs and what I need to be writing.
A few questions here, but one of them is about humor.
In Rifka, you wrote, my mother has always said the most tragic of disasters are those
that cause laughter.
What do you think she meant by that?
I don't know if that's my mom saying, but I don't know if it's like probably a proverb
that I first heard from my mom, but it's like the most evil of atrocity is what makes
you laugh.
And it can be, you know, it's open for interpretation.
You should be aware of one school of thought would say you should be wary of the things
that make you laugh.
But another school of thought would say this is a commentary on like our natural reactions
to tragedies, right?
In like 2012, 2011, something like this, we had like a protest and after the protest,
all of the women of the neighborhood were sitting down under the, the victory of our
neighborhood, which they always do.
And, you know, a bunch of soldiers, maybe 40 soldiers started marching down the street
and everybody dispersed and hid in their homes.
But my aunt was now passed away.
My aunt refused to go home.
She wanted to gather her teacups because she really cared about her teacups.
So I was begging her to go inside and she refused.
She was gathering her teacups.
So a soldier, a soldier, you know, grabbed me and squeezed me between his baton and an
electricity pole.
And it was very excruciatingly painful and traumatizing for me as a child.
But it was, it's also like a funny memory in a way, despite the pain, despite the, the
trauma that came with it.
It was, it's, there's still something funny about it.
The absurdity of it.
Yeah.
And it's like, it's dignifying to find humor in these kinds of things.
It makes you realize you are not so weak.
You are not so powerless.
Another thing is, you know, my same aunt who is like super obsessed with cleanliness would,
you know, insist on not going to sleep before washing the dishes.
And I would always tease her and say, what?
You're just going to like, you're going to give them the house clean.
Like you can leave it dirty so they have to clean it up.
And these little things, although like incredibly, you know, absurd and telling of a harrowing
reality that our family and many in the neighborhood we're living are also the coping mechanisms
that we were using to, to deal with our everyday reality.
And so much in the public framing of Palestinians, be it in media and novels and diplomacy and
so on and so forth is that of the powerless victim is that of the person who only weeps,
you know, like Israeli propagandists, for example will like show pictures on Twitter
of like a house in Gaza and they'll be like, look, this house has windows.
Like they're talking about their BCs, but they have a nice, they have a balcony on their
house.
What are you talking about?
Like, you know, or like they'll show a video of a supermarket in Gaza and they'll be like,
how come they're talking about a blockade when they have a supermarket and blah, blah,
as though, you know, the ceiling has been so lowered that we can't even afford the joy
anymore or, you know, a little supermarket in the neighborhood.
So as a poet, as a writer, I've written a book of poetry, but now working on a new book.
What can you say about your process of crafting words?
I think people listening to this can, can hear that there's a poetry to the way you
speak in English.
So somebody that cares about the craftsmanship of words in both English and Arabic, what
can you say about your process?
Oh, it's a lot more neat than like this conversation.
It's like, I am obsessed with, with sentences and it takes me a long time to like finish
a piece of writing.
I'm, I am a perfectionist.
Do you edit a lot?
I edit all the time and I like can't move on from one sentence until it's perfect.
But I will say my other writer friends here in New York do not face is how easily disrupted
my writing is by other news.
I'll pitch a story to my editor about something, for example, and then as I'm writing it, 20
minutes in, some kid was shot and killed by the Israeli military.
So you have to say something about it.
And then 30 minutes later, as I'm writing it, there's news about a home demolition in
Silouan and there is this relentless onslaught of news that prevents us and the presence
of the ability to analyze, to frame, to think, to conceptualize, to, you know, to write beyond
the current affairs.
We're stuck in this, in the relentlessness of the occupation that a lot of the time I
worry that the things I'm writing are always in reaction to a crime that took place to
a bombing that took place and so on and so forth.
And I think that's unfortunately true for so many Palestinian writers.
So, you know, I would say isolation and like stepping away from the news is very important
to do, but I don't do it.
Okay.
So the struggle to find the timeless message in it is an ongoing struggle for you.
I mean, there is the timeless, you know, it's not even timelessness, it's timeliness.
What you write is always timely because the occupation is ongoing.
But the struggle is, you know, moving beyond the news and tackling more nuances.
Because in Arabic, I can.
In Arabic, I can philosophize.
I can talk about violence and I can talk about my complicated relationship with violence
or like my complicated, I can complicate and nuance and give things nuance.
But in English, people still do not believe we are under occupation, even though it is
an internationally recognized fact that is broadcasted 24-7 through the world's most
watched screens.
So we're stuck in like a practice of providing facts and figure as an actually this happened
and this person did this and according to international law and blah, blah, blah.
So we're stuck in this because the basic truths about our own existence are denied.
That we don't even have the luxury of, you know, evolving our writing beyond it or at
least evolving my writing beyond it.
And this is what I'm trying to do with this new book.
That's fascinating that in English, your brain is more inclined to be, to go towards activism
whereas in Arabic, you have the luxury to be more of a philosopher.
I wouldn't say activism.
I would say journalism.
Just making sure, you know, like disrupting the flow of the sentence to insert a statistic
or insert a historical fact that should be implied and should be a household name.
But it's not, you know, I can't just say the Nakba.
I have to say the Nakba, the 1948 total near total destruction of Palestinian society at
the hands of Zionist militias that later formed the Israeli military that now terrorizes us
today and there's like three tier legal system, blah, blah, blah.
I can't just say the Nakba.
I have to give all of these explanations and that's heartbreaking and people are out to
do better.
People are out to, you know, do better.
This is not, it's not what my literature should be limited to.
It's not what anybody's literature should be limited to.
It's the job of, it's the job of, you know, news reporters to reward the news.
But a lot of the time they use looted language, they use passive voice, they obfuscate facts,
and it's on the shoulders of us, the heavy carrying.
Would you say the press in the United States does a good or poor job of covering Israel
and Palestine?
Terrible job, horrible job.
They don't do their job whatsoever.
What are the biggest failings?
Not mentioning that a town is occupied when you're reporting about an occupied town.
Not mentioning that a settlement is illegal or a settler is illegally present in a Palestinian
village when you're reporting on them.
Only quoting Israeli officials and only quoting Israeli politicians and police officers and
framing your entire analysis with Israeli officials and only interviewing Palestinians
when they have been brutalized and victimized physically.
Yeah, those are some of the issues.
There is plenty.
And then like saying things, you know, like Israel will bomb a hospital in Gaza and the
press will say like Hamas run hospital.
And this negative association with Hamas will remove any sympathy from the reader towards
victims of this hospital bombing.
A lot of things.
And a lot of them are sinister.
I have many friends, many journalist friends, and I've seen many journalists online speak
about their experiences when talking about Palestine, the censorship that goes on into
it.
And I have many journalist friends, some at the New York Times.
They used to be at the Washington Post who tell me the kinds of battles they had to do.
They had to go through with their editors to let them even utter the word Palestine and
not even in like news pieces, like pieces about, let's say, a Palestinian artist or a
Palestinian chef or whatever.
You know, there's lots of there's there's a lot that happens behind the scene that is
not reported on, because when it comes to Palestine, the the rules and the laws of journalism
are bendable.
Passive voice is king.
Emitting facts is acceptable.
Anything goes.
So you personally, just psychologically, what have been the lowest points in your life,
the darkest points?
A recent study came out and said that 52% of Palestinians have depression.
I would argue that the number is much, much, much higher.
I think it would be absurd for someone to live under the conditions we live under.
And not contemplate many things, many things, not just suicide, but many, many, many things.
And if and if people were to put themselves in our shoes for just one day, they would
understand where all of the rage and all the resistance is coming from.
It's not an easy life.
So where do you find the strength?
I'm surrounded by good people.
And I'm surrounded by good people and I don't even think of it as a strength.
I think of this as my obligation.
It just feels like the thing I have to do.
It's not, I don't need inspiration.
I don't need strength.
I don't need, it's just my obligation.
It's just, there is a great travesty taking place in the world.
And I and few others have been put in a place where we're able to talk about it to a few
more people.
And it's just my obligation.
I have to do it.
What gives you hope about the future of Palestine?
What gives me hope about the future of Palestine is taking a look at history and understanding
that across history, there has not been an injustice that lingered.
Um, endlessly, you know, everything comes to an end.
It's not necessarily, there's not necessarily like a perfect resolution for everything,
but nothing, nothing, um, continues and it's, and it's in the form that it started in the
occupation and colonialism and Palestine and Zionism.
All of these things are not at all sustainable whatsoever.
Um, so taking a look at history, you know, a lot of, a lot of what I'm saying, um, today
and what I have said in your podcast, many people would have, would be, you know, pearl
clutching hearing me say what I say, but I always try to remind myself that during Jim
Crow, during slavery, during the Holocaust, um, during the occupation of Algeria, um,
during any point of colonialism in the African continent, um, people did not possess the
moral clarity they possess today when they talk about these things and all of these things
were contested and controversial and in many, many, many cases, legal.
And today they are deplorable, condemnable, and people say never again, and they don't
remember them.
So that's what gives me hope is believing in the, you know, believing in the inevitability
of justice.
What do you love most about Palestine?
What are like maybe little things that you remember from your childhood, from your life
there in Jerusalem and elsewhere that you just brings a smile to your face?
I think just the unabashedness of Palestinians, um, where, where people who are told and were
at some point were told by the large majority of the world that we should shrink ourselves,
that we should be ashamed of who we are, that we are monsters, that we are terrorists, that
we are blah, blah, blah.
And Palestinian people don't really give a shit.
You know, they're continuing to live as they do.
They continue to resist.
They continue to write.
They continue to, to do, to do all that they do.
And I love that the most.
And I love our ability to laugh more than anything else.
One thing that's misunderstood in American culture about Palestinian culture or just
Western culture in general is like martyrdom culture.
A lot of the time people, um, will, will, you know, broadcast images of Palestinian
women cheering when their sons have been killed by, um, the Israeli forces.
And they'll say, you know, these people glorify death and these people are eager to like have
sex with 70 virgins in heaven and so on and so forth.
But that's not the case.
The whole idea of the occupation, when they are killing our children, the whole idea is
that they're trying to break our spirits.
So these mothers whose hearts are broken, who are anguished, who are, you know, so,
so in so much pain when they are cheering, they are not, they are not celebrating.
They're not cheering.
They are, they are letting the occupier know that you have not broken my spirit.
I have not yet been defeated.
And I think that is beautiful.
It's the same thing with our prison culture.
You know, Palestinians are fascinating in the sense that Palestinians go to prison and
they study and they come out with degrees.
They can parts, they can find ways to participate in civil society.
Um, they can even smuggle, you know, sperm from prison to give a life outside of it.
Because they understand in their philosophy of prisons, they understand that these structures,
these buildings were built to break your spirits.
So what do you do?
You allow it.
You don't allow it to break your spirits.
You're resistant.
You, you continue to hold on to life.
You continue to hold on to your love of life.
You continue to hold on to your love of freedom and you come out of prison and you're celebrated
by your community.
And the prison has not broken your spirit.
So all of these structures and system that is the designers movement has put into place
be it the shoot to kill policies or the prisons or the demolishing our homes that were meant
to kill our spirits.
They don't.
You, you demolish the home in Jerusalem and the people say, don't worry, we'll, we'll
build another and you demolish it and we'll build another.
That's what I admire most about the Palestinian people.
It's this resilience and you know, people love to say resilience, but I think it's stubbornness.
I think we're such a stubborn people and I think that's, that's great.
Well, Muhammad, thank you for being a man who exemplifies this unbreakable spirit.
Thank you for the words you've written, the words you've spoken, and thank you for talking
today.
This is an honor and this is, thank you for educating me.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Muhammad El-Kurd.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela.
It always seems impossible until it's done.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.